Happy Anniversary to Us! (Or, "It Rained in Doha!")

Since dates and weekends are fluid concepts over here, we celebrated our one-year anniversary twice. Saturday night was a Baroque festival concert at the Katara Opera House. It has been, shamefully, a full year since I've been to any real classical concert, which shouldn't surprise anyone who has been to Ridgecrest. It was a gem of a concert with a phenomenal pianist at the Kennedy Center, all part of my Washington Farewell Tour. Then I moved to the Middle East.

Please to note the Emir's special box in the back there.

Doha, though, both did and did not disappoint. The disappointing part was how it took, oh my goodness, 1 hour and 20 minutes to get there. It was supposed to be less than 30 minutes. I can't even. But Doha traffic (/construction) is for another blog, one which I recommend no one read. The rest of it, though, was as good as I've seen anywhere, and somehow, somehow, we had only missed 5 minutes or so. I don't think you measure an orchestra by its performance of Baroque, so I can't say too terribly much, but it was flawless and a delight to hear and see. The musicians were on the young side, which isn't surprising - Qatar is still in the developing world of culture. (There, I said it. And by that I don't mean that the developing world has less culture than the developed world; Morocco, for, you know, instance, has a phenomenally developed culture. I mean that...well, Qatar is working on it.) 

One more note on the concert and I promise I'll move on: Matteo El Khodr was one of the featured soloists, which is interesting because a) he's a Lebanese opera singer, which cannot be all that common, and b) more interestingly, he's a countertenor. I've never heard one live; shoot, I've heard very few recordings. I read that there are 63 countertenors in the world; whether that's accurate or not, it can't be wildly off. Very interesting experience.

This is what greeted us when we left the Bach and Handel concert. Just in case you had thought you were in Europe.

Anniversary Part 2 (today, actually on our anniversary) was very nearly thwarted at several points. We normally go to mass at Georgetown at 5 p.m. on Sunday evenings, after which we sometimes kill time in the library while the rush hour traffic reduces from "intolerable" to a milder form of obnoxious. This evening...I don't know what Rosko finds to read, but it was almost 8 by the time we left. We arrived at the Yemeni restaurant after a few battles with parking, only to be told that they had, I think, three dishes left for the evening. Disappointing, but, I mean, Yemen's 

got enough on their hands; they don't need my whining on top of it all.

I should back up, because it's probably not immediately obvious why we wanted Yemeni food for our anniversary. We had been there once with friends and it was delicious and not overpriced. Both of these things are, I think, rare in Doha. Fancy? Yes. Impressively priced even for petrol-financed expats? You betcha. But not usually delicious. 

Mid-hookah, before rain. (That, or Rosko is a dragon.)

There being no room, or at least food, at the Yemeni Inn, we headed to the Moroccan restaurant, where we enjoyed the view, smoke and two bites of food on a rooftop terrace before, yes, it started to rain. Hard. This is, I think, the fourth time I've experienced rain in the entirety of 2014, and it was as we were getting our meals delivered on our already-nearly-frustrated anniversary outing. (This is not to say that we weren't thrilled with the rain anyway. I took it as our little anniversary present from the heavens.) Our waiter was a phenomenal sport, though, and transferred everything indoors, then at last back outdoors so Rosko could enjoy his hookah while I read some Waugh and watched the people walk through puddles.

And that is how we bid farewell to our first year of marriage. Two of us in the rain in the Gulf, one of us in heaven, and Moroccan spices on our fingers. 

Grieving and Life

Today is our first anniversary, which is as good a day as will likely ever come to recommence this blog. But I can't do that without taking a moment to note the monumental change in our life since the last entries, of course. The below paragraphs are taken from an email I wrote during the first week after Freya's passing. While more of daily life is "normal" than at the time I wrote those words, the rest of it holds true. I thought I would put it here so that those of you who are asking how we're doing won't keep hearing silence from us. We are, as ever, so grateful for your outpouring of love, support and prayers.

As for us, we are grieving; we are also rejoicing. Every day brings its own mood, but, I believe, all of it has been quite...appropriate, for lack of a better term. Freya is worth the untold grief that we feel; she is also worth the inexpressible joy we have at her existence and at her place in heaven. I think that grieving - or at least our particular grieving at this time and place and for this cause - removes the mourner from his ordinary perch that is, for most of us, quite firmly grounded on this earth, and takes him to a place somewhere between heaven and earth. Perhaps that sounds strange, since nothing about grief feels heavenly. But I think it is our grief, or perhaps our profoundly intimate connection to one of heaven's newest arrivals, or perhaps simply everyone's prayers - all of it, this period of grieving - seems to give us some sort of clarity as we attempt to glimpse into the nature of God and of heaven, a clarity that I don't expect will last tremendously long but the lessons of which, I hope, stay with us the rest of our lives. 

Still, we flutter back and forth between that spiritual clarity, which brings peace, and joy, and I think some very real insight into the nature of our lives here on earth relative to the joy that awaits us, and life on earth. Life on earth, for its part, also has its mundane (not remotely in a pejorative sense here) elements - our friends here, our friends and family back home, cooking and eating, cleaning, going for walks, good gracious - a job interview the other day (I wonder what I said?) - and then on the other hand, this irruption of utter pain and loss into what we thought our lives were supposed to be. So even when the pendulum swings us back from the spiritual realm of contemplating God, heaven, and our darling Freya in heaven, to the earthly realm, we then must furthermore live and move between the more enduring elements of life, the life that "goes on," and this part of life that seemingly crawls or even stands still, in which the shock of losing her can hit you at any moment and pierce your soul with a pain you never wanted to even think about.