Midlife Meditation

To an introverted westerner who grew up shopping in supermarkets and malls, and finds those places tolerable during low times, but very hard to be in at rush hour or in the holidays, market day is a special kind of hell. In Dzodze, in Ho, in Accra, market day is a time when Ghanaians flood a public square with booths, canopies, tables, baskets, turning the center of town into an extremely crowded shopping center with mud floors, no refrigeration, and little apparent organization. I went to market day in Dzodze hoping to find shirts made of Ghanaian fabrics, rhythm instruments, perhaps some authentic craft items I could bring home as souvenirs. What I found was baskets of fish, some of it smoked, much of it raw, all of it fragrant; live crabs; live chickens; fruits and vegetables; toiletries; used books; CDs; piles of used clothing and shoes; beads; and, the closest to anything I was actually looking for, booths of beautiful textiles. The last led me to consider bar...

6/15/14 I saw wonders from the air: Windsor Castle, the neatly organized fields of Dorset, the more American-looking fields of France, the Sarah Desert, a thunderstorm flashing below the plane, and finally, the lights of Accra, not all that different from the lights of Portland, Chicago, New York City, Dallas, or any other city I’ve flown over—not from the air, anyway. Then the doors opened, the humidity hit, and after 34 hours of travel, I stepped onto Ghanaian soil. It was a rude awakening: waiting in a slow queue to be passed through customs, struggling to claim my bag, and the moment I was out of the luggage area, being confronted by scammers pretending to be airport officials, hoping to get something off me: a tip, my passport, perhaps even my suitcase. I had been warned by a sign in customs, and managed not to give in to any of them. Once out of the chute, I met Kofi, our director and host, who had hired three taxi drivers to ferry us to the hotel. Note that n...