Take Five

With Ramadan right around the corner and, more importantly, not around my corner, I confess that there's been a bit of a bounce in my step these last few days. And not just because I can enjoy a café con leche in an outdoor café at 2 in the afternoon for the next 30 days. Although I can. For it is my belief that, if there is an Omniscient Demiurge Floating About the Heavens on a Cloud, he or she is probably more than satisfied that during my last 2 Ramadans in Rabat, I never once plunged a pickle fork into my eye sockets, into the eye sockets of those fasting about me, or completely succumbed to a profound debilitating depression that a few gin & tonics with Mr. N didn't cure. Yes, I acquitted myself rather well. No god could ask for more.

Now I've heard all the Ramadan Rhetoric - of how it helps to develop a deeper relationship with Allah by communing with the poor and by keeping in check so-called vices (anger, envy, lust, and greed) while refraining from gossip & making sarcastic comments - but I'm just not a huge fan of it. What god would want his or her followers to abstain from snarkiness for a whole month? A month! Where's the fun in that?

Indeed, there even exist Infidels who believe that, at least in Morocco, Ramadan pretty much equals Party Time. These people are either delusional, misinformed, or have an incredibly skewed definition of 'party time'.

And if there is an Omniscient Demiurge Floating About the Heavens on a Cloud, he or she deigned to acknowledge his/her satisfaction with This Writer and her past Ramadan Performances by placing an accordion player in the tunnel of the Príncipe de Vergara metro this morning. But not just any accordion player but an Inspired Accordion Player whose god-sent mission was to fill Madrid's underground with the upbeat and quintessentially catchy quintupled rhythm of Dave Brubeck's Take Five. On the accordion. It was surreal and wonderful and it made me smile and I gave him change and so I just want to say "thank you, Omniscient Demiurge Floating About the Heavens on a Cloud, if you exist. Hearing Inspired Accordion Player this morning made being miserable and cranky for those miserable and cranky two holy months in Rabat almost worth it.

"And if there isn't an Omniscient Demiurge Floating About the Heavens on a Cloud, thank you Madrid. Or at the very least, thank you Inspired Accordion Player's Mother for forcing your son to take suckhole accordion lessons every Saturday afternoon for twelve years and being completely ostracized by his friends and never having a date for the school dance. From the bottom of my heart, thank you."

"And Ramadan karim," added the Omniscient Demiurge Floating About the Heavens on a Cloud. "Enjoy the Brubeck."