3:13pm Saturday, Gig Harbor/3:13am Dubai, United Arab Emirates

I am trying to capture the excitement in Arketa Zambakari’s voice. She called moments ago to tell me that her eldest son, Elario, is “Right Now,” in the air. That is, as I write, Elario is seated in Economy class aboard Emirates Airline flight #722. The heavy Boeing 777 has lifted off the runway of Nairobi’s International Airport for a five-hour flight to Dubai. He may reach Dubai before I reach the end of this note.

Tomorrow, 8:10am, Dubai time, (8:10pm today for me) Emirates flight 229 will take off for Seattle. This Boeing 777 will blast through the troposphere at a ground speed of 585mph, cross over Russia, send ripples of sound over the massive North Sea, pass Oh, so close but high above the North Pole then, with only a few of the fourteen hours remaining to reach their destination, charge from the top of the world through Canadian airspace and into to Seattle, Washington where, after he clears customs (where just after our son and grandson leave SEATAC for Maui, and just before our Australian daughter lands to spend a few days with us), David and I hope to greet and hug Elario before he boards Alaska Airlines flight 3026 for a three hour flight on to Phoenix, Arizona where his mom, Arketa waits. 

It is the voice of Arketa on the phone today that I hope to demonstrate for you. 

I was raised in Phoenix, Arizona in a time when deep irrigation ditches ran parallel to neighborhood streets and invited small children settled in galvanized laundry tubs to bob along the water; when horses and dirt roads ruled Scottsdale, and Cave Creek was way out there, desert, deserted but for a few ne’er-do-well shacks. 

Picture this: my nine-year-old barefooted self, clothed hardly at all, waging war against 114° afternoon heat when my mother hollered me home from a friend’s house. My job was to run from Willene’s house on one side of the asphalt road to my house on the other. 

Imagine the dance of dirty, bare feet on hot asphalt. It was a torture of about twenty-five feet before reaching the hot dirt shoulder of the other side, next to the ditch to be jumped. It was a bobbing dance, a hurried, hurling dance; a shift of my weigh from toes to heels, to the outside edge of my feet to the ball of them, back to the toes, to a combination of left foot toes and right foot heel accompanied by loud sucking of hot air, to exhaling the cry of “ooh, ooh, eeii, ooh!” accompanied by the wind-milling of arms and the hope of not landing in a patch of bullhead stickers. 

THAT energy, THAT hurling effort, THAT hope of reaching the other side—for Arketa, the other side of today, the Tomorrow, when her eldest, long-lost son, Elario, arrives after decades of sorrow and hardship and un-chosen story. Elario arrives tomorrow. Arketa will be at the airport. Arketa will embrace the boy she lost in 1991. Arketa will have made it across a painful expanse of life. May the reunion be like slipping bare feet into cool water after a hot run. 

P.S. As of January 16th, Father Elario Bazia Zambakari will be serving as parish priest at Saint Mary’s Church, Chandler, Arizona.

PPS. the entire story, ZAMBAKARI, is posted in ARCHIVES