Issue 24: Day by passing day

Lessons in box delivery, Al-Hasa irrigation, and a mother's poetry.

Dearest reader,

I trust this letter finds you as it leaves me, in good health. One of the first jobs I had as a teenager was a driving job I did for my mom. I was in the 10th or 11th grade, and she had started a project which involved having a selection of families who lived on the same compound as us receive a large cardboard box, filled with a refrigerator’s worth of vegetables from a farm in Al-Hasa, delivered to their door directly. I was the dutiful, prompt, delivery boy, and got paid in cash for my services.

I forgot which day of each week I would drive, but I remember that while driving the sky would change from light to dark. It being a remarkably low sky is something I also remember—and harshly orange, as though the orange were masquerading as purple. I was in high school, which means that while driving I had two things with me: a Nokia mobile phone, which I barely used, and an iPod Touch, which I always used. It had a matte screen protector that was smooth like paper, and it always showed the album art of the songs I had downloaded onto it, because I made sure it did.

It was during these drives where I learned what No I.D. and Kanye West productions really sounded like. What it sounded like when Pete Rock said, “Okay”. I can almost remember the exact side-street I was driving on when I pulled over to stop the car and listen, really listen, to The Joy, during one of those drives.

I visited the farm from which the vegetables were sourced twice or perhaps three times. My mom liked to involve me in the projects she herself got involved in, and made an effort to bring me with her to places. I remember being surprised the first time I saw this particular farm that grew the delivery vegetables because, at the time, I don’t think I had even conceptualized the possibility of agriculture (outside of dates) existing in Saudi. The farmer gave us a walking tour of the various plots of sand where his vegetables grew, he showed us how his irrigation system worked—which I remember being quite elaborate—and he introduced us to the laborers who kept it all going. One of the laborers—who, as I recall, was a dark, thin, handsome man from Pakistan—was the man I would meet each week in a parking lot outside the security gates of the compound to pick up the boxes. We’d usually talk about things whenever we met. I vaguely remember even showing him a song I was working on once, and he told me he liked it and that his friends might like it too.

Mom & Dad. Dhahran beach. Photo captured in 2012 by yours truly.

In October of 2017, my mom sent me a series of voice messages on WhatsApp. She also called me, and told me that she had written a poem and that she wanted me to do something with it. “I think this could be turned into something—a song, maybe”, is what I can hear her telling me at the time. Later that summer, I took one of the voice messages—they were all different recordings of her reading the poem she had written—and wrote some music to sit beneath it. I titled the song “First Take” and released it that summer. I commissioned a brilliant Saudi artist to translate a portrait of my mother into a painting which I used as the album cover.

I’ve made some choices that I regret in life—there’s a particular cluster of choices I made from a period stretching from the end of 2020 through the early summer of 2021 that immediately come to mind when I think of this, and I sometimes wonder if things might have been better if I had been intelligent, courageous, or mature enough to have avoided them in the first place. I don’t know what exactly I mean when I say “better” here—but I guess I mean to say that I wonder if I could have made different choices which, perhaps, would hurt people—people very close to me—less.

There’s a small group of people who’ve been beside me over the years, relentlessly committed, through light and dark. Their hearts were open towards me when I didn’t know what it meant to hold an open heart. These are people who ultimately taught me, as I understand it today, what it might mean to feel “love”. And towards them, I hope I can learn to—day by passing day—open my own heart.

That’s all I have for tonight. I hope you have a magnificent weekend ahead of you.

Love,
Reef