I think Cairo was a hard assignment for my family. I’m not sure how my dad felt about returning to the town he’d grown up in, but I know it was hard for my mom, being there without me. Wives, you know, aren’t really supposed to work on overseas assignments, but my school and my formation had always been important to her, and she’d done a marvelous, energetic job at both, and now she was there without me, since I was in college. So it’s weird when I mention it on our laundry list of overseas assignments, since I didn’t really live there.
But I did visit, four times in all. This was the fourth. Beth came with me, during the Spring Break of our sophomore year. I had never bonded with Cairo the way I’d bonded with the other countries we’d lived in. It was loud, god it was so loud, and it just never seemed to end. Not the noise, not the dust, not the sprawling poverty. I could see, objectively, its splendor and chaotic energy and the deep veins of its history but mostly, I was bored and lonely when I visited.
But I’m glad my last visit was with a newcomer to Africa, someone whose eyes were wide at every turn because it was all unfamiliar to her. Cairo through Beth’s eyes was at its best – captivating and exotic. My mom lined up stellar day after stellar day of fun and history and a little dash of decadence. It’s from whence I get my gracious hostess genes. We had a ball.
And my mom, in her ever-aware sense of hostessing, realized that the week we were visiting coincided with Eid el-Kbir, a period a few months after Ramadan that’s usually celebrated with sacrificial animals and donating food to the poor. It’s also marked, at least in Egypt, with dipping one’s hands in blood and marking walls, cars, homes. Hey, we were visitors – we never judged – and of course, this being our third Muslim country, my family was more than used to cultural differences. Only, Mom was a little worried about how Beth would react to all the, you know, animals. So she booked our last three days at the newly-minted Hilton resort, on the mouth of the Red Sea. Some cultural detox, if you will – in my family, nothing says home like the Hilton.
Of course, Beth was fine. Beth is open-minded, fearless, and the few bloody hand-prints or carcasses we did see weren’t anything to go crazy over. Still, that little gesture of my mom’s didn’t go unappreciated. For two days, we watched dolphins share waterspace with honking big oil tankers, ate home-brought chicken pie on the beach, and cavorted on the random trampoline. I remember it as the first place I read Harry Potter (in a matter of hours), a quiet, nearly empty resort that was basically all ours.
And the jumping photos sort of became a theme.

I think my luck started to turn when we got assigned this dorm, in the twilight days of my miserable junior year. The year had been bad for so many reasons I can now assign, post-apocalyptically, with collected clarity. As much as I adore SLC for its education and wide-open sense of learning, it can be a difficult place socially. To any alumni who wasn’t drunk all four years, they know that’s like saying the West Bank is an iffy neighborhood.
The story is typical – my junior year was mostly crappy and depressing. I didn’t talk to the people that could help and soothe and rescue (my parents and Beth) and I spent far too much time talking to people who couldn’t (names redacted). But then I got back for my senior year and the tides had changed. I had a confidence I’d picked up somewhere in the lowest depths, I had stopped running the newspaper which freed up, oh, my entire life. And I was living in this fabulous, fabulous apartment with only two other people and a turn-of-the-century greenhouse out my back window. It was the very last year McMasters was standing, and was all mine.
This view is still precious to me. Walking across the Slonim House lawn on my way back from class or conferences or coffee, looking at that old sloping roof and knowing my bed, my refuge, was there. I had a fire escape landing outside my room, with its own door and everything – and although my two uptight roommates didn’t like me using it since it didn’t lock from the outside, I used it a lot anyway.
It’s a pity that the apartment was the scene of the total dissolution of a friendship with a girl I’d known since freshman year. If I can speak in therapist-talk, she stopped being able to handle my truth just as I was growing the balls to show it, all the time, and damn what people expected of me. She broke up with me, even, in a nasty Dear John letter left on my desk; when I showed it to my therapist, foaming with indignation at the leveled accusations, Maureen wisely asked, “do you want to KEEP this friendship? No? Then she’s done the work for you.” A wise point.
It was a good year regardless. There were long talks with boys that didn’t mean too much, there were hilarious late-night photo sessions and cigarettes smoked happily off the back stairs (damn the roommates again). My car was parked right downstairs and it was my ticket to all the fun I had that year, free at last from the heavy burden of the paper. The room, in my memory, was always littered with color test prints, piles of clothes, and nothing but true friends. It’s a trend I’ve held onto.
I know SLC needed the arts center they built on that lot, but I wish that apartment was still there.