15 May, 2010
To my surprise and then delight, after an copious afternoon-long banquet in the town of Zahleh, Lebanon in the Beqaa Valley, Lebanon, I discovered an operating bumper car rink full of enthusiastic teen-agers.
It didn’t take long for me to join them.
At first I allowed myself just a single ride, since I was afraid of missing the bus, and so rushed down to the assigned meeting place about three hundred yards away. Once there, I learned that bus would not be leaving for another twenty minutes or so. I immediately threw down a dare to Solo Raharinjanahary (former Dean of the Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, Université d’Antananarivo, Madagascar, and until the day before Vice-President of AFELSH). Solo (pronounced “Seul”) is easily the wackiest of the colleagues, mostly Deans or former Deans in French-speaking universities. We are âmes soeurs of a sort. I knew he could not resist.
The race was off.
I had the decided avantage. Although I had not been in a bumper car for what I figure was over fifty years, it is like riding a bike. It comes back instantly. Solo had never ridden one, so it took a minute or two to get the hang of it.
But then he turned the tables.
I had utterly forgotten the existence of dodgems, but once behind the wheel — and I was decidedy DWI after two hours at table — I plunged momentarily back into the world I inhabited at the point in time when the going gets tough and we are torn between the untrammeled play of boyhood and the daunting new dimensions of life hormones are catapulting us into.
One of those, surely, is the loss of spontaneous joy, perhaps of spontaneity itself.
Or so it seemed to me as I dozed in the bus on the way back to Beirut, reflecting on the peals of laughter which had broken over me on the rink.
