04 August 2003

The Young Lion

I saw Osama down at the pool yesterday. He was having a beer in a big red plastic cup and seems to be doing well. He was worried about a couple issues, though, and I offered to sponsor him for a Green Card.

Not that Osama. I'm talking about the son of the Jordanian Army Attache. He graduated from The Citadel down in South Carolina and is finishing up his Masters of Electrical Engineering at Georgetown. He plays the goof around the building, and particularly on the pool deck. I laugh with him but he seems more like the class clown type, the show-off. I expressed surprise that he had completed a tough and uniquely American program. The Citadel is where Pat Conroy set his novel "The Lords of Discipline" and the institution was designed to produce the military leadership for the Palmetto State. Which I said was a long way from Amman, Jordan.

"When I am at the Chatham" he said, taking a sip of beer, "I do not have to be serious. When I am out in the world I treat it as a matter of importance." He struck a grave pose, his dark eyes deep. Then he laughed. Osama is no fool. I saw him for the first time at the season-opening social on the pool deck. He had flashing dark eyes and a brilliant smile and short black hair cut in an almost military crop. He made gentle fun of the older crowd with whom I wound up sitting, mocking the enthusiasm for the trio that was playing 1950s dance music. He saw me dancing with Margarite, the busty Finnish doyen with the dark-dyed hair. He got with the program then, and I think he wound up dancing with all the older gals. He had a great time. But I didn't know about his first name.

The crowd at the social was representative of the population of the Building. We have a diverse membership at The Chatham, the eight-story pink brick building just north of Route 50 in Arlington. Although it is a condominium, a lot of the owners lease out their units on a yearly basis. That works well for the transient population in Washington. The Chatham is a place of transition. It has four or five different types of units. Large efficiencies, many modified with a wall thrown down the middle to split off a tiny bedroom. I have one of those. The younger folks tend to have those, while the older residents have the two and three bedroom models that are quite spacious. There is no yard work at The Chatham, and you can walk away from the place on a weekend or a business trip. So we have some lobbyists and influence peddlers who use the building as a pied a terre in the imperial city, returning to other states and other families on the weekends. There is a gay component and there is the divorced crowd, male and female, starting over again. And of course the old couples who downsized from single-family dwellings and are waiting for the Big Transition. And the widow ladies with the blue hair who have been through the first half of it.

The Chatham offers tennis courts and a fitness center and an outdoor grill with a lock on the side. The twenty-four hour concierge and elegant lobby makes it a nice place, and the thick concrete construction that makes the units as quiet as vaults. I heard from Marty down the hall (she runs a dog-walking service and is a survivor of a State Department marriage) that there was a resident in the Building named Osama at the building.

I figured the young prankster must be Osama, since he was the only person I saw around the pool who looked Arab. Maybe it is stereotyping on my part, but I like to put two-and-two together. The other alternative I considered was that it really was Osama who lived here on a short-term lease. Maybe it was the real guy hiding out somewhere upstairs in a darkened apartment, recording garbled incendiary messages on a cassette deck and mailing them form the Buckingham Post Office during the day when most people are at work. It seemed as likely as any other place to be hiding.

I saw him yesterday at the pool. It had been another of those weird summer days in this strange season. I found it difficult to believe that it was August in Washington. It was humid but almost cool. Drenching rains rolled through to be followed immediately by blinding sunshine and the moisture radiated upward from the pavement in waves. I was down at my usual table on the deck, the one furthest away from the lifeguard so I can listen to my radio in peace. It was after rollerblading, and I was soaked in sweat. The young Arab guy came in through the gate in the tall link fence and signed in deck with one of his buddies. They carried drinks in plastic and walked down toward my end of the pool to set up shop.

"Hey, Osama!" I called out. It sounded funny, maybe an ethnic slur if I was wrong, but I figured it was worth a shot to unravel the little mystery. The dark-skinned young man looked up and responded. "Hey!" he said, remembering me from the pool social. I was the one who did the Pointer Sister’s song "Fire" in the Elmer Fudd voice. "How are you doing."

They dumped their towels and placed their plastic cups near the edge of the pool where they could get them once they were in the water. I decided it was as good a time as any to take a leap and cool off and we all arced into the blue water around the same time. We wound up in the deep end, hanging from the bottom of the diving board by oir hands. "So what a time in history to be named Osama" I said to him.

He shrugged and smiled. "It is the name my mother and father gave me" he said. "I could have changed my name. A lot of people did."

"What does it mean?" I asked.

He looked at me solemnly. "It means young lion in Arabic."

"Wow," I said. "It's funny that hasn't come up in all the talk about terrorism. What is an old lion?"

"Assad means lion, like Hafez Assad, the strongman of Syria. And it has come up and it does all the time," he said. "You just don't listen to the right media."

I agreed with him. A little understanding could go a long way to cleaning up the sewer of hatred that creates a generation ready to blow themselves up. The poisonous tone of the media, particularly the Middle Eastern media, is something that has concerned me for a long time and I never could crack it. I said we needed more Arabic speakers and we needed some more communication.

"Yeah, I talk to people back home and I tell them they have the Americans all wrong. They don't want to turn Iraq into a Christian country. They don't even want to turn America into a Christian country. They need to understand they way it really is here."

We talked for a long time, about the Hashemite Kingdom, and the years he had spent in London and the Netherlands and ten years in the States. He was twenty-three and he had spent the majority of his life as an American, and was a graduate of one of the toughest southern military schools. His sister had been born at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, while his Dad did the short course at Army War College. He was thinking about going back to Amman to visit him. He had retired and was teaching at the Jordanian War College in Amman.

"Is it going to be hard to get back here if you go home?" I asked. I thought about a kid I grew up with whose father returned to Canada and lost his green card at the border one day, thrown out of the only country he had ever known. It is a cold world out there, and measurably more frigid since 9-11 for non-citizens.

"Everything is hard these days," he said. "I will need someone to sponsor me, probably."

"Well, you can use me if you want," I said. "I would hate for the States to lose someone like you."

He took a sip and beer and thanked me before swimming away to join the younger crowd again. I thought about it and smiled. You have to help where you can. And I can't wait to sign an endorsement for Osama to come to the United States.