My wife, Sarah, and our son, Schuyler were up at Alta Laguna Park, here in Laguna Beach last weekend where Schuyler takes his tennis lessons. It's a beautiful park at the top of the first range of hills that rise up from the Pacific and mark the peak of Laguna Beach housing. A lot of folks come up there to see the vistas, use the parks and enjoy a beautiful day.
This weekend we are enjoying the company of Vasco, the nearly-adopted son of friends. He's a 4th-grader from Malawi who is smaller than average due to a defective heart, which has been repaired since coming to the USA a year-or-so ago. He's learning about all things American, including our language. Like most boys, he loves warrior-related play and stories. His almost-mother, Cathleen, refers to him as the Chocolate Ninja.
So Sarah, Schuyler and Vasco are up at Alta Laguna, walking to the courts and they pass a woman in a Burka (not a usual thing in Laguna Beach) and Vasco asks, "She ninja?" Sarah and Schuyler nearly died and quickly explained that women in burkas were not ninjas, and as much as they could get across about muslims, coverings, etc. . .
When Sarah was telling me the story later that night she mentioned that it was kind of ironic that Vasco connected the dots between ninjas and Muslim women as the hope of Islam and developing the Middle East largely relies on educating and including women in that world. She started playing with the idea of Muslim, burka-wearing women as "ninjas"--the secret weapon of their culture. I'll let her develop the idea further, but it spawned this short haiku last night:
winter black burka
the mystery of darkness
superheros await
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