The Socks of Addis Ababa

He is standing in his socks and singing.

I hear a voice dripping in adolescent sass ring out, “Don’t sing!”

The picture blurs slightly and he has broken out into a wide, gap-toothed smile. In that moment he is the spitting image of my father.

 “Why not?” I hear him ask. His face zooms in and I note his kindly, mocking eyes.

There is no need to wait long for the retort. “Because you sing bad.”

His eyes are narrow and his shoulders are shaking jovially. He is laughing but the sound is turned off. The scene restarts and now the laughter skips, each time a fresh attempt. I can’t remember the sound of his laugh.

But I remember his socks. They are dark brown, like the color of his rich skin, but the color is too washed out to be mistaken for bare feet. I especially like his socks because they contradict the first impressions of a man donned in a thin gray suit and straight black tie.

He had met us at the airport like that, but now, the next day, standing in the shining morning light the suit had lost its formality, it greeted me instead like a tired old friend. In the days to come my father had fondly recounted to me how this man had accompanied us to our temporary home and, at his own insistence, stretched out on the floor adjacent to my father’s bed to spend the night. My father’s face is beaming as he recalls their simple conversations, and I romantically envision the two of them like young school boys, taking comfort in the living sound of each other’s voices calling out in the darkness. Dubbed over my daydream is my father’s voice still describing that night while he interjects his own narrative with soft coos of “Oh my brother, my brother. Oh he makes me feel as if it were just yesterday.”

This makes me realize I am remembering the first time I ever truly met my uncle. I try to piece together the rest of the memory. Had he just woken up? I focus on his hair, but the image flickers. It could have been either way, slightly askew or neatly combed. I replay the entire scene again. The annoyed critic in all her nine-year-old authority is me. I don’t doubt the dialogue, it’s far too close to the nearly daily exchange I still have with my own father about his singing. But was I speaking English? I know how to say those words in Amharic, but did I know them then? Did my uncle even speak English? My mind spins for a moment as I feel embarrassed at not immediately knowing the answer. But I seem to recall not knowing before. I imagine the surprise on my father’s face and his words, “Huh! You think he doesn’t know? Of course he knows!”

Towards the end of our five-week stay we were all taking a drive around the city when my uncle decided he wanted to take us all out for lunch. Where was completely up to us. Being the hardest to please however, put the decision, more realistically, in my hands. I barely hesitated before announcing the restaurant of my choice with glee: “Blue Top!”

“Blue Top?” I hear my father’s voice echo mine with an unmistakable inflection of incredulity at my daring. More than a decade later my stomach still flutters uneasily at the disproval in his voice and my own naivety.

Somehow back then I didn’t know any better, or at least did not want to know. Blue Top was the name of perhaps the only chain of restaurants back then in all of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that catered to the American fast-food palate. To stumble across such food as burgers, fries, and ice cream was a rarity, but more so were the everyday Ethiopians that could afford to eat there.

I can’t say that my uncle ever expressed anything other than willingness however. My father on the other hand, knitted his brow when the final check came out and fought hard to help pay for the bill. They argued in Amharic as I sat blithely by, still nursing my disappointment over the burger they had served me loaded with toppings when I had specifically asked for none.

At some point later in the day my father took me aside. “Now, you are young, so you are forgiven.” With this famous opening line of my father’s, I immediately readied my defenses and poised myself to deny any and all of his accusations of bad behavior. “Next time, if a relative, out of the kindness of his heart, wants to invite you to a restaurant…then?” I didn’t like being asked questions in the middle of reprimands. I felt too much pressure to make sure I didn’t say anything to anger them more.

“Not say Blue Top?” I offered.

“Think!” He answered earnestly jabbing his finger into the side of his head. “Think before you speak! Think, oh, here is my lovely uncle, or auntie, or cousin, who is trying to do something for me. Oh, nice of them! I should just say, ‘Oh, thank you, nice of you, but you don’t have to.’ And that’s all.”

“But what if they really want to?”

“Then, think! Think of their living circumstance! You see how they live here; money doesn’t just fall from the sky. Pick a reasonable place and not this Blue Top nonsense.”

My conscience squirmed as he spoke. It was true; I had noticed the difference in the way people lived there. I recall vividly my sick surprise in seeing main roads lined with beggars as far as the eye could see. Mothers with starving children, men with amputated limbs, old women stooped over with age, all of them sucking their teeth in despair, their palms stretched upward, a constant murmuring sea of prayers, blessings, and pleas for help on every side of me. One encounter in particular has always stuck with me.

I was walking up a dirt path with my father one afternoon when I spotted two boys sitting off to the edge in the grass. One was sitting down, staring wistfully ahead, while the other was crouched ready to move at a moment’s notice. And sure enough, as my father and I drew nearer the boy straightened up and came bounding over to us. None of his dialogue remains in my memory and so it is most likely he approached us speaking glibly in Amharic. Proficiency in the language, however, was not necessary to understand the meaning of his outstretched, pleading hands.

Removed from the overwhelming streets of beggars, where giving to one feels like purposefully denying the rest, I handed him a few coins with my heart at ease. The boy took the money with a wide grin and ran back to the boy babbling happily away in Amharic. As we steadily drew near their post on the side of the path I took a better look at the seated boy, and how the other boy, who we had given the money to, was deliberately placing the coins in his friend’s hand and closing the fingers around the coins as if to make a point. As the seated boy’s face lit up with a smile, I peered closer but immediately regretted doing so as I recoiled in horror.

I could see far too much of the whites of his eyes with his irises, just barely visible, pointing directly upwards into his skull. And it was then that I realized he was completely blind. As we continued past them and down the path my father turned to me and asked simply, “Did you see how they help each other? Did you see their love?”

Back in the house, standing uncomfortably guilty before my father’s reproaches, this is the question I understood he wanted to me to see. Through his disapproval he was saying, “My brother is poor. But he paid for all of us to eat our fill. Did you see his love?”

He standing in his socks and singing. I see it.