Moroccan Keepsakes

Morocco, December 1981

                                            

Introduction

In December of 1981, three friends and I — all of us then living in Lisbon — flew to Tangier and rented a small Fiat for a ten-day drive south into Morocco. We intended to spend Christmas somewhere near the Sahara. At the time this seemed perfectly reasonable.

From Tangier we drove through the Rif Mountains to Chaouen, then on to Fez, and afterward toward the desert towns of Erfoud and Rissani. The roads gradually emptied. Villages became smaller and farther apart. South of Fez the land turned rocky and treeless, and by then our plan had taken on the quality of improvisation.

Our ambition was to reach Rissani and then follow a truck track toward the Algerian frontier. We imagined crossing quietly into Algeria for a brief look at the Sahara from the other side before slipping back again unnoticed. None of us had any real idea whether this was possible.

The trip unfolded unevenly. There were long stretches of empty road and conversation, roadside cafés full of smoke and sweet tea, moments when the Fiat seemed on the verge of mechanical collapse, and the strange exhilaration that comes from traveling beyond the edge of certainty.

Along the way I picked up a few objects almost casually — a small incense tagine, a brass container, and an old Quranic tablet. Looking at them now, I see them less as souvenirs than as moments in the journey itself.

Object I — Miniature Incense Tagine from Chaouen

I purchased this miniature incense holder -- shaped like a traditional ceramic 'tagine' -- in a small shop in Chaouen, a town popular with adventurers in the foothills of the Rif Mountains. Unlike the large clay tagines used for cooking, this version was meant for incense — bakhoor (perfumed wood chips) or amber resin placed inside and heated beneath the conical lid.

At the time, Chaouen already felt dreamlike: steep lanes, whitewashed walls tinted blue in places, thin mountain air, and drifting wood smoke in the December cold. Yet my own memory of the town is inseparable from two experiences. The first was being guided into an open lot near the medina by a group of teenage boys who showed obvious disappointment when they weren’t compensated for their ‘effort.’ I didn’t realise how serious they were about their self-appointed job until we returned to our car the next day and discovered all four tires had been flattened.

My second memory is even less pleasant. A day or two after arriving in Chaouen, I was suddenly overcome with food poisoning and spent much of the rest of our stay there confined to the guesthouse while my companions disappeared into the surrounding mountains on an overnight trek. (At least I had a novel by Camus to comfort me.)

The evenings were cold. I remember lying awake beneath blankets listening to muffled voices from the street below. Smoke and unfamiliar cooking smells drifted through the window from the medina. Occasionally footsteps echoed in the lane outside.

The little incense burner became attached to those memories — not adventure exactly, but the sense of isolation, discomfort, and the peculiar vulnerability that comes with being ill in a strange place far from home.

Object II — Brass Container from Fez

I bought the pictured small brass container in Fez, where the journey entered a different rhythm entirely.

After the openness of the Rif mountain roads, Fez felt enclosed and intense, especially inside the old quarter. The medina seemed to function as a self-contained world of workshops, narrow passageways, braying animals, smoke, tools, and voices echoing between stone walls. Metalworkers hammered brass in dim stalls while spice merchants, leather sellers, and woodcarvers worked nearby. Everywhere there were repeating geometric patterns — in tiles, gates, trays, and engraved vessels like this one. The container's surface carried the same repeating geometry visible throughout the city.

The exact purpose of the container was uncertain. Such things might have held spices, tea, incense, or ceremonial powders. What mattered to me was less utility than presence: the object seemed to condense the medieval atmosphere of Fez into something portable.

Object III — Quranic Tablet from Erfoud

I found the Quranic tablet in the market at Erfoud near the edge of the Sahara.

By then the terrain had changed completely. The roads stretched across open rocky plains broken by oases, scattered settlements, and the occasional camel grazing in the distance. Everything felt exposed to weather and distance.

On our first night in town we visited a local bathhouse. After the long drive it should have felt restorative, but my memory of the place isn't positive: dim light, steam rising from the water, faces appearing suddenly through the mist and then disappearing again.

The outdoor market the next day was easier to appreciate. Fossils, minerals, carved stone, old tools, animal skins, and strange objects were spread beneath awnings while traders bargained nearby. Camels stood tethered in the dust.

The wooden tablet immediately stood apart from the surrounding goods. Its smooth surface was darkened with age and smoke. Stylized Arabic script framed a central hanging-lamp design against a lattice pattern. On the reverse side were faded handwritten lines in ink striking me as prayers or exercises in calligraphy.

The object felt used rather than manufactured for visitors. That was what drew me to it. It seemed to carry traces of another life before arriving in the market at Erfoud.

A day or two later, outside Rissani on Christmas Day, we hired a local guide who pointed us toward a truck track leading into the desert toward Algeria. Several miles outside town the Fiat slid into soft sand and became hopelessly stuck.

What followed was part disaster and part comedy. We pushed uselessly beneath the winter sun while the Sahara stretched silently in every direction. Eventually several truck drivers stopped to help and together we managed to free the car and drag it back onto firmer ground.

When I think now of the tablet, those moments return with it: desert dust, exhaustion, laughter, and the immense scale of the austere land around us.

Closing Note

Together, the incense tagine, the brass container, and the devotional tablet form a small personal exhibition of Morocco from December 1981. They're modest objects, for sure. None is especially valuable. Yet each preserves something larger than itself: the cold mountain air and smoke of Chaouen, the enclosed medieval world of Fez, and the strange luminous atmosphere of the Sahara beyond Erfoud and Rissani.

What also remains after all these years is not simply the route we traveled but the feelings experienced during the journey itself — the sense of isolation while I was laid up in Chaouen, strange foreboding in the bathhouse, mechanical uncertainty, and the reckless confidence of youth, which brought me farther than good judgment probably should have allowed.

The greatest present from the trip was ultimately the Sahara itself: reached by road on Christmas Day after a week moving steadily south by southeast through Morocco, carrying the four of us into a landscape both stark and luminous with a majesty that has stayed with me ever since.

Wooden Paddle from Central Portugal

It was autumn 1981. I was living in suburban Lisbon and took a weekend camping trip with two dear friends: David, a Brazilian‑American scholar researching for his PhD, and Nucha, a recent history graduate from the University of Lisbon. We spent Friday night on sleeping bags inside the ruins of Abrantes Castle, and on Saturday morning drove north toward the medieval city of Tomar.

It was there , while driving along a wooded tributary of the Tejo that we spotted a tiny stone grist mill. Our curiosity got the best of us so we pulled over our Fiat and waded beside the riverbank to the stone riverside structure.

The mill was abandoned, its cool stone interior empty except for a single wooden paddle leaning against the base of one wall. Having inspected the object and speculated on its use, we carried it away, with the thought that the mill was no longer in use.

The object itself is modest in dimensions and weight: light wood, finger holes for grip, leather or hide patches nailed on each side as reinforcement for a central split repaired years earlier.

The paddle’s purpose is debated. While one AI site sees in it a flax tool, used in preparing the plant that becomes linen, I thought it was for use in pushing swaths of grain, and another site stated that this was plausible.

The argument for this as a ‘flax scrutcher’ goes like this. After flax stalks were soaked in water to loosen their fibers, workers had to knock away the brittle woody bits clinging to the stocks. A bundle of stalks would have been held against a board, and this paddle then swung down in quick, repeated strokes. The blows would have freed the soft fibers, which could then have been combed and spun into thread.

As for the other view, I’d suggest this was a grain paddle, for stirring or shifting grain as it was processed in the small mill. Both readings are plausible, I think, and maybe the paddle served more than one role in its previous rural Portuguese life.

From what I’ve read, hand-held paddles like this were common in rural Europe from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, when flax was still processed by hand before being woven into linen. Even as mechanized mills spread during the industrial era, small communities in Portugal continued to rely on simple wooden blades for everyday textile and grain work. Tools of this kind often remained in use well into the early twentieth century, repaired many times over, until rural mills were finally abandoned in favor of industrial production.

What matters now, I think, is this tool’s survival. Patched, worn, and adapted, it embodies the ingenuity of subsistence work—whether that was in linen or in grain. Like the Afghan carpet I last described or the Colima parrot pot described earlier, this wooden paddle is a witness to everyday craft traditions, retrieved by chance and now part of a personal collection that spans continents and centuries.

* The soundtrack for this post -- with medieval Andaluscian music -- is here: https://www.mixcloud.com/Dadd.../espa%C3%B1a-antigua-dpe118/

A ‘Tribal Afghan’ Carpet Story

In May 1989, traveling overland toward the Hindu Kush Mountains of northern Pakistan, I had stopped in urban Rawalpindi to catch a van that would take me north to the Karakoram Highway. One morning, stepping out from my modest hotel, I was approached by an earnest young man dressed in a shalwar kameez and a prayer cap carrying a rolled up object in his arms. With what seemed like a practiced motion, he quickly unfurled a carpet — this carpet — at my feet and asked what I would offer.

I recognized the piece, broadly, as an Afghan tribal work. At the time, Afghanistan was in the grip of war, and many refugees had crossed into Pakistan. Carpets—portable, durable, and culturally resonant—were among the goods they carried and traded. This one, with its bold geometry, saturated reds, and muted blues, seemed to speak of both tradition and displacement. I quickly made an offer and then found myself carrying a rug back to my room.

The Carpet Itself

This carpet is hand-knotted wool, with short, resilient pile and a wool foundation. Flip it over and the technical story comes into focus: asymmetrical knots typical of Afghan practice, and a knot density in the range of roughly 100-150 knots per square inch, and slightly depressed warps—all signs, so I’ve read, of village or camp production rather than urban workshop refinement.

Three large floral medallions stand within the off-cream field. My research suggests that these have some similarity to Turkmen guls but with adapted motifs. The structure and colour palette align with apparent Ersari Turkmen ethnic traditions, found in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan. The freer drawing of the medallions suggests Uzbek or mixed village influences—typical of northern Afghan weaving in the late twentieth century. The natural wool ground is supposedly notable, less dense than classical Turkmen all-over patterning.

The colours in this rug are classic vegetable dyes: madder reds, indigo blues, browns and greens drawn from natural dye mixes, and undyed wool. The tones are softened rather than vivid, consistent with age and use—exactly what we might expect from a rug woven in the 1970s or 1980s and acquired in 1989.

Wear and Use

The carpet shows the marks of a working life. Frayed edges and the reduced pile indicate it was used underfoot rather than preserved as a decoration. (I’ve had this rug on the floor of homes in four countries!)

Subtle abrash—the gentle variation in color caused by small-batch dyeing— runs through the whole field, a sign of traditional production rather than factory uniformity.

Context and Continuity

By the late twentieth century, many weavings described as “tribal” were already being produced in settled or semi-settled village or refugee camp contexts, often for sale rather than solely for the weaver’s domestic use. In moments of upheaval, that production had moved with the weavers themselves.

Seen this way, the carpet belongs not just to a particular place, but to a pattern: of human movement, adaptation, and continuity. Designs shift, materials change, and markets intervene, but the practice of weaving persists.

An Object That Remains

Thirty-seven years after my on-the-street Rawalpindi purchase, this piece is more than a souvenir. It is a record of both my journey and broader movements—of people, of craft, and of history carried in wool. The carpet’s wear does not diminish it but gives the thing context.

So this ‘tribal Afghan’ carpet remains what it has always been: a functional object, yes, but one shaped by human hands, bearing the imprint of a particular moment in time and then quiet endurance beyond it.

Vestiges of Memory: Portuguese Azulejos Now in Bohol

In August of 1979, I stepped away from graduate studies at Ohio State and set off on a backpacking trip across Europe. With a Europass in hand, I traveled solo to the UK then by train from London to Athens, where a chance encounter at the port changed the course of that journey and my life. There I met Sofia, a young Portuguese traveler bound for Mykonos. We became fast friends, and over three weeks of shared adventures she planted the seed: “Go to Portugal. Meet my family. See what you might do there.” (Sofia was working as an au pair in London, but advised me to visit her parents, which I did, and who graciously took me in for several months.)

By December of that same year I had left graduate school and the USA behind, carrying with me my experience teaching Russian and a desire to live and work abroad. England was my first stop, but by early 1980 Portugal became my home for the next two and a half years. I rooted in 'Lisboa' and started tutoring English, while I also traveled the country, learning the language and culture, absorbing the country's rhythms, its history and traditions.

It was during a visit to Coimbra, the country's capital until the 13th century and a cultural hub, that I found the blue-and-white tile among the photos below. In an amazing circumstance of luck, while I was staying in a rustic inn near an old building demolition site, I spotted a fragment of history among the rubble: a broken tile with its orange tree motif still vivid despite cracks and chips. This was no simple decoration — it was an antique azulejo, and from what I learned from an expert, likely from the mid 18th century. It might have once been part of a grand wall panel. Salvaging it felt like rescuing a piece of Coimbra's architectural soul.

Some time later, in a shop in Lisbon that promised vintage and antique wares, I acquired the floral tiles shared in this post. From the nature of the colour palette and the brushwork, these were probably hand‑painted in the late 18th to early 19th century, rustic and imperfect, yet alive with tradition. Their designs carry forward centuries of Portuguese ceramic artistry, classic objects that embody continuity with designs refined over time.

Together, this small set of tiles tells a layered story. The Coimbra fragment speaks of endurance, survival, and the persistence of beauty through ruin. The floral tiles -- including two that I have added to the cornerstone of a bamboo shed recently built on my property -- illustrate growth, natural development, and the artisans’ ongoing dialogue with heritage. Side by side, they remind us that legacy is not only preserved in intact monuments but also in fragments and reinterpretations. My own journey — from Ohio to Athens, from Sofia’s invitation to Portugal, from rubble to rescued tile, and now around the world to 40 years in Asia — mirrors the same themes: creative initiation, continuity, and stories carried forward.

In Bohol, these azulejos rest far from their Portuguese origins, yet they remain vessels of heritage and memory. They are bridges across time and place, reminders that even fragments of embossed blossoms and fruit can speak of legacy, resilience, and the enduring beauty of cultural tradition.

 

The Parrot Pot -- In Flight Across Time

 

This Colima parrot vessel was made nearly two thousand years ago in western Mexico, part of the Shaft Tomb tradition (c. 100 BCE–250 CE). These sculptural tripod jars were often placed in deep shaft funerary chambers, accompanying the dead into the afterlife. I once saw one just like this in the Los Angeles County Museum.

I’ve read that parrots in Mesoamerica symbolized vitality, sunlight, communication, and the lushness of the tropics — fitting guardians for a journey beyond the physical world.

This vessel was not thrown on a wheel; the potter’s wheel was unknown in ancient West Mexico. Instead, it was shaped entirely by hand all those millenia ago by a Colima artisan working within the Shaft Tomb tradition. Clay gathered from local riverbeds would have been tempered with sand or crushed volcanic grit to strengthen it. The rounded body was built up slowly through coiling and modeling, each layer pressed and blended into the next, the form rising not from rotation but from touch. Even now, with its balanced weight and quiet symmetry, we can feel the intelligence of hands that shaped this clay.

I’ve also learned that the three parrot heads and solid tripod legs were sculpted separately and attached while the clay was still leather-hard, the joins smoothed so that structure and sculpture became one.

Once assembled, the surface was carefully burnished with a polished stone, compressing the clay to create its soft sheen. A red wash — made from iron-rich minerals — was then applied to give the vessel its deep reddish earthen color and its strength. It was fired not in a kiln with gauges and controls, but in an open-air or pit firing fueled by wood, where temperature was judged by flame, smoke, and long experience. The mottling and tonal shifts across the surface are part of that process, the trace of fire itself.

Of course, noone knows the name of the person who made this pot. Colima artisans remain anonymous, their identities folded into time. But this was no casual maker. The confident modeling, the stability of the tripod stance, and the assured sculpting of the bird form suggest someone who was deeply practiced, working within a family workshop, passing knowledge across generations.

The pot began as earth gathered by hand, was shaped by skill and memory, and was fired by flame. That it still stands — and has crossed continents — is a testament to the culture that created it and to the artist who first gave it form.

I bought this piece in 1993 from a certified pre-Columbian antiquities dealer in Tucson, the friend of a friend. It had come from a substantial private collection of Colima material assembled decades earlier. At the time, I justified buying it because of its story, its beauty and my thought that it would be an investment. I also wanted it to join the collection of Indigenous artifacts I'd inherited and collected — objects that felt alive with continuity and presence.

I did not yet realize I was beginning a shared migration.

From Tucson it traveled to my home in rural Akita prefecture, Japan, where it became a fixture — and a conversation starter — for more than a decade. Its rounded, ribbed body and grounded stance seemed to always anchor the room, even as snow fell outside for months each year.

It was then crated and shipped to Kuala Lumpur, and later to Singapore, where it lived with me in four different residences. In our last apartment there, beside the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, we would often watch flocks of parrots early in the evening as they would sweep across the sky and, squawking to high heaven, settle into the rain trees for the night. The ancient bird-form vessel sat quietly indoors, while its living counterparts crossed through the twilight — a reminder that motion and continuity are part of the same story.

On my first trip from Singapore to Bohol, I hand-carried the pot on the flight via Manila, just to make sure it would be safe. After decades of careful packing and shipping across continents, it made its most recent journey not in a crate but under my arm.

Created as a ceremonial object for a shaft tomb nearly two thousand years ago, this vessel has already traveled across time. Its own modern migration — from Mexico to Arizona, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and now the Philippines — feels strangely appropriate. Like a small flock of parrots in flight, it has moved through geographies while retaining its essential form.

Originally acquired as an artifact, it has become something more personal. I now intend to keep it in the family, eventually as the repository for a bit of my own earthly remains — a quiet echo of its first purpose. In that sense, its long journey may come full circle.

An object made to accompany the dead has instead accompanied the living — across oceans, climates, and chapters of life — before returning, once again, to its ancient role.

Postcards from the Edge: First Steps Toward Becoming a Global Citizen

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 My First Postcard Home — from Moscow, USSR March 1977

An Overview

Today Russia is always in the news. Thanks to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, many Americans and people the world over can make comments about Russian military aggression or the sad plight of Ukrainians.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the focus on the Russian threat — then characterized as the Soviet nuclear and ideological / communist threat — was just as powerful if not moreso. As an elementary school student I experienced bombing drills where we kids had to either kneel under our desks or be dispatched to the school basement in an ‘evacuation exercise.’

That experience was my first awareness of the Soviet Union. By the time I was in 6th grade, I could have been conditioned to have fear and hate toward the Russian empire. In fact, the opposite was true. I wanted to know what the full story was. For that reason, when our teacher Mrs. Redd announced that to better understand the unit in our social studies book about life in the USSR we would have a visitor to our class who would show us a slide show about Russia, I was fully onboard. When she called for a volunteer to assist the gentleman in bringing his equipment into the auditorium and in the set up, I raised my hand. As it happened, the visitor would turn out to be our local high school’s Russian teacher, Mr. Ed Taylor.

And that was the start of my journey. Mr. Taylor’s slides showcased his own journey to Russia, and inspired by the vibrant human images and the man who shared them, from that point forward, I would take every opportunity to learn more about Russia, its culture and people.

I studied basic Russian language both in 9th and 10th grades in high school and also learned something about its culture and history. My most vivid memory of the classes was memorizing dialogues and practicing those with my classmates.

By the time I entered university in September 1974, the die had been cast: I would be studying Russian language and Soviet Area studies as my major and, if the stars aligned right and I did well, maybe I could teach Russian in the future and inspire students just like Mr. Taylor did, or perhaps I could even score an analyst job with one of America’s intelligence services.

Lucky for me, once I was enrolled in Ohio State University, I learned that the uni had one of the only study abroad programs in the USSR that existed for students in the USA. I was in solid.

That brings us to this postcard. In March 1977, nearly through my 3rd year at OSU, I had left Columbus as a naive but wide-eyed 21-year-old, bound for Moscow and a term at the renowned Pushkin Institute of Moscow State University.

Though I had already studied Russian for two years in high school and had learned a lot about the country's history and people through eight trimesters at Ohio State, such an immersion was something else entirely. I would be living in the capital city of the USSR and we would not be allowed to speak English, which was both daunting and exhilarating. Alongside language practice, we had to attend lectures on Soviet culture and history, gaining clearer glimpses into daily life and government policy decisions under Brezhnev’s USSR. At the same time, I'd have a chance to get to know real Russians, which I had not done in Columbus save for the professors I'd met.

My journey to Moscow was itself a rite of passage: Columbus to JFK, Icelandic Air to Luxembourg via Reykjavík, bus to Frankfurt, flight to Berlin, crossing through Checkpoint Charlie into East Germany, then eastward by train through Poland and Belarus. Finally, we reached Moscow — a city that seemed impossibly romantic and mysterious.

On my very first night, a few American companions and I descended into the Moscow metro and emerged into Red Square. That moment — stepping onto the cobblestone of the city I'd learned so much about and which had played a central role in global geopolitics for 60 years — sealed my fascination with travel and cross-cultural discovery. There I was, standing in the heart of Russia, hooked.

Looking back now, half a century later, I feel that this postcard was more than a note home to my family. It’s a snapshot of my transformation: the moment I stepped beyond borders and began to see the world not as one simply divided by ideology, but as a place connected by our common values, dreams and interests in bonding. It was when I first truly sensed our shared humanity.

The Postcard’s Visual Imagery

This postcard pairs two powerful symbols of Soviet identity. In the background stands Moscow State University, one of Stalin’s monumental “Seven Sisters" skyscrapers, its soaring spire and wings embodying the intellectual ambition and disciplined grandeur of the Soviet state.

In the foreground rises a World War II memorial: two stark, tapering obelisks with a commemorative plaque and wreath at the base. Red flowers soften the austerity, but the monument’s purpose is clear — honoring the students and staff of Moscow State U. who died in the Great Patriotic War (our World War II).

Together, the university and the memorial present a carefully composed narrative of Soviet endurance, achievement, and national pride.

Stamp Imagery

The stamps themselves carry ideological weight. One depicts Sergei Korolev, chief architect of the Soviet space program, surrounded by rockets and medals — a celebration of cosmic ambition and technological prowess. Another commemorates the 60th anniversary of 1917's October Revolution.

Even ordinary mail at that time was infused with meaning: these stamps projected the USSR’s identity as a scientific, historical, and ideological superpower. Against this backdrop of monumentality and state symbolism sits my handwritten message — personal and tentative.

Postcard Text (1977)

Hi, well, I finally made it. It’s really unbelievable. So different.

The food has been different but good. We aren’t allowed to speak English and that’s pretty hard but I like it. I’ve already made many new friends, many from our group and a few from other groups who are staying here but not many Russians yet.

Well, I plan to write a letter soon so I’ll say more then.

Hope everything is OK.

Brad

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Closing Thought

That spring in Moscow sparked a lifelong pursuit of cultural understanding. It led to further study in Russian language and literature, travel across Europe and Asia, and eventually to a career shaped by and for global engagement. This postcard — tentative, wide-eyed, and sincere — was the first step on a path that continues to unfold. It reminds me that even small messages sent from the edge can carry the weight of a mind beginning to open.