The Wall

There's a piece of art by Banksy that makes me feel...confused. Sad and happy at the same time. It's a painting of kids on the Israel-West Bank barrier.

In Liberia, I think of all the powerful people hidden behind high walls and wonder if the locals think something special is being kept from them, too. Last week, though, life imitated Banksy at the end of my street in the form of a thick cement wall with a metal door ajar showing a sliver of sand, grey waves and pink sky.

There was nothing else behind that door.

I tried to photograph it but I couldn't do it justice. Sometimes, there really is perfection on the other side of the wall. 

Maypole

I could definitely have done without this month. Things were already unraveling around me when, on Sunday, I was relieved of a car battery in broad daylight. But this morning, on the back of a pehn-pehn, I thought I was flying.

I'd never been on a motorbike during rush hour so I didn't know that the bikers and their riders form a spontaneous posse. Someone smart was blasting music so there was shimmying on Yamahas, weaving through lanes, gliding around other bikes, spotting one another with that warm not-yet-rainy-season wind in your eyes as the car-people sulk, air-tight, in gridlock. This is Monrovia's maypole dance and it's worth getting on some loon's open-air machine for. 8 o'clock this morning felt like quitting time on a Friday.

You've not beat me yet, May.

Wayne's World

A few months ago, my mother asked me to play wingman at another predictably awkward event hosted by some sisterhood of Southerners. There was singing and secrecy and there were sashes. They all wore white. So did I. I didn't mean to; no one told me otherwise.

This was the day I met the president.

I am not the star-struck type -- New York can jade a kid quick -- yet I literally had to be tugged toward this woman. Maybe it was because she’s my mom's boss, or because we've got that German blood, or because I knew she’d ask me why I’d waited a year and a half to lock eyes with her.

The truth is this: that all that time, all I'd ever thought was “I'm not worthy.” No fancy PhD, famous husband, fantastic job. Just me, standing there, tongue-tied, trying not to ruin the family name.

I refuse to go to any more of these things. My mom's just going to have to hire a date like the rest of us.

Bush Skills

Watching someone change a flat without a jack on Homeland made me think of all the bush skills I never learned in Liberia. I have no idea what's going on under the hood of my car. I can't tell one crop from another. I don't even know how to start a fire.

I can, however, behead, shell and gut a dozen spiky, spiteful lobsters. (My hands look like I went at them with a cheese grater.)

I figure that's worth something.