To my dear friend Mu’min
(who is turning four years old this week)

Dear Mu'min,

By the time you’re old enough and well-practiced enough in English to read this I do not know if you will remember me. Your oldest brother brought me to visit you several times these past few weeks. You were shy at first, hiding behind the hallway corner, then burying your face in your brother’s shirt after he scooped you up and told you to say hello to me. Then a word or two. Then silence again.

The ice inevitably cracked, because, at the age of three years, eleven months, and some odd days, you were hopelessly curious and incurably talkative. You constantly asked your older brother to name things in English—sofa, curtains, cabinet, rug. You were timid at first, but soon you were testing me too, challenging me to speak the English words for every single thing in sight.

The second time I came to visit you did everything you could to distract me from conversation with your mother and older brothers. I tried to show off my Arabic writing for you, thinking it would surprise you. “No, no, no,” you said. “This is ‘b’”—it was a completely eligible scribble. Of course you hadn’t begun to learn reading and writing in school; nonetheless you still seemed pretty sure that you knew the Arabic alphabet better than I did.

You always loved to tell stories and had previously told me one about a man living in a cave atop a mountain (though the story was abruptly terminated when a funny TV show came on). The third visit I made, just a week ago, you immediately started a long narrative recreation of a battle with soldiers, tanks, guns, Jews, and Palestinians, complete with sound effects and dramatic pantomiming. I could hardly understand any of it, and your older brother laughingly told me while he translated that half of it was incomprehensible. ‘Children’s talk’ he said. You chattered unceasingly, leaping up on the couch to shoot from a higher angle, trolling across the carpet like a grumbling tank; I told your mother you were born to become a writer.

I wonder how many years have passed since then. You must be at least a teenager, or maybe twenty, as old as your oldest brother was when I first met him. I try to imagine what realizations first rattled that tenuous bubble of childlike innocence.

You were born into a difficult time. The Israeli army invaded the city shortly before your birth. Your mother must have nursed you while the twenty-four hour curfews were still in effect, while the streets were being turned to rubble and debris. Then for years thereafter, including up until now, the army checkpoints strangled the city. Consequently unemployment, poverty, and smoldering anger took their toll on people, effecting children the last and the most. Your mother told me, you saw a man shot in the head with your own eyes when you were two.

I had seen children, no more than three or four years older than you were when I wrote this, who worked six hours a day: some with tired eyes, sullen eyes, faces far too old for children’s faces. But you, Mu’min, back then, right now, were still the light of your family’s home: incurable talkativeness, runny nose, mischievous antics and all.

Perhaps matters have improved since then. I hope they did. If not, then what will we say to a whole generation of lost children? That peace was sued for in blood, sweat, and tears, but not enough to overcome indifference, selfishness, or shortsightedness? My friend, if we your elders, have failed you in the intervening time between my writing this letter and your reading it, forgive us. It is a difficult world we live in, without easy answer or repose. Do your best to live in it with self-respect, with principle and dignity. I have tried to do the same in my life thus far, but I do not know what anyone can do to change the madness of our times.

The legacies of today may make for a poor inheritance, and on your birthday of all days it behooves me to present you with something that will last you until the days when you come into your own. So because I can leave you nothing else, take then one simple gift: after all the years, over all the distance, a near-stranger from a far away country remembers and loves you, because long ago you smiled at him and called him friend. Take this simple thing with you, dear child, as you are propelled into the future, that uncertain but ever-beckoning horizon.

--Brian