In eighth grade, I took a trip with Adam, my Roman Catholic neighbor, and his family to Seattle. We were taking another friend, Cherif, to see his father who was in a hospital there. At twelve or maybe thirteen years old, I had little awareness of why my friend's dad was in the hospital, all I knew was that I was taking a road trip to the biggest city in our state with my best friend, and, perhaps best of all, without my own parents.
Before leaving, Adam's parents prepped me for a cultural difference I would encounter on our trip.
"You know how you fast every month?" they asked me. Mrs. Lewis, though a devout Catholic, had grown up with an LDS father, and was good friends with my parents besides.
"Yeah," I said. It was not my favorite element of being Mormon.
"Well, Cherif's family does something kind of like that, only theirs lasts a whole month. They can eat at night and early in the morning, but while the sun is up, they don't eat."
"For a whole month?" It seemed extreme.
"Yes. They call it Ramadan. So while we're in Seattle, Cherif won't be eating meals with us. But it's nothing to worry about."
We stayed in the Embassy Suites which had a massive open atrium in the center of the hotel. From our room way up on the sixth or seventh floor, I could peer down through the glass railing at the narrow trails wending through the greenery. I'd never seen anything like it. Piano music wafted up, playing masterful arrangements of popular songs I vaguely recognized, probably for a wedding reception or other event.
The three of us boys had our own room while Adam's little brother stayed with his mom and dad in the neighboring room. What made them think having three 12-year-old boys share a hotel room alone is beyond me, but come to think of it, I'm not sure I would have wanted to spend any time with us. We stayed up late - much too late - watching TV. A movie information screen came up for National Lampoon's Summer Vacation, rated R.
I knew I was not supposed to watch R rated movies - my parents and my church teachers had warned me against them, but something about that severe capital R in that square box, and the warning listed below prevented me from speaking up. Besides, Adam acted as if he'd seen it already and he said it was funny.
The next morning, around 4 am, I woke to the sound of Thunder Cats playing softly on the TV. Cherif hunched at the kitchen table with three or four boxes of cold cereal stacked beside his bowl. He saw me lift my head from my pillow squinting over at him. He grinned around his spoon, "I love this show!" I groaned and went back to sleep.
I lived an extremely insular and selfish childhood. I didn't know anything about Islam or Muhammed back then. I'm not sure when I even learned. Perhaps not until six years later when the twin towers collapsed as I lay sleeping in the lower bunk at my parents' house. At around 9 am PDT, Mom woke me up, told me the World Trade Center had been demolished, and that it was time for me to go to the orthodontic surgeon to have my wisdom teeth removed in preparation for my mission. I scarcely knew what the World Trade Center was, either. Even then I did not consider that Cherif, the friendliest person in my class, who had been class president our senior year, was Muslim in the way that the news broadcasters that I watched that long week as I recovered on the couch talked about Muslims. Those Muslims could not be related to that gap-toothed teenager curling around a bowl of Froot Loops in that sixth-floor room of the Embassy Suites. They were from separate worlds.
Later in the morning, we visited Cherif's dad. At least, Cherif did. Adam and I idled around in the waiting room. Afterwards, we all went to an arcade where Mr. and Mrs. Lewis bought us prepaid game cards that gave us hours of gameplay on any of the machines we wished. We would grow apart gradually in years to come as I joined band and spent more time with band friends while Adam and Cherif both entered concurrent enrollment courses at the community college and spent less and less time around the high school. But we remained casual friends who once spent a weekend together and had a great time.
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