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Stopping for Melons
On the Side of the Road

by George Capaccio

t had been a long drive from Basra. In the afternoon we stopped in the ancient city of Ur to visit the reputed birthplace of Abraham, father of three religions. On the walk to the crumbling ruins, I felt like clay baking in a kiln, so hot was the sun. Thousands of pottery shards, millennia old, slept in peace on the ground. At the foot of the Zuggeraut, after our walk, we guzzled cold sweet water from north Iraq, then climbed back into the car.

“Shuf!” (“Look!”) the minister next to me said much later, gazing out the rear window. I looked. “The word means more than look,” he said. “Behold!” The sun was setting. It hovered above the desert like an immense mirage of fire and heat—eternal glory manifest, the original blast from which all things sprang.

A weekend of protests against the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq ended August 7—the day after the 55th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima—with the arrest of 104 people for sitting down in front of the White House. The WRL-endorsed protests were organized by a coalition that included Voices in the Wilderness and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Photo: Jeff Gustafson/EPIC

Near dusk we saw a man selling melons. Mike (Mike Nahal, coordinator of the trip) had the driver stop. All of us were hungry and dry after a full day on the road. Baghdad was still an hour away. The melons looked so tempting. The man selling them touched his heart and smiled as he welcomed us. Other customers stood around sampling slices and tossing the rinds in a pit.

Watermelons, cantaloupes, honeydews, freshly picked, brimming with juice and fragrance—the keeper of the stand thumped one after another until he found the ripest, then, with a few deft flicks of his knife, cut us each a dripping wedge. “Eat as much as you like,” he said. “When you have found what pleases you, we will talk about price. But for now, taste and enjoy. God’s bounty has neither beginning nor end. The fruit you see here is nothing compared to what you will find in Paradise.”

With the first bite into a succulent slice of watermelon, I thought I had truly found Paradise. God was here in the guise of this thin, sinewy seller of melons. He only wanted us to rejoice and savor the goodness and sweetness of life. I did so with great abandon and gratitude. Not for the fruit alone but for the spirit in which it was bestowed. For the delight that streamed from the fruit seller’s face as he shared his wealth and made no fuss about our paying up. He knew he had made a sale. Once tasted, the fruit of Paradise is impossible to resist.

In the kingdom of palms and peace, I forgot what I had seen that morning in a hospital in the south: children with fused fingers and cleft palates. With protruding brains or no brains at all. With twisted spines and enormous heads. With missing or horribly shortened limbs. I forgot how grotesque they seemed to me. I forgot how I tried but failed to see them as children of God in whom there are secret springs of wholeness and beauty.

I forgot the pain in the hospital director’s eyes as he told us how he and his staff had never seen such things before 1990. I forgot how the chief resident shrugged his shoulders and shook his head and said, looking at each one of us, “Here in the south we have more birth abnormalities than in any other part of Iraq. The only reasonable explanation we can find is your country’s use of radioactive weapons. Basra was irradiated. It remains so. More and more children are born this way. What can we do?”

With each slice of melon, I went on forgetting. I forgot the young girl with leukemia: how I stood by the side of her bed and held her hand and, having nothing else to give, offered her a plastic toy. I forgot how her grandmother, all in black and wrinkled to the bone, reached out her hand to me. I gave her the last toy I had, a green brontosaurus. She smiled and kissed my hand as if I had given her a rare jewel—as if I had just banished the disease consuming her grandchild. I forgot the waves of nausea that washed over me as I walked through the cancer ward knowing none of these children would ever go home again. I forgot that in my own country 70 percent of children with leukemia recover, that in Iraq remission is down from 50 percent to zero.

It was time to go. Mike insisted on paying for the melons we bought that night. I picked out two fat ones for the people I was staying with. They were expecting me for dinner. I was already late. We piled into the car. The sun was slipping out of view in a final wave of glory. I turned to Peter, the Arab-American minister from Kentucky. “Shuf!!” I said. “Behold the sun, mother of all melons!” He smiled. The sky lost its last light. All that I had forgotten came back.

George Capaccio is a writer, story-teller and activist from Arlington, MA. He has traveled to Iraq six times in the last three years with groups like Voices in the Wilderness.