matching tracksuits

Migrants to Herouxville, Quebec learn that lapidation — among other things — is not tolerated:

Don’t stone women to death, burn them or circumcise them, immigrants wishing to live in the town of Herouxville in Quebec, Canada, have been told. [...]

Its council published the new rules on the town’s website.

“We wish to inform these new arrivals that the way of life which they abandoned when they left their countries of origin cannot be recreated here,” the declaration reads. BBC NEWS

Members of the Muslim community are understandably upset:

However, the president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, Salam Elmenyawi, condemned the council, saying it had set back race relations decades.

He told Reuters news agency: “I was shocked and insulted to see these kinds of false stereotypes and ignorance about Islam and our religion.”

I write none of this to justify what the Herouxville council did. It was more than a little tasteless.

It might be a stereotype, but as Stephen Pinker and others have pointed out, within most stereotypes is a core of truth.

Truth is, there is stoning in the modern world:

• Afghanistan
• Iran
• Nigeria
• Saudi Arabia
• Sudan
• United Arab Emirates

In each instance, it is related to Islamic Sharia law. The truth is, contemporary stoning is a predominately (almost exclusively) Muslim practice. That is not to say that all Muslims support it; it is not to say that historically Muslims have been the only group to practice lapidation; it is not to say that only Muslims today stone. However, to say that associating lapidation and Islam requires “ignorance about Islam” is itself ignorant at best, misleading at worst.

What really caught my attention, though, was Elmenyawi’s juxtaposition of setting “back race relations” because of “ignorance about Islam and our religion.”

When did Islam become a race? We might call Muslims an ethnic group, but even that is extremely misleading. Did Elmenyawi misspeak? Was he misquoted?

K and I bundled L up Sunday afternoon and took her on her first outing: a walk through a local university’s botanical gardens.

We made a couple of loops around the trail that runs literally over the river and through the woods. Toward the back, there is a historic log cabin.

L, though, was unimpressed: she slept through most all of it.

Being house-bound is perhaps the most annoying difficulty of having a six-week-old infant. To date, it is certainly more difficult on K, who has been home with L since her birth and can go an entire day without leaving the apartment. That explains why she’s so eager sometimes to run to the store to pick up that forgotten ingredient for dinner — to go anywhere is a treat.

It’s something we’re both anticipating with smiles.

I woke up this morning to a fiery throat, thinking immediately, “Maybe I’ll come home early � as in, shortly after arrival � if we’re not terribly short-staffed.”� Much to my delight, I looked outside and saw a powered sugar dusting on everything and thought, “No school, I’m sure.”� And sure enough, no school. There’s less than an inch of snow on the ground, but no school.

I think back to the years I spent in Poland, buried in snow from December (sometimes November) to March. I believe we missed one day because of weather. If I recall correctly, students are not legally obliged to come to school if it’s colder than minus 18 Celsius (0 Fahrenheit), but many come anyway.

K laughs at the reaction here to the slightest bit of snow. There are two reasons, I explained to K. First, most places don’t have the equipment to remove snow city-wide. And given the fact that so few people have experience driving in snow, the slightest bit makes them nervous.

A colleague at work provided the second explanation: that there’s a certain phobia with local school boards about lawsuits, and so they cancel school at the slightest hint of bad weather.

Both reasons are completely foreign to K.

Many roads in Poland are literally packed with ice through most of the winter, so the thought of being spooked by a couple of centimeters of snow is absurd to her.

And the fear of lawsuits?

Only in America, she smiles.

Update

I went out for a walk at about eight. Suddenly, it was fairly clear why school was closed.

Just a few feet apart, three cars that slid off the road.

K and I look at L and try to imagine what she’ll look as a toddler. As a young child. A pre-teen. And so on. I can’t get much beyond the young child.

There are, however, a few things K and I are sure of.

She’ll have an inordinate number of bad hair days, thanks to that swirling cowlick just beside her right temple and another more toward the center of her forehead. In adolescence, they will likely drive her to angry tears at least once.

“That’s all assuming she’s the type to be terribly worried about her physical appearance,” one might suggest.

No, they’ll upset her no matter what — they’re that bad.

As a kid of ten, summer seemed endless, as did the school year. And that’s reasonable, for one year then represented ten percent of my life.

My folks are coming for a visit today — the first visit in two weeks. And today, of course, L is six weeks old.

Two weeks since they’ve last seen her. She’s fifty percent older. She’s probably close to a pound heavier and a couple of inches longer.

“Everyday something new” we read in all the baby books. And that’s not surprising, for even now, each day is more than one percent of L’s total life.