Late in life we live by memory, and in our solstices or periods of stagnation; as the starved camel in the desert lives on his humps.
-Memory, Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think of myself as KhairAllah’s aide-mémoire when I remind him of the drovers from the trips we made together. How could he remember them any other way, names from forty years ago on two of the twenty or more Daboukas that he has led. Mas’ūd abu Dūd, Abdullah Mansour, Rābih Muhammad Na’īm, and the others…I had written their names in my diary and recently put them in an email to his son to read aloud to him. And when he sent an audio message back to me in which he repeated their names, saying all were in good health and sent their greetings, I wonder if he too thinks of them every day, nameless or not.