Simple Wisdom, the Beauty of Work, and Tarrh

Year ago when I worked in the family winery in Corsica, I worked very closely with an old Moroccan guy named Etari Ahmed (nicknamed "Tarrh" by my uncle).  Tarrh is on my left in the picture.  Saltana is the chubby fellow on my right.  Saltana drove one of the tractors so I only talked with him briefly while he was dumping out the grapes at the winery.  Tarrh worked in the winery so I spent all day with him.  Saltana is the one who told me that planes had "hit those big building in New York" on 9/11 just a few hours after it happened.  How he found out before me when he was in the middle of a field in Corsica I will never know.

But Tarrh is the one I was thinking about today.  When I asked him how old he was, he said, "My mother said I was born in the Year of the Good Fig Harvest".  He had two or three years of schooling and literally signed his name with an "X" on legal documents.  Seventeen people back in Morocco lived off his minimum wage salary.  He lived in an actual shack so as to save money and sent home almost every dime he made.  His one indulgence was to buy Marlboro Reds for himself (which he would smoke when he was tired, cold, or hungry) .  He would give me cash folded in a paper napkin on certain nights, and I would stop at the store on my way to the winery the next morning and buy him a new case.  My uncle said this meant he liked and trusted me.  He went home for only 8 weeks a year and was apparently worshipped by his extended family for supporting them.

He once asked me why there were time zones  ("Why is the time differerent in Morroco, in France, in America?") and I had to start my explanation with, "Well, the world is round, a big sphere sitting in space." He nodded vigorously and I continued.  "Everyone wants noon to be when the sun is overhead, but it's not overhead at the same time for everyone so we change the clocks from zone to zone to make it noon for each zone when the sun is overhead".  He grunted and shook his head in wonder then smoked another cigarette in contemplation.   A few weeks later he would ask me the same question and we'd do it all over again.  Tarrh spoke in bad French with a heavy Arabic accent and I would answer in bad French with a heavy American accent. My uncle would tell us to knock it off and get back to work.

Every day started with a handshake; if someone's hands were dirty then you grasped the other's wrist and shook that instead.  The handshake was nonnegotiable.

If an elderly person was sick, Tarrh would ask, "Does he eat?" If the answer was yes then he would declare, "He will get better."

He told me, "Never throw stones at the elder, for one day you will be old too."

When we were in the 14th hour of a 16-hour work day and I would give him a suffering look he would shrug and respond, "The work is the work."

If my uncle complained about spider webs in the corners of the winery, Tarrh would smile while grabbing the broom and say, "He [the spider] works the night, I work during the day!"

If I wanted to know where a tool was, Tarrh would respond, "You look - you find."

Tarrh had a theory on race: women from different races had hotter or cooler wombs so the babies came out different colors.  (White women must have the lowest temperature.)

One day I dropped a bucket right into a vat of fermenting red wine.  The outgasses of carbon dioxide was so strong my eyes were watering and I almost fainted while trying to reach it.  (I could see it perched on top of the crust of pressed grape skins and seeds floating on top of the liquid.)  I asked Tarrh to help and he had me lower him by the ankles into the vat while he grabbed the bucket and I pulled them both out.  When my uncle found out he called us both idiots and bummed a Marboro from Tarrh.

Sometimes, the three of us would enter into a "dance of work" that I think few have experienced where one would be on his way to start a pump and grab a wrench the other needed to complete his job and silently slide it into his hand without breaking stride, signal the third guy that the pump was about to turned on so that he would open a critical valve downstream before heading up the stairs.  The three of us were so in tune with the operations we were carrying out that we would be doing 5 to 6 things at once, processing tons and tons of grapes and never exchange a word.  A look here, a nod there and we were making wine. 

I count myself lucky to know the simple wisdoms of Tarrh; the greatest of which is the bliss of work well done learned by working beside him.