Everyone, at some time or another, gives artful directions.  "Go straight until you see a BP gas station, turn left after the first McDonald's, go a couple of block until you smell berbere and onions, and see some taxis." is how one Eritrean man directed me to a restaurant in a new town.  It worked, too, perhaps better than your standard map directions. 

Certain events have also become artful directions for Eritrean-American life.  Our cultural calendars, like the man's directions, serve us better than the official dates.  Who, for example, remembers the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere falls around June 21-22.  But everyone knows graduations usher in a new summer.  Graduation time means summer has started.  In the city I grew up, I remember all the buzz of High School graduations.  It was (and still is) a magical time.  Only African-Americans displayed comparable enthusiasm when it came time for their children to graduate.  The ladies would dust off their heaviest gold, pour on the henna, and pull out their best zuria.  The men would come to soak in the praise of dressing up their women, and to establish their own status in the local community.  Young men and women took up the activity that occupies most of their time, looking young and beautiful, sometimes with the help of their mother's gold, with freshly trimmed and primped heads of hair.  The graduates?  Oh yeah, they're okay.  However, it took me awhile to figure out graduation had very little to do with graduating.  A new season, a new beginning, a rite of passage, that's what it was about.  It was a way to keep track of time creatively. 

I used to look down on the event as somewhat wasteful and excessively drawn out; I mean, its just High School.  Americans handled the graduation of their kids from High School in a sober and reserved manner.  At least one of the parents would come, perhaps some close friends, and quiet claps could be heard in the auditorium.  Thank goodness for African-Americans moms and sisters or Eritrean High School graduates would have the honor of loud families all to themselves. 

Weddings are another noisy event.  To my surprise I found out Eritreans in Eritrea do not usually make a habit of hitting up every wedding in town.  It seems even in some cities like DC, the Wedding scene has returned to the private sphere of the bride and groom.  But they remain in the public sphere as a norm.  It is good our traditional foods do not come in discrete quantities.  We can make a whole bunch at once because these affairs are come one, come all - whether you know the bride and groom or not.  Unlike graduations weddings are not always predictable, although mothers everywhere probably wish they were.  So they are not so much seasonally reoccurring occasions as checkmarks on the passage of time itself.  Because from around four or five to around twenty and twenty one, each year brings new, exciting, and sometimes painful changes in our youth.  Then after twenty-one, they enter a hazy stage with regard to age.  Who can tell the difference between twenty-three and twenty-six year olds?  Not until marriage do we sense a passing of time, a vivid sense of the change all life forms undergo.  The mothers rejoice the flowering of their children, they also weep for themselves.  Fathers, who mostly wish children became grown ups without the awkward stage known as growing up, look forward to patting each other on the back for a job well-done--then they have trouble thinking of what to do next.