She was a wise woman.

Heads turned as she pushed her metal shopping cart down supermarket aisles. Strangers at stop lights turned to see if she was wearing a fake attachable halo like the ones children might don with their Halloween angel costumes. Even the kindergarteners she taught noticed — and gave her silent reverent bows as she walked by.

The wise woman’s mane of pure, majestic white hair was unsettling.

People rarely dared to speak openly about it.

Women over 30 were the only ones who blurted out their fears in little bursts of self-conscious comments.

“I wish my hair were striking white. Not this awful, lifeless ash,” they said mournfully, always lifting a portion of their own hair and letting it fall back to their scalps like washed-out pieces of dead seaweed.

“You’re so lucky. Once you dye your hair, you can’t stop. But I guess with hair like yours, you’ve never had to dye it, have you?”

The wise woman would shake her head silently. Never.

“I can’t believe that. I remember when I got my first gray hair, I was devastated.”

She knew that even if she tried to say something to help them acknowledge their inner light, they would not hear it.

So she stayed quiet, as the women, wrapped up in the tragedy of aging, prattled on about their fear of becoming obsolete, of losing their husbands to younger women with thick, vibrant, undyed hair that tumbled down their backs.

“Just like the ones in the Pantene Pro-V commercials — you know which ones I mean?”

They sputtered about feeling threatened by airbrushed TV goddesses, whose sexiness and confidence seemed to flow into their bouncy hair.

The women would eventually finish their monologues and drift away, muttering about models and the latest haircuts on “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Never once really seeing the woman of wisdom’s luminous white hair.

If they had looked a little longer, they might have glimpsed the icy tips of the highest mountains piercing crystal blue skies.

If they had stilled their minds for a moment, they’d catch a soft aura and glimpse Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree and awakening.

They might feel the gentle warmth of a church candle between their palms. Or a pool of tranquility deep inside their bellies, like an untouched lake in a forgotten grove.

Instead, the women walked on without looking back.

Without even a silent kindergarten bow.

Rhian Kohashi ORourke

Amman, Jordan, is on its way to becoming a modern city in the Middle East. High rise buildings dot the landscape, and Mercedes and BMWs shoot through traffic circles. In the basements of every high rise and apartment building, you will find a “boab” who is sharing his living space with the tenants’ cars. The boab is a jack of all trades: he is a 24-hour live-in doorman, the building’s guard, a maintenance man, a personal grocery shopper, and the car washer. Indispensable but nearly invisible.

My name is Abu Hassan. People laugh at me because of my small feet. They are almost a size 4. No matter how I try, I can't hide them. I wear sand-colored open-toed sandals, like the ones we have back in Egypt. But here, in Amman, I wear sweatpants and not a long gallebeya, my traditional Egyptian robe that conceals my feet.

What's my daily routine? It's simple really. I wake up before the sun rises and wipe down each of the cars in the apartment building. There are 18 in total and they are all lined up. The six-story building is old and badly needs to be sandblasted. It's not nearly as nice as the one my son Mohammed works in down the road, but both buildings have the same owner. He is fair and occasionally generous.

I have my own room on the ground floor right beside the elevator, more space than I ever had in Egypt. There, we were six, packed in a tiny room. It was always filled with flies. The flies crowded around our babies' eyes when they slept, especially in the summer.

Now I have an entire bed to myself. I even have an extra one for when my son visits. There are no bugs, and I own a small black and white TV.

After washing and polishing each car early in the morning, I come back to my room and put my copper kettle on my small stove and wait until it whistles. I snatch it off the flame just as it is about to fully let out its piercing song so that I don't wake up everyone in the building. I mix in five spoons of sugar and dunk a tea bag that seeps its ochre goodness into the boiling water.

The glass warms up my fingers, which are rigid from the cold cleaning water outside. Unlike Egypt during the winter months, it snows here in Amman.

After my break, I sweep the entire entrance to the apartment building. The 14 pesky kids who live here leave little piles of candy wrappers in every nook you could imagine — between the cracks in the pavement, the grooves of car tires, and the tops of the entrance bushes. Every day I am forced to go on a trash hunt to keep the place spotless as they giggle and watch. As soon as I've cleared the entire area, they run to their school buses, leaving whirlwinds of dust and trash behind them. And I have to start sweeping all over again.

If it's a good day, the foreign woman on floor two may ask me to clean her apartment or help her fix things. She tips well, perhaps an American trait. She's clumsy, speaks broken Egyptian Arabic, and has a strange talent for breaking things.

She asks me to come up once a month to help her with repairs. I never know what to expect.

Last time, she had somehow ripped her curtains off their hooks. I've never known anyone who managed to do that. The time before, she had yanked the handle off the toilet. It took me a week to figure out that one. She then cracked her wooden bed frame in two. And one time she blew up her glass coffeemaker.

I call her Ruru, and that's what the kids call her too. At least she's able to distract them, by playing football with them after school so that I can get about my business.

Best of all, she loves my tea. She comes by once a day to chat, and I laugh. From her stories, I can tell that she's not just clumsy at home; she takes her klutziness into the world. Over tea and sometimes a tobacco waterpipe, or sheesha, she tells me stories — about her experiences at work and her convoluted attempts to buy things.

She calls pillows "beans." And when she tries to say "beans," she uses the word for "money" instead. Her Arabic is mangled, but she talks with her hands and reminds me of being back home in Egypt.

Ruru lived in Cairo for three years and has carried our humor with her. She seems to trust me more than others, because I can understand her even when her words make little sense.

Ruru is friends with the apartment building owner, so I feel extra kind towards her. I always put an additional scoop of sugar in her tea, even though she says it will make her lose her teeth. In return, she brings me treats. She knows what my favorites are: dried apricots and strawberry milk.

I pray that Ruru marries someone good. Someone who can fix many, many things.

Rhian Kohashi ORourke