But yesterday, I went with some friends to a lovely lake with paddle boats and to Afghanistan's one and only golf course. While we were on our way there, we turned a corner and...there was a cluster of jingle trucks, washed and ready for the next day's work! I love the whole jingle truck ethos of embellishing the ordinary, of elevating the workaday to art, of driving beauty all over the country.

There should be a word appropriate for the many-ness of jingle trucks. A tintinnabulation of jingle trucks? A prism of jingle trucks? They are a delight to the ears (if one could hear them over the traffic) and the eyes.

PS--after I posted this, I saw the most magnificent jingle truck ever in downtown Kabul. It had a sort of huge rounded marquis over the cab. Like a headdress for a dancer-- painted, spangled, mirrored, ribboned, tasseled. Utterly magnificent. Who knows what ordinary cargo it carried-- toilet paper? computers? bricks?