Life as a Berlin Ballad

The first part of this entry is excerpted from my Christmas-card letter I wrote the other day, December 18. I suppose it may seem a shade towards tacky to steal from myself, but hey, I was busy out there Christmas shopping today, and who knows when those cards are all going to get mailed! Anyway, we will now join the Christmas card letter already in progress:


The sun is shining,
the grass is green;
The orange and palm trees sway,
There's never been such a day
[except] In Beverly Hills, L.A.

Thus begins the somewhat obscure verse to the immortal “White Christmas” anthem written by Irving Berlin in 1942. In that year Berlin was Christmas-ing in California, writing songs for movies, far away from his beloved New York. This verse holds a special resonance for me this year—indeed, I would only have to change a word or two to reflect my new situation! Let’s change the “orange and palm trees,” to “olive trees,” and move Beverly Hills to Jordan and the picture is quite accurate! As I look outside the window right now at KA, we have the perpetually blue skies (a title of another Irving Berlin number by the way—Blue skies, nothin’ but blue skies, from now on…) I have come to expect in my five months in Jordan, and it is about 60 degrees out there in this corner of the Middle East. In spite of the lovely day, I concur with Irving Berlin’s next line: I am longing to be up north… and of course, in the next measure the world heaves a nostalgic, sentimental sigh as Bing Crosby’s baritone plaintively muses,

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,
Just like the ones I used to know…

When Berlin penned this ditty 65 years ago, many people were serving in the armed forces overseas for the second American Christmas of World War II. I can only imagine the millions of lumps in throats as people yearned to be back home, yearned to see their loved ones, and dreamt of those Christmas pasts of bountiful blessings. I understand that feeling better this Christmas than maybe ever before.

As all of you readers are aware, I moved to Jordan five months ago, and my compatriots and I are about to complete the first semester at KA. Since I started this blog in late July, I have henpeck-typed some 140 pages of my impressions—ruminations on the various and sundry experiences—from the gastronomic, travel, political, frustrating, joyous, challenging, humbling, and triumphant aspects that have opened up in my life since journeying to Jordan in July (hard not to relish that alliterative phrase!). I have this sentence rumbling around in my head from one of Bing Crosby’s Christmas specials, a delicious staple of my childhood December viewing. Bing once said: “Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won't make it ‘white’.”

As I wrote this last Tuesday in the Christmas letter: Tomorrow I will be celebrating my blessings as I board a plane in Amman, Jordan, and fly to Chicago and transfer there for a flight to Cincinnati. And there I will get the best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.

Here it is now December 22, and I have been home a little more than 48 hours. Of course it wasn’t an easy trip! These things aren’t meant to be smooth. We need obstacles and time for reflection and introspection! There was a delay of four hours they announced a day before the trip which meant I wouldn’t make my connecting flight in Chicago—but they promised me a hotel room gratis!

I arrived at the airport at noon for my flight at 3:30—they had warned me I needed oodles of time to rejigger my flights. I obeyed, and of course there was no line that far in advance, and it took about 60 seconds to zap the new documents out—but, let’s not be upset it didn’t really warrant oodles of time. I wrote postcards in a coffee shop—oh, my, postcards I had bought in August. When we left Amman, about 90 minutes into the flight, the captain came on and said we needed to go back to Amman, “to fix a little something.” Oh, now doesn’t that inspire confidence?! Eventually we learned the plane was leaking fuel—I think it was sensible to turn back when we still had 11 hours to fly.

They promised us a quick half-hour turnaround, and a meal in the waiting area at the airport. Why promise those things??? Neither proved reliable information, so when we headed out, we were about six hours behind that four-hour delay. I quickly saw the convenience and shower possibility of that Chicago hotel room evaporate.

We landed in Chicago at 2:15 a.m. Chicago time. Then began the lines: the line for immigration, for baggage, for customs, for information on connecting flights. My first moments back in the United States reminded me that there are lines and bureaucratic struggles in the United States too! We always joke about those tedious things in Jordan as simply endemic to Jordan, or we comment things like, “well it is an emerging economy, you know!” It was a 45 minute line to get a voucher for breakfast!

But, it just didn’t matter—the waiting, the pushing, the security checks (there were six in Amman and four in Chicago). I had fulfilled the pulse of the Berlin hope—I had come back “up North.”

Thirty hours after I left my apartment at KA, my dad met me at the Cincinnati airport. I got the best greeting you could imagine: “You’re skinny!” (It’s funny—people say this to me when they haven’t seen me for awhile. I rarely lose much weight, but maybe I am remembered as, what, more “solid” in their memories??)

The next few hours were fun as I padded my feet on wall-to-wall-carpeting again, and had cold milk, and a BLT, felt the weight of a quarter again in my palm, brushed my teeth from tap water, and drove a car. Ahhhh. Pretty good stuff.

We headed over to my niece and nephew’s school to pick them up—they didn’t know I would be in yet, so I got to surprise them. Jack’s jaw dropped, and he went silent, and Emma’s eyes widened and screamed out, “King!” Cashmere sweaters are nice, but that’s the real pay-off!

We spent the afternoon playing hide-and-go-seek, eating gingerbread cookies, wondering what Santa might bring. At one point as we hid from Emma (Jack and I always hide/count together—it’s a team project us boys), Jack whispered to me, “King, I missed you more than anybody else did!” How sweet can a 5 year old get???

As the violet hour of dusk approached, we headed off to the Cincinnati Zoo for the Festival of Lights. In the mini-van I asked if we could eschew the DVD player and listen to Christmas carols instead. Emma responded: “Oh sure, why not? You’ve gotten everything else you’ve wanted today!” Oh yes, the bloom is off the rose! The warm welcome was nice while it lasted!

Today as I shopped around the west side of Cincinnati, the mercury rose to 60 degrees. Wait—it felt like Amman just the other day…

Guess what was on TV last night as I began addressing the Christmas cards? I kid you not—the movie White Christmas—one of those movies I can watch over and over again, and I tear up every time when the old army guys show up for the General toward the end of the movie. And while addressing cards to friends in Dobbs Ferry, Atlanta, Charlotte, San Diego, Boston, Columbus, et cetera, I was reminded of another Berlin ballad to savor:

When I'm tired, and I can’t sleep,
I count my blessings instead of sleep.
So I fall asleep, counting my blessings.

Thanks Irving for the reminder…