Bittersweet

As I visited our neighborhood YMCA on December 31 for the last time to exercise in 2008, a vibrant sign caught my eye by the Fitness Center: “Feel Divine in 2009.”

Oh, yes. The New Year. It is here. (Look guys at the Y—I can rhyme too!). Every year I find it interesting how the sound of the new year coming in sounds almost exotic. Well, maybe not exotic, but it takes getting used to—maybe getting accustomed to the sound of the incoming year is like breaking in a new pair of shoes.

It may be clichéd, but everyone loves to use the ebbing of the old year, and the welcoming of the new, to take it all in—what has happened since we last exchanged partners in the dance of the new years. In the blogosphere, and in every other media outlet, it is certainly de rigeur, to look backward, and smile in the face of forward. I will join the legions in the next few days as I muse about 2008 and 2009.

Right now I am writing this on New Year’s evening—January 1—in one of the international terminals in JFK airport. This afternoon I left my dear friend Sylvia’s New Year’s Day party (and by the way, Sylvia sure is swell—I asked her months ago if she would start her party an hour earlier just so I could spend 90 minutes at her party! That’s a friend for you…and I reveled in her annual tradition of pulled pork…) and left Cincinnati bound for the return to Jordan and KA.

This terminal has been outfitted with a great place to sit and plop a laptop and actually feel comfortable typing away, at a desk, waiting for a plane. In front of me stares the blank screen, and off to my left I keep watching the baggage handlers doing their Herculean tasks (careful guys, those are Christmas gifts from my family in there…).

One of the staples of the “look backward” every December is the survey of who we lost in that particular year. I do not plan to run-down every celebrity I will miss (although wasn’t Suzanne Pleshette just divine in “The Bob Newhart Show”?) but in the closing days of December I did think about a handful of people that swelled my heart with a bittersweet feeling of loss. I suppose as I shuttle between my “homes” in New York and Cincinnati and Jordan I am reminded of the issues of transience and permanence anyway.

I am reminded of the death in July of college professor Randy Pausch. He died in his 40s. You most likely heard of this man—his “Last Lecture” became a best-selling book and a YouTube sensation. I remember learning of his death while attending a conference in San Diego. I had never met this man, but as Diane Sawyer relayed the announcement of his death, I cried. As you imbibe his passion for life and following dreams, you know he left us far too early. I remember reading a quotation from him in the Brown Alumni Monthly: “Achieving childhood dreams is not always easy. But brick walls are not there to stop us,” he said, “they’re there to make us prove how hard we want something.”

Remember, not much earlier in the summer political analyst Tim Russert died—an untimely death at 58, a newsman who obviously cultivated deep respect and love in his peers. I loved when Tom Brokaw, his friend and colleague, reminisced that Russert always marveled, “And we get paid for doing the stuff we love to do!” That should be our goal, finding a job that allows us such gratitude and delight.

In early August we learned that Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. Solzhenitsyn was a landmark of the 20th century, an 89-year old titan who decided to use his horrible memories of Stalinist life to speak, as they say, truth to power. His book about his travails in the gulag is a testament of courage—as he bravely told the world about Soviet barbarity and warned us to speak out against barbarity.

More than just movie fans mourned the death of Paul Newman, he of the legendary baby blues. If you have read anything about his foundation, and his brand name Newman’s Own, you know of the power of celebrity and his transcending power of philanthropy.

And there are the less famous people whose untimely passings (let’s be honest, is it ever really timely?) broke my heart. In August my family learned of the death of a grand-daughter of our family friend Edna, this grand-daughter a 41-year old artist and singer who succumbed to cancer and left her husband and three children. And earlier in the year my dazzling friend Patti Bazzle who also succumbed to cancer, leaving all she knew bereft. It is, in a word, bittersweet.

I roll that word around in my mind now as I sit in JFK airport, on the way back to my middle eastern home, fresh from the beauties of a long vacation in the United States. I wage war with the word ‘bittersweet’ the way those guys outside the window in Terminal 4 wage war with the mountains of suitcases of the travelers. When they temporarily beat back the enemy, they look with satisfaction, declaring victory—“There. Done.”—and then they smile at their own arrogance as another truckload of suitcases arrive.

We just came back from Walt Disney World two days ago and my sister exerts Herculean efforts (not unlike those baggage handlers outside my window) to plan and execute the perfect family vacation. She takes pictures to lock our six-year old and 10-year old in time. We click the picture, check its perfect capturing of a perfect moment and say, “There. Done.” As if it were ever done.

Bittersweet is a great word. Let me quickly take advantage of the wireless here and look it up on dictionary.com. Of course we know that it means, yes, there it is: “Producing or expressing a mixture of pain and pleasure: tinged with sadness.” But as I scroll down, past all the references to bittersweet plants and roots, one definition gave me pause, and provides that New Years’ silver lining for which we all long—this definition reads: “A sensation that is at first sweet, then bitter, then sweet.”

Yawn. Now it is the early morning hours of January 4th. Jet lag is playing tricks on me, robbing me of sleep for the second day in a row. I think I was interrupted on New Year’s Day by a phone call—one more chance to speak on the same continent.

So I have returned to Jordan. I had the best sleep I have ever had on a plane—almost 8 solid hours as I stretched across three seats. So now Jet Lag wags a fickle finger at me.

A small group of us arrived a day early in Jordan, hugging and catching up. Walking around campus and picking up in conversations from last month felt like that familiar, well-worn pair of slippers easing onto your feet.

But last night, as many of the boarders roared back into the dorm, word quickly spread that Israel had sent ground troops into Gaza. During the vacation at Disney World I had caught snatches of the news reports of last week’s air strikes into Gaza and the devastation to civilians. As it came time for bedtime a few hours ago, we allowed the boys to continue watching the news reports for awhile.

Please know that I am not in harm’s way—the fighting is a couple hundred miles away, but this cause of the “ghettoization” of Palestinians and the undying hope of a two-state solution to the real estate fracas is near to the hearts of our boys and our families. International experts will be spinning scenarios all week, as we shuffle off our backward looks at 2008 and look full in the realities of 2009. As the New York Times reports right now: “The strikes — and the Arab anger over scenes of death and destruction — have highlighted divisions in the Middle East that can prevent Arab nations from working with Israel.”

Could that medieval definition of bittersweet come into play? It would certainly be our prayer.

When I think of that swing of bittersweet, of my December returning to my wonderful friends and family in the United States, the January tinges of sadness at leaving, I am reminded of this day, January 4th, and that is the second anniversary of when I first met Eric, the headmaster of KA, and the wheels set in motion to bring me to Jordan.

And back to sweet…

As we process the grave news, I am reminded of a great comment from radio commentator Paul Harvey:

"In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these."