Bookends

I guess it took me a week to recover from lolling around a 19-bedroom beach house last weekend in the exclusive Tala Bay section of Aqaba in southern Jordan! It was a scorching weekend at the beach, so some of us spent a good deal of the afternoons enjoying the beach house, noting that the blue skies continued unabated outside but enjoying the LCD-Big Screen TVs inside (by the way, how many of those do you need? They were everywhere in the house!) and the bank of computers with super-high speed internet access.

Of course a weekend dominated by TV and computers could have been anywhere on earth, so it was a strange kind of generic, universal, resort weekend.

Last Saturday I heard a familiar, “Hellooooooo,” at the poolside door. There, with her usual grand smile was Alena, a former colleague at KA. One of the chaperones had called Alena and let her know that a band of KA boarders would be descending on Aqaba and she came to visit—and also swan by the gorgeous Las Vegas-y lit pool.

We sat and talked a bit, and I asked, “Alena, how is Fatcat?” I learned that since my visit to Aqaba last September, Fatcat had indeed bit the dust. For any of you who don’t remember the story of Fatcat, you could scroll back to the September entries, September 15, 2008, to be exact, and read the epic tale of Fatcat. It is in the entry marked, “Postcard from Aqaba,” and here is an excerpt, to catch you up to speed:

“Fatcat is loud. Fatcat has a pulsating mew that may be similar to Chinese water torture. Fatcat wanders around wherever he/she so desires. I think it’s a he. But, no matter. Fatcat got adopted by Alena. [a former colleague who had moved to China briefly and then she bounced back to Jordan in the Red Sea beach town of Aqaba]. Alena left Fatcat in the charge of some colleagues who did not spend the summer in Jordan. So Fatcat made the entire campus his abode. As new people moved onto campus, and into his former home, Fatcat tried to insinuate his darling self onto the newbies. Fatcat got into some trouble with other cats, presumably cats with more charming names! Anyway, I saw Alena on campus a few times in the last month, and everytime I spied her, I asked someone—“is Fatcat leaving?? Could it be happening??” Alas, Fatcat remained on campus, not going with her mommy down to Aqaba.

One night Tessa grabbed my arm, and said in her Judi-Densch-ish tone, “John-O—something must be done with Fatcat.” There was an interesting gleam in her eye! For a woman with a seemingly endless supply of grace and calm, I knew she couldn’t mean anything approaching harm to our adorable campus mascot. “John-O, if Alena does not come back quickly, I am afraid we are going to have to take that Fatcat down to Aqaba. It really must happen.” Whenever Tessa says “really” it has the authority and command of a naval officer. There must be a roadtrip to liberate the KA campus from Fatcat.

It seems Alena did not have a cat carrying case—that’s okay, we would purchase one if necessary. Fatcat must be returned to her mother! Must happen soon. Must.

So now I learn on this sultry May Saturday that Fatcat had recently expired. I also realized I hadn’t seen Alena since that wacky roadtrip way last Fall, when the corn was green into the school year. I hadn’t been back to Aqaba since then, and rather than go inside and watch Harold and Kumar Do Something at Guantanamo Bay or check Facebook yet again, I found a shaded part of the beach on the bay and thought about how things had changed since that last visit in the Fall.

Teachers have such a luxury of viewing time in very discrete chunks. Each school year is like the perfect scrapbook for a set amount of time—180 or so school days with added weekends and breaks—with a definite beginning and a definite ending. I wonder what it is like in the business world (you notice I did not say real world as many teachers often do—the school world is real enough for me!) when there is not an exciting school opening to a year that heralds such promise, or when there is not a day when your face is stained with the tears of good-byes at the end. I have never not been in the school world—I have been a student or teacher all of my life, so I view each year of my life since that day I enthusiastically marched into Kindergarten at Westwood School in my grey and yellow striped shirt as a year with bookends of the beginning and end.

Since the Tala Bay beach is rather isolated, I put my hands behind my head on the wicker beach chair and thought about the changes since last I visited Aqaba at the beginning of the year. I suppose the thought could have been an obituary for Fatcat, but it turned out to be just ruminations on the year, marking a kind of bookend for the end of the year.

When those carloads of madcap teachers descended on Aqaba last September to deliver Fatcat to her mother, we pledged that this was the first of many happy trips together this year. We had a great weekend—we stayed cheap in a nearby Motel 6-ish place, but lounged around and ate all day at the swanky Moevenpick hotel. We were going to travel often, and together! As we toasted Sondra and Rehema’s birthdays at a late-night supper right on the edge of the Red Sea, there was conviviality and warmth.

But life never goes quite as easily as that. We never traveled as a group after that trip—too many duty schedules to manage, and many colleagues scattered to the winds every weekend anyway since many have cars. We lost some of the solidarity we treasured and exalted on that trip. Maybe it was inevitable. People start looking at how long their tenure may be here in Jordan, and act and plan accordingly. But seeing Alena and learning of the death of Fatcat allowed for an interesting day of reflecting on this year.

That afternoon, I stretched and thought about what had changed in the world since that trip to the beach last September. I mean, more than just that Fatcat had died.

Think of some of the headlines since last September:

• A $50 billion dollar bilk! A financial scandal of unprecedented scale and scope from that Bernie Madoff con-man

• Allegations of a pay for play governor

• Giants of America’s great industrial revolution—Chrysler and GM—humiliated, hat in hand begging for billions

• A vanishing middle class

• Vanishing city newspapers

• Punishing ice storms and walloping blizzards

• The deaths of beloved icons like Paul Newman, playwright Horton Foote and Bea Arthur

• The return of a hard-right Israeli government

• Terrorists resume killing in Northern Ireland after a dozen years of progress

• A shoe thrown at a head of state in disgust…and carrying with it in its brief flight across a room, the distance, difference, and wariness that exists between two peoples, two nations, two cultures, and two religions

And the list could go on…I am not trying to achieve an exhaustive list of events in the last nine months. I am not even trying to prove that ours is a faulty, fragile, dangerous, brutish world. I am simply working on the metaphorical scrapbook of the 2008-2009 school year, both internally and externally.

One can re-cruise through the blog entries to learn of all the other stated ups and downs of the year. But for all of the frightening news stories and rifts with adults and unexpected twists in the road, it comes back to the children.

I think of two sets of children—my niece and nephew, and my students.

In this school year Jack, a winsome 1st grader, learned to love school. He adores his teacher, and the adoration is reciprocated. Emma, a clever 4th grader, improved her work in gymnastics and piano, making way for the kind of achievements she will enjoy in the next few years.

It doesn’t surprise me that on such a calm day at the beach I think of Jack and Emma. Most of the time I am at a beach is at Walt Disney World, where Emma and Jack and I have spent 5 trips in the last six years. But it is more than sun and sand reflections. They are blissfully unaware of those headlines that can torture adults. They are full of the excitement, the joy, the hope, the future, and spending time with them would soothe the most troubled soul.

Last Fall when I went to Aqaba the school year was so new—I wondered if those 50 AP students could become the mighty academic warriors they needed to be. As the year proved, they indeed became such students. I could bask in their improvement and success on that piece of beach a few kilometers from the Saudi Arabian border.

I can’t really put a bookend on the 2008-09 school year though. Not everything is known and primed for the scrapbook yet! At the end of this week, our play opens…I will be in touch to apprise you of that progress.