…and be Mary…

Here it is, the first day of February! I had decided over the weekend that I would write a blog entry about how even though it was a full month since New Year’s Day, and a month since I got on a plane back to Jordan I would remind the world of the promises and the hopes that are invested so naturally on New Year’s Day. Oh, the resolutions and the intentions and the smiles and the hopes of early January! Remember, I wrote early last month that we needed to look the New Year “right in the eye” and make it all better. I was going to write today about how the spirit of the New Year was right here in my pocket, and I could take it out and smile at it as if it were still January 1 or 2 or 3. I was going to write about Friends (the actual collection of people I know, not the great sit-com) and feel all warm and fuzzy so that you on that cold continent over there might have a warm fire in your psyche after the blogisode about Friends.

But then today happened.

I mean, it’s not really an unusual day when teaching adolescents and trying to manage, or help others manage, the stresses of school life.

Well, actually, it did have an unusual start. And I am still trying to figure it out. Mondays are the one day when we do not have School Meeting at 7:55 a.m. (and I happen to have first period free) so I can toddle about the apartment or go have a leisurely cup of coffee with Lubna before jumping into the fray.

I noticed this morning that there was something strange under the front door of the apartment, and I just assumed our zealous maintenance guys had some great ooooooooze on the floor of the dorm trying to get it clean.

I open the door to check on the sludge-y stuff that I suspect is cleaning product, and notice that I have about a dozen egg shells on the floor, and notice that I have the detritus of egg all over the door. Hmmm…my door had been egged in the middle of the night! What had happened? The strange thing is that I thought about last night, I remembered that the dorm had been unusually quiet at bedtime, and I saw not a soul in the hallway after Lights Out. I hadn’t had a confrontation with a derelict young man, and frankly, no name popped into my head of who might have done it. Except that I teach school, assign work, and wave a magic gradebook over people’s lives.

I can’t remember any other time in my career that I was egged. So, strange. Just a strange start to the day. You know, you don’t want to take it personally, and I know the seniors feel the stress of senior year (seriously, every senior year has been stressful…I am sure Moses complained to his buddies about how no one in the palace really understood, and when the pharaoh was a little boy, no one had the stresses of being a senior like he had them) and are cross about life, but oh well. I would rather have had a western omelet instead.

But the day was one of a succession of odd chats: taking someone aside and quietly and calmly discussing infractions or missed obligations. The young man who disrupted science class endlessly, and the young man who didn’t understand why he couldn’t just go into town alone and do what teen-agers need to do, and the colleague who was stressed about how no one understands how hard it is to be away from friends and family, and the colleague who didn’t know why we weren’t friends on Facebook (seriously!). I had a student who needed to go over the grading of a test, sure that his A- was really an A and then I had the student who needed chastising because of a nasty email he sent to a teacher telling him how much he hated him. I ate lunch by grabbing a piece of fish and walking around the Dining Hall trying to find the two errant seniors who needed to turn in their Senior Jackets to me because some people thought the nicknames on the jackets the young scholars had chosen were inappropriate (actually six jackets had been deemed inappropriate, but four of them have been successfully recovered by Jacket Hunter Johnny). Oh and I had a couple of meetings and a couple of classes. We discussed doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants and the ensuing wars (“My chalice is golden and expensive! My chalice is simple and made of wood! Let’s fight!”). Everything was testy today!

So I need something other than the cheesiness extolling the virtues of friendship.

Let’s face it—I need a little levity, and well, maybe I need to make fun of a couple of people!

Over the thirty-one months of blogging I have resisted—for the most part—mocking my Arab friends’ English. It just isn’t fair! And remember, they are operating, thinking, debating, writing and acting in a second language. So I never culled gaffes and used them as fodder in the blog. But a little chuckle might lighten the mood on this February 1st.

Administrators send emails all day long—I mean that’s what they do, and 99.9% of these emails have great English grammar and vocabulary, but there is one who ends many, many emails with something that gives me the giggles. In Administrator-speak, I have learned that when one is peeved at a colleague, one tends to end an email (a.k.a. rant) with the phrase “please advise.” Well, this one administrator—stop me, okay, it’s just a chortle, always ends such emails with “please advice.” Okay, a little chortle—what’s the harm?!

There was another email advising the reader that an important matter was still unresolved. The pronouncement read, “The matter is still bending.”

Now, actually I can explain that gaffe, I think. In Arabic you don’t have a “p” sound. For example, if you are lost in Jordan, trying to find your way to Petra, you just stop and beg, “Wein Butra????” See, if you say the P in Petra, you aren’t really local. Cool, no? So I think the mistake was that the impulse is not to say a p like in pending. Well, that demystifies the comment, I guess and takes away any of the risible effect for which I long!

But my favorite gaffe actually reminds me of how interesting and profound little tiny mistakes can be. Okay, this came from a student’s test last week on the Renaissance. There was an art work and the prompt asked the students to analyze how the work exemplified the intellectual concerns of the era. The student commented how the piece was from Venice, and went on to comment about the trials and tribulations the Venetians endured as their economy suffered and collapsed in the second half of the 15th century (If you are dying to know why, well, it is simple, the recently-triumphant-in-Constantinople -Ottomans closed down the shipping lanes to and from Venice, I guess to teach those cocky Venetians a thing or two about control.

The mood in Venice might have been one of panic, since a major source of their wealth suddenly vaporized. But in an unusual response, the Venetians decided to throw up their hands and throw themselves a party of sorts. Their art turned quite escapist, rather risqué, and bacchanalian. I described in class that the Venetian artists adopted the mantra of “Eat, drink and be merry…for tomorrow we may die!”

We looked at a number of art works by Titian and Giorgione and Bellini that supported this theory. Indeed the work on the test called on just such knowledge.

So I am reading this excellent response from a student and the student writes that in Venice they adopted the idea that one should “Eat, drink and be Mary!”

It is just a homonym—a simple little spelling error—but it made me laugh. Instead of merriment, the directive is to be Mary! The Virgin Mary? Mary Magdalene? Mary, Queen of Scots? Mary Todd Lincoln? Mary Astor? Stop me!

So I laughed. I didn’t have the heart to let the student know the gaffe (Annunciation, anyone??), but it actually made me think that it is a pretty good pep talk.

I thought of Mary, the sister of Lazarus in the New Testament. Mary is the gentle hostess—gracious, attentive, a listener and responder to the people and the hubbub buzzing around her. Her personality isn’t showy, but she is purposeful and sensitive to the frustrations and fears of those around her.

Maybe that is what this day needed—a total out-of-the-blue reminder that when it seems like chaos, why not just calm down, “eat, drink, and be Mary.”