Well, maybe next year…

It is just after midnight, and by the end of the next 24 hours I will be on the plane flying back to Jordan to begin year four of this chapter of my life at KA. This day was the usual mish-mash of doing a million things, trying to see and enjoy as much of summer life, and American life, and Cincinnati life as I could.

In between categories on the Emmy Awards tonight I worked at packing up all the things (files, books, new clothes, American food products) for the suitcases for tomorrow’s flights. And as usual, there were some regrets about not cleaning more this summer.

Every time I come home, I envision devoting a couple hours a day to really cleaning and going through things in my old bedroom and my storage unit in Cincinnati. If you read the above paragraphs, you might get the idea that those expectations never are met. And so there is always a tinge of regret that I just didn’t take the cleaning seriously enough. In my defense, though, you should know that in the last week, I did spend about 8 hours going through some files from the storage unit, but still there is a residue of regret.

Maybe it’s the midnight hour, but those thoughts of regret remind me of one of the joys of the summer of 2010: Bernadette Peters’ performance in A Little Night Music on Broadway. I was there for her first performance of the replacement cast, Ms. Peters, along with 85-year old Broadway legend Elaine Stritch. I became a convert to Bernadette Peters’ charisma in December, 1985 when I saw her in Song and Dance (and maybe sometime I will tell you the story of how I ended up going to her dressing room that evening and actually meeting her…well maybe now is the time…I was with my college friend Sarah, who knew all the doormen at the Broadway theaters. We went to the stage door to meet one of her dancer friends in the show, and the doorman asked us if we wanted to meet Ms. Peters. Sarah declined, but I quickly interjected, “I would,” and so this man took me to her dressing room. She was gracious. I was a bit star-struck and incoherent.)

Part of what was thrilling that night in July was enjoying the audience reaction to these two stars in A Little Night Music. Each time one of these actresses appeared you could feel the love of the crowd for these veterans. You might be wondering how any of this relates to the “regret” I mentioned earlier…Okay: in the last verse of her quietly heart-breaking rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s anthem of regret, “Send in the Clowns,” Bernadette Peters asks us to ponder with her the cruelty of missed opportunity. “Isn’t it rich?” she asks as the actress Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, her sarcasm dampened by deep sorrow at the realization that in life and love, timing is everything.

This is one of those songs that is overplayed in our pop culture, and so it can become tedious. But in the hands of a master interpreter, like Ms. Peters, it is revelatory and allows you to reflect on the regrets of your own life and, well, maybe through all of history! One of the famous lines of the song sighs, “Well, maybe next year…”

So yeah, I have a hint of regret over not getting more cleaning accomplished this summer, but regret in August is simply not one of things in which most teachers indulge. Indeed, as I set about packing tonight, my quickly-vanishing regrets-over-not-organizing some-piles-a-bit-more pale in comparison to that heady August feeling most teachers feel about returning to the classroom. While there certainly will likely be some Desiree Armfeldt expressions of “Well, maybe next year…” for every teacher in every June, this is the time for unbridled enthusiasm about the coming year.

As August ripens into September we teachers get a little intoxicated with the possibilities of the year…the possibilities, the opportunities, the blank slates of it all—this will be the year it all works! Attendance! Relationships! Curriculum! Mentoring! Accreditation! Apathy! Success! It is like New Year’s Eve for teachers as we await the beginning of the new school year, the perfect year in our minds!

Ahhhh…I am savoring this feeling I get every year at this time…

So while I was doing a wee bit of cleaning yesterday in that bedroom upstairs (see? I did do a little work around all the fun visiting of the summer!) I came upon my diploma from Brown University. It has stood on a bookshelf for a long, long time, but I picked up the diploma perhaps because I realized it had been 20 years since I received my master’s degree from Brown. I opened it up—yep my name is still there with all the Latin explaining that I had an AM (again, because of Latin) in European History. I looked at the seal of the university and the motto beneath the seal. In Latin, the motto reads: “In Deo Speramus.” At Brown one of the disasters-of-courses I took involved studying medieval documents in Latin. My paltry Latin knowledge wasn’t enough to soar in that class. But this Latin I could do! “In Deo Speramus.” Those words do not mean in God we trust. Those words do not mean in God we believe. Those words mean in God we hope.

That’s it—that’s my stock in trade as a teacher in August! It is not a giddiness over grading (my, my, no, no, no) or a naivete about how some relationships will sour, or an immaturity about how a perfect accreditation report or lesson plan signals perfection in teaching, no it is that feeling/vibe/mindset that hope will activate us, energize us, and set us off down that urgent path to train and inspire our young charges.

Hope. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to hope, does it? And certainly in a world where hopes are dashed so easily or ideals tarnished or discarded, it seems a remnant of an earlier, quainter era. But we never regret hope, do we?

Emily Dickinson once wrote that, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Feathers. Flight. Soaring. Planes. Airport. Tomorrow. Return to Jordan. No Regrets. Hope for the New Year.

In a nice bit of serendipity, the scripture in church this morning was from Jeremiah 29:11 that reminds us about the future and that God’s plans “give hope.”

The funny thing about my experience at Brown was that it showed me clearly that the college world was not my destination. And it wasn’t timing or missed opportunities, it was the actual revelation that I belong in secondary education. At the time I clutched that diploma for the first time, of course I had no idea where the next 20 years would take me. At the time I focused on my upcoming trip to the USSR and Baltic States with the Brown Chorus and an upcoming visit to cousin Susan in San Diego. But I had a new job coming up that fall, in Charlotte, and I knew, I knew that that was the place for me. I sailed on that hope that summer.

While Desiree Armfeldt is consumed with the mistakes she has made and finds cold comfort in her web of regret. “In Deo Speramus” can not be next year. No, it’s today.