October Woes

Margot remembered again!

Margot Robinson is one of those great souls who cross your life’s path for a short period of time, but fortunately she is never that far away. Margot was a “Junior Fellow” the first year of the KA project. Margot had just graduated from Deerfield the previous June, and she ventured to Jordan for a “gap year,” to work as a kind of prefect/proctor/indentured servant in our lovely new world. Margot and I worked together for a brief spell doing some drama work, but all year, she was just a joy to know.

In that first fall at KA, we talked one day about what we missed the very most from home. It’s an interesting question: and the answer might surprise you. It kinda surprised me! Since we live in a world of email and skype and vonage lines, communication with family and friends is not as big a burden as it was when I studied abroad in Austria in the mid-1980s (has it really been 25 years???). And since we have Hamudeh DVD, a.k.a. “The Candy Store,” providing us with (ahem, bootlegged—sorry Stephanie, I will send you a royalty check!) pretty recent TV shows, it comes down to…what? Food? Well, remember when I fly back from the U.S. I come loaded down with at least 30 pounds of food smuggled into the kingdom.

So I told Margot that what I miss the most is the changing leaves of autumn.

I have never lived far away from the magnificent changing leaves. Growing up in Ohio, especially right near a municipal forest, the autumnal beauty was all around me. Then when I went to Denison, well, the annual Licking County fall pageant was radiant with the maroons and yellows and oranges. In North Carolina, the changing leaves came a little later, but, please, I didn’t live far from the Smokeys and the Appalachian Trail…and then when I went to Brown, it was a zippy trip into New England to revel with all the other leaf-peepers. In New York I had a special connection with this one tree in particular. It was a tree right by Broadway in Tarrytown, right there by the Washington Irving Elementary School. It seemed it would explode into the most majestic red leaves every year right at my birthday. I always thought it a nice little present from the people of Tarrytown.

But here in Jordan—no changing leaves.

It was not long after our discussion that Margot returned to the U.S. for a week for some conference or something. She came back with an envelope full of autumn leaves from Massachusetts for me. I loved those leaves! I loved her remembering! Such woe at not seeing the collage of beautiful leaves every year.

Margot left Jordan in the spring of 2008, bound for Williams College. But each October I receive a letter in the mail, catching me up on her adventures in college, and also full of the autumn leaves I miss so much. Last week, the letter came and I have a tiny piece of the autumn I love so much.

I went and asked one of our science teachers why the trees change colors in the fall. I am sure somewhere sometime a science teacher taught me this, but it probably went the same place as the lessons my father gave me in car mechanics. Oh dear, why can’t everything stay in one’s brain!

The science teacher reminded me that trees are green in summer because chlorophyll, a green pigment in the leaves, absorbs red and blue light from the sun. The light reflected from the leaves appears green to our eyes. I learned that chlorophyll is an unstable substance, and bright sunlight causes it to decompose rapidly. So that is why plants must continuously synthesize and regenerate it. The shortening days and cool nights of autumn, I am now told, interfere with this process. As chlorophyll breaks down, the green colors of the leaves begin to fade. So some trees change from green to bright yellow as the chlorophyll degrades (oh, this teacher is a smartie!). In others, the action of sugar in leaves creates a red pigment, causing the leaves to turn shades of bright red as the chlorophyll fades.

Well, more stuff I didn’t know how it operates. Hmmmm…

For a couple weeks I have not been able to use my Jordan bank account ATM card. It seems I have been here long enough to have had an ATM card expire! It is three years after all! And the way it works here, the way the banks operate, they cannot send you a new ATM card. One must go to the bank. During banking hours. Which also happen to be school hours…argh….

So today I had a chunk of about 90 minutes to do what could be/should be a 35 minute trip to Madaba and back including the running in time to get the new ATM card. On the way I see a mother of a student who is struggling in class, and we talk for a little bit—it was a healthy, and necessary conversation. That’s okay—I don’t need lunch today, I’ll be back in time.

I zip down the road to Madaba, find a parking place not too far from the bank, run over to the bank, watch them stamp forms and check my various IDs and give me the new ATM card (“I hope it will work later today,” he adds as I leave. Yes, that would be nice. I need to pay back everyone who has been loaning me money!).

As I get back to the car, oh, no—really? A flat tire. A flat-as-a-cliched-pancake tire. Of course my father is too far away to call (If I had called him, he probably would’ve said, “All right, I’ll get on a plane tonight and be there tomorrow.”) So who do I call in Jordan? I call the ubermensch Julianne. “Um, Jules, I know you aren’t really in charge of this, but I have a problem.” After I tell her where I am, she says, “I will send someone for you. It’ll be fine. Call me in 20 minutes if they aren’t there.” Besides the 425 students at the school, she has to watch out for me too!

So in 15 minutes two guys are there in a school van, ready to help. This is one of those moments when I feel the most inept! Woe is me! But the guys open up the trunk of my leased car and start to cluck cluck (or is it ‘tut tut’??) my misfortune. They can’t find a jack, and it seems that the spare tire is flat. I whined that I had never looked at the spare tire and so didn’t know…I didn’t…have…a jack…oh, I am in Woe Soup at this point!

The guys get their own car jack and set out to take off the wounded tire and then we haul them over to the school van and they are in charge. I thank them profusely as we rush down the road to the gas station. We stop at the place where just the other day I overpaid for an oil change (and that was with a fluent Arabic speaker negotiating the price!). I explained that not only did I have no money, but my ATM card probably didn’t work either. They reassured me there was no problem.

In the next 30 minutes I watched a brilliant tire man at work—strangely, this tire guy reminded me of the science teacher who explained such important phenomena to me, phenomena like the science about which I knew next to nothing. I watched him take the tire, do surgery on the whole tire, figuring out the problem, doing this and that, looking at the innards of the tire in a way that I am sure I have not seen before (or again, my mind has purged the experience!). He took out the inner tube and fixed it, fixed—well, fixed both tires.

No charge!

The men asked me when I had class again, and assured me I would be back in time. They whisked me back to the public square where the car was parked, and bada-boom, bada-bing, put everything back in place. I told them they were my heroes. One guy said, “What is hero, Mr. John?” I said, “Superman!” They laughed. They took care of my woes.

I chose the title of the blog entry in part because of the woe of missing the leaves, and in part because of the temporary woe today with the tire(s), and in some part because this title reminds me of one of my favorite songs, “When October Goes.”

But as woes go in the world, these are not bad woes. Qxhna, a student from the U.S. got back tonight from a brief trip to interview at colleges in the U.S. Another student saw me asking her about her few days in New York, and how I love it there. She said, “Oh, Mr. John, you miss it so, don’t you?” I said, “Of course. Walking in Central Park in autumn is glorious. But of course, autumn in America does not have you, dear Jude.”

The woe can be tempered, either with wonderful students, remembrances from Margot, or my ubermenschen in Madaba-Manja.

In two days I am traveling to Kathmandu for a conference on school leadership. I will be sure to send you a postcard about this trip to Nepal!