legend out of happenstance

Summer comes in fits and starts when ending the year at KA. It is nearly 3 weeks since the seniors graduated, a week since we bade good-bye to the underclassmen, and yet we faculty are still in meetings! Meetings yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The weather in Jordan—perpetually sunny with blue skies in the mid 90s—says that summer has arrived. The students we all taught are reveling in summer. And soon summer, real teacher summer, will be here soon.

I decided to get a head-start on one of my favorite things about summer—reading for pleasure…

Now I do some reading for pleasure during the year, yes, that is true. And with my fairly peripatetic ways, I am reading on planes quite often. But there is nothing like that summer reading when you are lying on a couch with a summer breeze floating by, or sitting on the front porch as a rain storm (that would be in Cincinnati!) freshens everything, or lazing under the shade of an olive tree (that would be in Jordan!) lost in another world.

So this last week, as classes ceased and grading finally ended, I started the summer reading. Shhhh…don’t tell anyone I got a headstart on summer! I began with a book suggested by my good friend, my math teacher colleague Dragana, a 2007 historical fiction book by Nancy Horan called Loving Frank. Dragana had said in her inimitable voice of authority: “John, I know you will like this book. It is about Frank Lloyd Wright—oh, it doesn’t end well.” Normally, one doesn’t really like to know much about a book, but I guess Dragana didn’t want me to get my hopes up!

Anyway, Frank Lloyd Wright, huh? I remember as a child seeing some of his homes in Kankakee, Illinois when my mother would drive us half-way to Chicago to meet her suburban Chicagoland sister, Helen. I teach FLW in AP Art History so I have enjoyed seeing how much he loved Egypt and Japan and sought to bring elements from those worlds to his homes in the United States.

I also remember watching a grainy, late 1950s TV interview (not in the 1950s, mind you, I was not alive yet!) with Frank Lloyd Wright and he was asked about a comment he had made lauding himself as the “greatest architect of the 20th Century.” The old architect with the shock of white hair looked disgruntled and protested to the interviewer, “That’s not true! I said I was the greatest architect of all time!”


Wright was indeed a visionary, and his Prairie homes made in Oak Park, Illinois (ahhh….see the example above!) were organic in nature and designed to blend into the landscape rather than compete with it.

FLW himself—ego, bravado, talent, control, temper—on the other hand, could hardly be considered as a man who “blended into the landscape” and his unconventional affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, a married woman of Oak Park with two children, resulted in tragedy both personal and professional. (I shouldn’t act so knowledgeable about this affair—I only learned about it from the book.)

So author Nancy Horan's historical novel takes you into the lives and minds of this unusual couple and explores their relationship and its effect on the people who loved them as well as those on the periphery of their passion.

We are drawn into the inner thoughts of Mamah, an unusually accomplished woman for her time in her own right.....college graduate, fluent in several languages.....and her attempt to “stop standing on the side of life watching it float by” and instead “swim in the river and feel its current.” In an era when women were expected to quash any desire for personal growth and “act happy,” Mamah's personal conflict threw her into the arms of charismatic Wright. Both Frank and Mamah were trapped in loveless marriages, and they ultimately sacrificed everything in order to be together: leaving their spouses, their children, and their credibility (the factual recitations from contemporary Chicago papers reminds us how forbidden and taboo infidelity was then—Mamah and Frank didn’t have a People magazine yet through which to tell their side of the story). Although society pegged these two lovers as wicked adulterers, I was moved by their desire to share their lives together. They thrived off each other not just physically, but they had a deep intellectual connection that seemed to justify their choice to be together. By the way, this really is in no way a major spoiler—you get all of this in the first 50 pages…there are 300 pages more to go.

And what a fun summer read! I lay under one of the olive trees by our administration building, in the shade, several late afternoons in a row engrossed in the story. One of my favorite moments in the book comes from author Horan’s assessment of Frank Lloyd Wright himself: “He could make a legend out of happenstance.” I love that line! Indeed, anyone who blogs just kind of assumes that they also make legends out of happenstance! I mean, think about the proliferation of social media—the tweeting and the facebooking—we are daily, hourly, every second making legends out of happenstance.

But of course it does go a little deeper than that—the line is a celebration, not just a self-publishing claim, about our lives, the happenstance, the quotidian. One of the things I love about the Thornton Wilder play Our Town so much is how it elevates the quotidian. In an age long before the internet, Wilder is kind of blogging about the ordinary lives of the Webbs’ and the Gibbs’s.

Of course, that got me to thinking of some of the “happenstance” moments in my life of late—well, I mean, the ones that haven’t already made it into the blogisodes.

There is the time a couple weeks ago when I volunteered to chaperone a study break trip to the new Taj mall in Amman. I am sitting at the Starbucks there, minding my own business, hoping the students will all come back on time, reading for pleasure on my Kindle, when I hear a loud voice over my shoulder exclaim, “Oh, good! You speak English! Can I talk to you? May I sit down with you?” I quickly learn that this woman named Kelly has been desperate to speak to someone in English. She wasn’t in danger, she didn’t need car help (thank goodness!), she didn’t need money nor had she lost her passport. No, but I did learn a fair amount about this Kelly, in this happenstance conversation, over the next 40 minutes!

It turns out that Kelly has been in Amman for about 6 weeks, recently arrived from Kansas City. She doesn’t get to speak to someone who speaks English very often, you see. She had been a dispatch operator for a taxi company in Kansas City ("Did you know they have great BBQ there?" She misses it so!) and had met a man who lived in Jordan on-line. The _____ (fill in the blank for the right noun—friendship? relationship? lonely planet-acquaintance ship? stalker-ship???) blossomed and the man proposed (!!!!!) and so Kelly, who had never left the United States before, got a passport, took her savings from said dispatcher job, left Kansas City and flew to Jordan to meet, marry, and live with her husband’s family (who don’t really speak English). The husband goes to work every day, six days a week, and she is left with the mother-in-law who doesn’t trust air conditioning, doesn’t have Dr. Pepper in the house, and doesn’t like shopping. So this was Kelly’s second time out of the house alone…so of course, she was thrilled to speak to someone who spoke English so she could tell me the story of the beautiful ______ (fill in the blank for the right noun). Oh, and she will be in Jordan for about six months while they await his visa to go with Kelly to America. Oh. What an ______ (fill in the blank for the right adjective) conversation with Kelly. I was able to tell her that the grocery store in the basement of the mall would have Dr. Pepper for her. Happenstance—and kind of fun.

Another happenstance moment that should become legend: a recent dinner at my friend Reem’s parents’ house in Amman…this wonderful couple moved back to Jordan last year from Georgia to be with family, and they had us over for a dinner in their garden. Maybe the best meal of the year…plus in a beautiful garden on a cool evening. The meal was legendary. And Reem is legendary.

Then another happenstance thing—but not in the good category, came recently when I had another flat tire in Jordan. I think I have had 5 flat tires nowin my time in Jordan—probably the amount I have had in 15 years time in the USA—and, well, you know I am inept about that kind of thing. Remember—I was so glad Kelly didn’t need car help! But the best part of this little flat tire episode is that I went into my usual produce store in Madaba, asked if I could leave the car there on the street until tomorrow, and then some of the guys from the shop came out and changed the tire for me. Legendary help!

Another small happenstance moment—the other day I was in a little store in Madaba, a kind of Walmart that is perhaps .005% the size of a real Walmart, and I found a hand-held mixer at a decent price. Now I have not been willing to buy one of those things here—“how long am I going to be here??” I always say. Well, I am at the end of five school years here. I think it is time to have a mixer instead of whisk and whisk and whisk and whisk. So there. I did a legendary thing. I made a statement that I may be staying here a little longer. Enjoying the moments of happenstance that make it into the blogisodes and become, at least in my self-publishing mind, legendary!