Knitted to the world

“So what’s it gonna take, Ken, to get your boy outta there?” asked a well-meaning acquaintance of my father last week at the Tuesday night buffet gathering at The Farm in Cincinnati.

A week earlier my father coyly commented to me during our telephone visit, “Lots of people are asking about you and hope you are okay.”

I know the news reports are dire about the situation in Syria. Yes, the situation is bad in Syria, that ongoing humanitarian catastrophe that has claimed perhaps 100,000 lives and forced almost 2 million Syrians to flee the country. And yes, Jordan borders Syria, so every time one of the maps flash across the news screen, it looks as if we in Jordan must be in imminent danger.

However, it is hard to convey how normal our lives continue here at KA, just a couple of hundred miles away from the not-so-simple civil war in Syria. It must make us look blasé when we say to our families that no one is worried here. I hadn’t written anything about the ferocity in Syria since I didn’t want to fan the flames—the news agencies in the United States do enough of that for us. But I thought it might be important to look at what some of the things in the last week have been like, and that, for those of us in Amman, and south of Amman (Syria is to our north) we see no evidence of these struggles, no one speaks in guarded tones about their fears for the future of Jordan—and it really is normal school life going on.

Wait, a minute that is not entirely true! Last week a glimmer of my old life visited me. As many of you know, in the last chapter of my life, the New York chapter, I saw on average 2 theatrical productions a week, seeing up to about 150 productions a year all told (I can do the math, on average it was 2 in many weeks, and a glut at some other times). So since I moved to Jordan in 2007, outside of the theatrical events on the campus at KA, I had seen one lone theatrical event in the kingdom. One!!! One—EVER!! It was a dance story about the founding of Petra, in Arabic, but opulent costumes and projections of Petra. So when a colleague said that a West End touring production was coming to Amman with The Sound of Music, I could hardly believe it!! A show, a Broadway show coming to Amman??? And, to top it off, it would be presented in a great location, al fresco, at the oldest site in Amman, at the ruins of the Roman Citadel high on a hill overlooking downtown Amman. A show???? And I don’t have to fly to London or New York??? So a group of faculty (mostly new faculty—they have no idea, this might be their last show here for years!) gathered to go and see the fun.

It hardly mattered that I know the show forwards and backwards. If one of the nuns had fallen ill at the last minute, I could have gone on! (“Gloria patri et filio, et spiritui sancto!” and of course, “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?”  A flibbertigibbet, a will-of-the-wisp, a clown!”) or if Rolf, or Georg, or Max, or heck, even Baroness Shrader had gotten delayed at the airport, I could have filled in!

They built a temporary staging with seating for several thousand outside, right on the site of where the Romans had built a temple a couple thousand years ago, and they had cameras projecting onto a big screen intimate images of the stage production, and then right to our right, down from the Citadel is the Roman amphitheater. The gods of the theater must have been happy!

The production was efficient and well-done. Actually two of the Von Trapp children were from Amman and did a fabulous job. The book still gets laughs in all the right places, and Maria did her best, although how can we ever erase Julie Andrews from the performance? Captain Von Trapp was appropriately a fuddy-duddy, and Max was almost dull, but the children—all they had to do was march on or off stage and the audience cooed and applauded. The show worked well. I relayed one of my favorite memories from seeing this show over the years when I saw a semi-professional production but the Mother Abbess couldn’t quite reach the notes. As the notes ascended in “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” the actress began to pull at her habit, and tried (in vain) to pull the notes out of thin air and her costume. As she reached those long-held, high notes at the end, she grabbed on to a nearby column from the set, hoping against hope that the stability of a fake column might lend her a little traction in holding those notes. Alas, as I recall, the audience just looked down, almost in prayer, that the actress might end the song with a little dignity left in-tact.

But the Amman night was beautiful. Above and below the actors, all around, were the lights of Amman, and it even looked a little like Salzburg, the setting of The Sound of Music. The abbey in the show is on top of the Festung in Salzburg, and overlooks the Austrian town, and it looked a little like the twinkling lights of Salzburg. And of course, seeing the show reminds me of my time in Salzburg, in my junior year of college, lo those many years ago.

So that was on my mind last weekend—enjoying the show and hoping the Von Trapps could keep away from the Nazi menace. That’s about as close as I came to the Assad menace of Syria.

But this past week was just one of those serendipitous weeks of school pleasure—probably not the stuff of blog entries, but enjoying teaching about the Greeks (I mentioned in one class that I was glad I lived another year to get to teach the Greeks again…I think they thought I was a little batty!) and the potential of the Greeks and their fascination with the human project. I shared with them the wisdom of Maxine Greene, who when I had her as a teacher at age 80 [her age, not my age!] said she loved the phrase, I am what I am—not yet. How Greek of Maxine!

This week my colleague Lilli and I embarked on our annual fall blitz-tour (I probably shouldn’t use a German word this close to the Von Trapps!) of visiting 80 classes in 16 school days. As the Deans of Faculty, Lilli and I visit classes, offer some feedback, and take the temperature of the school academically. It is always fun (and a little exhausting) to see so many classes. I started with English classes and I was treated to a lesson on topic sentences and what one should expect from a good topic sentence. Another English class scrutinized thesis statements (did she know I love this???) and how we can write more effective thesis statements. Another English class asked the class to respond to this quotation from C.S. Lewis: “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He thinks he is ‘finding his place’ in it, while it is really finding its place in him.”  The class had trouble with some of the vocabulary words, so the teacher skillfully helped them understand the words so they could understand the meaning of the quotation, and wondered how, and by what we are knitted to the world.

Another day I visited two of the big guns at the school as they taught: Julianne, the Dean of Students, and John, the headmaster. Julianne is teaching the “History of Freedom” course that we created at Hackley, and she does a bang-up job exploring the nature, vagaries, and changing nature of freedom. This day she was looking at ancient Rome, and the apostle Paul, and gauging the freedom found in the Empire, and in this new Christianity. The class looked at issues of control and freedom, and freedom and slavery, studied Paul’s words to the Romans, and compared Zeus and Jesus. John had his class discussing a piece by Malcom Gladwell about how one measures excellence.

You see, just a thrillingly mundane week here at a school that is working hard to prepare students to read and write and speak well and maybe, maybe solve some problems in the world.

Yes, there are problems in Syria and I do not deny that. But none of the Jordanians that I know is worried about imminent danger. We have close to 50 students from the USA here and not a single one has been asked to come by a parent. It is life as usual, business as usual, education as usual here at KA.

But for the entire world the Syrian issue is worth pondering, whether action or not against Assad is advisable. Ask 20 people, you’ll get 20 differing responses. What is certain is that the rival rebel groups are turning on each other and Assad has a “rump” state left to him around Damascus. As my wise friends wonder, if President Bashar al-Assad clings to power, will this civil war lead to a major conflict between Sunnis and Shiites throughout the Muslim world, and then that might divide Lebanon, destabilize Turkey and Iraq, and empower Iran.

Still, the world can’t afford to passively await the outcome—should we negotiate with Assad to accept a transition from power? It does seem likely that Syria will become a “failed state” and we do not want the al Qaida-affiliated rebels to get the chemical weapons.

In what ways are we knitted to the world? Each of us is knitted to our surroundings, to our routines, to our place in the world. I appreciate my father’s friends who worry, but I think too much of their worry is more partisan, or it seems that way from the Fox News reports about the debacle of the situation for President Obama. As I explained to my father that I think the news reports of the danger for Americans is fear-mongering, he did say, “Shall I tell them to stop keeping you in their prayers?” Indeed, just as Maria needed it, those prayers are crucial.

Life is never as simple as the plot of The Sound of Music—and indeed, some of the historical inaccuracies of the movie make the Salzburgers cringe (the little trip over the Alps at the end would lead right into Hitler’s German “Eagle’s Nest,”) but there is that wise moment when the Mother Abbess reminds Maria that when God closes a door, he opens a window. How are we knitted to this world? Do we do the knitting or does the world? How do we find those windows? When my window opens, will I be waiting in the hall???

Wonderful things to think about as this perfectly wonderful and mundane week comes to a close.