Yesterday I turned 50 years old. I kind of whispered it at first, since it is somewhat hard to believe, but then since my boss, John Austin, yelled it out at a senior staff meeting on Thursday morning, and longtime colleague Fatina screamed it out in a History department gathering on Thursday afternoon, the cat is out of the bag anyway.
As some of you may know, and chuckle about, I
haven’t always been entirely truthful with my age. When I was 23 I decided that
I would age myself a few years so that I had a little more credibility in my
first school. I thought if I came across as 26 or 27, then I would appear that
I knew infinitely more than I did. Then when I moved to my third school in
1996, I thought, hmmm…let’s turn 30 all over again. People always act like
that’s a fun decade to turn into, so let’s do it again! So I shaved a couple
years off the actual age. As time went on, I had to keep straight in my head who
thought I was what age…good heavens, what a ridiculous charade to maintain!
So, now that I have reached the half-century
mark, I would rather someone think I looked all right for my age, instead of,
“Oh, well, he looks fine for his mid-40s,” and I guess I just don’t care what
people think if I know more than I do, or less than I do. Whatever I am,
whoever I have become, whatever I know or do not know, it is simply the
summative achievement of this particular moment in time. Oh, how very Zen I am
at age 50…
Yesterday was one of those birthdays people wish
for all the time—a day not at the workplace, a day that could actually be
totally lazy and self-indulgent (meaning no grading of papers, no writing of
college recommendations, no meetings, just a slowed-down, self-indulgent day…).
My King’s Academy friend Lubna and I always go to the Dead Sea to celebrate her
birthday (two weeks from yesterday) so I decided that we should go on my
semi-centennial birthday. While lazing around in the spa I looked back at these
other birthdays that mark the beginning of a new decade…very interesting the
trip down memory lane. As I looked back, I realized I was kind of “king of the
hill” for the beginning of the decade and then changes and unforeseen things
happened in the journey. I know, I know, that is exactly what happens in life,
but very interesting to look back at the beginnings of each of these decades.
10th birthday I spent my 10th birthday in a funeral
home. I had looked forward to this birthday for the obvious reason that I would
finally have two digits to call my own for an age! How would I feel to have two
hands completed in numbers? I was this much closer to the teen years! And then
my Aunt Ann Griley died. So here I was in the funeral home, moping around, not
so much because my aunt had died fairly young (you don’t think of 46 as young
when you are turning 10!) and my rambunctious cousins had lost their mother.
No, I was disappointed that this was how I got to spend my 10th
birthday. Wow. Childhood had kind of lead to this day, I assumed, and then I
was stuck in a suit in a funeral home. My mother had arranged that I could go
to my friend David Freeman’s house later on. His mother had made stuffed
peppers. I didn’t like stuffed peppers. So she made me some hot dogs. So that
was the birthday dinner the night I had two digits to claim as my age. Big
whoop. Of course, who knew what lay ahead of me at that point. I hadn’t yet had
Miss Wilson in 5th grade, the teacher who transformed my thinking. I
hadn’t yet gone to Gamble Junior High and played in the orchestra, the band or
sung in the choir. I hadn’t yet learned French. I hadn’t yet gone to Western
Hills High School and discovered their music and theater programs, and the
great friends I would make with those groups, no discovered Mrs. Michaels and
Mrs. Schneider…I was excited to turn 10, but I had no idea what lay ahead of me
as an adolescent.
20th birthday On this birthday, the day I left behind the
childish dreams and notions of teenage-hood, I spent as a sophomore at Denison
with all my cool college friends. We probably played “Tears For Fears” and “Men
At Work” (and yes, probably “Air Supply”) on a stereo and hung out with our
clique, our very independent, non-Greek clique of smart, mostly Ohio-public-school
friends. This was the era of big glasses and Bill Cosby-esque sweaters. We had
survived the freshman year with panache, and as sophomore year began, frankly,
we were king-of-the, well something. We weren’t juniors or seniors, and we didn’t
have cars, but we had already entered some junior and senior seminars due to
our high school AP grades and our top performances in freshman year. I had
joined the Denison Singers as a freshman (with a European tour, no less, the
second of my not-yet-out-of-my-teens-life) and had decided that I would become
a history professor. In fact, I plotted out my life, or the important stuff,
you know, up to your 40s. I would be a history professor like my idol, Amy Gordon,
start a family, teach at Denison and then assume the presidency of Denison in
lovely Granville, Ohio. The same month that I turned 20, the current-president
of Denison, Robert Good, a former ambassador to Zaire, announced that he had an
inoperable brain tumor and would most likely die within the next year. The
student body soon after surprised Dr. Good with a party, all 2000 of us in
sweatshirts emblazoned with “The Good Years,” to celebrate his tenure and his
life. In fact, he did die the next September, and I remember thinking in that
year how he had packed a great deal into his 60 years, and that was a pretty
good way to live life. But on the birthday, we were forever 20, excited about
college experiences and our friendships. I had no idea yet that I would study
abroad the next year, would accidentally miss my grad school deadline as a
senior forcing me to re-think the plan to immediately become a professor, that I would become a
high-school teacher instead, move to the south, finally get on with graduate
school at Brown, hate grad school so much that I knew I had to return to what I
loved, the high school classroom, and direct plays. None of that would have
made much sense at that long ago party on the west quad at Denison.
30th birthday This birthday came in the middle of preparations for my most complicated
and audacious play EVER—Noises Off. So my life plan was a little off-track. I
probably wasn’t going to be the president of Denison, but I owned a
three-bedroom house on a quiet street, in a beautiful section of an
up-and-coming metropolis. I had been at Charlotte Latin for three years, become
unbelievably happy teaching AP Modern European History, directing plays for a
school with a generous budget, and teaching students who were amazingly
committed, brilliant and fun and kind. Noises
Off requires a two-story set that
revolves and the structure was there by the birthday. The blocking was done.
The cast worked like the finest Swiss watch! I taught students who loved being
in class—I mean, can it get any better than this?? Is this what my 30s, heck,
the rest of my life, would be like???? My sister had found the man of her
dreams—hey, he loved me! She was planning a wedding to celebrate family and
love. We celebrated my birthday on the set (I joked that the set of Noises Off was better decorated than my
house—no joke actually, and then I made a sick joke to a friend after the
success of this play. I said that I might as well kill myself since I couldn’t see
how I could top myself!). Who knew that I would soon apply for the Klingenstein
program in New York, get whisked off to a sabbatical in New York, bid a sad farewell
to the brilliant Casey Brown, incur the wrath of headmaster Ned Fox, and look
to move back to New York and start all over somewhere else, selling my house in
under 48 hours. I remember wondering to Catherine Justice, “Maybe this has all
been a fluke. Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing,” just a few weeks before I
packed up the car and headed to Tarrytown, New York. You can see why I might
have shaved a couple of years off the actual age…
40th birthday By now, the age thing had become much like legendary entertainer Jack
Benny—I would perpetually stay 39. But this birthday is celebrated with a surprise
party in Manhattan at Christy’s house. My visionary-but-not-well-organized-friend Christy had planned a party with Hackley friends
and other friends to celebrate my new decade. This was a quintessential 40th
birthday—all of us at perhaps the “peak” of our careers, celebrating in an
apartment on Central Park West, near all my favorite things in my favorite
playground on earth—New York City. I raced out of Hackley School every Friday
afternoon, escaping by way of Metro North into the City for a weekend of
theater, camaraderie, art, good food, walking, laughing, music, church, and
eventually heading back north those 18 miles for Sunday night planning for the
next week. I headed home to Cincinnati several times a year for the important
re-connections with my family. Ahhhh…could life get any sweeter? I felt
intellectually challenged at Hackley and with New York at my feet, I directed
several plays a year with marvelous actors, I worked with Chuck Edwards, my
former student from Charlotte, and now an incredibly strong teacher and
remarkable colleague…go ahead, let life continue…Who knew that soon there would
be a trip of bad students that created bad feelings that set the stage for me to
know I couldn’t stay at Hackley forever, forsaking the “gargoyle” I hoped to
earn with 40 years of service. Who knew
a magazine article spied by the wondrous Anne Siviglia would lead to a dinner
out at swanky Le Bernardin with Eric Widmer, an old friend of the Siviglias now
founding a new school in Jordan. Who knew I would leave the hearkness table of
my room, the exceptional students at Hackley, that I would bid adieu to
Manhattan and come to the plains of the biblical kingdom of Moab?????
50th birthday So here I am—at my semi-centennial, towards the end of this most
self-indulgent blog, in the most self-indulgent media of our self-indulgent
world. I teach a course I love, direct a play once in a while, live in a
challenging place, sometimes lonely since it is not as full of people and
activities as other chapters of my life. Doris Jackson, another angel of a
friend, prophesied that I would find clarity in the desert. That is true. I
help run the school, help develop the talent of teachers, and have learned an
enormous amount from people around me about how schools work and how other
groups in the world survive. In some ways, I feel successful. But it is always,
or should be, always about more than
whatever success means. Have I lived up to the talent and potential of when I
turned 10 or turned 20? Have I internalized the integrity and sense of fair
play and generosity and hard work that marks my father’s contribution to this
earth? Have I imagined and executed things in the precise and enthusiastic way
that my mother operated and contributed to this world?
So I chose a painting,
a Chinese painting, the one at the top of the blog entry, to mark not only my
50th birthday, but how it feels at the turn of a new decade. This is
a work by Song Dynasty painter Ma Yuan, called Mountain Path in the Spring. We see a scholar looking out at the
world in front of him, rather obscured in the way Chinese artists loved, not
sure what lies in front of him. There is a young charge near him, helping with
the journey. The scholar sees a bird in flight beyond him, intersecting that activity
with his contemplative stillness. I imagine he looks back in his mind at what
the other decades have been like, but certainly in the misty stillness before him,
even with his scholarly pedigree, he has no idea what still might lie ahead.
I suppose that is the
beauty of it all and the risk of it all in this journey of life. Doris Jackson
loves to send me devotion books, and yesterday, on that semi-centennial since
my birth, the title of the day’s devotion was “Immeasurably More.” The piece refers back to a passage in
Ephesians where Paul thanks God for all He has done, “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.” My goodness,
even Doris, in all her wisdom, couldn’t have guessed those perfect words would
appear on my 50th birthday.
I talked to some of
these people mentioned in the blog last night, the ones who have loved me and
blessed me through these 50 years. I probably should have closed with the words
of Paul, but since he got the title of the blog, I can’t resist going back to
the final words of one of my favorite TV shows of all time (you didn’t think I would have a blog entry about my entire life and
not mention a TV show, did you???????!)
The Wonder Years ended its run the year I turned 30. I
loved the words then, and I showed this clip at a drama banquet in May, 1993.
But the words are even better now, with a half-century under my belt:
“Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One
day you're in diapers; next day you're gone. But the memories of childhood stay
with you for the long haul. I remember a place...a town...a house like a lot of
other houses... A yard like a lot of other yards...on a street like a lot of
other streets. And the thing is...after all these years, I still look
back...with wonder.”
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