Immeasurably More

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.

10^th birthday I spent my 10^th 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 10^th 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 5^th 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.

20^th 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.

30^th 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…

40^th 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 40^th 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?????

50^th 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 50^th 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 50^th 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.”

 

The kind of September

As the last seconds of September, 2013 whizz past us, I am reminded of the iconic and wistful song from the Mad Men-era theatrical fable, The Fantasticks, in which “El Gallo” sings,

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.

Wait a second! (I slam on the brakes in my mind and scream mentally again) Wait a second!!!

Slow and mellow??? September?????

In my always increasing days on earth, I don’t know if I have ever experienced a slow and mellow September! I know, I know, it’s not a reality-based show, and it beautifully sets up the line to come: when you were a tender and callow fellow. But as I was driving into Amman for dinner with lovely former colleague Annabel and her husband Tim, I hummed the tune, thinking about the end of this month, and the image of a slow and mellow September just made me laugh. Thinking about Septembers past then made the 30-minute drive go a little faster!

In my lifetime, four of my Septembers have been in a brand-new school for me, eagerly trying to adjust to a new building, new policies, new children, new colleagues, new curricula, new sets of politics and lingo. A first month in a new job setting is hardly slow and mellow!

In my lifetime, two of my Septembers have been as a brand-new student in graduate school, both stuffy Ivy League universities which are not by nature terribly welcoming, even though both schools have officially been welcoming students for nearly 300 years each. The graduate school life is intense, and each time I had to adjust to missing the teaching-school life. You feel 8 again as you look for new friends with whom to eat lunch and hope it will turn out as well as life in the 8^th grade did.

In my lifetime, 26 of my Septembers have been the first month of a new teaching year. September is always like “New Year’s” for teachers, but that first month is crucial as you diagnose each student, attempting to gauge exactly what each one needs from you so that the rest of the year can be spent tailoring every single thing to meet particular needs and help each child soar beyond where they were on that first day of said “slow and mellow” September. Exciting? You bet! But fraught with the painstaking work that something major is at stake—September is the crucial month of the year to earn trust and respect in the classroom. Slow and mellow??? Ha!!!

In my lifetime, well over 40 of my Septembers have been spent in school, in general, going from pre-school all the way up—and while “back to school” always means new clothes and new possibilities, think of what it also means: the loss of old friends or old colleagues, new settings where you just don’t know every nook and cranny, the resumption of old habits and old grudges, the very real possibility that 6^th grade might be demonstrably and impossibly harder than 5^th grade, the fear that those 9^th graders really do beat up the 7^th grade boys every day, the fact that as President of Studio Choir in 12^th grade might be more than you bargained for, the fact that each year you assume a little more responsibility….hmmm…slow and mellow…in what universe?????

In my lifetime, 19 of my Septembers have witnessed the beginning of plays I am set to direct. Ahhhh…directing of plays, one of the most delightful and tense things I have done as an adult. The thrill of picking the perfect play, planning the rehearsal schedule, casting those very fragile egos, fretting over the sets, crunching numbers to try and buy enough costumes, hoping against hope the theatrical stars will align, and watching your baby unfold…a nail-biting and thrilling exercise, and the antithesis of slow and mellow!

In my lifetime, 31 of my Septembers have meant being away from my home base of Cincinnati. I have not lived full-time in Cincinnati since graduating from Western Hills High School in the Reagan era, but I am never spiritually far away from my family. Each September is a reminder that after a beautiful summer, there is that jab of pain to leave my family and go to Denison or North Carolina or Brown or Columbia or New York or Jordan.

In my lifetime, four of my Septembers have been in a position in charge of the faculty at a young school. Sure, it is like the beginning of sleep-away camp as you plan for their excited arrival, but then that first month with the ex-pats, as they adjust and speedily or not unpack from their long journey, they chafe and assimilate, and no, it is not mellow hoping that they all fit in and do well and figure out the life of a KA teacher.

Even in childhood, which of course as the song plays in your head is supposed to be rosy, the words sing,

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.

But even in childhood it wasn’t that wistful. Each September brought about new lessons and new situations and new hardships. But…but…but…while the words to the song promise that
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow

there are so many exciting things about this first month of autumn. For one thing, September is full of important birthdays for me, from childhood friends on upward, but two notable birthdays are the days of my iconic teachers, Miss Wilson and Mrs. Schneider. Each September, just two days apart, are the birthdays of two of the greatest teachers I have known. Miss Wilson taught me in the 5^th  grade and Mrs. Schneider taught me choral music in high school. I called each of them this past month, on their day, thanking them for the millionth time for their influence, their gifts of precision and care and deep meaning, and their legacy. Thank goodness for a September for the opportunity to thank them.

I don’t know if a September has passed in the last quarter century when I have not been thrilled and grateful to get to be a teacher. I think it is the fact that it is decidedly not slow and mellow that makes me enjoy the process. The other day at sit-down lunch, a senior asked me if since I have been at KA for a long time, am I bored here now?? "Never, my dear!" School and the process of figuring out school is never boring, and never slow and mellow…

Soooooo, if the Schmidt and Jones ditty from The Fantasticks is totally wrong about September, then what song might fit? What is the mood of September? How should we regard September? Is there a good song for September? As I drove back to campus after my wonderful reunion dinner with Annabel and Tim, I thought about what my mother would say about September. She would probably have mentioned the importance of harvest, that we are in the season of harvest before a long winter (hints of the “Deep in December” line from “Try To Remember”).

But everything with my mother was deeper than just the surface. Every lesson was more than an expedient end of a moment---everything was setting up a better way to live. No wonder I learned so much from her about the beauty and ephemeral nature of life itself. So I am driving back to campus thinking of the concept of harvest, of the fruits and bounty of harvest, and I can hear my mother asking, “So what have you harvested lately? What kind of September is it for you because of your own personal harvest???” Oh, she would definitely have asked that one! And she would have launched into the beautiful metaphor about harvesting and reaping, nodding in a wise way about how we “reap what we sow.”

Instead of the plaintive “Try To Remember,” my mind darts to another song, much less slow and mellow, but the upbeat, old 19^th century gospel hymn, “Bringing In The Sheaves.” So as I drive down the airport road from Amman to campus, I am humming and singing the old words:

Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

That is a more fitting song for September! Nothing slow and mellow about sowing and reaping. The writer was inspired by the words in Psalm 126:6, "He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.”

That’s a pretty good kind of September…

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.

"Johnny Steak-head"

A month ago today I landed back in Jordan and then immediately set to work: two weeks of meetings and orientations, and as of yesterday, 13 real school days. September is a glorious and exhausting month—back to school, but also soooo important to diagnose all the needs of students and colleagues.
 

September is a month to think of all the changes: departed colleagues out, new people in, changes in status and job—oh, so many adjustments every September! I remember at Hackley, one colleague would say every single September: “Oh, this is the hardest September ever!” I would always remind her that she had said the same thing the year before, we just forget how hard of a month it is. Don’t forget I said ‘glorious’ as well.

 

As I said, one of the things September requires is an adjustment to a change in jobs. In some ways, this year is so similar to last year for me. I am the Dean of Faculty again, reside in the same apartment, have the same courses to teach—but there are some changes for me. There are three things I am giving up, and while each was a voluntary and sensible thing to hand over, there is always that transition of not doing some of the things one has done and adjustments. I am no longer head of the History Department. No, there was not a coup, although a colleague last spring hoped I would be all right after the take-over! For seven years I was the head of the History Department at Hackley, and now for the last six years here. But our head last year suggested that it would be wise to let someone else lead since I needed to spend more of my time on the whole faculty and not just my favorite, pet department. I didn’t want to run the risk of department members feelings I didn’t give them enough time, nor did I want the rest of the faculty to feel I spent all my time with one department. So that made enormous sense. Lyman, a terrific colleague, is doing a great job running the department. I get to go to meetings, and for a change, I don’t have to run those meetings!

 

I am no longer doing the choir at KA. For two years I did my best with an enthusiastic bunch of students who hadn’t benefitted from the wonderful background I had with the music program of the Cincinnati Public Schools. We met only once a week (try building a program with 45 minutes a week! Ha!) but had a fun time. I tried some Handel, some gospel, some 80s pop love songs, some Broadway, and some choir and flute music. Their favorite piece was the 1940s hit “Sentimental Journey.” We hired a great young man from Yale to teach Philosophy and run the choir. He is very talented and will do a grand job, I am sure. But it is an adjustment from what I have done to pulling back from that.

 

And perhaps most notably, I have retired for the time being from directing plays. When I visited Chuck last month in Charlotte, he could hardly believe that statement since it has been such a major feature of my educational identity for 25 years. Yes, but I travel a good deal attending job fairs, hiring faculty, and the pressure of time and money, appropriate scripts, inadequate set and costume possibilities, it all seemed like a good time to let someone new and younger take over. In the spring I directed a play called, The Exam, but since the students knew of another, far-inferior play with the same name, I re-named our work, The Final Curtain. It made sense on several levels: a ghastly character called “The Exam” (the embodiment of every fearful exam you have ever taken) sang part of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” and taunted how this exam might be those students’ final curtain. It was also the last play of some lovely seniors involved in drama last year, and secretly, I knew it was my ode to my semi-retirement. I told Chuck for the first time ever I wasn’t burning to direct a play. He didn’t believe me. I confirmed that it was true. He still didn’t believe me, and I conceded, well, maybe I just thought I would take a break, and he made me name a play I might just burn to do. Okay. Okay!  I would like to direct (again) Defying Gravity, this great play I remember seeing in 1996 in a small theater in New York and I knew I had to direct it. Actually, that was my swan song directorial effort at Hackley, 7 years ago this autumn.

So there are some changes. Three things that have been a part of my identity and brain space have been let go to three new people. The new drama director is a recent college grad with whom I had an exciting conversation and interview last spring. He is beginning with one of my favorite plays ever, the Steve Martin comedy about Picasso and Einstein, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. All three of these “successors” will do fine work, but it is always a little strange to think about how much input they might want, but I want to give them the space to their work, make their own mark, and improve the school still further.

 

Just in case you are worried that I don’t have anything new, well, my dear colleague Julianne made sure that I had something new to sink my teeth into. It’s different. Yes, it is a stretch. As Julianne worked on her assignments for the after school co-curricular program, she wrote me a note that she had a doozy of an assignment for me. In her email to me, she wrote, “You are slated to assist during the weight training minor for three terms. I am sure you will poke fun at me for this for a long time, but I appreciate you being a great colleague and agreeing to do this. After 25 years in the school biz, I finally get to be a jock!! I am in charge of weight training!

I don’t think of this as a punishment, and Julianne didn’t intend it as such. She gives me a whole new persona! She concluded her email, christening me with a new nickname as well! Your new nickname is “Johnny steak-head” (a steak head is bad name for a dumb jock)!"  So there you have it, out goes the History, Music, and Drama, and in comes the Weight Training Johnny Steak-head. I want to make Julianne proud!

This is a year in which I decided I need to decide if I truly love managing faculty. The appraisal system will get into place, my work with the Teacher Fellows is entrenched, and my challenge is to inspire the faculty adopt a growth mindset. And I get to be Johnny Steak-head! In spite of my new jock name, I am reminded of a Emily Dickinson quotation that I think is appropriate at the start of this important year: “The sailor cannot see north—but knows the needle can.”

Sometimes the project of school, and well, life, feels like one is lost in a sea of complex challenges, conflicting expectations, and vexing problems—compounded by the expectation that I am always supposed to know what to do. But just as I felt that first year when I came to Jordan in 2007 and clarified so many things for me about education, it is about finding your own compass. I may not always remember every policy in school, but I do know that treating people with respect is an excellent start. My job is very much about listening (whoa!!! What other changes for me the Big Talker!?!), being a good listener with new teachers, with veteran teachers, angry and unhappy teachers, and noticing and appreciating the good deeds being done around me. The tide of stories I hear in a given week, sitting on my couch in my air-conditioned office, is an astonishing array of human stories of pain, bewilderment, exhilaration, pride, loneliness, fear, and hope. Somebody angry may at the root be simply afraid of changes or diminishing status. Someone whose move has rendered them overwhelmed in spite of years of teaching under their belt might create someone both arrogant and helpless. There will be a student whose troublesome behavior is a mask for sadness or the anxiety that school is a nightmare for them. Everyone has a story to tell, and one of my jobs is to listen and respond meaningfully to these stories.

This might be why the blog posts are fewer than in days of old. There is hardly a shortage of things to share or reflect upon—I am in the middle of a region fighting for whatever “The Arab Spring” might have positive left in it, working at a school whose mission is so noble and captivating that it provides daily inspiration, teaching students so enthusiastic and willing to work that it is never boring, mentoring young teachers who have graduated from the best colleges in the US and now are working to figure out how to engage adolescents. Never dull. And, by the way, never scary…well, not in the “scary that many of you might worry about.”

The lack of “scary” is due to several peerless colleagues, the headmaster and Julianne, and hey, there is always a new duty, a new nickname. This year I get to be Johnny Steak-head! I wonder where that will take me??! And while Dickinson’s words ring true, “The sailor cannot see north—but knows the needle can,” I also have the assurance, as Julianne mentioned in her email, unveiling my new name that “We joke about being here all the time, but we both know that this is where we are supposed to be.”  We joke about it only because we wonder how in the world we ever got here!! Oh, yes, that’s right—our friend Anne Siviglia! When our car is stuck behind a herd of goats or sheep, or goats and sheep, Julianne raises her fist in the air and exclaims, “Thanks, Anne!!”

But Julianne is right—this is where we are supposed to be. Here’s to that crucial, diagnostic month of September!

 

Convocation 2013

 

It has been three weeks since I left Cincinnati—and not a single blog post? Oh, dear readers, if you are a longtime blog follower you know that coming back to Jordan and the resumption of the duties and meetings is a juggernaut! But, seriously, in this beginning of our seventh year at KA, things have been smooth and well-run, from the first senior staff meeting, to the workshop with heads of department, the new faculty busy-ness, returning faculty, and finally the student orientations, both old and new. There might have been blog posts, but when things run smoothly, somehow it seem less interesting! I have re-read some old blog posts from the beginning of the school in 2007—when it was all new and untried. Admittedly, those make for more compelling reading. But while things are sharpened and tightened and more stable every year, I should not fail to discuss the wonder they still provide.

Anyway, here we have the first blog post of this school year. I am cheating a little bit since the bulk of this prose is not a blog post but a speech I gave last week. The speech came last Wednesday afternoon, at the conclusion of our first real day of school. And by real I mean that on Wednesday we have a complete day. The day before we have mini-classes where we run through a school day with 10-minute classes so that everyone can have a good dry run at the dress code, walking the halls, finding rooms, having intros to classes, and get an overview picture of the day.

John Austin had asked me to speak to the school and formally inaugurate the school year. What a pleasure! While a little daunting and scary to speak to the school, I do love enjoy exploring what kinds of things might help us better frame the next nine months of work. So when I stood in front of the 481 students and 100 faculty and administrators, here is what I offered them:

 



"Way, way back in June, just a few days after I got back to the United States from Jordan, I went to my college for a reunion. One night, some friends and I stayed up late, and one wondered, “What was it that was so great about our time in college?” Another friend quickly said, “There were no rules!” My group of friends decided that after a couple weeks, that really wasn’t that big of a deal anymore. One wise friend said,“It was so great because we felt empowered! Our teachers helped empower us to tackle hard projects and do incredible thinking and work.” As we savored the nostalgic memory of those college days of feeling empowered, another friend turned to me and said, “Hey, John, you teach grades 9-12. Are those kids empowered? Can it happen in high school, or do you have to wait until college for that kind of empowerment?”

I loved the question. And having taught for a quarter century now I can say, it can happen in grades 9-12. It doesn’t always happen. But it can. This concept of empowerment, of you seizing control of how you learn, and mastering a subject is possible in high school. And it is so very important for you all to know that empowerment is the key to success.

I want to show you an art work that I teach in my course around the end of February, but this is a great image for each of us to ponder today. Let’s look at this painting… [above the blog post you will see Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above The Fog]


When this comes up in my course, we discuss how it fits into the historic time, but my favorite thing about teaching this painting, is promising my class something: I promise them that if they work hard, study, and take risks, on the day of the AP test, and more importantly, for many days after, they will feel like this man! Take a closer look at him. He has just trudged up a mountain. He is standing at the summit, taking in everything around him. He is above all the work, the labor, the hard times he endured to get to this peak. You know, we can’t see his face, but I would imagine sweat drips off his face. He has just trudged up a mountain—he probably has sweat stains! This has not been an easy task. But I promise my class that if they seek ways to grow and learn as scholars, they will earn the right to be on top of the mountain.

Last year when I taught this painting, a student said something quite remarkable. I have taught this art work for 10 years, but students who try hard are always saying things that I still haven’t heard before! The class commented about this man’s accomplishment and how he had empowered himself to get to this point. The student last year said, “But look, even as he takes in all he accomplished—he sees there are more peaks yet to conquer!” Think about this—this man is going to go back down the mountain and do it again, and rise even higher at another peak.

On our first formal day of class this year, I not only encourage you, but I urge you to work for your empowerment this year. And I am talking to the faculty as well—when your teachers feel empowered to seek excellence, to seek more effective techniques and strategies in the classroom, and if they continue to seek their empowerment, you will only do all the better.

I have an office in the math wing upstairs. I encourage you to come by and talk to me about your own personal empowerment. Come by on days when you feel empowered and tell me how and why you feel empowered. And come by on days when you don’t feel empowered and tell me how and why you do.

And all this talk is not just about grades. One could say that the fate of the world is in the balance of your empowerment. That’s a dramatic statement, I know, but His Majesty founded this school so that you might solve the problems of Jordan. The only way you will ever do that is if you feel empowered, if you can climb up those mountains of yours and then set your sights on reaching another, new peak. If your teachers are empowered, you will be more empowered. If you are more empowered, you will find those other peaks around you in Jordan, and I daresay the world, and your empowerment might solve some very real problems.

I want to share a few lines of a poem that I like a lot. Here are the opening lines:

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured…

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.



Are those not the most depressing words ever???????

Suffer! Torture! History says, life will be bad! But it is reality isn’t it? We don’t have to travel very far to find suffering and torture. Okay, here is the next word of the poem:

But

 


What kind of a word is that?? What does that ‘but’ do????? That word can turn everything on its ear. That word can change the course of suffering and history’s proclamation of despair.

Let’s read four more lines in that poem:

 

But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

There it is! That last line is what His Majesty wants in us. He wants us to look at the world around us, see all the disasters that there are, and he wants us to say, “But!” and when we are like that guy on the mountaintop, that empowered man, standing with the world at his feet, we might accomplish what the King wants. We might in that beautiful phrase, we might be empowered enough to make “hope and history rhyme.”

Let this be the year when each of us works harder than before and each of us trudges up a mountain. Nine months from tomorrow, on Graduation Day, I hope each senior can feel like that guy in the painting. Let each of us work for that empowerment this year. Let us work so that we not only endure the year, or passively do work, but that we have empowered ourselves, triumphed, and look excited for the next peak. Let’s take the next 9 months and seriously work on that empowerment."

 

 

“A part of something special”

 

The summer is winding down…officially I have about 48 hours left of summer. I get on the plane on Monday late afternoon bound for Paris and Amman, and when I make that step onto the Delta jet, summer comes to an end.

But as summer comes to its wistful conclusion, and "Year #26 of Teaching" for me gears up, I will look back on last Saturday, August 3, 2013. A week ago right now I attended an anniversary of a group that once meant a great deal to me. Over a year ago a group of intrepid alumni of the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir decided to work and create a reunion for those in this choir under the direction of Glenville Thomas. Thomas, an educator born in Wales and from Zanesville, Ohio, convinced then-Governor James Rhodes in 1963 that the mighty Ohio State Fair needed a choir based on the fairgrounds who would perform daily around the goings-on of the Fair. By the time I joined this choir in 1980, so many traditions had been put in place. The choir, back in those days, was 300 high school choristers strong, at least two from every one of Ohio’s 88 counties. You wore red-white-and blue, suffered in the hot dorms on the fairgrounds, and sang at least 5 concerts a day. After the State Fair ended each year, there were chances to sing at festivals around the state, perform the Messiah in December in Zanesville, and then work toward a European tour (benefitting cancer research) the summer after one sang at the Fair. From time-to-time Thomas took alumni to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Tournament of Roses Parade.

 

Music teachers across the state submitted candidates for the Fair Choir and then Mr. Thomas and his wife, Mari, chose the members of the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir. When I received acceptance in 1980, I had never even been to the Ohio State Fair. I was not really the State Fair type—these fairs cater to the rural folk, and I am decidedly urban. But being in the choir was a magical experience. We lived on the fairgrounds for 23 days—imagine at age 16 how exciting it is to be away from home for three weeks! We performed 110 concerts during the Fair, marching across the fairgrounds under the summer sun dozens and dozens of times. Thomas organized his choir not by voice section, but by SATB quartet, so that the sound was balanced (Soprano Alto Tenor Bass) no matter where one might stand. So 75 quartets strong made up this choir of teen-agers. You made friends from all over the state. I remember friends like Sally and Joan and John and Debbie among many others, and as I have driven across the state the last 30 years every time I enter a new county I can remember names from that choir in 1980.

 

I bought into the whole thing—I did the Europe tour, I made my father drive me to rehearsals across the state for Messiah and anytime the group got together. The following year my good friend from West High, Peggy, sang in the choir, and I drove up to hear her concerts. I came back for Alumni Days and loved every iteration of this group. In 1983 my sister made the choir and so I very excitedly accompanied the family the day we took her up to the Rhodes Center to move into the dorms. As it turned out, one male staff member had not shown up, and Peggy, who was on staff that year, told me to speak to Mr. Thomas volunteering to come join the staff.

When the errant staff member still hadn’t shown up, I got the call to come up and join the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir staff! Those three weeks were heaven! I got to meet a whole new 300-member choir group, cemented my friends with some of my 1980 choir members then on staff, and shared this experience with my sister.

Even though I was only 19, that summer had a significant impact on my thoughts about my career paths and leadership qualities. At that time I knew I wanted to teach history, and teach in a college, but I had not thought much about how one leads people. I was only a year older than some of the older members of the choir, so I had to figure out how to manage the boys in my dorm. The leadership of the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir considered fear tactics as the best to get the kids to mind you. I tried that, and while I could do it, I realized what a less-than-perfect model upon which to build the morale of an organization or to inspire trust. I came to see that if you cultivated respect, the members in the organization would really do whatever you wanted. I tried that, and found that to be an infinitely more rewarding way to work with people. I kind of liked working with high school students as well! A few years down the line, this experience helped me decide to teach in a secondary school. However, my decision to go against the protocol of the staff did not endear me to the leadership and I was not asked back to be on the staff.

In the early 1990s Glenville Thomas died unexpectedly, and thus ended 29 years of his running the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir. Since his death over 20 years ago, I have returned only three times to the Ohio State Fair for Alumni Days. Besides my friendship with Tony Buscemi (a biannual visit to Indian restaurants!) those days receded more and more into the dusty annals of time.

So last summer when the announcement came heralding a major reunion to commemorate the 50 years since Glenville Thomas began the All Ohio State Fair Youth Choir, I looked forward to returning to the State Fair. The organizers of the reunion hoped to have a 1000-voice choir perform in the Coliseum once again (the current choir hadn’t performed in this vast space since 2001 and the alumni had not performed there in over 20 years). Facebook pages kept up reminders and many of us signed up to attend. First of all, I was just happy the event coincided with the summer vacation in the United States!

At the beginning of the summer I targeted about a dozen people I hoped to see the most at the reunion. I wrote impassioned letters to them, reminding them of what the choir had meant to us in our youth. I didn’t hear from some of them, a couple said they would think about it, and finally, in the end only two of them decided to come to the reunion.

Reunions are tricky things—I have spoken about them before in the blog. If you were my friend John Johnson, the bass in my marching quartet, my dorm buddy, and my best friend at the 1980 Fair, he didn’t go to Europe, stopped coming to Alumni Days in the mid-80s and subsequently fell out of touch, it was just three weeks of his now half-century life. Should we even go back to those days of marching in the heat (by the way, no sunscreen protection whatsoever!) and singing??? I never heard from John. How do we look now? What did I do in life?

There is never a reunion where everyone comes back to something. Are the ones who return the wise ones? The foolish ones? If you never see 100% participation at a reunion, can one ever escape disappointment? As I drove up to the reunion last Friday I worried about the disappointment. In the end my sister decided not to go. My one constant Fair friend Tony decided not to go. It was such an interesting reflection about the glass half-empty/half-full. The half-empty part was obvious: few of the recipients of my plea wrote back; I was going alone; maybe it was a waste of two good days toward the end of summer.

But turning the glass the other way, here are some good things. I had found Sally Adams! Sally had been my best friend on our 1981 Europe tour but we had last seen each other in 1983. Not longer after that the letters and Christmas cards came to an end. Like many friendships, it kind of just vaporized. But I had found Sally on Facebook and while she didn’t want to come to the reunion, she invited me to stop by her house before the rehearsal. She lived a few miles from the fairgrounds and so after 30 years we had our own reunion. It was wonderful to catch up, hear about her life, and yes, I would have known her radiant smile anywhere. Time melted as we saw each other and talked about our 1981 adventures getting lost in Paris, buying Royal wedding loot in London, and throwing snowballs on a Swiss alp that longago July. Thirty years. A lovely moment to rekindle a once-powerful bond.

When the decades of the choir members gathered on Saturday morning to rehearse what we would sing in the Coliseum, I realized this was certainly an aging bunch! The very youngest of Thomas’ choristers were now approaching 40, so we had 40-somethings, 50-somethings, and 60-somethings gathering to remember and perform pieces they had sung 30 or 40 or 50 years ago as teens. There were about 5 pieces in common over the years that every choir had learned, so one of Glenville’s assistants, Girrard, took the helm to conduct us. He knew there was trepidation in the room. Some hadn’t sung for years. The numbers didn’t quite reach 1000. There is always a little melancholy tang in the air with a reunion. Would it be worth the effort and time to have come back???

Girrard wisely gave a pep talk about the experience of being in the choir, the legacy of patriotism, musicianship, friendship, wanderlust, enthusiasm, vigor, that Thomas had bequeathed to each of us. Girrard said, “No matter if you know 2 or 200 people here right now, you were a member of an exciting organization, you were a part of something special.” That morning, that afternoon, and that evening at the gala reception toasting 50 years since Thomas first plucked his Ohio choristers, it was a beautiful reminder of that something special.

No one from the 1983 choir, the year I was on staff, came that I knew well. So I focused on the 6 from my 1980 choir and had a grand time. We had a real quartet for the marching and the singing, and the table of us that evening laughed and smiled greatly as we looked back 33 years. Two people had come just because I asked them. I focused on the fun table there that night and what this group has meant to me over the 33 years since a 16-year old boy from Hamilton County with perfectly feathered and parted-down-the-middle hair spent 23 days in a hot dorm in Columbus.

While the concert in the Coliseum was a thrill (I think we had 800 people raising their voices in song) and the impromptu concert in front of the Butter Choir and Butter Glenville Thomas in the Dairy Barn certainly gave me chills, my two favorite moments, perhaps, came in rehearsal last Saturday morning. One song that Glenville loved was the jaunty tune, “In a Shanty in Old Shanty-Town,” a song I performed dozens of time but without too much affection. There was one moment in the song, to the lyric of “rocking chair,” when Glenville instructed the choir to lean forward in unison (like the rocking chair…). He thought it was a cool move. Anyway, last Saturday when we rehearsed for the first time “Shanty,” we came to that moment in the song. Instinctively, the hundreds of us there at the rehearsal all leaned forward and then chuckled. Would you believe this little tiny moment made me tear up???!!! I have no idea why, but it brought back all those memories of the choir and what it has meant to me. This dumb little gesture! Memories and tear ducts are funny things…

Then a little while later, when we rehearsed my favorite piece of the choir, the men sang “I Believe” and the women sang “Ave Maria” in counterpoint. We practiced in our separate vocal parts, the hundreds of us perhaps intimidated by the high notes required at the end of the piece. The familiar-in-my-memory introduction in D flat major began. The piece was, indeed, as beautiful as I remembered. When the hundreds of us finished the song, there was an eerie silence following the climactic soaring chords. No one said anything. But, I noticed something so sweet. All around me I noticed those 40-something, 50-something, and 60-something men who had journeyed back to the fairgrounds, and very innocently, and not so unashamedly, had taken off their glasses to wipe their eyes. As we did this Girrard broke the silence and said, “That’s all right. Remember we were a part of something special.”

I didn’t go back there to pretend to be 16 again. I went back to see what I remembered, what emotions might stir up, what we all looked like. And by singing those 5 ancient songs, we had a little taste of immortality last Saturday. Immortality of what? Who knows, but I felt a little sense of immortality.

So as the summer ends I look back on the bookends of the Summer of 2013 of choir reunions. The beginning and end of this summer with sweet memories and a touch of whimsy and wistfulness.

So what does $35 get you for food in New York City?

July has come and gone now and so the tremors are felt heralding the end of summer. That is not a tragic thing—summer is meant to be that restorative time before we go back and attack/embrace a new school year. And there comes that moment in summer when The Sigh happens. The Sigh is when I wonder what joys and challenges the new school year will bring, the possibility of transcendence, the optimism of every possibility, the rush of wonder about what my classes will be like, and anticipation and giddiness over if the art works will have the same magic in Art History class again. The Sigh is not the end of summer—well, for me it always comes in July, so I guess it could be the end of summer, but it is the realization of the end of summer, the letting go of the restorative need of summer. The Sigh is a good thing, because it is always followed by The Smile at the wonder of school and teaching. But naturally, one doesn’t really want to let go of summer…summer for me is time in the United States, driving a better car, understanding all the signs in English around me, outings with friend Sylvia, breakfasts with my dad at the diner, insane amounts of outstanding Cincinnati ice cream, and of course, the pilgrimage to New York.

I arrived home from New York yesterday and so the pixie dust hasn’t quite fallen out of the greying hair just yet. Visits to New York are actually more and more like visits to the perfect small-town. I guess I say small-town because I enjoy most the comforts of “the familiar” in New York—time in Central Park, my favorite this, my traditional that. Spending an afternoon with an old friend or former student is higher on the priority list than a boat ride on the Hudson; spending an afternoon discovering a dive pizza place in Brooklyn outranks a splashy tourist-y site.

This year I took in 7 theatrical presentations during my summer visit—varying from the Broadway plays to experimental musicals in a festival of new works, to a misguided work with a male drag queen as Bette Davis, to the one-woman-descent­-into-drugs-and-then-redemption show to the free, outdoor Shakespeare, all captivating in part because I love live entertainment. Shakespeare is not a constant for me on visits to New York, but this trip afforded the opportunity to see two excellent productions, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest. Both productions, while free, were more than just no cost—they were creative, provocative opportunities to think about issues and stories and laugh as well. Both companies that produced these shows understand that Shakespeare is more than anything else an entertainer, an exquisite, story-telling, fun-loving, crowd-pleasing entertainer. Both companies’ approaches to these plays were more passionate than academic. Neither play was about The Bard as “historical relic”—each play was about pleasing a crowd, offering an insight or two about humans, and making us revel in theatrical magic. The enthusiasm bubbled over in every moment of the two plays. Furthermore, each of these plays delighted a number of children and not just “grad students.” Both companies (The Public Theater and New York Classical Theater) know instinctively that if presented well and with love, children will devour hungrily the stories of the plays. Well, both audiences simply enjoyed the fun provided.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play I have never read, but the company re-imagined this comedy of the war between the sexes as set in a spa in the Alps for the twentysomething set. There are vows of chastity involved, breaking of vows, horny young people, and slapstick comedy. In many ways the production reminded me of a sweet cousin of the American Pie movies. It was exciting and fast-paced.

Two nights later I attended a performance of The Tempest by a group known for its gimmick of moving the audience during frequent breaks in the performance. For example, this play began inside Castle Clinton in Battery Park and during the next two hours we, the audience, moved seven times! There is a suspense as to when in the action of the play we will be asked to pick up and move again. You sit on the ground, stand, maneuver to the front of the crowd, and take in a new setting as to how and when it enhance the play. The shipwreck in the opening of the play was theater magic, cost them nothing, and set the tone for an exciting and eye-opening way of doing theater. The multi-generational audience moved along, happily moving 100 yards here, moving back there, sitting with the setting sun over the Statue of Liberty as the comely young couple of this play is reunited. Children laughed at the hoary jokes of the drunkards and maybe even enjoyed the poetry of The Bard. Nah, they but they really enjoyed the three-actor Ariel and the snarky things she/they said about the characters!

One day when I took some leisurely time in a book store (now I know it is summer since they are so, so, so few book stores in Jordan) I looked at a book about helping children appreciate Shakespeare and the writer said: “Say this line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I bet you can memorize some Shakespeare. Come on now, go into a room and say the lines, “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.” Nine syllables! You can do it!” The writer had such fun urging you to say these lines over and over and imagine sitting near this bank where the wild thyme is blowing in the breeze and bursting into flower. This reminded me of the path I take through the park every day on my way from breakfast to my morning tete-a-tete with great art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Somehow saying this line from Shakespeare, just like the walk in the park, the theater,  the moments in the Met, and the visits with old friends, are good for the soul. Ahhh…summer…

Almost everything about the summer has been wonderful and satisfying. How can it not be so? I set up the summer to visit family and then friends and then family and then friends and then family and friends…for 8 solid weeks. But once in a while a disappointing meal creeps in and wreaks havoc in the summer serenity and serendipity. Last week, argh, that disappointment meal was at Artie’s Delicatessen. Okay, so Artie’s is near the entrance to the park where you go for the Shakespeare. Artie’s is a place I have been to before, although not for some time, and I always liked the old-fashioned deli food, the bright, retro setting, and the mom-and-pop feeling. It felt 1950s and 1990s at the same time. Anyway, Christy and I went, decided to split an entrée and get a bowl of soup each. From the moment we entered the restaurant and met the indifferent staff, looked at the exorbitant prices in the menu, to the denouement of the boring and tasteless meal, it was a disappointment. Since my trip is so carefully crafted, I thought, oh what an error in coming to Artie’s! Blah, blah, blah…this meal, this meal that tasted like boiled shoe leather, was $35! We had two bowls of soup and one entrée…I know, “New York prices” and all that, but around 2001 Artie’s was still a pleaser. Somehow I started looking around at the other $35 meals I had and measuring them and comparing them on some cosmic scale. The day after the Artie’s fiasco I treated five of us for lunch at Sookk, a Thai place that I like (umm, I ate lunch there four times on this visit!!). Five of us had a four-course lunch—let me take you through the meal, from the vegetable soup, appetizer, entrée and rice and coconut ice cream…for…no way…seven dollars each! And it’s great. And the restaurant is clean and creatively set up. And the wait staff is friendly. And five of us ate a super meal for the same price as the drudgery meal at Artie’s (don’t get me started on the Artie’s waitress! Okay, I’m started. As we slurped our soup, she arrived with the brisket entrée and asked us, “Yeah, so what do you want me to do with this plate??” I moved our soup bowls to a nearby empty table so she could plop the plate of boiled boot on the table.) So five of us ate for that same price.

A day or so later I met a friend at a fancy Viennese-style café on the Upper East Side. We had coffee and sacher torte mit schlag. I chuckled when the bill came and it was also $35. But, not a disappointment! While a steep price, here we were being swanky in an art museum with a Viennese vibe, and a tasty time-travelling feel to the days of Gustav Klimt.

I guess here’s the thing about the trip to New York—in so many moments were there insights. In one moment I discussed Thurber with a friend, with another friend we celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 95^th birthday, his longevity, his example of stamina, mercy and courage. On one day a Met guide pointed out a thrilling new piece of Japanese art, at the Cloisters a guide wondered how a medieval woman would approach this Madonna and Child statue. I ventured to Brooklyn for a $5 slice of pizza (Christy’s response, even after our 70-minute wait for the pizza: “This slice of pizza may have ruined me for all other pizza.”) So many transcendent moments!

I go to the Met like I join my father at the diner for breakfast—a serious hour where one gets fed, learns something new, and catches up with old friends. There are lessons to impart and lessons to learn. Both trips are about communication and structured days and enjoying a positive message. Each visit with an old friend or former student is excellent. Oh, wait, that’s not true. Hmmm… one visit was disappointing. I saw someone who talked non-stop and never asked me a question about my life. It wasn’t like my feelings were hurt, it just got a little dull simply hearing the person talk and drone on. Like the plays, there was one play that was a clunker. There was a meal that was a clunker. There was a visit that was a clunker.

I guess the difference is the feeling of transcendence. Going out to Brooklyn for the transcendent pizza. Enjoying Sookk and the $7 Green Curry lunch with a new colleague and old friends, opportunities to kindle and re-kindle. The new piece of Japanese art offers a new vocabulary and vision for the world.

And then there was the boring $35 meal at Artie’s. Oh well, not every meal can be the salute to Nelson Mandela or the new enthusiasm for Shakespeare comedies.

Oh, but maybe they can! That is part of the afterglow of The Sigh that creeps in every July!