If you were to look in my weekly planner, there are only two entries for yesterday, and neither look especially noteworthy at first glance: “Hike”—and “Dinner.”
The other day, the boy who figured prominently in my last blog entry, the boy who joined me for lunch during his weekend of punishment last Saturday, the boy with whom I subsequently bonded, came up to me and said, “I am trying to plan a hike for Friday and Miss Wendy said I need five adults to come along. Would you be willing to come along?”
“What kind of hike?” I asked. “You know, it’ll be cool and I need five adults.”
Even though outdoorsy adventures are not really my thing, I obliged. If this guy was planning something positive and productive I needed to join the group. When I mentioned to another colleague that I had agreed to go on a hike through Wadi Mujib, she kind of smiled and said, “You know you’re gonna be in water the whole time on this hike!” Sigh. Such a warning raises two of my greatest fears in doing outdoor challenges: (1) in rushing water I know I will lose my glasses and (2) in rushing water I know I will slam my head against a boulder and dramatically perish. However, I promised the young repentant that I would accompany him on this trek.
Yesterday morning 32 of us set out on our journey. It is through neighboring Madaba, past Mount Nebo, down down down the hairpin curves that lead to the Dead Sea, past the resorts, and about 15 minutes later we arrive at the entrance to Wadi Mujib.
One of Jordan’s most spectacular natural features is this immense Wadi Mujib (a wadi is Arabic for valley, and what we have here is part of the great Rift Valley, that vast earthquake-crack gash in the earth that extends from Jordan down to Kenya. Jordan is just lousy with wadis!). Wadi Mujib has been dubbed, with a canny eye on tourist dollars no doubt, as “Jordan’s Grand Canyon.” The moniker is well-earned however—it delivers awe-inspiring views like its Arizonan cousin. Of course, there is also that added bonus that many things Jordanian appear in the Bible: I learned that this area was known as the ‘Arnon’ in the Book of Numbers.
So yesterday your very own ‘Jordan Johnny’ tackled this adventure hike down the Mujib river. “Welcome to the Lowest Adventure on Earth!” is the sign that greets you as you park in the lot by the entrance to the Royal Society for the Conservancy of Nature center to begin this challenge from the lip of the Dead Sea—the famed Lowest Point on Earth. As we left the Visitor Center, heading toward the gorge and the river, I read some of the wall texts introducing one to this area. I noticed one of the observations was from Jacob Burckhardt, a famed 19th century German historian I had studied in college. He said of the Wadi Mujib in 1812:
The view which the Mujib presents is very striking; from the bottom where the runs through a narrow strip of verdant level about 40 yards across, the steep barren banks rise to a great height, covered with immense blocks of stone, which have rolled down from the upper strata, so that when viewed from above, the valley looks like a deep chasm formed by some tremendous convulsion of the earth, into which there seems no possibility of descending to the bottom.
So we head down a ladder and immediately one finds oneself in the water. 95% of this hike is in water knee-deep, and at other times, chest-high waters. I think the best way to describe the hike is that you are white-water rafting and you forgot the raft. Cascades and boulders are at every turn. The last 1500 meters of the journey (see how I am trying to convert to that blasted metric system!!) passes through the Mujib Siq, an ominous, narrow cleft through which the river runs over a 20 meter waterfall. This unique canyoning adventure involves swimming and balance and climbing over rocks and waterfalls—you know, standard fare for me on a Friday. This wild and majestic valley probably is at its peak in April when the wildflowers bloom in Jordan—I will have to remember that next year, but the cliffs of limestone with their ancient sharp swirls still intrigue. Since the chasm is often just about 20 feet wide (who am I kidding with the Metric System!) and the 300 foot walls are so steep that they appear to meet, the rushing waters seem to reverberate in this alluvial chamber.
The students are deliriously happy acting like frogmen landing on a fantasy Normandy Beach, and I spy my buddy Hamzah sitting in the middle of a waterfall yelling, “This is amazing.” It is beautiful, there is no denying that, and I enjoy the physicality of the experience. Of course, it is not my first choice for a weekend—I am still the urban prowler, and next week’s weekend trip to Istanbul is still my preference for a great weekend. But as I negotiate these rocks, trying to figure out how to pull myself up over the shelves of rocks, or the tricky clefts of the boulders, or through the water sprays, I like the problem-solving nature of this adventure.
What I try and do in my classroom is just as hard for many of my students as this physical challenge is for me. I am asking them to analyze and evaluate and decide and connect and reflect in ways that are difficult, sometimes seemingly impossible, but once they start, they find how exciting it is.
Yesterday as I came down through the Siq back to the entranceway, some of the coming down was harder than going up. I had trouble deciding where to place my feet, worrying about the slickness of the rocks, doubting that I could solve this problem. I needed another adult to hold on to my hand a few times, and once I made this leap, it really was not as treacherous as it had looked. I know! The metaphors of it all!!! What ultimate delight in just gritting ones teeth and doing it one step at a time.
As we came back there was no way around that waterfall and my two biggest fears. I watched everybody else as to how they turned their bodies—no one else slammed into the rocks on the side, and my glasses were held on by those outdoorsy glasses-holders I had bought for a whitewater rafting trip back in 2003 (see how organized I can be—I could locate such a thing yesterday morning!) when my NEH group when on another such outing, however with the rafts.
The 20 foot slide down the rocks through the waterfall was great. If I had not been with 27 other students I might have climbed back up and done the whole thing again!
So like wet dogs we all climb out of the Wadi Mujib and head home—and I had an impressive scrape on my knee to prove the kind of daring I had demonstrated that day!
I had been invited to Friday night dinner at the headmaster’s house earlier in the week and I learned it was to honor the Korean Ambassador to Jordan and his wife. Now, I don’t exactly travel (yet!) in such diplomatic circles where one addresses fellow dinner party guests with “His Excellency,” but their son is coming to KA in the fall. There were two other KA faculty there, and an older couple, a Korean couple that have long been dear friends of the headmaster and his wife.
The conversation was lively, and during the dinner portion of the evening the headmaster asked his longtime friend to share some of his life stories. “As the senior member of the dinner party, I ask that you tell a little about your life,” he said to his friend who had been a noted surgeon for many years. He explained about growing up in what is now North Korea, and how he had left for the United States in the late 1940s, and how after the Korean War, he could not contact his remaining siblings in North Korea. He finally visited with them 40 years later, but their lives had not been as prosperous and happy as his had been. He described what their diet had been like in the 1950s, a kind of pitiful living off the land. At one point he said, “It’s as if they were living underwater, just trying to come up for air.”
He had no idea the kind of metaphors flying around that day!
By the end of the evening, Meera, the headmaster’s wife, had thanked everyone for coming, and said to us, “We are a table of many nationalities tonight. But one of the interesting things about this dinner party is that each of us is far from our original home; each of us has made sacrifices to go somewhere new and start over….Here’s to surfacing above the water.”
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Strange Things
As teachers look back on any school year towards the end of May, no matter how things went that year, they are tempted to say, as Samuel Johnson said of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, “None ever wished it longer than it is.”
But, I gotta say, we are not just limping toward the finish line here. Yes, I know I get on a plane in 4 weeks back to the United States for the summer, and I am happy about that, but things, strange and wonderful, continue to happen here at KA.
I am enjoying the meteoric rise of student Robert right now. Rob is of Dutch-Arab descent, and has been doing fine all year long. However, in the month of April, homework assignments just didn’t get done from Rob. I tried to cajole the class with brownies (as already noted in a previous blog entry) but Rob's homeworks still remained unfinished. About two weeks ago I spoke to Rob’s advisor, and suggested a parent-teacher-advisor conference. Within 48 hours the conference had happened. It was a delightful meeting. Rob’s mother and I spoke for about an hour, and we discussed grades (Rob had six zeroes on homework assignments—not exactly promising marks) and the pressures of high school, and also how much I valued her son in my class. Before the conference I had asked for a ride after the conference into Amman with her (and Rob too, after sports practice). That could have been awkward, I suppose, if the meeting had gone poorly, but it was a wonderful chance to continue our conversation and let Rob know how much we both cared, and what is at stake, about his work.
That Thursday was a test on the materials we had explored since spring break. It doesn’t only happen in TV Movies—Rob earned one of the highest grades in class, an unqualified A. It was a stupendous test. He improved on his previous test score by about 25 points, but more importantly, he had taken our challenge, and demonstrated what a keen scholar he could be. Later that day, Rob asked me, “How did Farah Hamati do it? How did she go from a C- to an A- in two months?” I said, “she started doing her work. She realized what was at stake. She cared about each assignment. One at a time.” Rob had the A test in his hand, and promised he would pull a ‘Farah Hamati.’
A couple days later Rob knocked on my apartment door—he had been working on a homework assignment due two days later, but he wanted to show me his progress. In particular he wanted to ask about this one question that was tricky. I had asked the students to compare the words of Karl Marx with the actions of Lenin, and see where they didn’t match up. It is not a simple question. Rob had written a very strong paragraph, and nailed the distinction. It had the earmarks of a committed student. When Rob turned the entire assignment in on time, I made a big deal in class about the come-from-behind Rob and his rapid rise. One of those sharp students in my class said, “Rob is just like Japan in the 19th century—rising so fast and so strong!” These guys, what can I tell you? Strange things are happening!
On Friday, since I was not out-of-town in some glamorous locale (I know, another boo-hoo moment for me) I volunteered to interview students applying for a summer enrichment program the school offers. This program was one of the seminal feeders for the school’s inception and by all accounts has been a glorious program for the school and for younger students in Jordan. The public schools in Jordan are asked to identify some noteworthy students, ages 11-13, who might do well in an intensive English-language program. About 30 students come in the summer for a free two-week enrichment program, and then many of these are young people who apply to KA and are offered scholarships. It is designed to help students “come to the table” so they can better compete with more privileged private-school students.
I got to interview 22 students on Friday, and in these speed-interviews we are to ask them some basic questions (“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” “Where do you live?” “How old are you?”) so we can judge their conversational ability. Some families drove several hours so they could take a placement test, meet staff members, and enjoy this interview. The question that was harder for many of the ones I interviewed was, “What do you do after school?” Of course, it involved more than a one-word answer, and required some complex thought and sentences. After our brief conversation the students had a paragraph to read aloud for me so I could judge their reading ability. The word “hug” appeared at the end of the passage, and I was surprised how many ways there are to pronounce the word ‘hug.’ The students I interviewed were so sweet and so eager to come here and learn. There were about 80 applicants for the 30 spots, and it was very exciting to look at the possible future classes of KA.
One more self-indulgent boo-hoo: Saturday I was eating lunch alone (really, it’s okay! I have things to do!) when someone came beside the table and asked if he could join me. This was a student, and not just any student—a student who had recently found himself in a mess of trouble and was serving out a suspension punishment with hard labor on campus and a denial of weekend privileges. This was also a student with whom I have had several run-ins (run-ins of the most pedestrian type! We had a 10-minute discussion/confrontation recently after I asked him to tuck in his shirt!). I was almost finished eating, so I said I would not be there long. He sat down, and said, “I know what you think of me. I’m sure you’ve given up on me too.”
This had not been an easy week for the young man. I had not been privy to the discussions about his situation, but I knew a little. As we talked for the next 30 minutes he explained how Arab parents react to these kinds of accusations, and how people had already tried him before hearing what he had to say. As we talked, his omnipresent tough-guy bravado melted away, and we talked about how one survives public embarrassments. I told him I had not written him off actually, it took a bunch of times before I make that move as an educator. It was a remarkable conversation. He is suffering from such pressures now from parents, peers, faculty, and we talked about how one comes through those fires. I assured him I would be on his side. I swear, if you had told me an hour before that I would have one of those “Afterschool Specials”-moments with that guy, I would have just laughed.
Maybe that was why I needed to be here this weekend on campus.
Not all of our students are the garden-variety “comeback kids.” Some of our students have been strong all along, and I suppose I neglect writing about them because they lack the drama of “His reading scores were so low and now he reads Tolstoy!!!!” appraisals. One guy, Abdullah, has lived on my hall, been in the drama class I taught briefly last fall, and been in one of my classes. He is one of the most joyful students I know. He is one of the most academically minded students I know. He has earned B+, A-, A grades all year, but I haven’t spoken about him much. But one of those great teacher-student moments happened recently that bear repeating.
As we talked in class about the glorious summer of 1914, and the ever-growing excitement about a big war, I discussed the Viennese composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler had composed his 7th symphony with this fervor in mind—the world was on the brink of war, and needed a war, a destructive war to purge society of its evils. But finally, after such a war, the war would be made new, made clean, in order to march onward toward progress. I told the students that the final movement of Mahler’s 7th was this thrilling experience of this promised new world.
In that summer of 1914, as Germany and Austria declared war on the Triple Entente alliance, young men marched excitedly down the streets as ad hoc bands blasted that last movement of Mahler. It must have been made for an exciting afternoon with the hats waving, ladies cheering, trumpets blaring.
It was a nice moment in history class to set the stage for what would be the deadliest war in human history.
That night I was making some rounds in the dorm, and I like to peek my head in during study hours and just make sure the boys are doing okay, maybe even doing some homework. I see Abdullah with head-phones on and ask what is playing. “I found the Mahler symphony online, and I wanted to hear what those guys heard as they marched off to war.” Really? Wow. I hadn’t actually thought someone might seek out the symphony—I used to play the movement in class, in New York, but I didn’t bring all my CDs here. But how great that Abdullah sat there on a lovely spring night in 2008 trying to imagine what it felt like to stand there on that busy strasse and hear those symphonic promises of new life. Strange things indeed.
Today on the treadmill I finished the last episode of the first season of Friday Night Lights. What a fantastic show. It is one of the best dramatic series I have ever watched. You know, it’s making me love football! And I am not just saying that to make my brother-in-law happy. At this one moment the coach said to his wife, “I am living my dream.” I exercised away on the treadmill, captivated by the show and the game, totally enthralled. I suppose stranger things have happened, I just can’t think of any.
But, I gotta say, we are not just limping toward the finish line here. Yes, I know I get on a plane in 4 weeks back to the United States for the summer, and I am happy about that, but things, strange and wonderful, continue to happen here at KA.
I am enjoying the meteoric rise of student Robert right now. Rob is of Dutch-Arab descent, and has been doing fine all year long. However, in the month of April, homework assignments just didn’t get done from Rob. I tried to cajole the class with brownies (as already noted in a previous blog entry) but Rob's homeworks still remained unfinished. About two weeks ago I spoke to Rob’s advisor, and suggested a parent-teacher-advisor conference. Within 48 hours the conference had happened. It was a delightful meeting. Rob’s mother and I spoke for about an hour, and we discussed grades (Rob had six zeroes on homework assignments—not exactly promising marks) and the pressures of high school, and also how much I valued her son in my class. Before the conference I had asked for a ride after the conference into Amman with her (and Rob too, after sports practice). That could have been awkward, I suppose, if the meeting had gone poorly, but it was a wonderful chance to continue our conversation and let Rob know how much we both cared, and what is at stake, about his work.
That Thursday was a test on the materials we had explored since spring break. It doesn’t only happen in TV Movies—Rob earned one of the highest grades in class, an unqualified A. It was a stupendous test. He improved on his previous test score by about 25 points, but more importantly, he had taken our challenge, and demonstrated what a keen scholar he could be. Later that day, Rob asked me, “How did Farah Hamati do it? How did she go from a C- to an A- in two months?” I said, “she started doing her work. She realized what was at stake. She cared about each assignment. One at a time.” Rob had the A test in his hand, and promised he would pull a ‘Farah Hamati.’
A couple days later Rob knocked on my apartment door—he had been working on a homework assignment due two days later, but he wanted to show me his progress. In particular he wanted to ask about this one question that was tricky. I had asked the students to compare the words of Karl Marx with the actions of Lenin, and see where they didn’t match up. It is not a simple question. Rob had written a very strong paragraph, and nailed the distinction. It had the earmarks of a committed student. When Rob turned the entire assignment in on time, I made a big deal in class about the come-from-behind Rob and his rapid rise. One of those sharp students in my class said, “Rob is just like Japan in the 19th century—rising so fast and so strong!” These guys, what can I tell you? Strange things are happening!
On Friday, since I was not out-of-town in some glamorous locale (I know, another boo-hoo moment for me) I volunteered to interview students applying for a summer enrichment program the school offers. This program was one of the seminal feeders for the school’s inception and by all accounts has been a glorious program for the school and for younger students in Jordan. The public schools in Jordan are asked to identify some noteworthy students, ages 11-13, who might do well in an intensive English-language program. About 30 students come in the summer for a free two-week enrichment program, and then many of these are young people who apply to KA and are offered scholarships. It is designed to help students “come to the table” so they can better compete with more privileged private-school students.
I got to interview 22 students on Friday, and in these speed-interviews we are to ask them some basic questions (“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” “Where do you live?” “How old are you?”) so we can judge their conversational ability. Some families drove several hours so they could take a placement test, meet staff members, and enjoy this interview. The question that was harder for many of the ones I interviewed was, “What do you do after school?” Of course, it involved more than a one-word answer, and required some complex thought and sentences. After our brief conversation the students had a paragraph to read aloud for me so I could judge their reading ability. The word “hug” appeared at the end of the passage, and I was surprised how many ways there are to pronounce the word ‘hug.’ The students I interviewed were so sweet and so eager to come here and learn. There were about 80 applicants for the 30 spots, and it was very exciting to look at the possible future classes of KA.
One more self-indulgent boo-hoo: Saturday I was eating lunch alone (really, it’s okay! I have things to do!) when someone came beside the table and asked if he could join me. This was a student, and not just any student—a student who had recently found himself in a mess of trouble and was serving out a suspension punishment with hard labor on campus and a denial of weekend privileges. This was also a student with whom I have had several run-ins (run-ins of the most pedestrian type! We had a 10-minute discussion/confrontation recently after I asked him to tuck in his shirt!). I was almost finished eating, so I said I would not be there long. He sat down, and said, “I know what you think of me. I’m sure you’ve given up on me too.”
This had not been an easy week for the young man. I had not been privy to the discussions about his situation, but I knew a little. As we talked for the next 30 minutes he explained how Arab parents react to these kinds of accusations, and how people had already tried him before hearing what he had to say. As we talked, his omnipresent tough-guy bravado melted away, and we talked about how one survives public embarrassments. I told him I had not written him off actually, it took a bunch of times before I make that move as an educator. It was a remarkable conversation. He is suffering from such pressures now from parents, peers, faculty, and we talked about how one comes through those fires. I assured him I would be on his side. I swear, if you had told me an hour before that I would have one of those “Afterschool Specials”-moments with that guy, I would have just laughed.
Maybe that was why I needed to be here this weekend on campus.
Not all of our students are the garden-variety “comeback kids.” Some of our students have been strong all along, and I suppose I neglect writing about them because they lack the drama of “His reading scores were so low and now he reads Tolstoy!!!!” appraisals. One guy, Abdullah, has lived on my hall, been in the drama class I taught briefly last fall, and been in one of my classes. He is one of the most joyful students I know. He is one of the most academically minded students I know. He has earned B+, A-, A grades all year, but I haven’t spoken about him much. But one of those great teacher-student moments happened recently that bear repeating.
As we talked in class about the glorious summer of 1914, and the ever-growing excitement about a big war, I discussed the Viennese composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler had composed his 7th symphony with this fervor in mind—the world was on the brink of war, and needed a war, a destructive war to purge society of its evils. But finally, after such a war, the war would be made new, made clean, in order to march onward toward progress. I told the students that the final movement of Mahler’s 7th was this thrilling experience of this promised new world.
In that summer of 1914, as Germany and Austria declared war on the Triple Entente alliance, young men marched excitedly down the streets as ad hoc bands blasted that last movement of Mahler. It must have been made for an exciting afternoon with the hats waving, ladies cheering, trumpets blaring.
It was a nice moment in history class to set the stage for what would be the deadliest war in human history.
That night I was making some rounds in the dorm, and I like to peek my head in during study hours and just make sure the boys are doing okay, maybe even doing some homework. I see Abdullah with head-phones on and ask what is playing. “I found the Mahler symphony online, and I wanted to hear what those guys heard as they marched off to war.” Really? Wow. I hadn’t actually thought someone might seek out the symphony—I used to play the movement in class, in New York, but I didn’t bring all my CDs here. But how great that Abdullah sat there on a lovely spring night in 2008 trying to imagine what it felt like to stand there on that busy strasse and hear those symphonic promises of new life. Strange things indeed.
Today on the treadmill I finished the last episode of the first season of Friday Night Lights. What a fantastic show. It is one of the best dramatic series I have ever watched. You know, it’s making me love football! And I am not just saying that to make my brother-in-law happy. At this one moment the coach said to his wife, “I am living my dream.” I exercised away on the treadmill, captivated by the show and the game, totally enthralled. I suppose stranger things have happened, I just can’t think of any.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
A Mid-Spring Night’s Reverie
This has been a week of wistfulness.
Back in Miss Wilson’s 5th grade class (one of the best, best learning experiences of my entire life) one of the things she had us do in Language Arts (as they called the study of English in those elementary school days) was choose some of our own vocabulary words we wanted to master, and as we practiced using them in sentences, she had us look up the words in the OED to discover the origins of the particular word. When the time of our vocabulary test came on Friday, we not only knew the definition of the word, but also the first time that the word had been used in the history of the English language. She had us doing that in 5th grade! That was certainly a little destiny in my becoming a historian…
Just for fun I checked out on dictionary.com what the OED origin of wistful is. Its origin can be traced to the early 17th century and meant “a quiet, attentive longing or yearning.” The site also records that it may be ”characterized by a melancholy.”
Yep. It has been a week of wistfulness. I have already recorded some of my thoughts from earlier in the week, but several other scoops of wistfulness have been added to my Wistfulness Sundae. Today is my dad’s birthday and I miss him. Never could I imagine a father so able to hold a family in such a loving grip.
I realized it has been a year since I have seen my friend Chuck. I talk to Chuck regularly, yes, and have no fear about a weakening bond in the fires of friendship, but still, there is a longing to see the great friends of one’s life.
I also had my weekend plans cancelled. I know, boo-hoo. But we have a day off school tomorrow for Jordanian Independence Day, and I had made plans with a KA family to travel to Mt. Sinai (lemme just refresh your memory about the significance of this place: remember a certain burning bush? remember some commandments etched in stone? Yep, that’s the place) to hike up into the mountains to the 1500 year old St. Catherine’s monastery and then relax at a nice Red Sea resort. But the father in the family, an eminent surgeon, has a surgery assignment today. I know, boo-hoo. The poor little international teacher-traveler has no plans! Moreover, everybody else is out and about shopping in Damascus or camping or something. Yes, I will survive. I am writing my final exam this weekend. But I am a little wistful.
And not the least of my shades of wistfulness I owe to my attendance this week to the first full-length production of a play at KA. There were maybe 30 actors, from a 6 year old daughter of a colleague, to the headmaster himself, in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wistful? I didn’t direct the play. Wistful? Do you know me at all?
The cast performed the play not in our auditorium, but in the biggest courtyard on campus, a place that took advantage of the lovely desert evenings. The audience sat in the playing area ¾ around the cast. Under the night sky with a cool spring breeze, the space created a holistic setting for the play that has love and fantasy at its core. They didn’t create much scenery, but they cleverly used beautiful fabric panels to set the scenes of the fancy homes and woodland fairyland. Director Tristan decided to set the play in the 1920s which allowed for perky music and beautiful costumes that sparkled under the pink-and-blue lighting design he chose.
Early in the play a character commands that we should “awake the spirit of mirth,” and the cast performed the play with a mirthful enthusiasm indeed. While I must say I am not a fan of the play, and I worry that a Shakespeare play was nearly totally lost on the audiences (Jordanians and Americans alike) and so the text was underserved, we got to watch our students put on a play! There was one boy, Mohammad, who in the beginning of the year had not seemed to be a very serious scholar. Faculty worried about his mischievous streak. But as he performed the role of Bottom, and clearly reveled in the comic machinations, it reminded me all over again why I love theater with high school students. It transforms the participants.
There’s the wistfulness: I didn’t direct the play. In the last 20 years I have directed 60 plays, and I miss it. The OED got it right—it is “a quiet, attentive longing or yearning…characterized by melancholy.”
I am not jealous of Tristan’s success—I just miss doing what he gets to do. Of course there is tremendous work in directing a play—the hours, the decisions, the hand-holding, the voids of creativity, the patience, the fretting, the disasters, the frustrations, again, the patience, but it has been one of the most wondrous, and integral parts of my teaching career.
Directing a play is a bit like being a horticulturalist—someone who loves to cultivate, say, orchids. It is painstaking work, in a special place, a hothouse, and with nerves of steel, and the patience of Job, one finally watches that precious blossom burst forth. And, as every horticulturalist knows and rues, that gorgeous, living being is ephemeral. It doesn’t last long, and soon after, as time flies, it is but a memory. But in that whole process, if you love it, it is unfettered joy.
And so as I watched the performance the other night, I coveted those rushes of emotion they were experiencing backstage and onstage. It is nice to be a spectator, but it is certainly not the emotional experience that directing provides. As the characters in the play whirred back into a fairyland, I took a trip of my own, a beautiful trip down memory lane of some of my directing experiences in the last 20 years:
First Stop: Hello, Dolly! I debuted big, with a huge musical and a cast of 60. About a week before the opening in the spring of 1988, I was frustrated over a bit of farcical business that the students couldn’t seem to master. I said to my friend Mary, “I want to sign a proclamation right now that I will never, ever be foolish again to direct a show.” Mary watched me enact my own little quasi-historical event as I signed my name to this promise. On Opening Night Mary was beside me as we peeked into that horrific gym at Gaston Day School, watching the birth of the show, tears coming down our cheeks, and she wondered if I meant to honor my sworn testimony.
Next stop: the spectaculars at Charlotte Latin School! They gave me the most money to spend on theater, and in my five years there I directed 19 shows, some of them huge! Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was the biggest—I think every cast member had about 7 costume changes, and again, about 60 people performing (including that dear friend Mary—we had long since just laughed at my commitment to avoid theater!). When Joseph’s family reunites at the end of the show (and the supernova talent Casey as Joseph will never be topped in my mind) those were not just actor-ly tears on the faces of the brothers—we felt that moment. There was Noises Off, certainly the most ambitious set I have engineered, and the most difficult directing assignment of physical movement, but I had the cast of my dreams, and it made it all seem so easy. That buddy Chuck—it was one of the eight shows we did together during his high school days—he was in that triumph. I remember the night before we opened, and I had the idea that the curtain call should be a speeded up version of the entire plot of the play raced to Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus.
Third stop: the smaller plays at Charlotte Latin were just as miraculous as the big budget splashy shows. It was at Latin that I honed my skills to work at the subtleties of inspiring casts to elicit great moments in acting. Four plays became signature pieces of mine: I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Twelve Angry Jurors, Our Country’s Good, and Our Town. You couldn’t ask for more dedicated, talented actors, and as we noted at the last play before I took a sabbatical in 1994, we treasured each other.
Fourth stop: the unbelievably bad stage and auditorium at Hackley! When I first saw the “theater,” I thought, this will be a challenge! But in those 11 years, in those 30 or so plays, I discovered another pool of talent, another source of life-long friendships. I remember introducing the students to classic American plays, like The Crucible and You Can’t It With You (the first high school play I did, by the way, around the time when John Wilkes Booth was a hot actor) and then moving from the chestnut plays to the experimental plays, directing them in Christopher Durang, Tom Stoppard, The Laramie Project and Oh, What a Lovely War. I worked with gifted students like Harrison, a student who elevated everything he was in. I hoped that the plays like Our Country’s Good would reveal the redemptive power of theater.
Fifth stop: the last play I directed, 18 months ago in November, 2006. I put together an evening I called “Defying Wilder” in which we looked at the work of Thornton Wilder juxtaposed with a play from the 1990s that seemed to call on Wilder-ian tendencies. I had a feeling that that would be my last play for awhile, and I invested it with a kind of elegiac quality. Each of the three works is, to me, a montage of hope and faith, and the three works together formed an expression of our capacity to recover from catastrophe and move hopefully forward again. In Pullman Car Hiawatha, a 28 character one-act set in a Pullman Railroad Car traveling from New York to Chicago, Thorton Wilder uses the microcosm of a train car to explore the pulses of life as they collide physically, metaphysically and cosmically. Beginning with a view of passengers in an overnight sleeper car, Wilder’s vision expands to a macrocosm of American towns through which the train passes and eventually encompasses the entire universe. Wilder’s inspiring message rings clear: the world may be too large to fathom, but the miracle of love guides our way through the night. In this play we also see the creative roots for Wilder’s better-known Our Town. While death was in fact a central theme in all three plays, it did not dominate the elaborate fabric of life that extends from leaky hot-water bottles and dropped suspenders up to, literally, the music of the spheres. Rather, it is the fabric of life, seen in cross-section in these three plays, that is important; but most important is the message that love renders life so much more than meaningless noise.
Wistful yes, but the last stop was a beautiful montage of smiles and tears and hugs and moments from Sarah, Eric, Michael, Kathleen, Elizabeth, Megan, Chuck, Kess, Billy, Ethan, Junko, Catherine, Greg, Will, Mandy, Simon, Elizabeth, Jennie, Erika, Ian, Eric, David, Tanaz, Millie, Adam, Stefan, Liz, Tom, Kieran, Alyssa, Alta, Alex, Katherine, Julia, Kenrick, Harrison, Becky, Dora, Kate, Jonathan, Jake, Soyoung, Michael…
These are the stars I saw in that desert sky.
Back in Miss Wilson’s 5th grade class (one of the best, best learning experiences of my entire life) one of the things she had us do in Language Arts (as they called the study of English in those elementary school days) was choose some of our own vocabulary words we wanted to master, and as we practiced using them in sentences, she had us look up the words in the OED to discover the origins of the particular word. When the time of our vocabulary test came on Friday, we not only knew the definition of the word, but also the first time that the word had been used in the history of the English language. She had us doing that in 5th grade! That was certainly a little destiny in my becoming a historian…
Just for fun I checked out on dictionary.com what the OED origin of wistful is. Its origin can be traced to the early 17th century and meant “a quiet, attentive longing or yearning.” The site also records that it may be ”characterized by a melancholy.”
Yep. It has been a week of wistfulness. I have already recorded some of my thoughts from earlier in the week, but several other scoops of wistfulness have been added to my Wistfulness Sundae. Today is my dad’s birthday and I miss him. Never could I imagine a father so able to hold a family in such a loving grip.
I realized it has been a year since I have seen my friend Chuck. I talk to Chuck regularly, yes, and have no fear about a weakening bond in the fires of friendship, but still, there is a longing to see the great friends of one’s life.
I also had my weekend plans cancelled. I know, boo-hoo. But we have a day off school tomorrow for Jordanian Independence Day, and I had made plans with a KA family to travel to Mt. Sinai (lemme just refresh your memory about the significance of this place: remember a certain burning bush? remember some commandments etched in stone? Yep, that’s the place) to hike up into the mountains to the 1500 year old St. Catherine’s monastery and then relax at a nice Red Sea resort. But the father in the family, an eminent surgeon, has a surgery assignment today. I know, boo-hoo. The poor little international teacher-traveler has no plans! Moreover, everybody else is out and about shopping in Damascus or camping or something. Yes, I will survive. I am writing my final exam this weekend. But I am a little wistful.
And not the least of my shades of wistfulness I owe to my attendance this week to the first full-length production of a play at KA. There were maybe 30 actors, from a 6 year old daughter of a colleague, to the headmaster himself, in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wistful? I didn’t direct the play. Wistful? Do you know me at all?
The cast performed the play not in our auditorium, but in the biggest courtyard on campus, a place that took advantage of the lovely desert evenings. The audience sat in the playing area ¾ around the cast. Under the night sky with a cool spring breeze, the space created a holistic setting for the play that has love and fantasy at its core. They didn’t create much scenery, but they cleverly used beautiful fabric panels to set the scenes of the fancy homes and woodland fairyland. Director Tristan decided to set the play in the 1920s which allowed for perky music and beautiful costumes that sparkled under the pink-and-blue lighting design he chose.
Early in the play a character commands that we should “awake the spirit of mirth,” and the cast performed the play with a mirthful enthusiasm indeed. While I must say I am not a fan of the play, and I worry that a Shakespeare play was nearly totally lost on the audiences (Jordanians and Americans alike) and so the text was underserved, we got to watch our students put on a play! There was one boy, Mohammad, who in the beginning of the year had not seemed to be a very serious scholar. Faculty worried about his mischievous streak. But as he performed the role of Bottom, and clearly reveled in the comic machinations, it reminded me all over again why I love theater with high school students. It transforms the participants.
There’s the wistfulness: I didn’t direct the play. In the last 20 years I have directed 60 plays, and I miss it. The OED got it right—it is “a quiet, attentive longing or yearning…characterized by melancholy.”
I am not jealous of Tristan’s success—I just miss doing what he gets to do. Of course there is tremendous work in directing a play—the hours, the decisions, the hand-holding, the voids of creativity, the patience, the fretting, the disasters, the frustrations, again, the patience, but it has been one of the most wondrous, and integral parts of my teaching career.
Directing a play is a bit like being a horticulturalist—someone who loves to cultivate, say, orchids. It is painstaking work, in a special place, a hothouse, and with nerves of steel, and the patience of Job, one finally watches that precious blossom burst forth. And, as every horticulturalist knows and rues, that gorgeous, living being is ephemeral. It doesn’t last long, and soon after, as time flies, it is but a memory. But in that whole process, if you love it, it is unfettered joy.
And so as I watched the performance the other night, I coveted those rushes of emotion they were experiencing backstage and onstage. It is nice to be a spectator, but it is certainly not the emotional experience that directing provides. As the characters in the play whirred back into a fairyland, I took a trip of my own, a beautiful trip down memory lane of some of my directing experiences in the last 20 years:
First Stop: Hello, Dolly! I debuted big, with a huge musical and a cast of 60. About a week before the opening in the spring of 1988, I was frustrated over a bit of farcical business that the students couldn’t seem to master. I said to my friend Mary, “I want to sign a proclamation right now that I will never, ever be foolish again to direct a show.” Mary watched me enact my own little quasi-historical event as I signed my name to this promise. On Opening Night Mary was beside me as we peeked into that horrific gym at Gaston Day School, watching the birth of the show, tears coming down our cheeks, and she wondered if I meant to honor my sworn testimony.
Next stop: the spectaculars at Charlotte Latin School! They gave me the most money to spend on theater, and in my five years there I directed 19 shows, some of them huge! Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was the biggest—I think every cast member had about 7 costume changes, and again, about 60 people performing (including that dear friend Mary—we had long since just laughed at my commitment to avoid theater!). When Joseph’s family reunites at the end of the show (and the supernova talent Casey as Joseph will never be topped in my mind) those were not just actor-ly tears on the faces of the brothers—we felt that moment. There was Noises Off, certainly the most ambitious set I have engineered, and the most difficult directing assignment of physical movement, but I had the cast of my dreams, and it made it all seem so easy. That buddy Chuck—it was one of the eight shows we did together during his high school days—he was in that triumph. I remember the night before we opened, and I had the idea that the curtain call should be a speeded up version of the entire plot of the play raced to Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus.
Third stop: the smaller plays at Charlotte Latin were just as miraculous as the big budget splashy shows. It was at Latin that I honed my skills to work at the subtleties of inspiring casts to elicit great moments in acting. Four plays became signature pieces of mine: I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Twelve Angry Jurors, Our Country’s Good, and Our Town. You couldn’t ask for more dedicated, talented actors, and as we noted at the last play before I took a sabbatical in 1994, we treasured each other.
Fourth stop: the unbelievably bad stage and auditorium at Hackley! When I first saw the “theater,” I thought, this will be a challenge! But in those 11 years, in those 30 or so plays, I discovered another pool of talent, another source of life-long friendships. I remember introducing the students to classic American plays, like The Crucible and You Can’t It With You (the first high school play I did, by the way, around the time when John Wilkes Booth was a hot actor) and then moving from the chestnut plays to the experimental plays, directing them in Christopher Durang, Tom Stoppard, The Laramie Project and Oh, What a Lovely War. I worked with gifted students like Harrison, a student who elevated everything he was in. I hoped that the plays like Our Country’s Good would reveal the redemptive power of theater.
Fifth stop: the last play I directed, 18 months ago in November, 2006. I put together an evening I called “Defying Wilder” in which we looked at the work of Thornton Wilder juxtaposed with a play from the 1990s that seemed to call on Wilder-ian tendencies. I had a feeling that that would be my last play for awhile, and I invested it with a kind of elegiac quality. Each of the three works is, to me, a montage of hope and faith, and the three works together formed an expression of our capacity to recover from catastrophe and move hopefully forward again. In Pullman Car Hiawatha, a 28 character one-act set in a Pullman Railroad Car traveling from New York to Chicago, Thorton Wilder uses the microcosm of a train car to explore the pulses of life as they collide physically, metaphysically and cosmically. Beginning with a view of passengers in an overnight sleeper car, Wilder’s vision expands to a macrocosm of American towns through which the train passes and eventually encompasses the entire universe. Wilder’s inspiring message rings clear: the world may be too large to fathom, but the miracle of love guides our way through the night. In this play we also see the creative roots for Wilder’s better-known Our Town. While death was in fact a central theme in all three plays, it did not dominate the elaborate fabric of life that extends from leaky hot-water bottles and dropped suspenders up to, literally, the music of the spheres. Rather, it is the fabric of life, seen in cross-section in these three plays, that is important; but most important is the message that love renders life so much more than meaningless noise.
Wistful yes, but the last stop was a beautiful montage of smiles and tears and hugs and moments from Sarah, Eric, Michael, Kathleen, Elizabeth, Megan, Chuck, Kess, Billy, Ethan, Junko, Catherine, Greg, Will, Mandy, Simon, Elizabeth, Jennie, Erika, Ian, Eric, David, Tanaz, Millie, Adam, Stefan, Liz, Tom, Kieran, Alyssa, Alta, Alex, Katherine, Julia, Kenrick, Harrison, Becky, Dora, Kate, Jonathan, Jake, Soyoung, Michael…
These are the stars I saw in that desert sky.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Captain Update
I have movies and TV shows on my brain today…
Tonight I am going into Amman to see the world-wide premier of Indiana Jones and the Something Something 4th Installment! It is opening in Amman the same night it opens in the United States! There is a group of about 35 of us going tonight to see the film at a new theater in a new mall.
But there are other movies on my mind today too. As I read through today’s copy of The Jordan Times I spied an article about Captain Abu Raed, the first Jordanian feature film exported to the world’s cinemas. I saw this film about two months ago and wrote about it in the blog. The paper stated that the Jordanian embassy in Washington hosted a special screening for diplomatic bigwigs.
Captain Abu Raed presents a universal story of friendship, inspiration and heroism, and as the ambassador to the US commented in the article, “This is a story of intersecting across social boundaries in contemporary Jordan and shows the world the complex beauty of our region.” The embassy statement went on to say, “The film captures breathtaking footage of Amman and especially east Amman where the first settlers gave life to the city.”
I read the headlines and scan the newspaper every morning during my coffee break, which I take in friend Lubna’s office. In every school in which I have taught I have gravitated to the great secretaries I have known. Lubna, a secretary for the faculty, is one of those essential stops of the day. In fact there is a group of regulars who now congregate in Lubna’s office (we have affectionately dubbed her “Lubs” actually) about 9:00 after the first class of the day. Lubs prepares coffee for us, and we have christened the sofa area near her desk “Lubs’ Lizard Lounge,” since we tend to have a little dance party action to start the day. I don’t even remember how it all got started, but one of the young teachers, Chris, she and I started dancing a little and getting everybody all warmed up for the day. As I said, it has become an essential part of our day—laughter, pep talks, and the omnipresent Nescafe.
This morning we were talking about Captain Abu Raed, and how the film crosses over “Jordanian” borders and captured all our hearts, no matter where we are from. Lubna reminisced about a TV show she watched as a child with her family in Kuwait. (For the record I am two weeks to the day older than Lubs.) As she described the show, forgetting the title, I said, “Lubs, that sounds like a show I loved as a child—The Waltons.” She squealed with delight—“That’s it. We loved The Waltons!”
If you have never seen The Waltons it would come across as corny and hokey, I guess. It is the story of a Depression-era family in rural Virginia and how they coped with the trials and tribulations of daily life. This show would certainly resonate in phrases like, ‘it celebrates the human condition.’ It was one of the seminal TV shows of my childhood. It started on television when I was about 9, and we all four watched it together, and in many episodes my mother would start crying about something in the storyline, so my sister and I usually succumbed to the tears as well. My stoic father held us together so we didn’t all dissolve into tears. The oldest son was a guy named John-Boy, and soon thereafter my grandmother started calling me John-Boy. The youngest child in the family was darling Elizabeth, the same name as my darling little sister. The show lasted for 9 years, but as I got into teen-age years such a show did not capture my attention in the same way any longer.
As Lubna and I realized that for many of the same years in the 1970s we both watched this show, we joked about how our childhoods could hardly have been more different: her childhood in Kuwait and mine 10,000 miles away in the American Midwest. I asked her, “what did you like about the show?” Lubna smiled and said, “It really reminds me of Arab values and lifestyles.” What??? How is that possible?
But that Walton family was more like my family! It seemed incredulous to me that a family in the Gulf region would have anything in common with this Baptist family suffering hardships in 1930s America. I said, “Lubs, what in the world in that show is like Arab values?” “It’s simple,” she replied. “That show is about people that believe in their land, and treasure their name, love their God, and build their lives on the strongest bedrock—family.” Hmmmm…
We laughed as we remembered episodes we had enjoyed as children, and we decided that maybe more families around the world should watch The Waltons and possibly it could serve as a some kind of bridge to peace. (!) I told her that I had a DVD set of the first season, and I promised that I would loan her the discs to rekindle her love for this beloved show.
Of course none of the young ones who hang out with us in the Lizard Lounge have seen (or heard of) The Waltons, so we had to turn our attention back to catching them up to speed on the history of Indiana Jones. None of our young peers was born in 1980 when the first movie opened, and they just don’t know the history of Indy, and the greatness of the third installment. So as our Nescafe cooled we had to act out some of the set pieces from The Last Crusade—whew, Nazis do make great villains don’t they??
As most of the day passed by, the John Williams theme song played in my head. Who knows if the newest installment lives up to the third one, but a night at the movies is always a delight.
Tonight I am going into Amman to see the world-wide premier of Indiana Jones and the Something Something 4th Installment! It is opening in Amman the same night it opens in the United States! There is a group of about 35 of us going tonight to see the film at a new theater in a new mall.
But there are other movies on my mind today too. As I read through today’s copy of The Jordan Times I spied an article about Captain Abu Raed, the first Jordanian feature film exported to the world’s cinemas. I saw this film about two months ago and wrote about it in the blog. The paper stated that the Jordanian embassy in Washington hosted a special screening for diplomatic bigwigs.
Captain Abu Raed presents a universal story of friendship, inspiration and heroism, and as the ambassador to the US commented in the article, “This is a story of intersecting across social boundaries in contemporary Jordan and shows the world the complex beauty of our region.” The embassy statement went on to say, “The film captures breathtaking footage of Amman and especially east Amman where the first settlers gave life to the city.”
I read the headlines and scan the newspaper every morning during my coffee break, which I take in friend Lubna’s office. In every school in which I have taught I have gravitated to the great secretaries I have known. Lubna, a secretary for the faculty, is one of those essential stops of the day. In fact there is a group of regulars who now congregate in Lubna’s office (we have affectionately dubbed her “Lubs” actually) about 9:00 after the first class of the day. Lubs prepares coffee for us, and we have christened the sofa area near her desk “Lubs’ Lizard Lounge,” since we tend to have a little dance party action to start the day. I don’t even remember how it all got started, but one of the young teachers, Chris, she and I started dancing a little and getting everybody all warmed up for the day. As I said, it has become an essential part of our day—laughter, pep talks, and the omnipresent Nescafe.
This morning we were talking about Captain Abu Raed, and how the film crosses over “Jordanian” borders and captured all our hearts, no matter where we are from. Lubna reminisced about a TV show she watched as a child with her family in Kuwait. (For the record I am two weeks to the day older than Lubs.) As she described the show, forgetting the title, I said, “Lubs, that sounds like a show I loved as a child—The Waltons.” She squealed with delight—“That’s it. We loved The Waltons!”
If you have never seen The Waltons it would come across as corny and hokey, I guess. It is the story of a Depression-era family in rural Virginia and how they coped with the trials and tribulations of daily life. This show would certainly resonate in phrases like, ‘it celebrates the human condition.’ It was one of the seminal TV shows of my childhood. It started on television when I was about 9, and we all four watched it together, and in many episodes my mother would start crying about something in the storyline, so my sister and I usually succumbed to the tears as well. My stoic father held us together so we didn’t all dissolve into tears. The oldest son was a guy named John-Boy, and soon thereafter my grandmother started calling me John-Boy. The youngest child in the family was darling Elizabeth, the same name as my darling little sister. The show lasted for 9 years, but as I got into teen-age years such a show did not capture my attention in the same way any longer.
As Lubna and I realized that for many of the same years in the 1970s we both watched this show, we joked about how our childhoods could hardly have been more different: her childhood in Kuwait and mine 10,000 miles away in the American Midwest. I asked her, “what did you like about the show?” Lubna smiled and said, “It really reminds me of Arab values and lifestyles.” What??? How is that possible?
But that Walton family was more like my family! It seemed incredulous to me that a family in the Gulf region would have anything in common with this Baptist family suffering hardships in 1930s America. I said, “Lubs, what in the world in that show is like Arab values?” “It’s simple,” she replied. “That show is about people that believe in their land, and treasure their name, love their God, and build their lives on the strongest bedrock—family.” Hmmmm…
We laughed as we remembered episodes we had enjoyed as children, and we decided that maybe more families around the world should watch The Waltons and possibly it could serve as a some kind of bridge to peace. (!) I told her that I had a DVD set of the first season, and I promised that I would loan her the discs to rekindle her love for this beloved show.
Of course none of the young ones who hang out with us in the Lizard Lounge have seen (or heard of) The Waltons, so we had to turn our attention back to catching them up to speed on the history of Indiana Jones. None of our young peers was born in 1980 when the first movie opened, and they just don’t know the history of Indy, and the greatness of the third installment. So as our Nescafe cooled we had to act out some of the set pieces from The Last Crusade—whew, Nazis do make great villains don’t they??
As most of the day passed by, the John Williams theme song played in my head. Who knows if the newest installment lives up to the third one, but a night at the movies is always a delight.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
A Rooster’s Crow
A little while ago I got off the phone with my sister, and much of our conversation today involved reminiscences of our mother, the magical Mary Martha. It is not infrequent that we invoke her name, or a story about her, or one of her many aphorisms that regale our family, but today is different. Today is two years since my father called us and told us she had slipped away.
Elizabeth said to me, “The day she died was such a sunny day—there were so many rainy days that month, and she left us on the most beautiful day of all—and on her own terms.”(I wrote about my mother in depth on a November 27th blog entry in case you want to go back in the blog archives and read it.)
At her funeral, several people made a point of telling me, “She was such a fighter.”
I appreciated their sentiment, of course, but I have never really liked that imagery of warfare when people discuss disease. “He lost his battle with cancer,” is an oft-heard phrase when someone dies after enduring a disease such as cancer. For our family my mother’s MS forced us to live in the meantime, and we rarely dabbled in that imagery of warfare when speaking of MS. As I think about it, my mother never construed her multiple sclerosis as an enemy. I try not to judge others who thoughtfully do choose it, for whom “fighting” may be a helpful stance and attitude. On the other hand, I’m critical of the media when, without genuine thought or analysis, it routinely declares in its death notices that so-and-so died after a long battle with cancer. Why does it have to be a battle? Why must it be that the person lost that battle? Are folks with cancer good fighters if they win? Bad fighters, failing falling foot soldiers, if they lose? Can they be heroic only in triumph? It is never an issue of defeat or victory—we are, all of us, going to die. Why not use the imagery that acknowledges how one experiences living, or experiences dying?
As my father composed the death notice for the newspaper he included the words, “Mary Martha was a 49 ½ year survivor with MS.” I thought about his choice of words. He chose the word, ‘survivor,’ yes, but more remarkable to me is that he insisted that it read ’49 ½ .’ If you know how newspapers work, you know they charge for every iota of type, and it ain’t cheap. My father, a man who wears the label ‘frugal’ with great pride, paid for that important ‘1/2.’ He didn’t have to—but as he wrote about his dear Mary Martha, he wanted her to have every bit of credit coming to her: she had incurred this disease as a young woman, and had survived for 49 ½ years. Every moment was a miracle. Whatever that cost, it meant something for my father to convey that.
Suffering a physical sickness is to experience the effects of breakage in the body’s significant relationships. Our family understands that well. But one of the multitudinous things we learned from our Mary Martha is that sickness is not an enemy. Indeed, as we witnessed through her, sickness is a rooster’s crow, calling us to the truth about ourselves, and to the precise condition of our relationships—God, family, society, nature. In a perverse way the MS accomplished a number of blessed things for our family: over the years we realized that the MS provided us with those coveted Our Town moments—the opportunity to reconcile ourselves before time ran out.
That concept of warfare has become for our society so common a means to comprehend so many things: war on poverty, war on terror; we battle for ratings, for grades. We fight, with huge war chests, for victory in elections. Fightin’ words everywhere we look…more and more of our experiences are bounded by battlefields. We haven’t grown much, have we?
Our family grew, had to grow, to accommodate the MS in our midst. While attention spans seem to get shorter and shorter all the while (umm…whatever happened to thoughtful letters? Brief emails suffice; lengthy phone conversations have become instant messages and texts; politicians respond to complex issues with 10-second sound bites. Hmmm…) Mary Martha taught us to patiently look for what is both hidden and present. She loved the bible story about the faith of the mustard seed, that teeeeeeny seed that requires time. As the MS consumed more of her time, she never abdicated that faith. In fact, that faith offered her more clarity and sustained her.
In March, 2006, in what would be my last visit with her, one afternoon she and I looked back together on earlier days spent at the American Baptist Assembly in Green Lake, Wisconsin. We went there every summer until I was in my high school years, and my mother loved the rigorous bible study and provocative challenges in trying to tackle world missions projects. Her speech was not very strong during that rainy March visit, but I reminded her of a study she had enjoyed one summer, maybe back in 1978. It was a simple psalm, and a deceptively simple commandment: Be still, and know that I am God. I reminded her of the minister who led this, and how he led a 60-minute bible study on those few words of the psalmist. Years and years after that study had come and gone, we talked, just mother and son, about those powerful words, and the challenge in those words. How often she and I have not been still! We are talkers, without a doubt, but what a profound challenge to be still—the activeness of that quieting command, and then the profound leap of faith to know God.
Mary Martha had an ability to understand that even after 49 ½ years with MS, she was not beyond the reach of God’s love. In fact, perhaps because of it, she knew even more matter-of-factly the reach and dimension of that summit.
This afternoon I went to visit my friend Randa in the administration building for a little bit. Randa and I are the same age, and almost three weeks ago her mother passed away here in Amman. We sat, this afternoon, 10-month old friends, holding hands and remembering the reach of a mother’s love.
It has occurred to me on more than one occasion of the timing of those events two years ago. It would be just a few months later that word of an exciting new school in Jordan would cross my radar screen. I have wondered if my mother had been alive if I would have given that opportunity more than a passing glance: I had always thought that it would be wrong to leave the United States and be so far away from my mother. Of course, she would have loved to hear all about what I have seen and heard and done these last 10 months. She would have had the biggest smile of all.
Maybe my loss that day was just the rooster’s crow I needed.
Elizabeth said to me, “The day she died was such a sunny day—there were so many rainy days that month, and she left us on the most beautiful day of all—and on her own terms.”(I wrote about my mother in depth on a November 27th blog entry in case you want to go back in the blog archives and read it.)
At her funeral, several people made a point of telling me, “She was such a fighter.”
I appreciated their sentiment, of course, but I have never really liked that imagery of warfare when people discuss disease. “He lost his battle with cancer,” is an oft-heard phrase when someone dies after enduring a disease such as cancer. For our family my mother’s MS forced us to live in the meantime, and we rarely dabbled in that imagery of warfare when speaking of MS. As I think about it, my mother never construed her multiple sclerosis as an enemy. I try not to judge others who thoughtfully do choose it, for whom “fighting” may be a helpful stance and attitude. On the other hand, I’m critical of the media when, without genuine thought or analysis, it routinely declares in its death notices that so-and-so died after a long battle with cancer. Why does it have to be a battle? Why must it be that the person lost that battle? Are folks with cancer good fighters if they win? Bad fighters, failing falling foot soldiers, if they lose? Can they be heroic only in triumph? It is never an issue of defeat or victory—we are, all of us, going to die. Why not use the imagery that acknowledges how one experiences living, or experiences dying?
As my father composed the death notice for the newspaper he included the words, “Mary Martha was a 49 ½ year survivor with MS.” I thought about his choice of words. He chose the word, ‘survivor,’ yes, but more remarkable to me is that he insisted that it read ’49 ½ .’ If you know how newspapers work, you know they charge for every iota of type, and it ain’t cheap. My father, a man who wears the label ‘frugal’ with great pride, paid for that important ‘1/2.’ He didn’t have to—but as he wrote about his dear Mary Martha, he wanted her to have every bit of credit coming to her: she had incurred this disease as a young woman, and had survived for 49 ½ years. Every moment was a miracle. Whatever that cost, it meant something for my father to convey that.
Suffering a physical sickness is to experience the effects of breakage in the body’s significant relationships. Our family understands that well. But one of the multitudinous things we learned from our Mary Martha is that sickness is not an enemy. Indeed, as we witnessed through her, sickness is a rooster’s crow, calling us to the truth about ourselves, and to the precise condition of our relationships—God, family, society, nature. In a perverse way the MS accomplished a number of blessed things for our family: over the years we realized that the MS provided us with those coveted Our Town moments—the opportunity to reconcile ourselves before time ran out.
That concept of warfare has become for our society so common a means to comprehend so many things: war on poverty, war on terror; we battle for ratings, for grades. We fight, with huge war chests, for victory in elections. Fightin’ words everywhere we look…more and more of our experiences are bounded by battlefields. We haven’t grown much, have we?
Our family grew, had to grow, to accommodate the MS in our midst. While attention spans seem to get shorter and shorter all the while (umm…whatever happened to thoughtful letters? Brief emails suffice; lengthy phone conversations have become instant messages and texts; politicians respond to complex issues with 10-second sound bites. Hmmm…) Mary Martha taught us to patiently look for what is both hidden and present. She loved the bible story about the faith of the mustard seed, that teeeeeeny seed that requires time. As the MS consumed more of her time, she never abdicated that faith. In fact, that faith offered her more clarity and sustained her.
In March, 2006, in what would be my last visit with her, one afternoon she and I looked back together on earlier days spent at the American Baptist Assembly in Green Lake, Wisconsin. We went there every summer until I was in my high school years, and my mother loved the rigorous bible study and provocative challenges in trying to tackle world missions projects. Her speech was not very strong during that rainy March visit, but I reminded her of a study she had enjoyed one summer, maybe back in 1978. It was a simple psalm, and a deceptively simple commandment: Be still, and know that I am God. I reminded her of the minister who led this, and how he led a 60-minute bible study on those few words of the psalmist. Years and years after that study had come and gone, we talked, just mother and son, about those powerful words, and the challenge in those words. How often she and I have not been still! We are talkers, without a doubt, but what a profound challenge to be still—the activeness of that quieting command, and then the profound leap of faith to know God.
Mary Martha had an ability to understand that even after 49 ½ years with MS, she was not beyond the reach of God’s love. In fact, perhaps because of it, she knew even more matter-of-factly the reach and dimension of that summit.
This afternoon I went to visit my friend Randa in the administration building for a little bit. Randa and I are the same age, and almost three weeks ago her mother passed away here in Amman. We sat, this afternoon, 10-month old friends, holding hands and remembering the reach of a mother’s love.
It has occurred to me on more than one occasion of the timing of those events two years ago. It would be just a few months later that word of an exciting new school in Jordan would cross my radar screen. I have wondered if my mother had been alive if I would have given that opportunity more than a passing glance: I had always thought that it would be wrong to leave the United States and be so far away from my mother. Of course, she would have loved to hear all about what I have seen and heard and done these last 10 months. She would have had the biggest smile of all.
Maybe my loss that day was just the rooster’s crow I needed.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Fires of Our Devotion
It is getting hot again. I would say it gets to about 90 degrees in the peak of the afternoon now. Find the lightweight blazers! Don’t let them know you are wearing used-car-salesman-like short sleeve shirts! (Why hide the ‘ss’ you ask? Short stocky man in short sleeves? Need you ask?) Keep the wash cloth handy in case your brow gets a little moist as you explore the 1919 Paris Peace Conference! It is not as hot as it was last August and September. But there are some reminders…and there were beads of perspiration around 8:30 a.m. this morning…
As with the heat, there is another reminder of what life was like way back, way back here in August and September—time goes so fast in class. There is never enough time in class to accomplish all I wish in my headiest of hopes. As Mr. Hall taught me in French class at Gamble Junior High, “Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.” For the Francophobes in the group, that would be, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Ahhh…but it is not the same! Yes, time in class is still a precious commodity, but back in the beginning of the year, the period I dubbed “Scratch,” I had to corral these young scholars simply to open a notebook, hold a pen, restrain their every impulse. I gave out candy if they did the most basic student tasks—showing up on time, raising their hand, showing me a pen! It was candy to cajole. Now the “problem” as I careen through the centuries of world history is that they have so many questions! I may not get to something in class because they are so fired up by their own discoveries they have to ask question after question! And offer epiphany after epiphany!
As perspicacious Adam suggested a couple months ago, here is how he envisioned my students’ progress this spring: “You've reached The Poke. The students are starting to get it, though some need to be nudged a little bit more. In addition, pokes are discrete. An itch is felt continuously, but not as many students are causing you discomfort any more. And once most people have really gotten it, you'll have reached The Tickle, because you'll feel all giddy. And once everybody's gotten it, you'll find The Soothing. And when the year's done, you'll find The Relief.”
Guess what? We have made it to The Tickle. If you could have watched them this last week as we explored the First World War, and the headaches and back-room deals that culminate in the Treaty of Versailles, and heard them studying for a test last night, there is little doubt: they are now giddy about history. Go figure!
It may be hot out, and old Kronos might steal time from class, but it is not the same.
Last week I thought the students were finally ready for one of my favorite phrases in teaching history: the stew of simultaneity. I don’t know when this phrase popped in my head—maybe it goes back to Charlotte Latin, but the idea is that I want them to deal with many things happening at one time, and revel in that stew, and that they are all happening at one time, ahhh…what a great word—simultaneity. Here are my young Arab scholars, smiling as I offer them this tough word, and they start saying, “Hmmm, Mr. John, the stew is so nice. This stew of simultaneity!”
We spent our first week back from spring break dealing with what I called “on the cusp of the 20th century,” and we looked at the rise of Japan as a military power, and the erection of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the paintings The Kiss and The Scream, and the Rudyard Kipling poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” Eugenics, the science of racial superiority, and among other things, the bizarre string of assassinations of government leaders around the world by anarchists. After we learned about each one discretely, I put many of the items, and vocabulary words, on the board, in a random way, so there was a mess of words on the board. In class I asked each student to come up to the board, one at a time, and connect at least two things with a line and explain the connection. Now this is an exercise you can only do if students are prepared and willing to connect the dots. It takes outstanding evaluators, connectors, and reflectors to do this exercise. I tell you, they were giddy. I think it was Rashed who linked ‘Positivism’ and ‘Marxists.’ He believed that this perverse movement of Positivism (akin to “Don’t worry—be happy”) might have developed out of the fear that the Marxist promise of a class struggle would come to pass. This young man who had thought research and knowledge a few months ago was just printing a page off an internet site, offered a wonderful speculation.
In one class I made brownies. Now, I have to explain why this class got some brownies—it was not just a generous spirit. I had made a bet with this class, a class in which several members had had a hard time doing and submitting homework. So in February I promised that when we had 100% participation in submitting homework, they would get brownies. Do you know, it took until April for that 100%??? But—it happened, and so last week I made good on the promise. After I gave out the 17 brownies to the members of the class, there was considerable brownie goo left, so I decided I would offer pieces of brownies for the most stupendous epiphanies that day. One student remembered when I gave out candy for simply holding a pen, now I returned to food distribution but for much more higher-order work!
Here are some of the insights, as I remember them, which earned them gastronomic medals:
(1) “The Russo-Japanese War is a big deal because it is the first time in hundreds of years that a non-European power had beaten a European power.” A moment after she said that, another student realized that that military victory “trashed the theory of eugenics!!”
(2) Qusai was noticing that in Klimt’s painting, The Kiss, “there are rectangles all over the man’s coat, and circles all over the woman’s coat.” Scrappy Jude yelled out, “Oh my, that’s just like the Greeks! The same shapes! Men were always seen like rectangles and women with circles in their architecture!”
(3) Leen said, “Japan wanted to have its own version of European progress. The Japanese had to give up feudalism—even though it allowed for stability, it didn’t transform them. They got a plan.” And a moment after that, Farah yelled out, “and they paid for it with their silver mines! That’s how they paid for all the changes!”
I noticed that all three of those observations started with one person, and another young scholar piggy-backed…oh my gosh…are these guys listening to each other??? Is it possible? And the exclamation points I am using is just my way of trying to relay their giddiness! And mine!!
We have moments reaching poetry as well…Adel looks at all the stew of good and bad and suggested about the new inventions: “These new toys were the keys to the gate of Hell and the lock to the doorway of Heaven.” Raja cynically offered, “That “White Man’s Burden” stuff is just a justification to enslave people.” Reed drew a graph illustrating the development toward progress made by England, a steady climb over 100 years, and the meteoric rise of Japan in under 50 years. She loved her graph. Another Jude offered, “The Kiss reminds me of Leonardo’s drawing of the “Vitruvian Man” with the circles and the squares, that it is the meeting of male and female—the perfect kiss.”
As we debated whether it was a good time in which to live or not—in glamorous new cities like Vienna and Paris, using new inventions like the automobile and the radio, but also enduring terrorist assassinations and the nervous spirit pervading The Scream. Hamzah noted that in Munch’s painting The Scream “there were so many curly, confusing lines and that is like what is happening in the world and you look for the straight lines, the only way you can take to survive from the terror and the unconfidence you are living in.” Abdullah calmly waved his hand, and nonchalantly quoted a source we looked at in early April: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
A boy named Faris reliably comes up with provocative conclusions, and he often goes back to The Mission, a movie from which I showed some scenes back in March. The movie is about the Spanish colonization in South America. Faris stroked his chin (I had told them, it really does help to have good ideas to stroke your chin!) “The Scream reminds me of the moment in the movie The Mission when Robert DeNiro goes through a lot of agony in the river to get to a new moment of truth. The man in the painting is on a path, and he is on a path and we don’t know where he will end up.”
According to Adam, we get to end up in Soothing and Relief.
As with the heat, there is another reminder of what life was like way back, way back here in August and September—time goes so fast in class. There is never enough time in class to accomplish all I wish in my headiest of hopes. As Mr. Hall taught me in French class at Gamble Junior High, “Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.” For the Francophobes in the group, that would be, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Ahhh…but it is not the same! Yes, time in class is still a precious commodity, but back in the beginning of the year, the period I dubbed “Scratch,” I had to corral these young scholars simply to open a notebook, hold a pen, restrain their every impulse. I gave out candy if they did the most basic student tasks—showing up on time, raising their hand, showing me a pen! It was candy to cajole. Now the “problem” as I careen through the centuries of world history is that they have so many questions! I may not get to something in class because they are so fired up by their own discoveries they have to ask question after question! And offer epiphany after epiphany!
As perspicacious Adam suggested a couple months ago, here is how he envisioned my students’ progress this spring: “You've reached The Poke. The students are starting to get it, though some need to be nudged a little bit more. In addition, pokes are discrete. An itch is felt continuously, but not as many students are causing you discomfort any more. And once most people have really gotten it, you'll have reached The Tickle, because you'll feel all giddy. And once everybody's gotten it, you'll find The Soothing. And when the year's done, you'll find The Relief.”
Guess what? We have made it to The Tickle. If you could have watched them this last week as we explored the First World War, and the headaches and back-room deals that culminate in the Treaty of Versailles, and heard them studying for a test last night, there is little doubt: they are now giddy about history. Go figure!
It may be hot out, and old Kronos might steal time from class, but it is not the same.
Last week I thought the students were finally ready for one of my favorite phrases in teaching history: the stew of simultaneity. I don’t know when this phrase popped in my head—maybe it goes back to Charlotte Latin, but the idea is that I want them to deal with many things happening at one time, and revel in that stew, and that they are all happening at one time, ahhh…what a great word—simultaneity. Here are my young Arab scholars, smiling as I offer them this tough word, and they start saying, “Hmmm, Mr. John, the stew is so nice. This stew of simultaneity!”
We spent our first week back from spring break dealing with what I called “on the cusp of the 20th century,” and we looked at the rise of Japan as a military power, and the erection of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the paintings The Kiss and The Scream, and the Rudyard Kipling poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” Eugenics, the science of racial superiority, and among other things, the bizarre string of assassinations of government leaders around the world by anarchists. After we learned about each one discretely, I put many of the items, and vocabulary words, on the board, in a random way, so there was a mess of words on the board. In class I asked each student to come up to the board, one at a time, and connect at least two things with a line and explain the connection. Now this is an exercise you can only do if students are prepared and willing to connect the dots. It takes outstanding evaluators, connectors, and reflectors to do this exercise. I tell you, they were giddy. I think it was Rashed who linked ‘Positivism’ and ‘Marxists.’ He believed that this perverse movement of Positivism (akin to “Don’t worry—be happy”) might have developed out of the fear that the Marxist promise of a class struggle would come to pass. This young man who had thought research and knowledge a few months ago was just printing a page off an internet site, offered a wonderful speculation.
In one class I made brownies. Now, I have to explain why this class got some brownies—it was not just a generous spirit. I had made a bet with this class, a class in which several members had had a hard time doing and submitting homework. So in February I promised that when we had 100% participation in submitting homework, they would get brownies. Do you know, it took until April for that 100%??? But—it happened, and so last week I made good on the promise. After I gave out the 17 brownies to the members of the class, there was considerable brownie goo left, so I decided I would offer pieces of brownies for the most stupendous epiphanies that day. One student remembered when I gave out candy for simply holding a pen, now I returned to food distribution but for much more higher-order work!
Here are some of the insights, as I remember them, which earned them gastronomic medals:
(1) “The Russo-Japanese War is a big deal because it is the first time in hundreds of years that a non-European power had beaten a European power.” A moment after she said that, another student realized that that military victory “trashed the theory of eugenics!!”
(2) Qusai was noticing that in Klimt’s painting, The Kiss, “there are rectangles all over the man’s coat, and circles all over the woman’s coat.” Scrappy Jude yelled out, “Oh my, that’s just like the Greeks! The same shapes! Men were always seen like rectangles and women with circles in their architecture!”
(3) Leen said, “Japan wanted to have its own version of European progress. The Japanese had to give up feudalism—even though it allowed for stability, it didn’t transform them. They got a plan.” And a moment after that, Farah yelled out, “and they paid for it with their silver mines! That’s how they paid for all the changes!”
I noticed that all three of those observations started with one person, and another young scholar piggy-backed…oh my gosh…are these guys listening to each other??? Is it possible? And the exclamation points I am using is just my way of trying to relay their giddiness! And mine!!
We have moments reaching poetry as well…Adel looks at all the stew of good and bad and suggested about the new inventions: “These new toys were the keys to the gate of Hell and the lock to the doorway of Heaven.” Raja cynically offered, “That “White Man’s Burden” stuff is just a justification to enslave people.” Reed drew a graph illustrating the development toward progress made by England, a steady climb over 100 years, and the meteoric rise of Japan in under 50 years. She loved her graph. Another Jude offered, “The Kiss reminds me of Leonardo’s drawing of the “Vitruvian Man” with the circles and the squares, that it is the meeting of male and female—the perfect kiss.”
As we debated whether it was a good time in which to live or not—in glamorous new cities like Vienna and Paris, using new inventions like the automobile and the radio, but also enduring terrorist assassinations and the nervous spirit pervading The Scream. Hamzah noted that in Munch’s painting The Scream “there were so many curly, confusing lines and that is like what is happening in the world and you look for the straight lines, the only way you can take to survive from the terror and the unconfidence you are living in.” Abdullah calmly waved his hand, and nonchalantly quoted a source we looked at in early April: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
A boy named Faris reliably comes up with provocative conclusions, and he often goes back to The Mission, a movie from which I showed some scenes back in March. The movie is about the Spanish colonization in South America. Faris stroked his chin (I had told them, it really does help to have good ideas to stroke your chin!) “The Scream reminds me of the moment in the movie The Mission when Robert DeNiro goes through a lot of agony in the river to get to a new moment of truth. The man in the painting is on a path, and he is on a path and we don’t know where he will end up.”
According to Adam, we get to end up in Soothing and Relief.
Monday, May 12, 2008
The Heralded and Unheralded May 8
For a long time May 8 has been a very memorable day for me—a day I have relished and even celebrated. Strange, though, it isn’t a birthday or anniversary of anyone in my close knit circle of love (although May is “littered” with birthdays of friends of the highest order—I mean you’ve got Junko, Aunt Dot, Stephanie, Liz, Megan, Dawn, Mary, Rick, Gary, Anne, and my father—whew!—and a very special nephew who is 6 years old this very day!) nor a major “holiday” along the lines of Thanksgiving, Independence Day or Christmas.
But every May 8 I stop and remember how big of an impact May 8, 1985 had on me as a young historian. That particular May 8th was the 40th anniversary of what has become known as “V-E Day,” the victory in Europe at the end of the long Second World War. That spring semester I had had the wonderful good fortune to study in Salzburg, Austria (one of those times that easily ranks as among the best decisions of my life) learning so much about international diplomacy, music history, art history, traveling, and living with a family in gorgeous Salzburg. I was nearing the end of my European adventure, and traveling alone for a few days before meeting friends of my grandfather’s from his war days in England. On that May 8, I was in Aachen, Germany in the morning, and visited a famous cathedral, and happened upon a memorial service. It was a very solemn affair, with black-clad, teary Germans weeping some forty years later at what that crushing loss still meant for them. The pain in their faces haunted me that day as I contemplated how Germans must approach that date every May. That evening I ended up in Brussels, Belgium—not far at all geographically from Aachen, but light years away in terms of how they celebrated May 8. Fireworks lit up the sky in Brussels and I got caught up in a parade, a celebration, a veritable party for the victory of the Allies.
Ever since that day with my good luck to see how commemorations were different on both sides of WWII (or maybe it was good planning, I don’t remember which) I have kept in mind how the very same day can be observed in markedly divergent ways.
Ten years later, in 1995, I was in New York nearing the end of my year with the Klingenstein Fellowship (another time that easily ranks among the best decisions of my life) as May 8 came around for the 50th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities in Europe. I celebrated on the naval aircraft carrier the Intrepid, moored in Manhattan, and spent the sunny afternoon with hardy, happy WWII vets and hearing speeches from Big Names in NATO. I remember that many of the speeches harbored the same sentiment: given the 1991-92 implosion of the USSR, the world was entering a period philosophers now dubbed “the end of history.” Hmmmm…Another May 8 to file away for the existential scrapbook.
Here I am, savoring another May 8, in a new locale. I would add that I can easily mark the decision to come here as an important decision, and probably another, among the best decisions of my life. But this May 8 is a wholly different celebration/acknowledgement than I have ever contemplated. May 8, 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the independence of Israel. I will admit—I don’t believe I have ever really stopped and thought about Israel’s joy over independence after roughly two millennia of Jewish exile. But just as I found on that long ago May 8 in Aachen and Brussels—there is more than one side to a story, or truly, more than one way to observe a day of independence.
I knew that this year May 8 would have new meaning for me—last week as the date fast approached there were probably a dozen articles in The Jordan Times reviewing the 60th anniversary and what it meant to Jordanians. So, as any fairly intrepid historian might do, I began to interview my new Jordanian friends about what this anniversary meant to them as Jordanians. It is Aachen and Brussels all over again…
One friend said to me, “While there will be great fanfare in Israel on May 8, for 60 years Israel has been sitting on my heart. It kicked me out of my home, my nation, and deprived me of many things.” Our librarian referred to the fact that when Israel proclaimed independence, the new state also uprooted hundreds of thousands of people. This friend, along with nearly everyone else with whom I spoke, referred to the contrast of the Israeli joy to their naqba—their ‘catastrophe’ and the beginning of 60 years of violence and distrust.
I had an email from a friend recently telling me, “I hate to say it, but I imagine the readers of your blog are tired of hearing about it,” matter-of-factly bringing up conflict in the Middle East. Tell me about it. Imagine what this has been like for the people of this region over the last sixty years. But that is the beauty of a blog—I feel compelled to write about something, and you may or may not choose to read about it! Ha!
Certainly Israel has been one of the biggest success stories of modern times. A nation was reborn out of Holocaust survivors and uprooted Jewish communities who built a booming economy, created an innovative agriculture, and, correct me I am wrong, revived a dead language. They also sustained a democracy (however imperfect and dysfunctional democracies usually are) that is vibrant.
But also, as we look at commemorations of this version of May 8—Israel was born in war, and has lived by the sword ever since. In November, 1947, the United Nations acted to partition Palestine and end the British mandate in the area. According to historical record there were about 1.4 million Arabs who lived in Palestine, and by 1949 more than half of those had been displaced. What verb you choose to use says something about on what side of the fence you fall, for how you celebrate the Middle Eastern May 8. I read one article that said that “Palestinian scholars—and some Israeli scholars, say it was systematic ethnic cleansing ordered by Zionist leaders to clear the way for the Jewish state.”
Whatever “verb” you choose, it is interesting how poignant, how ever-present the stories of the refugees are—it is easy to find someone willing to discuss the effect of this diaspora on their family, the bitterness of dispossession and exile, and how they cling to a “right of return.” One of my dear friends at Hackley, the only Palestinian I had met before moving to Jordan, related to me her family’s story, and, in the most heart-wrenching part, confided that one of her parents continues to wear the family’s house key around the neck in the dear hope that they might return to the family home. Another colleague here reminisced: “We had houses and land and olives and grapes and prickly pears and dates. Now what do we have? Nothing.”
Of course those hundreds of thousands had to go somewhere—some fled to the United States, but many fled to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. From what my friends here say, refugees are treated poorly, especially in Lebanon (laws barring refugees from many professions, subjection to violence and massacre, etc.) Israel firmly opposes letting refugees return to their original homes (of course many were bulldozed decades ago, reminds a colleague). An editorial in the paper quoted Chaim Weizmann, one of the founders of Israel, calling this displacement of Palestinians “the line of less injustice.” I guess this was the belief that the persecuted Jews had to have their state even if it meant depriving Palestinians of their right to self-determination. Maybe the Israelis see this “right of return” as a kind of Palestinian Trojan Horse—believing that Palestinians want to return to their homes, their orchards, their villages, their churches, so that they can undermine the Jewish state from within.
Isn’t it simply about justice? Thousands of families were pushed out in the wars launched after Israel’s establishment. They have a right, a human right, to return to their homes if they desire. Of course, the ever-present violence and suicide bombing has inured us to the pain and struggle; we lose sight of the nearly 5,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis killed since the year 2000 over this issue.
There is violence. There is division. There is hopelessness. If you can imagine the famed painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso, you might say that the catastrophe of Guernica mirrors some of the catastrophe known to the Palestinians. Yet, in the horror of his black-and-white expose, Picasso also paints a tiny hand, almost obscured by the terrible incidences, but a hand, nonetheless, holding a little flower. Could it be the long view of history affording us some hope?
As I scanned the news for reports of such hope during the build-up to this anniversary, I found a tiny article, one of dozens my father clipped for me from The Cincinnati Enquirer (I will never be bored on a plane ride since my father makes sure I have plenty of reading he has clipped so lovingly for me!) that had something that seemed like that tiny flower Picasso placed in his work. The headline from this March 26, 2008 story reads, “Saudi King Calls For Talk Among Religions.” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has made what the reporter called an “impassioned plea for dialogue among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the first such proposal from a nation with no diplomatic ties to Israel and a ban on non-Muslim religious services and symbols.”
Maybe it is just another conference. The call does not discount the naqba my Jordanian friends suffer as they mark another year away from the heartbeat of their homeland, but finding that flower in the painting always changes Guernica from a resignation of despair to a flicker of hope, and if it took Jews 2000 years to recover a homeland, maybe my Palestinian friends will one day be able to speak of the naqba as a historical phenomenon. The end of such a historical phenomenon.
Wonderful May 8—so much to savor…
But every May 8 I stop and remember how big of an impact May 8, 1985 had on me as a young historian. That particular May 8th was the 40th anniversary of what has become known as “V-E Day,” the victory in Europe at the end of the long Second World War. That spring semester I had had the wonderful good fortune to study in Salzburg, Austria (one of those times that easily ranks as among the best decisions of my life) learning so much about international diplomacy, music history, art history, traveling, and living with a family in gorgeous Salzburg. I was nearing the end of my European adventure, and traveling alone for a few days before meeting friends of my grandfather’s from his war days in England. On that May 8, I was in Aachen, Germany in the morning, and visited a famous cathedral, and happened upon a memorial service. It was a very solemn affair, with black-clad, teary Germans weeping some forty years later at what that crushing loss still meant for them. The pain in their faces haunted me that day as I contemplated how Germans must approach that date every May. That evening I ended up in Brussels, Belgium—not far at all geographically from Aachen, but light years away in terms of how they celebrated May 8. Fireworks lit up the sky in Brussels and I got caught up in a parade, a celebration, a veritable party for the victory of the Allies.
Ever since that day with my good luck to see how commemorations were different on both sides of WWII (or maybe it was good planning, I don’t remember which) I have kept in mind how the very same day can be observed in markedly divergent ways.
Ten years later, in 1995, I was in New York nearing the end of my year with the Klingenstein Fellowship (another time that easily ranks among the best decisions of my life) as May 8 came around for the 50th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities in Europe. I celebrated on the naval aircraft carrier the Intrepid, moored in Manhattan, and spent the sunny afternoon with hardy, happy WWII vets and hearing speeches from Big Names in NATO. I remember that many of the speeches harbored the same sentiment: given the 1991-92 implosion of the USSR, the world was entering a period philosophers now dubbed “the end of history.” Hmmmm…Another May 8 to file away for the existential scrapbook.
Here I am, savoring another May 8, in a new locale. I would add that I can easily mark the decision to come here as an important decision, and probably another, among the best decisions of my life. But this May 8 is a wholly different celebration/acknowledgement than I have ever contemplated. May 8, 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the independence of Israel. I will admit—I don’t believe I have ever really stopped and thought about Israel’s joy over independence after roughly two millennia of Jewish exile. But just as I found on that long ago May 8 in Aachen and Brussels—there is more than one side to a story, or truly, more than one way to observe a day of independence.
I knew that this year May 8 would have new meaning for me—last week as the date fast approached there were probably a dozen articles in The Jordan Times reviewing the 60th anniversary and what it meant to Jordanians. So, as any fairly intrepid historian might do, I began to interview my new Jordanian friends about what this anniversary meant to them as Jordanians. It is Aachen and Brussels all over again…
One friend said to me, “While there will be great fanfare in Israel on May 8, for 60 years Israel has been sitting on my heart. It kicked me out of my home, my nation, and deprived me of many things.” Our librarian referred to the fact that when Israel proclaimed independence, the new state also uprooted hundreds of thousands of people. This friend, along with nearly everyone else with whom I spoke, referred to the contrast of the Israeli joy to their naqba—their ‘catastrophe’ and the beginning of 60 years of violence and distrust.
I had an email from a friend recently telling me, “I hate to say it, but I imagine the readers of your blog are tired of hearing about it,” matter-of-factly bringing up conflict in the Middle East. Tell me about it. Imagine what this has been like for the people of this region over the last sixty years. But that is the beauty of a blog—I feel compelled to write about something, and you may or may not choose to read about it! Ha!
Certainly Israel has been one of the biggest success stories of modern times. A nation was reborn out of Holocaust survivors and uprooted Jewish communities who built a booming economy, created an innovative agriculture, and, correct me I am wrong, revived a dead language. They also sustained a democracy (however imperfect and dysfunctional democracies usually are) that is vibrant.
But also, as we look at commemorations of this version of May 8—Israel was born in war, and has lived by the sword ever since. In November, 1947, the United Nations acted to partition Palestine and end the British mandate in the area. According to historical record there were about 1.4 million Arabs who lived in Palestine, and by 1949 more than half of those had been displaced. What verb you choose to use says something about on what side of the fence you fall, for how you celebrate the Middle Eastern May 8. I read one article that said that “Palestinian scholars—and some Israeli scholars, say it was systematic ethnic cleansing ordered by Zionist leaders to clear the way for the Jewish state.”
Whatever “verb” you choose, it is interesting how poignant, how ever-present the stories of the refugees are—it is easy to find someone willing to discuss the effect of this diaspora on their family, the bitterness of dispossession and exile, and how they cling to a “right of return.” One of my dear friends at Hackley, the only Palestinian I had met before moving to Jordan, related to me her family’s story, and, in the most heart-wrenching part, confided that one of her parents continues to wear the family’s house key around the neck in the dear hope that they might return to the family home. Another colleague here reminisced: “We had houses and land and olives and grapes and prickly pears and dates. Now what do we have? Nothing.”
Of course those hundreds of thousands had to go somewhere—some fled to the United States, but many fled to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. From what my friends here say, refugees are treated poorly, especially in Lebanon (laws barring refugees from many professions, subjection to violence and massacre, etc.) Israel firmly opposes letting refugees return to their original homes (of course many were bulldozed decades ago, reminds a colleague). An editorial in the paper quoted Chaim Weizmann, one of the founders of Israel, calling this displacement of Palestinians “the line of less injustice.” I guess this was the belief that the persecuted Jews had to have their state even if it meant depriving Palestinians of their right to self-determination. Maybe the Israelis see this “right of return” as a kind of Palestinian Trojan Horse—believing that Palestinians want to return to their homes, their orchards, their villages, their churches, so that they can undermine the Jewish state from within.
Isn’t it simply about justice? Thousands of families were pushed out in the wars launched after Israel’s establishment. They have a right, a human right, to return to their homes if they desire. Of course, the ever-present violence and suicide bombing has inured us to the pain and struggle; we lose sight of the nearly 5,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis killed since the year 2000 over this issue.
There is violence. There is division. There is hopelessness. If you can imagine the famed painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso, you might say that the catastrophe of Guernica mirrors some of the catastrophe known to the Palestinians. Yet, in the horror of his black-and-white expose, Picasso also paints a tiny hand, almost obscured by the terrible incidences, but a hand, nonetheless, holding a little flower. Could it be the long view of history affording us some hope?
As I scanned the news for reports of such hope during the build-up to this anniversary, I found a tiny article, one of dozens my father clipped for me from The Cincinnati Enquirer (I will never be bored on a plane ride since my father makes sure I have plenty of reading he has clipped so lovingly for me!) that had something that seemed like that tiny flower Picasso placed in his work. The headline from this March 26, 2008 story reads, “Saudi King Calls For Talk Among Religions.” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has made what the reporter called an “impassioned plea for dialogue among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the first such proposal from a nation with no diplomatic ties to Israel and a ban on non-Muslim religious services and symbols.”
Maybe it is just another conference. The call does not discount the naqba my Jordanian friends suffer as they mark another year away from the heartbeat of their homeland, but finding that flower in the painting always changes Guernica from a resignation of despair to a flicker of hope, and if it took Jews 2000 years to recover a homeland, maybe my Palestinian friends will one day be able to speak of the naqba as a historical phenomenon. The end of such a historical phenomenon.
Wonderful May 8—so much to savor…
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