From Christmas to Christmas

The last time I was this far from home during the holidays, it was 1993, I was living in Asahi Residence, a white three-story apartment building a mile from Yokota Air Base in Fussa-shi, Japan. I'd been married for six months and Becky was four months pregnant with Jonah. I was in the first year of a four-year enlistment, we missed our family and friends, and we must have wondered what in the world we'd gotten ourselves into.

Now, twenty-three years later, our kids all grown up and about the same age I was back then and they are consumed by formative experiences of their own, and I think about where we are today.

The year has been consumed with thoughts of the Middle East. Since John first called us on Christmas morning, our lives have revolved around this idea of living and working 6,900 miles from our home on the opposite side of the world. The sun rises at home after ours has set and we sleep while back home busies about their day. Samson gets on the school bus as we go to bed. Matt drives across the tundra of Renville County sipping coffee and listening to the radio and the ghostly hymn of the call to prayer drifts into our open window at 5 a.m. Mom keeps the axis fixed at Sumter Mutual keeping the connection with Silver Lake, the site of my own personal big bang and the early formation of what would become the universe that sustains the life I've led.  Dad sits in his chair, reading into the night as the moon lights the frozen surface of Lake John and its sparse village of fish houses. I walk down to the canteen after 5th period to buy some fattouch, a Lebanese salad I rely on for sustenance, seasoned with sumac spice--the same color as the berries on the sumac back home. Katie and Hallie send snapchats and we see them hours later and laugh together. I walk through the courtyards between the villas making a 45 minute circuit listening to an episode of the TED radio hour on my headphones. Oma is settled in out at the end of 500th lane, a fire glowing behind the glass door of the wood stove in the corner, while she slices cucumbers for an artfully quartered sandwich snack before posting a message on facebook. The refrigerator hums in the darkened room of the 3rd floor staff lounge waiting for Henke to trip the automatic lights when he comes in to measure out coffee, fill the reservoir with water and begin again a day at AHS. We finish a movie late into the night and lay out our clothes for work the next morning and then go to sleep.

I am the sum of all my experiences, of my people, here in the final days of 2016. It has been one year since I began this journey and I'm happy and miss my friends and family and hearing the winter wind in the branches of the pines surrounding the cabin. But I need to remember this time, too, here at 6 a.m. while Amy, love of my life and fellow adventurer, is still asleep in the next room of villa W18C, Sara Compound, Aziziyah, Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, this 16th of December 2016.

Merry Christmas.

Cows Know Nothing of Eternity

A string of cows tread single file, bags heavily swaying,
dull hooves pulverize the ground into a floury cumulus.
Turned toward the familiar barn door,
the comfort of routine goads them from pasture to stanchion.
Morning and evening, the biochemical process,
whereby receptors fire under experience and
invisible circuits click open then close
a maw full of cud while heads rise and fall
with each lumbering step as they steer
a bovine docility, lumbering
towards a predefined zone of the known.

The Reptile in Our Brain

See how that angry red eye opens, then closes?

A flash of morse code winks coordinates.

The tail of a fox moves rhythmically in the road ditch ahead.

We close the distance.

A cell phone tower blinks mechanically.

Only rainwater on a spider web woven in the branches of a spruce.

Just the wind anxiously inflating a tattered plastic grocery bag

hopelessly twisted in the dried stalks of dead milkweed in the ditch.

Color drains back into the dawn and

The kodachromatic slideshow in the rec room sharpens

into the high definition insistence on veracity.

So the mundane march continues

until the elemental charge of the scrape of a bear's claw

on the yellow vinyl siding outside the living room window at night.

This Day

Dawn fades in,
or erupts-
but birds still chatter,
sounds will gather,
and the break of day
begins another chapter
of unnumbered pages,
even as the final morning star
waves goodbye.

Conversion Therapy

The assignment was for my seniors to read an article about the science of love as part of their unit on the theme of love and loss and then answer a few questions about some of the specific claims that were made. Zeinab sat alone at the table while the rest of her small, distracted class pretended to do their work on the couches that lined the center of the library and chatted about the election results. They all had chromebooks awkwardly perched in their laps as they pecked responses into a google doc.

The table was actually four tables pushed together around which fifteen students could sit, but Zeinab sat alone looking at the laptop screen, her hands gripping the edge of the table, her cheeks were red and she looked preoccupied. I knelt by her chair and asked if she needed any help then I saw that she was embarrassed as tears filled her eyes but hadn't yet run down her cheeks.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"What do you need, Zeinab?"

She just replied the usual, teenager speak.

"Nothing." But there was something so I gently pressed.

"Do you need to talk to somebody." This is my go-to line when a kid clearly is upset but not sure if it's in my league to handle. She just shook her head and wiped the tears that now ran down her cheeks.

"Do you want to go sit on the sofa in the hallway?" She agreed and I asked the librarian to watch my class. I grabbed some tissues and led her out into the hall, and sat down.

"What can I do for you?' I asked, but she just said nothing.

"What's on your mind?" I kept at it.

"It's so stupid." She said. "You'll think it's stupid."

"What is it?"

"It's the election," she said. It was Wednesday afternoon, so it was late at night in the states and Donald Trump had been declared the winner of the presidential election.

"My brother goes to college in the U.S. and I've wanted to go to college in the U.S. (University of Chicago) my whole life and now I'm not going to able to."

She was feeling every bit of the result of the election and had clearly been listening to the language of the campaigns. She was worried about her brother but also worried her opportunity to follow him had now disappeared. She went on to say that her family was from Syria and she had lived in Saudi Arabia her whole life.

I explained to her that I was surprised by the result, too, but, while I knew what was said during the campaign,  I reassured her that I didn't think she'd have anything to worry about. She went on to say that as someone who has lived in the middle east she'd witnessed some of the "shadiest" politicians around, but Trump "is fucking crazy."

We talked about the danger of getting too wrapped up in the news, especially facebook. She already knew this, though. She's a smart kid. I said politicians say a lot of things to get elected, some more than others, but in the U.S. the president doesn't control the government and he'll have advisors that would check the kind of rhetoric used in the campaign and he'll have to work with the Congress.

Then she asked me if it was true that Mike Pence supported conversion therapy for gay people. I said I didn't know, but that no matter what a politician thought about it, the country had already settled that issue.

We sat there together for a few more minutes and then the bell rang and class was over. I told her to try not to worry too much and I'd see her tomorrow.

Ripple River

A couple of years ago,  I was running on the path around Rippliside, a few blocks from our house. The loop circled the elementary school and the city park, baseball fields, hockey rink, skate park and picnic area. It's one mile length was a convenient marker to build up stamina, always knowing how little or how much my muscles ached at a point in comparison to the last time.

The Ripple River meandered along the edge of the park and provided a natural boundary along which the running path followed its contours before pulling away and turning back towards the baseball field and the elementary school. I always felt lucky living so close to the park and appreciated the city's maintenance of it.

Along the river's edge between the path and a dogleg that brought the river into the park was a bench that in the spring was in the middle of a pool of water as the river came over the bank and in the middle of summer was in a groomed area of grass.

On this day, as I ran out of breath and thought about supper or what I was going to watch on TV that evening I saw from across the park that someone was sitting on the bench looking out at the river as it made its slow turn inward. I still had some distance to go before I approached the place and as a runner of questionable commitment, I appreciated the change in scenery.

As I drew closer, I saw something white in the grass at her feet. She didn't turn to look at me but kept staring at the river passing in front of her. The profile of her face was calm but focused and while she was not a young woman, she wasn't old either. In her lap, she cradled a telephone--not a cell phone but the receiver of a landline phone with a short curly phone line attached to a white push button phone, which sat on the bench next to her. The cord that plugged into the wall trailed into the grass at her feet. I kept running around the circle to eventually complete another mile, but when I got back to this same bend in the river, she was gone.

I was tempted to make a joke of this and share the experience with others but there was something about the scene that held my tendency to joke in check and I never did tell anyone.

Recently, as I researched material for class, I read an essay by Courtney E. Martin about the benefits of keeping connections with lost loved ones. In her essay, she referenced a story about a man in Japan following the 2011 Tsunami which was later part of an episode of This American Life. I selected the essay for my seniors as we read material for our theme on love and loss. Before they read the essay, I told them the story of the woman I encountered in the city park. They all wanted to know what happened next like I was setting them up for some sort of revelation. I just asked them to read the essay.

I don't know what the woman I saw in the park that day was doing or why she had that phone in her lap. I don't need to know, but I'd like to think she was just doing what she needed to do.

Venn Diagram

The first quarter is nearly over. I've been trying very hard to be a good teacher to my students and a positive and contributing member of the teaching staff. I strive to be positive with my students but firm when I need to be--as much as my personality will allow. I try to model patience, gratitude, and understanding with varying degrees of success. Sometimes I even try to teach stuff. I am grateful for the opportunity to do this work here in Saudi Arabia. It is no less of an honorable endeavor here than it is for my friends back in Minnesota.

No matter the interpersonal confusion within a system or the general backwardness of a place where the tail often wags the dog and the forest is lost from view because everyone has been directed to put their head inside of a single tree or we communally fixate on our ability to describe, admire and talk about all of the educational tools one has at their disposal (even though a hammer remains the tool of choice) there are still 15-30 kids sitting in each classroom waiting, oblivious of the machinations and ambient clabber playing at a frequency only people with advanced degrees in educational leadership can hear.  [that may be a run-on]

Sometimes I imagine animated shorts, the kind you catch a glimpse of during the Academy Awards ceremony but never get to see the whole thing. One of them goes like this. A girl (or boy) stands before an audience trying to make themselves understood but each time a member of the audience whispers to their neighbor or looks at their phone or the clock, a portion of that girl disappears like a character beamed off a hostile planet on Star Trek, but they proceed to articulate their point. A person at the back of the room giggles at something her friend has whispered and before you know it the shoulder or torso of the girl at the front fades out. Someone else checks their snap chat and half her leg vanishes. The girl exists only in so far as the energy of the space is not violated, but each time a violation reoccurs another piece of her dissolves. At some point the audience is left just staring at a google slide waiting for a bell to ring when they will get up and go on to the next room and try it again.

Soul Pics

Last night our new friend, Ben, spoke of Sara in a way I felt but hadn't articulated before. He said it doesn't have a soul. I see what he means, what with all of the ornate gardens and immaculately swept streets lined with pruned trees and sidewalks and villa after villa that looks exactly the same except for the minor efforts to individualize them, plants, welcome mats, wind chimes and bikes parked out front. Indian men washing vehicles under the carport canopies, Indian men trimming the gardens in the back ("Hi, Boss"), Indian men selling me my milk at the grocery store ("Thanks, Boss"), Indian men (Sanjay, to be specific) cooking lambchops or salmon on the grill for all the hungry people unwinding at the end of the work week, Indian men driving three wheel bicycles with baskets full of supplies around the compound heading to or from jobs that need to be accomplished, just like Dave Rom drives his plumbing truck back and forth around Aitkin county. There are plenty of pickups, too. Yep, white Toyotas, everywhere, with the Saudi Catering Company Logo on the side that makes me think of the Dharma Project from the TV show Lost, every time, other apt comparisons: The Truman Show, The Stepford Wives, Groundhog Day. Occasionally I see a calico house cat on the hunt walking through the garden out the back window or sliding between the villas and running across the road under the street lamp at night. The cat is a like a an exclamation point at the end of a run-on sentence.

Ben is right to an extent, although a place is also about what you bring to it. We create our own reality, especially here, where everything is secure (seeming) and gated, at least the two institutions that will come to define our life in Saudi Arabia.

Yesterday afternoon there was a celebration at school. The social committee, about six women, organized a potluck (I brought potato salad) for the staff that was also a baby shower for Niha, who is about to give birth any day. There were a pile of gifts. But that is not the only thing it was. It was also a welcome to the new staff members in the high school along with a small gift for each of us, a celebration of the July - September birthdays and a best dressed contest judged by the principal and the vice principal as everyone was asked to wear pink or blue in honor of Niha's baby.

The high school vice principal and Niha

Then, there were the pictures--lots and lots of pictures, small group pictures, large group pictures, pictures of the food, pictures of departments, pictures of receiving the welcome gifts, pictures of the birthday people. It was joyous. The women (there are only three male teachers) were ebullient in their colorful clothing and they danced around and laughed and so many were just overcome with joy.

The High School Staff 

Some of us more reserved types, hung back and observed but it was filled with energy and goodwill. They had done this before and loved it. It was the first time since I've been here that I had a real sense of being welcomed to the staff and saw how excited they were about us as evidenced by the steady stream of selfies. I have a great picture with my adopted English department home away from home. There has been enough time now sitting through the interminable, mind-numbing meetings and we are coming to know each other and getting comfortable, slowly forming a bond that's going to naturally develop in a small group of people working toward a common purpose in the face of an educational bureaucracy that is even more of an alphabet soup of acronyms than back home--IPGP, KUD, UBD, PLC, ad infinitum.

Nishat, Sadaaf, Humaira, Me, Asmaa

This is the reality.  I think it's the recognition of the insanity (or inanity) of a administration that keeps those they administer sane (or enraged, dumbfounded,  punchdrunk, etc.). There are problems everywhere, but here, just like there, it's the people, my people, and my students that matter. Take care, friends.

On this 50th Anniversay of Star Trek

This solo mission
of space exploration,
accreted psychic meditations,
tuned up
cosmic perambulations
incontinental
blasts of flash frozen
astronaut excrement
destined
to drift soundlessly,
immemorially
through
the vacuum of space

Flux Capacitor

Yesterday I felt funny, like my underwear was on backward or something. The day and my expectations for its progression did not align and so no matter what lense I tried to look through, it appeared to me out of focus and time was thick and lacked any kind of viscosity.

My friend Chris thinks he is still suffering from a bout of culture shock and maybe that's what it feels like sometimes. We anticipate the cost of our moves so that it becomes second nature--both the quality of time and what that time can purchase.

Yesterday, everything was mismarked--either over priced or under priced and I felt like either someone didn't know what the hell they were doing or I was being taken advantage of and there was nothing I could do about it.

At ten o'clock in the morning I thought it was three o'clock in the afternoon. I ran around the perimeter of the compound on two separate occasions, once early in the day and once later, probably trying to gain a sense of equilibrium, wrap my head around the invisible clock, the fields of energy that we operate within--but it was not to be.

Now here I am the next morning writing this, awareness of my perspective reclaimed.

 The feeling I had yesterday wasn't my underwear, the lubrication of my minutes or some cosmic blue light special--just Saudi Arabia messing with me.

The Journey

This morning I listened to an Onbeing podcast and tuned out the conversations in the van. I looked out at the small, scalloped drifts of sand partially concealing random old tires from vehicles of different sizes scattered across the landscape. Our back route to school is particularly ruinous. Each day we pass by a lone toilet gleaming white and standing alone out in the sand, another half a kilometer and there's an overturned sofa half drifted over. As we turn the corner and slow for the intermittent speed bumps we pass by an entire neighborhood of city streets and light poles presumably laid out by some city planner, only there are no buildings, just streets laid out in blocks and a vast boulevard that stretches around it lined with dead palm trees each fallen over in the same direction as if they’d melted under the heat of the sun. The light poles stand erect, some straight and others at crazy angles that communicate chaos. We turn on to the four lane highway and begin the middle stretch of the trip where there are always two large excavators with enormous jackhammers affixed to their cast iron proboscis chipping away at a hill of stone while a road is being constructed into the distance behind them. Meanwhile, our talkative friend, a Jacksonville Jackie Gleason with a dash of Paul Giamatti holds forth in a blast of anecdotes and commentary on a forty minute loop occasionally broken by other van mates squeezing in their own words edgewise and abbreviated. We pass trucks of Arab men who stare shamelessly at the unclothed arms and uncovered heads of the Western women they find alongside them on their morning stretch of road. As we approach the last few blocks, there is a vast urban lot covered in trash and the occasional skinny stray dogs that sniff and probe the edges of a giant putrid pond, a kind of fountain of filth with a shore of trash rimmed by plastic bottles; the water inexplicably rises and then recedes. Yesterday, it was over the road and our driver slowly rolled through but today it is back from the road. We pull up to the gate of our school where what appear to be two freshly employed men in ill fitting polyester uniform shirt and pants roll mirrors around the underside of our van as we pause before pulling into the courtyard to be deposited at the back entrance.

This is enclave living. People arrive and depart the school for the most part in small white passenger vans, some with curtained windows and others without, from which they are collected or deposited from their islands in the ocean of Saudi culture. Their original lives aren’t here but their home country--Pakistan, India, Lebanon, Syria, South Africa, places that may be imperiled by war or riddled with economic strife or simply a lack of opportunity. Maybe some, like us, just wanted to do something different. Their husbands are businessmen or engineers or doctors or college professors here, where they practice their vocation within certain limits but are safe from the vagaries of statelessness, as they’ve been allowed to be here because they have something valuable to offer. I am one of these people. I teach their children. My students, clutch SAT practice books to their chest and snapchat their friends, day dream of playing video games after school or hope for the opportunity to play basketball or participate in drama club. Girls giggle around a magazine as they read quizzes and lists shaded with innuendo and boys pull books from the shelves on virginity and terrorism and joke and laugh. “Bin Laden is a Saudi?” One asks incredulously. “Egypt didn’t want the statue of liberty?” “I hate reading.” “Is this ok?” as he shows me a slim picture book. Kids.

The librarian, a lovely Indian women whose eyes are magnified by thick glasses glides through her presentation in an incomprehensible, musical accent occasionally stopping to scold a student who doesn’t appear to be paying attention. “You’re smiling; this boy is not listening!" She pauses for effect. "This is for you!” She pleads. Embarrassed, he is quiet. Then she lifts her gaze and continues with instructions on how to log into a research database.

Meanwhile, the floors are ceramic tile, the walls are concrete, the ceiling tiles are a non porous plastic and the students speak in a variety of accents creating a cacophonous clatter I am only beginning to understand. But it will come.

Convocation

At the end of our district convocation at the Dahrhan campus we made our way through the gate, returning our visitor pass lanyards to the guards through a little drawer at the bottom of a window where they then returned the identification left when we'd arrived. Just outside was a long narrow walkway covered by a canopy to shield us from the sun as we waited for the van to collect us for transport back to our villa.

It was a busy area of women and children waiting for rides, some clumsily donning their abayas and others, like us, climbing into white Toyota passenger vans where we buckled our seat belts, the sweat evaporated from our bodies and gave our lives to the drivers, men who did battle everyday on the roads of Dammam and Al Khobar where it seems no traffic rules are followed and vehicles honked their horns, jostled for position, slowed down, sped up, avoided collision and encountered close calls, all as a matter of course.

Just as we pulled away, my friend motioned for me to look down into the small white car alongside us where a woman sat in the passenger seat, her head and body entirely covered in black except for the small eye opening in her niqab. She was the senior member of a department at the high school, always beautifully covered in layers of colorful fabric and her head perfectly wrapped, covering her hair, ears and neck framing her face alone. She spoke confidently and with purpose and it was clear that her colleagues respected her judgement. I exchanged a glance with her, looking for what I'd heard as she turned from us and her husband pulled away from the side of our van and we turned and made our way back to the compound.

Swimming at Night

Last night I swam outside in the pool while the full Arabian moon hung overhead and the call to prayer sounded in the distance. A few BAE guys were gathered around the outdoor restaurant gesturing with their arms and reacting to one another with facial expressions I couldn't read. The air was thick and heavy and pushed me back to Waukenabo and a Minnesota night when I had the same view as this Middle Eastern one. Clay and Ann hung on the side of the pool and chatted with Amy, slowly getting to know one another. Carolyn swam alone on the other end of the pool taking in all of the changes that brought her to this place. Chris had left earlier, frustrated, he walked home after returning from an excursion to purchase a guitar from a local vendor where neither the quality nor the price were satisfactory, but what could he do? He wanted to make music and so far this was all there was. Until we have our iqamas and feel our feet beneath us, the uncertainty will remain.

Traveller

A small tuft of bog has broken loose and drifted into the center of the lake. It looks lost and alone as it moves further from its source. This is the natural order of things it seems, a conspicuous separation, an imperceptible severing of the fibers and humus and peat, the loose strands hanging bare and exposed in the deep water, the dry grasses bent in the stiff wind , new grass bright green and thick hugs the surface of the hummock as it drifts with a wind toward a new margin somewhere across the lake.

Satellite

A tangerine moon stares through the spruce trees as stars reveal themselves in the night sky, multiplying, first one or two then too many to count. And the coolness of the air... What person isn't overcome by this vastness, this space? There's no quantifying or qualifying what I see from my front porch. Then, a starlight like the others, moving steadily, interminably across the sky, so closely blending in, but for the linear projection, the controlled velocity, predictable in its human intention. It glides beneath--a soft tear in the fabric of the firmament.

Gone

Whatever it was is lost now to the low lying place behind the tamaracks. An object, a child, a feeling, that idol you worshipped and allowed to define you is buried in the peat preserved for another to find, identify and apportion themselves to.
It's like that, isn't it? So long as you know it's there and understand that it can't be rediscovered by you. You've buried it, but exhumation is no longer possible.
Reanimation is unnatural. The result is a dead wish, moldering on the edge of our desire, tender and soft and malignant.
You must make new and leave the anthropology to those more qualified. Return your shovel to the shed and just remember.

What is this?

What is this that we walk to desolate places and sit? Quiet, isolated places where the sea gulls scream or the wind whispers in the pines. Is it a taking stock somehow of our inner selves to see if it is well with our soul? Or do we wander around a store of fine gifts, examining, turning over in our minds of what we could have if we were willing to pay the price? Too often we gently replace each object on the shelf and move on.
But what if we didn't?
These questions by now are tired and shopworn, yet essential to be asked because it is the asking that may permit us to pay the price.

Mow Carefully

I have a good friend who once told me if I found an eagle feather not to pick it up or touch it because in his Native American spiritual beliefs it has sacred qualities. I understood that it would be disrespectful to alter it, sort of like desecrating a church, I suppose. So later, as I mowed the trail near the giant, old red pine in our yard,  I looked up at the eagle’s nest which has been there for as long as I can remember and again admired its massive size and position atop the last thick limbs of the tree before it begins to taper off.  This time, however, there was a feather on the ground in the path ahead of me. Heeding my friend’s request, I stopped the mower, got off, and gently pushed the feather into the tall grass at the edge of the trail and continued on with my mowing.

Later I looked up the significance of the eagle feather and read that it symbolized great strength, courage, leadership and prestige and that the bald and golden eagles are considered sacred birds. They only have two eggs and this is a reminder of both the dichotymous and binary relationships in our world.

I turned off the computer and thought, it is a story, no different than those told to me during Sunday school and in church when I was younger. But that was not the point. This story, like all of them, is only meaningful because of what the hearer or reader brings to it. To the story of the eagle feather, I bring the love I have for my friend and so when I moved that feather from my path, I respectfully acknowledged his path and was glad. 

Crossbay Lake

From here the north knows no boundaries. It does not recognize state or province, village, hamlet or city, but the north is there in all of the sublime mystery that drives people to go, that pulls people toward it out of a need to discover for themselves that which they cannot find in themselves. While it may not even exist and we fool and deceive ourselves in myth, it is no more or less valid than all of the myths by which we live. 

First Day

Here is where I end up with my students, contemplating this line, parsing its language and the meanings it suggests. Fitzgerald transformed Gatsby's tragic quest for a return to an innocent past into an observation of what it meant to be part of this vast country--suggesting Gatsby's delusion may be ours as well.   

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

It may be a while before I see that line again, as today, my first day unmoored from my world as an Aitkin High School teacher, I begin living it.

Between the World and [Him]...

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in brutal prose of his experience as a black man in America where he uses his body as a motif for the realities of existing in a place that is built on the destruction of bodies. It is a letter to his son that tells of growing up in Baltimore, the school system, his family, his college education at Howard and his time overseas--of the recent spate of well publicized deaths of black people at the hands of police officers and of a man named Prince Jones whose story comes to us in part from Prince's mother's perspective, a woman born of soul crushing poverty who had risen through hard work, determination and persistence to be a successful medical professional and had built a home and life based on all of the rewards she has earned, but her son, too, was killed. Those rewards could not save her son. Coates is the sum of his experiences which have led him to fear for the safety of his son, and, while his son grows up in a different world than he did, it is still too familiar to allow complacency to undermine one's ability to forget the road traveled. To forget that road is to forget the lessons and warnings that portent the ever-present possibility of the destruction of one's body.