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.