Winter solstice has always been my New Year, not for any pagan belief system but for a darkness that comes on the heels of my birthday and the anniversary of my mother’s passing. Inside, at least, I tend to be still. There is no frenzied buildup to the actual holidays. This was reflected in the tone and temper of the talks I gave on Friday. I spoke to an entire sophomore class of 300 students broken up into eight sessions, 45 minutes each. Adding to the depth of my reflection, this event was held at my alma mater. Pomperaug is a regional high school in western Connecticut. Thirty years ago it was an assemblage of cow tipping pumpkin smashing river dipping yokels. Now it is an affluent stopover for people migrating into or out of Manhattan.
Rather than replicate the same talk over and over, subconsciously I was compelled to continue the narrative from one session into the next. If the students from different groups compared notes they would find they were the beneficiaries of a one-time event, while equally having missed out on seven others. I didn’t always show the same video either, but mixed in various clips from Mehan orphanage to the Art Party to the refugee camp and Kabul in general. I spoke about my journey, the individual kids, and the vision of democracy created from within. I spoke about the war and who is fighting it, not only for the opposition but also on our side the role class has played in the shaping of our military. I spoke about caring, and how I discovered what is great about America and what freedom truly is while stowed away in the orphanage. The extent to which the students were transfixed was revealed by their utter silence during the part of the video when Farzana reads Rumi and for fifteen seconds the children are shown screaming on the carnival ride, but with no sound. Questions were compelling and nuanced, increasing the level of discourse. For example, one tall blond boy with large eyeglasses asked if cultural differences modified the effectiveness of my teaching the orphans and similarly, their ability to learn. A girl who looked to be an athlete from the mold of Picaboo Street asked about diet and nutrition in the orphanage, and how it is the children look so healthy. By the time my last group of students filed in, my voice was cracking and my narrative had begun to waver. Still, this was the largest single group of the day, and I couldn’t allow myself to drop the ball. Just as I was introduced, it came upon me to forego all preambles and subject headings. I decided to tell the story of my last few days in Afghanistan. Every step of this narrative gave opportunity to weave issues of wider import, from the distribution of food to the refugees to running through the games I played with the younger children. Gender, women’s rights, culture, and even history have a place at the table of this story, culminating with the rooftop finger of whiskey given to me by Kaka Ryan, his ensuing reminiscence of five years of torture, civil war, Taliban and now the eight years of occupation and struggle. As his moonlit eyes looked into mine and told of how he would never forget me, so I looked into the eyes of the students before me, attentive, unglued from their routine, actively hinging their lives with the soldiers and marines, the suffering urchins and widows, recognizing in the orphans a bit of themselves, something essential, beneath their skin and not far from their core.
Mr. Bass, the history teacher who organized the visit is the only one to have experienced in its entirety what turned out to be my six-hour “talk”. He is a barrel chested, salt and pepper bearded kindly man dressed in wool with the soft eyes of the kind of teacher students might remember more as an uncle. He approached me after the last of the sophomores had filtered away. He wanted to say many things, but in the end just shook his head. His eyes were wet. He handed me $350 raised by the students and faculty, then grabbed his wallet and pulled whatever money was in there, stuffed it into my hand and wrapped my fingers around it into a fist. His voice shaking, he told me if there is ever anything I can do for you… and left it at that.
This experience was in the making long before I stepped into that school. Here I was being welcomed by my old football coach, my French teacher, English and Phys Ed teachers who somehow remember every detail about the Class of ’79, and I couldn’t help but wonder how far back a story can be set into motion. Whatever the case, these past few weeks have revealed the extent to which the wayfarer’s “boon” can be gifted again and again, only to increase the more it is given away. Two silver-haired men recently gave proof to the effects of this alchemic paradox. Only an hour from our meeting one of them connected me to the upper echelons of the United Nations as well as the headquarters of Rotary International, and the other wrote a check for five thousand dollars. Whether a random conversation at a holiday party or speaking at the Harvard Club, the narrative is a living, breathing entity. There is nothing to sell, only a story that is somehow more real than, as Frank Rich bluntly identified in his latest editorial, this decade of fraud. From Enron to Iraq, from John Edwards to Tiger Woods, from “Reality TV” to Wall Street the narrative has exhausted Americans of our wits, our ability to believe in anything worldly. But it doesn’t stop with us. Everywhere is a seeming endless array of smoke and mirrors. No wonder fundamentalism has surged in every major religion extant in every corner of human society. It appears to many as our only escape.
In the last few weeks I have spoken to some New York philanthropists, sixth graders from St. Pius elementary school, actors, builders, writers, veterans, entrepreneurs and even the denizens of my hometown from whence thirty years ago I ran away. Everywhere this notion on the airwaves there is some sort of culture war is proven to me to be a myth. Already I have in hand ten thousand dollars, the backing of an assortment of individuals and institutions intent on providing education to the orphans, and the interest and best wishes of some thousands of Americans, not for a spell of rhetoric I’ve concocted but for the universality of our experience. The only way out is through… goes the old lyric. That is how the myth is disempowered, replaced with something we can taste, hear, speak to and see with our own eyes. Something we can actually feel.
While giving a radio interview in Westerly, Rhode Island I fielded a call from a woman who with a deep breath and a sigh asked the most dreamy of questions. “When do you suppose,” she said, “people will stop treating each other inhumanely and realize we are all one?”
Increasingly, as I wander back to my beloved orphans by way of this immersion with my own people I see the oneness that woman spoke of is not so nearly as mythological as the notion we are destined to war ad infinitum. Peace exists all right, like the man donning Afghan clothes and speaking for six hours about transcending distance existed in the shy, goofy, curly haired boy I was when traipsing the hallways of Pomperaug High School so many years ago. All that remains is mere recognition.
