World Beginnings

  We sat on my balcony in Beirut overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. His name is Alex Moore and we met when I taught his son in Sri Lanka; he was staying with me while refreshing his memory of the city during the war. Sexy on so many levels. He still looked like the college quarterback; tall, fit, blond, real Southern sex. So many stories of his time in the Secret Service from eating cookies in the White House kitchen during Gerald Ford’s time, running beside Ford’s limo to helicoptering into Beirut from Cyprus, under the radar at midnight, after the Marine barracks were blown up in 1983. He was in the process of writing a fictional book and was revisiting a changed city.   It has now been published, Boundary Hunter, and is on Amazon. His style reminds me of David Baldacci with a similar storyline and a hot protagonist. Politically we were polar opposites and conversation soon turned to Muslims, which in his mind are all terrorists; but that is another topic. We moved o...

  One of my favorite activities in the school year was Week Without Walls, WWW. This was a time for students to learn and experience beyond the classroom. Teachers were in charge of planning the trip and there was a learning focus, to most of them. One that will stay with me forever, not my trip, was building bathrooms in Bali. We tend to think of Bali as an exotic vacation but there is extreme poverty off of the glitzy tourist paths and the students came back changed forever. It is important to point out that these students are extremely privileged, living in a rarified world of drivers, maids, cooks and gardeners. They’ve never cleaned anything in their lives.  Unsurprising, to those who know me, I always focussed on local animal shelters. My last year in Beirut our project was to build cat shelters for a woman who was feeding and caring for about thirty cats in a vacant lot across from her house. Students raised money through bake sales to buy all of the supplies, Then alon...

This is one of my favorite pictures from my time in Beirut. This well-dressed man, starched white shirt, silver cufflinks and polished Gucci loafers wanders down from the corniche after a long day in an air-conditioned office. He borrows a pole from a random fisherman. As he casts his line into the teaming Mediterranean, yesterday, today and tomorrow float away in the tide. Occasional low, deep murmuring voices, the smells of the sea, fish and men take him back long ago with his father and his father’s father. Soon he has left the screaming problems of today and he is on a Phoenician ship sailing to the Greek Isles with a precious cargo of olive oil in earthen jars. Too soon, his reverie is broken by a tug on the line. He carefully pulls his catch in, placing it in a bucket, leaving it for the others whose needs are greater. He trudges up the stairs to the crowded corniche and makes his way home to his luxurious flat, with walls of glass overlooking the sea. The sea air still clings to...