The Foreign Service Officer's Favorite Post

A few weeks ago I was feeling overwhelmed by health issues, thinking I might need to retire early from the Foreign Service, and was looking back at my career as a foreign service officer. Foreign service officer is abbreviated as FSO. We use a lot of acronyms in the Foreign Service (FS). What were the highlights of my career as an FSO? What were my favorite assignments? Did I accomplish anything? For that last question, it's really this: Did I help people, make their lives better? That's an important one. I left behind a career as a social worker helping refugees assimilate into American society to become an FSO. I felt that as a social worker I was serving my community and my country. I did not feel like I was moving onto a higher calling by becoming an FSO. I was leaving a higher calling behind. So, it's important to me that in this FSO career I did something to help people. However, I'm probably saving that for a later post. 

Here, I'll take an easier route and reveal my favorite four as an FSO. The answer surprised me. I'm in the middle of my fifth tour. My career began in Arlington, VA with about nine month's worth of training, two thirds of that language. Not a highlight. Not my favorite assignment by any means, and technically not my first tour. Studying Mandarin Chinese language for six months was painful. There are much better ways to learn a language than the Foreign Service Institute (FSI, now NFATC) method. I had been looking forward to language training. Paid to learn a language; how awesome is that! Instruction methods for Mandarin at FSI were old school, not a good thing in my opinion. And for six months there was no escaping needing to think in Chinese, always the pressure to learn more, study more, memorize more, think more in Chinese, and finally talk, talk, talk in Chinese. My wife is a native Mandarin Chinese speaker and comes from a Malaysian Chinese background. Encouragement for her means constant criticism, or constant exhortations to study more, study harder. I generally like talking/speaking in Chinese, communicating. I don't like it when my wife is constantly grimacing, correcting me, and ever other sentence telling me to study more, study harder, and then gradually, little by little, and with a lot more grueling study and practice I will be able to communicate correctly. 

Obviously scratch off that initial training assignment as a career highlight or favorite. I think people go into the FS dreaming about their favorite place to be assigned, i.e., their number one post to work and live. I didn't think about this too much. I was just excited to make it into the Foreign Service. That said, when I did think about it, I mildly dreamed of Central Asia, Mongolia or Kyrgyzstan, the further places from the USA, foreign and isolated. I padded out those dreams with open spaces, barren mountains, the occasional sheltered lake and mountain stream in a pine forest with fresh, crisp air. Or, I could have dreamed of Central Africa. That also seems incredibly foreign and distant from the USA. However, I knew my wife would never go in for an assignment to Africa, and I don't like jungle  To finalize entrance into the FS as an FSO, one must sign an agreement that she or he is worldwide available. So, technically I knew we could be assigned to a post in Africa. The Department of State (DOS) told me to expect China. 

Let's get beyond training. My posts have been Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Washington D.C., Hanoi, and Maputo. My favorite place to live was Rio. We lived near the base of the Dois Irmaos, or Two Brothers, the picturesque pair of mountains or hills seen in the distance from Ipanema Beach. I loved Rio for the mountains and the views from the tops, which always included the sea when looking east. The beaches, famous and otherwise, were fine. I am a mountain person and Rio is defined as much by mountains as it is by beaches. Women in thong swim suites, women unashamed of their bodies regardless of age and shape, were a bonus. A daily bicycle commute to work that included riding along Leblon, Ipanema, and Copacabana Beaches, then past the famous Pao de Acucar, or Sugarloaf Mountain, was almost unreal as the perfect bicycle commute. Our children were young while we were in Rio, and the locals absolutely adore children. It proved to be an entry way to meeting many Cariocas, the Brazilian slang for local folks from Rio. Cariocas are generally very buoyant, vibrant people. My wife love this about Rio, loved the music and dancing that seemed to come to Cariocas so freely. It was a wonderful time to be alive as a family in Rio. Work was work. 

Family hike up the Dois Irmoes.  My favorite mountain, The Pedra da Gavea (The Rock of Gavea), is in the background, far left with its summit in the clouds. The favela of Rosinha is in the middle distance. 

But, looking back, our positing in Rio was not the highlight of my career as an FSO. To my surprise, as I took everything into account, it was Washington D.C.. Actually, work in Washington D.C. and life in Pimmit Hills, Virginia.  I felt like a normal American again. We rented an extremely small house in one of America's first subdivisions built for veterans of WWII. The house had a big yard, as did all of the little houses in Pimmit Hills. Our house had a front porch. We had a small garden. I did a lot of gardening, tree trimming, raking leaves, and mowing the lawn, pulling weeds from the lawn. Our girls could walk to school going down the street and then across a small stream and through the edge of some woods, although sometimes they road the long, yellow school bus. We walked to parks, had picknicks in the back yard, jumped on the free trampoline we found on Craigslist. The girls had friends in the neighborhood who could easily come for visits. There was a 7-11 just up the street a few houses away, which brought all sorts of characters to the edge of the neighborhood, and not far beyond that a small shopping center with a Trader Joe's that I essentially used as our fridge, being able to walk there in two minutes. We went for hikes along the creeks leading to the Potomac River almost every weekend. I rode my bicycle to work most days, sometimes taking the metro. My bike commute was along multiuse paths most of the way and was a 12-mile ride in one direction. Towards the end I crossed the Potomac River on the I-80 bridge with views of national monuments and Georgetown University's towers. I passed the Kennedy Center and the Watergate Hotel. 

My girls think of their three years in Pimmit Hills fondly, almost like home. I'd never consider Virginia or the D.C. metro area to be home, so it's odd to see that my girls do. They were comfortable there. I think life made a little more sense and had a nice, identifiable rhythm they fit into. I felt rather normal, which is a good thing. I was happy to not deal with house keepers, cooks, and nannies, do everything on our own, pay normal bills. The commute to work was good and healthy. Work in Children's Issues felt fulfilling, like I was serving a higher good, or at least a higher purpose. Senior FSO's always diplomatically say their best tour is their current tour. For me, that third tour in Washington D.C. was it. I can't bring myself to be diplomatic and write otherwise.  

The kids playing in Pimmit Run, not far behind the house in Pimmit Hills, Virginia. 

Work was not just work. For my Washington D.C. tour I was a country officer in Consular Affairs' Office of Children's Issues (CI). My job was to resolve international parental child abduction (IPCA) cases. I more or less chose the assignment as my number one spot when I added it to my assignment bid list. It was not a popular place to work, but the Special Advisor for Children's Issues visited the U.S. Consulate General in Rio while I was in the middle of my bidding process. She gave me an earful on the nature of IPCA work. What stuck was that I could help people in crisis every day. "Soul crushing!" one of my managers in Rio called it.  Those cases never get resolved, so you talk to people in crisis every day and there's nothing you can do. "It's perfect for you!" another one of my manager's told me. I respected them both and went for getting my soul crushed because it's perfect for me. As soon as I put CI on my bid list with those nine other "dream" assignments, CI was the guaranteed destination for my third tour.  

I'm not to go into any detail on the abductions I worked to resolve. I will write that I was fortunate to have two mentors, older ladies, Giny and Ann. They were long serving civil servants in CI, had both endured almost unthinkable trauma with their own children, and could be forces of nature in resolving international parental abductions, bringing kids back to their left behind parents (LBPs). Many cases do go unresolved. Country officers talk to the LBPs on the phone and in person, time after time, year after year, and there's nothing that can be done to help them short of sanctioning the countries where their children have been taken. The DOS (specifically CI and the Special Advisor for Children's Issues) must review foreign governments for non-action in helping return abducted children to LBPs and eventually these countries can face sanctions if the governments fail to take action. Who knows if sanctions would resolve anything. They have been threatened. LBPs with no other options often demand sanctions. I don't blame them. What else can they do? The majority of countries are not party to the Hague Convention on IPCA, so there are no international laws that can help them, no resource other than to negotiate with the taking parents (TPs) or demand the DOS sanction the countries where their children were taken.  I'll simply write that Giny and Ann were inspiring and trained me well. I resolved many cases for which the Hague Convention was not a tool, and in others was able to convince the abducting parents to at least allow the LPPs to talk to their children some disconnected from the LBPs for more than a decade. The work was exhausting and often left me heartbroken and feeling useless. But looking back, I know working on these cases is what I will remember most about my career as an FSO. If I hadn't had that third tour in CI, I know I'd be doing something other that the Foreign Service today. 

The last thing I will mention on assignments and tours is that it's only at the beginning when it's about the location, the post. Most FSOs and people thinking of becoming an FSO have that dream place they want to work and live. By the second or third tour it's not so much location as it is the work, the dream job. There are hundreds of different types of jobs in the DOS. Towards the end of a career it can become less about the job and more about the people. The FS is an up or out organization. FSOs who are skipped for promotion for too many years must retire. Then there is the usual attrition for issues such as: This was not the career a given FSO thought it would be; unbearable distance from family and friends; health issues; overseas life wearing on spouse and kids; a given FSO is a fuck up and gets forced out; and a thousand other issues. At any rate, when an FSO is up there in rank and responsibility, their peers become fewer and fewer. They know all their peers personally or by reputation, so posts can become an issue of who you want to work with as opposed to the work itself. The luster and excitement of exotic life and work in that dream location abroad went up in smoke a long, long time ago. 

 

 

Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Stephan Fabian Owns the Interiors

    Here's a post I wrote, scrapped completely, and wrote again. It's dedicated to Steven Fabian's interior artwork for Dungeons and Dragons. I absolutely love this guy's art, knew nothing about him or his technique other than he an older stalwart of sch-fi and fantasy illustration who worked mostly in black and white. As I wrote the original post, my content continued to balloon as I discovered more and more info about Fabian, then finally had a light bulb go off on how to use his website, which is a trove of art and information. I also discovered that Fabian passed away last year at age 95! 

 One of Stephen Fabian's illustrations for the AD&D Ravenloft module Feast of Goblyns, by Blake Mobley, published by TSR in 1990. It was one of the few Ravenloft products I owned, bought it for the maps and art. It turns out Fabian hated doing these horror themed drawings. 

Stephan Fabian's official website is here: https://fabianartgallery.azurewebsites.net/gallery.  It's clunky, but has hundreds of pieces of his work. Oddly, he has only a handful from his work at TSR. He states directly on his website's TSR pieces that he retained ownership of all the art he did for TSR. Every piece of art Fabian places on his website includes his comments about the assignment. It's worth a look once you get used to the controls. Hint: use the "Back to the Gallery" button near the top of each page. The scale of his images played havoc with formatting for this post. 

Cover to Fantasy Newsletter No. 24. a sci-fi fanzine. Fabian states the published added the blue tone. Published in May, 1980. 

Here is something to bend the curve of the general rule (my rule?) that creativity declines with age. Fabian did not become a become a published artist until the age of 36, and was not a full time artist until the age of 44. He started doing interior art for TSR in the mid-1980s, around the age of 56 or 57. Fabian joined the U.S. Air Force right out of high school, working radios and radar, then becoming an instructor for the Air Force on those same areas. He said his love of sci-fi writing and art stemmed from his picking up smaller circulation sci-fi magazines a the air base PX. 

Cover to Science Fiction Review No. 26, another sci-fi fanzine. Published July, 1978. This is classic Fabian style outside of his TSR work. 

From 1952 to 1974 he worked a range of industrial jobs, finishing those careers as a foreman and engineer of  aircraft instruments at Simmonds. That's a very involved job. To emphasize again, he was not a full time artist, with the bulk of his brain power going to his engineering work. He submitted his first illustration to Twilight Zine in 1966, and other magazines in the sci-fi and fantasy genres through 1971. These were mostly unpaid submissions and the publishers kept his artwork. But he was good. In 1970 and 1971 he was nominated to the Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist. After being laid off by Simmonds in 1974, Fabian went professional as an artist. He had no formal training. But he was good, with nominations to the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist from 1975 through 1981. He won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 from the World Fantasy Convention. 

From the 47-page softcover booklet Guinevere & Lancelot And Others, by Arthur Machen, published in 1986. Fabian did at least four illustrations for this booklet, including this one, which I adore. The illustration at left gives a strong sense of the melee combat scenes Fabian did. The D&D Gazetteers #6 The Dwarves of Rockhome and #13 The Shadow Elves feature several large scale battles involving orcs, dwarves, men, and elves. 

Fabian gives some hints on when and how he learned to paint with the caption to his painting The Cabin. He was 35, studying about color and light, learned that the color of the light in the sky need to be reflected in colors below. In one of six illustrations he did for Robert E. Howard's Queen of the Black Coast, Fabian also explains that he had to study anatomy, writing there is no way to be creative with human form, no way to depart from models or photos without understanding anatomy. He says he had a huge reference library of photos to draw from, but they were references only. He didn't copy them. 

One of at least six illustration plates Fabian did for a run of the Robert E. Howard story Queen of the Black Coast, from the Conan story cycle published by Bortner and Kruse in 1976. Fabian was clearly influenced by Frank Frazetta's work for Conan, as can be seen here, an illustration that takes its que from Frazetta's 1971 Conan the Destroyer painting. 

Fabian's style lends itself to smoothing out the human form, rounded lines, few sharp edges. He worked primarily in black ink and black or gray pencils, did some acrylic painting, which always carried less detail, and focused more on forms and composition. In many ways I can see his art falling into the field of design. While his work spans a wide range of mediums, styles, and genres, it is always distinctively Fabian. About half of his work uses pencil on coquille board to achieve his distinctive, dotted shading patterns. One of the most complex uses of this shading pattern is in the Conan illustration, above. Another interesting and complex example is below.

Illustration of The Hag, from the story collection We are all Legends by Darrel Schweitzer, published in 1981. 

I became an instant fan of Fabian with the D&D Gazetteer series. He did a lot on interior work for the AD&D 2nd Edition Ravenloft setting books, to which he was well suited and which I had little interest. And Fabian wrote that he didn't have an interest in those either, only did it for the pay checks and begged to work on something else. My favorite TSR product of Fabian's bar none was the AD&D 2nd Edition Dragonlance boxed set Time of the Dragon, for which he did all of the interior illustrations. His love of the female form is on display here, oddly with three separate drawings of of mostly nude women being abducted, or maybe rescued? So that was intriguing.  His drawings were so evocative of place. They do so with with style, grace, elevating the mundane, making the dangerous beautiful. Those drawings inspired my twin brother and I to make our own fantastic settings for D&D games. 

   And now I'll turn to some of those childhood favorites with a few pieces from the D&D Gazetteer series, followed by a few pieces from Time of the Dragon. 

Fabian's take on the the Veiled Society in Gazetteer #1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos.

This secret society was famous in the D&D adventure B6 The Veiled Society by David "Zeb" Cook. Fabian's illustrations for this first Gazetteer mirrors much of the art he did outside of TSR, using coquille board for shading. 

Large interior illustration form one of the very best products TSR ever made, Gazetteer #5 The Elves of Alheim. Fabian packed Elves of Alfeim book full of work, much of it top notch. This Gazetteer made elves feel dangerous and live dangerously. Fabian's style here is what he used for majority of his TSR art - less detailed lines, smooth and rounded inks and gray pencil that capture the essence and feel of a given location, culture, or personality. 

Gazetteer #13 The Republic of Darokin was a little thin on illustrations, but contains my favorite interior illustration from the whole series. Darokin is a nation of merchants, and the book brings in a merchant character class. This illustration makes that merchant character class work as a trope for an adventure game. 

From Gazetteer #14 The Atruaghin Clans. This was the last in the Gazetteer series and as a publication was one of TSR worst examples of jumping the shark. The Gazetteer crammed in five North American indigenous cultures onto a tiny plateau, something like a Lost World. Take individually each Gazetteer was a masterpiece of RPG writing, art, and cartography. Taken as a comprehensive whole setting they were ridiculous. That said, Fabian packs in many wonderfully illustration to this book, and he writes that he enjoyed the change of genre. 

                                                                                                                                                                      

                        

One of only a handful of TSR art Fabian has on his website are two illustrations from Time of the Dragon. The first is above with elves and mind flayers. This is the second., nomadic elves taking easy advantage of the local goblin tribes. 

Fabian's wonderfully atmospheric and frightening illustration from the David "Zeb" Cook's 1989 Dragonlance boxed set Time of the Dragon, detailing a new continent for that setting. Here primitive mind flayers, called the Yaggol, terrorize a group of, well, primitive jungle elves. 

One last Fabian illustration from Time of the Dragon, those bad ass nomadic elves again, this time either taking a captive or rescuing a captive. This image just brings on the setting of these aggressive elves with such gusto. I can feel the mountain air, the thunder of hooves. Minus the woman., this illustration actually reminds me of a scene from a Western movie, maybe Silverado.  Like most of the other TSR illustrations here, I had to take this image as a screen grab from Archive.org. 

Finally, a self portrait Fabian did in 1960s, his coquille board technique on full display. This is followed by an end piece he graphic he did, origin unknown, and a poem a fan wrote to him inspired by his 1974 illustration Ismet. 

"Time, that insidious thief,

robs me of my precious youth,
etching his lines on my canvas
as he quickly passes.
An unappreciated masterpiece
in a gallery of modern art."
- by Kathleen Robson

Mystery of the Cracked Mug Solved

 Memories normally hit me when I am half asleep, either in the early morning, or as I am coming out of an afternoon nap. They jolt me wide awake. The memories are always nice. "Well hello there old friend. I didn't know you were still spending time in these parts." None of these memories have been of bad times or unpleasant experiences. They are bits and pieces of years gone by come back for a visit, connecting me to my past and still building a foundation of who I am. The jolting awake is not pleasant, and once awake I feel old, which is also unpleasant. The years that slipped away out of view coming back to haunt me and remind me of how far I've travelled, how much the roads have taken a slow but steady toll. It yanks me out of bed or off of the couch. Do something. Do it now. Live in the moment. 

What woke me up from my nap earlier today I cannot remember. I did sort out the mystery of the cracked mug. There is a powered ginger drink I have in the office that makes a nice hot drink, somewhat energizing.  After emptying my mug there is a leftover residue. It's that residue that cracks like glass. So, I am not losing my grip on reality. My memory still works. The mug that was all cracked glaze on the inside one day and then perfectly restored the next day was not my memory playing tricks or glimpses into different dimensions. It was powdered ginger drink.  

My older daughter, Solveig, has a birthday soon. She's getting up there in years, leaving childhood behind. I think one of the memories that came back to me was of Solveig when we lived in Virginia. She was still a kid - round faced, big smiles, enjoyed games of tag, chase, dancing around out little house. That was me once too, long ago. It's hard to see in either of us now. 

The Fights of Grades 7 and 8 in Valdosta, Georgia

 I moved from Alpine, Texas to Valdosta, Georgia, in the summer of 1988. I was 13 years old.  We drove a big Dodge van and a U-Haul moving truck, and I think towed a car behind the moving truck. The van had two bench seats behind the cab area, with a majority of the back as rough, open space. In Alpine we had used the van for four years like a work truck. We moved construction materials from Alpine to Terlingua Ranch, where we built a small cabin in the desert below the Chisos Mountains. We used it to move construction materials for a car port, barn, and fence we put into the empty lot next to our house, and to move hay bales and feed for our horse, Painted Lynx. It was a utilitarian beater van and we piled it full of belongings, two dogs, and a cat for that long drive to Valdosta, Georgia. The horse stayed behind. We drove Interstate 10 most of the way, crossing desert, dried out hill country with scrub oak, pine barrens, cypress swamps, and more pine barrens. The geography went from flat where we hit I-10 near Fort Stockton in west Texas to flatter by the time we reached Valdosta, leaving I-10 somewhere in the Florida panhandle. I'm not sure even the Texas hill country displayed any remarkable elevation. We reached Valdosta near the end of August, pulling into a large half circle driveway flanked by slash pines and dark green azalea bushes, at the back of which was a white ranch style home which looked rather elegant and formal compared to the simple ranch house we moved away from in Texas. Our Dodge van looked out of place. I remember opening the side door of the van and some plastic bags full of clothes tumbled out onto the asphalt driveway.  I had a ceramic painting of a battle from the England's War of the Roses wrapped in clothes in one the of the plastic bags that fell out of the van. It broke into pieces. It reflected me perfectly. 

I tell my daughters about how awkward I was in my teens. To illustrate this best, I tell them how my twin brother, Leif, and I started seventh grade in Valdosta, Georgia, at Valwood School.  During lunch breaks we stood behind a large bush next to the entrance of the cafeteria and slowly plucked leaves off, tearing each one into tiny little fragments. No talking, just plucking and tearing leaves. That's what we did on our lunch breaks for the opening several months of seventh grade, probably well into 1989. We were not hiding. We were in plain view of everyone walking in and out of the cafeteria. The teachers must have been worried. I can only imagine what our classmates thought of us. 

Leif and I had a hard time fitting in with the other kids. Valwood was a private school. Valdosta, population 50,000, was a large city compared to Alpine, which had under 5,000 people. The public schools in Valdosta were huge. The idea of moving away from Alpine had traumatized my twin and I so much that my parents agreed to send us to the small private school called Valwood where they felt we would feel more comfortable. With our older brother, Tor, there were three of us, so the school gave my parents a tuition break. Tor was going into 10th grade, played football and so had a scholarship for that. My grandma paid the remainder of the tuition. There were a handful of kids at the school like us, not well off and needing scholarships to attend. Most of the kids came from wealthy families. Leif and I didn't have a stitch of name brand clothing. We had generic shoes from who knows where. We had to bring our lunches from home rather that buying food from the rather well appointed cafeteria. I suppose we could have fit in if we tried, but that had never been our modus operandi. We were born shy, as our mom loved to tell us. We were built in friends of sorts, generally happy in each others company and could go comfortably for hours without talking.  

Among the boys in our grade there were two popular activities - hanging out at lakes on boats and hunting. The class nerd, Matt, perhaps also on a scholarship, liked to play with Legos. We just couldn't bring ourselves to do any of that with them. Tor did well. He was a hunter in Texas and could fish on the lakes in Georgia.  

A painful memory from that first year in Valdosta. My mom made a girl friend who had a younger daughter, probably five years younger than us. Leif and I had been awesome baby sitters for the three kids of family friends back in Alpine, so mom said we would make great baby sitters for her new friend's daughter. We sat down and watched TV with her for three hours, never saying a single word. At one point she started singing along to a bouncy Publix grocery store commercial, "...bring it all together at Publix..." We glared at her and she stopped singing. After her mom picked her up she broke into tears. Our mom lost a new friend. Yes, we were awkward. We were shell shocked into silence. Seventh grade was the worst year of my life. Several times we broke down in tears as my parents got ready to drop us at school. We refused to go, collapsed to the ground. We were 13 years old. 

Over the course of three years in Alpine, Texas, we had battled our way into acceptance and even to the margins of the popular crowd. I didn't get into any fights in seventh grade in Valdosta. My classmates had never seen fights. The concept of a school fight at Valwood seemed inconceivable to them. The boys often played touch football during morning class breaks. Leif and I enjoyed football and joined in with sixth and seventh graders. My mom had bought me a new cotton jacket, mint colored with a brass zipper, that looked rather preppy. I wore it everyday in the mild winter of 88/89. We were trying to fit in. (My mom also bought me my first pair of name brand shoes, leather deck shoes, and a t-shirt from Banana Republic.) During these touch football games one of my classmates, Micah, liked to grab and yank my jacket instead of doing a standard, simple touch. One day he started yanking on my jacket just to pull me out of plays and laughed derisively each time.  Then I was running a ball back, weaving, dodging, and Micah caught my jacket, pulled it over my head, and dragged me off the grass and onto the sidewalk that way, jacket over head, still on my feet, but unable to see. I stood up and kicked him in the balls so hard his nuts could have ended up in Scotland on dinner plates. Micah limped, doubled over, back into the school, tears streaming down his face. No one knew what to so say or do. They'd never seen anything like it. Micah shuffled around in pain for the remainder of the day. I still wonder if I caused him permanent damage. He never bothered me again. He never told the teachers what I'd done. I don't know why. That was my "fight" from seventh grade. 

Eighth grade was marginally better. We has several news students, none who seemed to be from wealthy backgrounds and may also have been on scholarships or reduced tuition. One, Becky, is without doubt the most award person I've ever been around. She always hid her face behind a screen of long hair, spoke in painful whispers that were normally inaudible, was hunched over, and wore Punky Brewster shoes. Another, Alex, vied for the position of class nerd, wore thick glasses, had an Afro and mustache, and occasionally did spontaneous ballet maneuvers on top of the picknick tables. The previous year, our classmate Eric, aka Rudy Booty, told me that no one like me. I still hear his words; "Why are you even here? No one likes you." Eric had his own struggles with being accepted and fitting in, and apologized to me later that day for his words. In eight grade I could imagine someone saying the same thing to Becky or Alex. 

In eight grade I got into one fight. It was with our PE teacher, Coach P. 

Coach Platania arrived in eight grade as our new PE teacher. He had a daughter who attended the lower school on a full scholarship. Coach P drove a small two door Honda or Toyota hatchback. He was bigger than the car. He was massive. He had a very obvious bump on one shoulder that was a fat deposit. We called it Freddy the Fat Deposit. He was bald, but always had a stubble of spiky hair on his shiny bald head. He had a beard, which was unusual in Valdosta in the 1980s. We wore glasses. He looked and moved something like a bald gorilla in glasses. Coach P was a nice man. For someone so large and overweight he was a very dedicated PE teacher. He coached the middle school basketball team. I don't know anything about his life before coming to Valwood except that at some point in the past he had been a bar bouncer. 

One beautiful spring afternoon Coach P had us in a combined class with the 9th graders, co-ed. It was a small school so boys and girls were always together in PE. We were playing baseball. Let's say the azaleas were blooming because I remember it was a beautiful day. Baseball frustrates me. I can't hit, throw, or catch. I'm sure I'd struck out once or twice this class already. But is was a beautiful day. My next at bat I hit a double, first time ever. It was so exciting. Kevin, brother to fraternal twin Geoff and sons of the middle school English teacher and dean, was playing first base.  Kevin and Geoff were also reduced tuition guys. As I rounded first base Kevin laughed and hit me in the face with his glove. Why? No idea. We were on good terms. As I ran on towards second base a rage filled in me. Kevin was still laughing. My face hurt. I turned around and sprinted right back into him. I was broken, almost two years of frustration with my life in Georgia pouring out as fists into Kevin's body and face. 

I have a vague sensation of Coach P yelling, then grabbing me off Kevin. He was yelling and pushing me backwards. When coach P was mad his whole head turned bright red. He was mad. "What the hell are you doing! You can't do that to people!" What are you thinking!" and pushing me. I was screaming back at him then; "I'm so fucking tired of this school, of these people! They never leave me alone!" I was screaming something along those lines, tears streaming down, and then charged at Coach P, shoved him backwards. I remember his next words exactly. "If you ever touch me again you will wake up in a hospital." 

Things came back into clear focus. There Coach P and I were squared off against each other, Kevin still in a heap on the ground not far away, Leif and Geoff standing nearby, the five of us surrounded by the rest of the 8th and 9th grades, all of the popular kids laughing and pointing. I had another realization as sharp as the one I'd had after chasing David to the top of a stranger's roof in sixth grade back in Alpine, Texas, a gang of classmates surrounding the corner of the house yelling at me to kick David's ass. Then I realized I was a bully. I had fought so hard to be left alone by kids being kids that I'd become the bully. Now here I was two years later, my soul in anguish, Kevin hurt, Coach P threating to put me in a hospital and lose his job, Leif and Geoff ready to intervene one way or another, and all those rich, well put together, popular kids laughing at the spectacle. We were always the losers. Fighting achieved nothing except to make us, the leftover losers, an entertaining sport for those rich people who always stayed clean, always had an easy time way up high above the fray.  

Coach P said we were going to the Principal's office, now. It was a hard edged order.  We set off, Leif right behind us. Soon all of our classmates were following. Halfway to the classroom buildings Coach P stopped. He looked at me, Leif, then all those other students. "I have a better idea. Let's just check on Kevin." That was the end of it. I think he decided that taking me to the Principal was a bad idea. The Principal would have heard that he'd been pushing me and had threatened to put me in the hospital. But I never would have told the principal that. I felt worse for Coach P than anyone else out there. We were the losers. I wanted to tell him him everything and never did. What was everything? That we were cut from the same cloth, Kevin and Geoff too, all the same. We were all fighting the wrong people. We were all fighting each other when there was no reason for us to be fighting. Fuck those rich people. Fuck this place, this school, this city, the endless rows of slash pines, the root bear colored water that stunk like turpentine, the mosquitos, sand fleas and no see'ems, the steamy air that sucks away the will to move, the extra boat houses on private lakes, tanned girls in their bikinis, gun clubs and country clubs, luxury cars, houses with five to ten bathrooms, and perfect hair. Fuck it all.  

I never said anything to Coach P. We stayed quiet, remained on decent terms without ever mentioning what happened that day. He left Valwood two years later. Leif and I became decent friends with Kevin and Geoff, who graduated from Valwood one year before we did. Leif and I stuck it out, graduating in 1994. The school, located on Gornto Road and surrounded by woods on three sides, is gone. It move to the countryside two or three years after we graduated to become a proper prep academy. Where the old school stood there is now a cinema complex. The woods have been completely replaced by neighborhood houses. 

That spring day in 1989, playing baseball on Valwood's football field, that was the last time I ever struck someone in anger. My last "fight", in other words. I hit people playing football throughout high school, and playing stickball in college, but that was all sanctioned violence in good fun without any of the deep, horribly raw emotions. The few remaining times in high school when I was tempted by anger to fight someone I stopped myself. I had reached the conclusion through experience that fighting ends badly even when you win. 

Book Review - The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey

Feeling fuzzy on memories, it's time to do a book review. The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey is written by a friend of mine, journalist, writer, and poet John Zada.  We were flat mates in Cairo, Egypt for about one year in the the middle 1990s. One chapter of the book deals with a horrifying episode we passed through together in Cairo. That event is in a book. John's version is not exactly as I remember it. However, it is there, a shared memory. It happened in some form or another. 

John told me about four years ago that he was working on this book, a memoir of his life in the Middle East. At the time I was living in Virginia. Last year he told me he told me he'd done it, finished his labor. I won't call it a labor of love. I think it was a sort of catharsis. It's not that the act of writing itself was laborious or cathartic. John is a writer by profession and has two other books published prior to this one. I believe this book was a challenge for him because it was so personal, was an attempt to unveil who he is, and it was a failed attempt. The book itself is very good. It's his attempt at self discovery that seems to have failed. John is from Toronto, Canada. His parents migrated their from Cairo, Egypt. But they were refugees from southeastern Turkey, part of the Christian communities purged from that country in a genocide at the close of World War One. John felt out of place growing up in an Arab Christian household in largely Jewish suburb of Toronto. He went off to find himself after starting college, thinking that the Middle East held the key to unlocking who he truly is. So, this book is about his travels through the Middle East, from Morocco to Turkey, over several decades. 

This book is not what I expected. I was actually a scared it might be a tell all of John's life in Cairo, of which I was a not insignificant part, and which included the first women with whom I truly fell in love, one of whom was John's deep love interest for a time, regularly spending nights with him in his room, just a wall and a door between us. This was not an amorous love I felt, but Plutonic love, a new respect for the opposite sex who taught me how to be emotionally normal. Still the jealousy was there, especially on those nights and the mornings after. It felt like a Leonard Cohen song. I thought this book would be John's Alexandria Quartet with a Cairo spin. But this book is not that. 

I've read several adventure/cultural collections from journalists recounting their travels and travails in the Middle East. This book is that to some degree, but so much more, woven together as an homage to John's mentor, Kamal Bey.  That was a surprise. I expected Kamal Bey to be a fictional character. John had never mentioned Kamal to me before. Beyond homage and travelogue, the book is that deepening identity crisis, a search for lost roots, a critique on tribalism, and a brief but meaningful history of genocide on the upper Tigris River. The arc of Kamal Bey's journey is very poignant. The arc of John's search is increasingly manic, and in many ways without resolution. 

The language in The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey can be challenging. It is often lyrical and sometimes ornate. Maybe it strays too far from prose in places and tries for poetry where it should not. I love John's poetry. He used to sit up late into the dark of night in Cairo, our flat over the Corniche El Nil, the Nile River just beyond that, only a candle burning reflected off crystal chandeliers, writing hunched over a notebook pouring out poems sometimes until the first calls to prayer broke the stillness. He read them to us later the following day, or saved them until Fridays, when the city's rhythm slowed to a languid crawl. So many memories coming back. 

If I did not know John and had not lived one chapter of this book with him, would I have enjoyed reading it? Would I recommend it? Yes. For those who love travel or for those who are lost, this is a wonderful book. It works on so many higher levels than typical tales of travel to distant places. Take Fred Birchmore's Around the World on a Bicycle, for example, which I wrote about in an a earlier post. John's book is not passing through on an adventure and experiencing the exotic. It's a search for a part of him that was lost. It's a return. It's a rejection. In the end  The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey left me with a haunted feeling, a longing feeling, which I believe most people who read it will identify with in some way. 

Cracked Memory

Large ceramic mug featuring a hand-painted cow with butterfly wings, cost over $30 USD. Very nice, but I'm cheap. I bought the mug a month ago because we had a free visit to a tourist trap highland cow farm with the opportunity to bottle feed some calves. My nephew works there pushing cows and shoveling cow shit. Because the visit was free for me, my wife, and our two daughters, I bought the pricey mug to support the my nephew. I use it at work. I was upset this week when I saw the interior glaze of the mug had cracked into a kaleidoscopic pattern, wondered if I was going to be drinking glaze flakes with my tea and die. I saw those cracks all week long, staring at me with every sip of tea. Today, the cracks were gone. The glaze appears completely whole. What happened? 

It gave me pause because I had another thought tickling my brain this week. Am I who I think I am? I saw a picture of eight-year-old me. It's old, the colors faded, looks like it could be from a 1960s photo album of my parents' rather than a photo of me in the mid-1980s. Is that me? These memories I have, are they real? At age 51, I finally feel detached from the me of childhood. There seems to be no relation between the two. My daughters are now much closes to the age of 23 than I am, the age when I met my wife. I feel divorced even from the me of my 20s. This week doing online interviews with foreign service officers bidding on my current position, I found myself fascinated by my own image staring back at me from the computer screen. That old man doesn't look like me. But that is me. Is the kid from my memories me? The man who fell in love with my wife, is that me, or some trick? 

Artificial intelligence and the risks it may pose to humanity finally captured headlines this week. Finally. Is that what got my brain so twisted, wondering if any of this is real or just an artificial creation?

Seven or eight years old, driving across Wyoming around 1983

First Time Commemorating 9/11, because I was in Singapore in 2001

 On September 11, 2001, I was in Singapore. It was early in the night. My wife, at the time girl friend, and I had just gotten into a banger of a fight. I can't recall about what. We were out on a date in a part of Singapore known as Clark Quay. I only recall that we had been admiring the Old Hill Street Police Station, a British colonial building now painted white while the shutters and window frames were  painted in a rainbow of other colors. Not long after that the argument began and we split in different directions, screaming at each other. I don't normally drink alcohol and had a pittance of an English teacher's salary, but made my way to the Raffles Hotel Long Bar and ordered a Singapore Sling. Underwhelming. I made my way out to our HTB flat on Upper Serangoon Road, which we shared with two other flat mates. Shin was there. The TV was on. World Trade One had been hit and was smoking. We forgot our fight and watched the remainder of the events of September 11, 2001 unfold. 

I remember seeing footage of all the first responders - EMTs, police, fire fighters and their sea of vehicles with flashing lights surrounding the World Trade Center and thinking it was too much response in one spot, something terrible was going to happen. It did. I heard an NYC fire fighter address the issue this week on the 25th anniversary of the attacks. He said they could have pulled everyone out earlier, saving the lives of dozens, maybe hundreds of first responders; saved NYC Fire Department from their most tragic day in history. Then he countered by saying with no reservations that if had they pulled back and left regular people to die in the World Trade Center, that would have been the most tragic day in NYC Fire Department History, far beyond the loss of life of more than 300 first responders. They had a job to do. They understood it meant risking their own lives, loosing their own. They did it. 

I was far away from America on 9/11. I have never marked the anniversary and never paid much attention to it until this year. It's not that I didn't care. I did. I quit my job and returned to America. Rather, it's that I felt disconnected. That's why I returned. This year I did the stair climb in our Embassy with the Marine Security Guard detachment to commemorate the sacrifice of the first responders at the World Trade Center. After the climb I watched videos, hours of them for three days straight, about the attacks, the people who lost their lives and the people who survived. It was the first time I heard that counter argument to my fear 25 years ago in Singapore that the the first responders needed to pull people back, have resources to respond elsewhere. Now I can better appreciate what they went through and why they had to try, stood their ground in the face that looming, hellish catastrophe. 

Old Hill Street Police Station, Singapore

September 11 Memorial in NYC