Let me digress with a personal memory. When I was very young, 3 or 4 years old, I used to spend summers at a cottage my grandfather owned on the Connecticut shore. The cottage was very simple and unheated except for an immense stone fireplace. My grandfather, then near 80, loved the cottage for its view of the ocean and for its particular vantage, which let him watch the ships passing in and out of the local harbor. My grandfather was a sea captain and the ocean was in his blood. In fact, his first job at age 12 was as a cabin boy on one of the last commercial clipper ships in business on the East Coast. Perhaps it was his life on the ocean that made him arise every morning before dawn and come downstairs to watch the sun come up. On most mornings, even in July and August, he would light a fire in the fireplace, tip his rocker to watch the first rays of the sun catch the small islands off the coast, and prod the fire occasionally with the end of a broom handle he used as a poker. My greatest delight as a 3- and 4-year-old boy was to sneak downstairs and crawl into his lap and fall back to sleep as he watched the sun come up and the fire banished the chill with the smell of wood smoke. The memory of those moments before the fire is one of the earliest memories I have. It is the first in a succession of memories that unfailingly recall security and peace. We all need such refuges in life. Your meditations show how adeptly you create your own treasured places that bring peace and a perspective founded on reflection. And you will need to have those places of internal refuge in the years ahead. The world around us has been tossed in a perfect storm these past two years. We can only hope that it is beginning to subside. And in such a storm you will need memories to sustain you and guide you and give you protection against the worst of the tumult. When things get bad in my life, I remember those moments before my grandfather's fire. What will you remember when you need something to get you through life's tough stretches? I imagine, if the members of the class of 2003 are like the members of the other 221 Exeter classes that have proceeded them, many of you will find some of those memories in your time at Exeter. This may seem improbable to you right now, especially if during your time here you found classes or sports or activities that seemed particularly hard. We don't often look for security and a sense of accomplishment in things that are difficult, but, in fact, that is often exactly the place to begin searching. Tamer Shabaneh Love and sorrow-for his family, and for his native land-suffuse the meditation of Tamer Shabaneh, a two-year student from Hebron, Palestine, who is a member of the Seeds of Peace program.
The living room of my grandparents' home, where I spent much of my childhood, was a rather curious museum. "Praise the everlasting, commend the builder, and shall thou never forget the mortality of all that is." An inscription in my grandfather's eloquent Arabic was fixed to the wall alongside an enormous collection of photographs. They were old pictures of my family, from the youngest of my uncles to my grandparents' parents. The black-and-white photos sometimes bored me, to be honest; only mystery unified them. I did not understand the meaning those pictures bore for my grandfather, seven of whose 10 kids still live in diaspora-in Jordan, Dubai and Spain. This set of lively yet colorless pictures concealed a quality that no one but my grandfather could comprehend. What would often strike me in this history, recorded on a wall, were two pictures. One is of my grandma when she was 14, some time before marriage, dressed in a short skirt, leaning against a brick wall, with a cunning smile on her face and a small rose in her hand. The other is of my grandfather with his parents, all wearing criss-cross Palestinian headdresses on a warm spring day, standing before their plowed field, their sleeves rolled up and their palms darkened with dust and earth. These pictures were windows on my parents' extended family, but meaningless ones. I could not find the right time to ask them about the pictures nor grasp their attachment to that lost past. In spite of this, I realize that what motivated my grandfather to constantly contemplate them was the peace of mind, the nostalgic reminder of such tranquil days, imprisoned in the pictures for eternity. This absolute serenity was captured within the frame, with the time that froze to tell the story of something lost, buried in the distant memory of the elders-something I was then too young to identify. My grandfather was a hostage of his nostalgic past. He was lost and troubled. That tone of resignation was always apparent in his voice, but it was equally evident in the rest of my family. All my family conversations disguised numerous threads that I was not then able to connect together. Such conversations left the impression of something wrong, something we, as a Palestinian family, were too weak to consciously confront and positively affect. It was a feeling we silently accepted and comfortably coexisted with. My earliest childhood coincided with the fiercest years of the first Palestinian Intifada, the popular mutiny against the Israeli occupation authorities. It was the year when my family tea conversations concealed a sense of defeat, a subtle relinquishment and helplessness. As a result of that never-ending exposure to military occupation and the feeling that the occupation was supposedly "normal," the entire world in my confused and confined 5-year-old universe revolved around the belief that all humanity lived under the same circumstances. Zoë Brennan-Krohn The six weeks she spent volunteering at Ballytobin-a therapeutic farm in Ireland for people with special needs-taught Zoë Brennan-Krohn, a three-year student from Orleans, MA, much about human nature, its complexity and its considerable beauty.
Maggie Reilly was the person I ended up spending the most time with at Ballytobin. Thirty-one years old and profoundly autistic, Maggie was physically small, but tremendously strong. She was uninhibited in using her strength and her powerful voice when she didn't get what she wanted, yet it was often impossible to know what she was thinking. Early on, I was disturbed by her, because she, more than other people in care whom I knew, seemed so totally beyond my comprehension. She was powerful and active and had no speech, but clearly knew what she wanted and was determined to get it. I often suspected that she understood far more than she let on. "Cheeky little monkey," my house mother used to call Maggie, when she'd show in some small way that she understood what was going on around her. Most of the time, though, Maggie was in her own world. She'd rock from one foot to the other, making a strange sound that always reminded me of a train whistle. Often she would stop for a moment, then start jumping up and down, which soothed her when she was restless. I didn't understand these things. I didn't know what I should do to stop them, to make her stop feeling compelled to lock doors behind her, or to drink everything she saw, or only to eat when a fork full of food was in front of her. And I never understood these things. I don't understand Maggie in the rational, logical way that people expect to understand each other. I never learned to rationalize her unpredictabilities, but eventually, as I got to know her, I stopped trying. Toward the end of my time at Ballytobin, I began looking after Maggie in the mornings. Despite my confusion about her, I grew to enjoy taking care of her. Maggie loved water tremendously, and giving her a morning bath was the time when I saw her most relaxed. She would bound downstairs and open the cupboard under the sink, hurling everything out until she found the drain plug, which she would push into my palm as she dragged my hand toward the drain. Lying in the bath, she'd make noises to herself, splash and drink the water, only getting out when I'd removed the drain plug and all of the water was gone. Although Maggie loved the water, I loved the moments spent drying her once she'd gotten out of the tub. It was one of the few times I'd see her smile, an awkward sort of smile, infrequently used. She'd hold her arms out, bent at the elbows, and let me dry her body, rub lotion into her skin and help her into her clothes. None of this made me understand her better-it didn't make her more normal, or explain any of her habits or compulsions. It did make me feel close to her. It did help me develop a special relationship to her, one unrelated to her special needs. It made me like her. |
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