Happy Thanksgiving!

I am here.  *cringe*  I may have been shirking my blogging duties for the past ten days, but I do exist.  And I accept full responsibility for my actions.  Or lack thereof.  It may be comforting for you all to know that part of the reason I didn’t write anything was that I really couldn’t think of anything worth writing about.  I am very busy right now, what with finals at the junior college next week, and the Christmas concert for my music classes, and a baptism, and recruitment for teachers for next year…but most of that seems sort of boring.

Actually, I should talk about my new work as a recruiter/pretend HR person.  Perhaps you all have picked up on the fact that job descriptions at the mission tend to be amorphous and vaguely defined.  I teach at the high school as well as the junior college; the junior college teachers also provide feedback for each other on everything from curriculum questions to classroom techniques.  I recently read and commented on Eric’s drafts of final exams…not that my comments helped him much, but hopefully they lightened the mood.  On top of that, when Betsy left, I started to attend the meetings of the Junior College’s “steering committee.”  It’s not exactly a board, but it makes decisions.  And I take minutes for the meetings.

I guess what I’m trying to say is just this: jobs morph and expand.  In fact, my responsibilities here seem to follow the refrigerator principle: no matter how empty the fridge begins, and no matter how large it is, “stuff” expands to fill all available space.  So anyway, my newest project has been the somewhat daunting task of recruiting people with Liberal Arts-ish backgrounds, who also happen to want to donate the next year or two of their lives to teaching at our school as volunteers.  Woohoo!  I have been sending out emails to everyone and their brother, and in the process have discovered two things:

1) The Catholic college world is even smaller than I had thought.  The contacts the other volunteers have given me for Franciscan and Benedictine have included TACers who went to school with my parents, and whose children went to school with me.  My cousin, who went to Franciscan years ago, forwarded me my own email, which he had received via an alumni email chain.  Another of my emails to a different Catholic college was returned by a former volunteer at the high school here in Benque.  My conclusion: everyone in the Catholic college circuit is at most one degree of acquaintance removed from everyone else.

2.  In a wild, unexpected twist of events, I kind of enjoy this kind of work.  I was as surprised to discover this as anyone who knows me will be, I think.  When I graduated from college and started looking for a job, I struggled to take advantage of my contacts.  I hated, and still do hate networking on my own behalf.  It is not something I’m good at.  For that reason, I thought it was an enormous joke that I would end up recruiting for my job.  I thought, “I’ll do my best, and hopefully God will do the rest, because I am not good at this at all.”  But apparently when I am networking for a cause I care about, and when my tentative requests are met with warm approbation and interest, I quite like the job.  The jury’s still out on whether I’m any good at it, but at least that’s something.

That said, please keep our search for possible volunteers in your prayers.  Also, if you or someone you know is interested, and has a background in Liberal Arts, Philosophy, Theology, Humanities, Classics, English, History…or even Business, since we are offering a Business major as well…please get in touch with me!

Anyway.  Back to the holiday at hand.  Thanksgiving is, of course, an American holiday, but the school employs so many American volunteers that they have a tradition of celebrating it anyway.  Sort of.  Our celebration consists of a half day at the high school, mass, a school-provided dinner of rice and beans and chicken, set up and served by the American volunteers themselves, and desserts provided by the volunteers as well.  A little unorthodox, but at least it marks the occasion.

In any case, the real point of the holiday is, in fact, thanksgiving, and I do have much to be grateful for.  I have been trying to remember to ponder my blessings more frequently and habitually.  I am thankful for God’s hand in my life; the hand that brought me here suddenly and surely, when I did not know what to do.  And really, I should not neglect to mention St. Therese’s intercession as well, since the opportunity fell into my lap during a novena to her.  I am thankful for my background, my education and my other experience, which suited me to do this job, even as imperfectly as I do it (and that itself is a testimony to God’s support).  I am thankful for the opportunities I have had for the past 24 days to ponder and reflect, deepening my relationship with Mary as we prepare for our Marian consecration on December 8th.  Finally, and dearest to my heart (though perhaps it shouldn’t be), I am deeply grateful for the relationships I have with the people in my life: my family, my friends at home in the U.S., and the people who have come into my life and welcomed me into theirs since I have been in Belize.

All of these things should perhaps lighten the tragedy of having no turkey and stuffing (or even pie!) today.  Then again, since food is my One True Love (as we all know), that is a tough pill to swallow.  Actually, since it doesn’t even feel like Thanksgiving today, it is not nearly as tough as it would be otherwise.

Unwelcome Excitement

I have to teach in 11 minutes, so this will be an exercise in speedy relaying of information.  We shall see how it goes.

Anyway, on Friday night, we were watching a movie at the guys’ house.  Kelley & Melissa left before the end of the movie, but Katie, Elisabeth and I watched the whole thing, and then walked home.  We noticed that the motion light at the back of our house was on, and then, as we approached our gate, a man walked out of it.  He had a hat pulled down low on his forehead, was rather large, and had the nerve to say “good evening” to us.  I was apparently looking at the ground (are we surprised?), and therefore didn’t see him emerge from our gate, so I was confused when Katie & Elisabeth ignored his salutation, and then began to freak out as soon as he had walked around the corner.

When we got to our front door, it was already open.  Kelley and Melissa were standing in the doorway to their bedroom in some shock and confusion.  Apparently they had been in their room and had heard the door creak.  Melissa looked out into the living room just as our “friend” was opening the unlocked front door, but he retreated, possibly because she showed up.  Imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t left!

Everyone was understandably freaked out.  I probably reacted the least, not that that’s really a good thing….don’t know where my reactions live, but sometimes they don’t show up at appropriate moments.  The girls were scared to be in our house alone, so they wanted to get a boy, but the man had gone in that direction of the neighborhood.  I cast my mind around for a weapon, settled on my knife (though I am much more confident that I would have the guts to hit someone over the head than actually stab them), and told Katie & Elisabeth I would go over the the boys’ house with them.  Kelley & Melissa stayed home.

When we got to the boys’ house, their lights were off (they had made a swift retreat to bed in the ten minutes since we had left), so we shouted and banged on their door.  There was no response.  Luckily (for us?) their door was also ajar – the latch is unreliable.  Yet another thing that needs to be fixed.  We went into their living room and continued shouting, but not a single boy woke up.  Finally I decided to go down the hall, beginning with Eric’s room, since the light was on (he had fallen asleep grading).  I pounded on the lintel and yelled his name until I heard movement.  Poor Eric wandered out looking very confused, paced around, half taking in our somewhat jumbled story, grabbed his throwing stars (weapon of choice…I think he’s secretly a ninja?  It is rather unclear.) and a jacket, and walked back with us.  We sent him all around the house and up on the veranda, where he half-expected the man to be lurking still (due to the ambiguity in our story and the lack of awakeness in his person).  Finding nothing, he went to bed in our living room.

That first night, most of us slept badly.  Katie & Elisabeth extracted a promise from the priests in the morning to have someone fix our fence, which is not very secure.  In the meantime, we have taken to chaining our gate closed much more often, and the boys have taken it in shifts to spend the night in our living room.  This is an especially unpleasant penance because our dog, who just had puppies, tends to bark at any animal that comes down the street (but don’t worry!  She likes intruders just fine.  Actually we think she didn’t meet the intruder, because she was curled up with her puppies on the far end of the veranda.  This is a problematic state of being for a guard dog.)

Further developments pending…I am one minute over my goal time, and should be in class already.  Therefore please also excuse typos etc.

Volunteer Day; or, The Martinez Farm; or, Once Upon a Waterfall

On Saturday, Mr. Rodolfo (the principal) took all the volunteers to a farm out in the bush, less than an hour from Benque.  The occasion was “volunteer day,” although this year the support staff were also invited (but none came).

Before I go on, please dispel from your mind the images of manicured pastures and cozy red barns conjured by my use of the word “farm.”  The Martinez farm is beautiful, wild, exotic; it is anything but manicured.  We drove most of the way over dirt roads through increasingly jungle-like scenery.  The family who owns the farm makes their living by renting it (or parts of it) out, hosting visiting archeologists and the like.  A little-known benefit of living in Mayan territory, I suppose.

Although the farm is large and prosperous, the family lives very simply.  Below is the kitchen.  The Martinez’s cook most of their food over a wood fire in this thatch-roofed, dirt-floored structure, where we ate our barbequed chicken and tortillas around a large picnic table.

Most of the day was rainy and overcast, which meant that it was almost chilly; but the main effect of the rain was the incredible amount of mud.  Later on I washed my clothes three times before I was satisfied that they were clean, and I hadn’t even participated in the mudbath…er…pickup soccer game (though I did get muddy by other means; more on that later.).

We didn’t actually explore much of the farm.  Rumor has it that they keep wild (?) horses somewhere on the property, but we didn’t see them this trip.  We did go down to the stream behind the main set of buildings and outbuildings, where we discovered a gorgeous tree-house.  It stands half in the stream, overlooking the beginning of a glorious series of cascades.  Apparently the Martinez’s actually rent the treehouse to archeologists as a place to stay.  There are beds on the second floor (the building has a second floor!), and hammocks on the first.  Imagine, for a moment, the experience of being a visiting archeologist; exploring and digging through ruins in the natural peace and beauty of the jungle by day, and sleeping each night in an open-air treehouse, to the accompaniment of the soothing sounds of a real waterfall.  Actually, imagine being an archeologist at all.  What a job!

The tree-house (I should probably call it a “stream-house” or something more accurate; it wasn’t exactly in a tree…) came complete with a ladder, to allow for easy descent into the pools and cascades at the head of the waterfall.  After lunch, most of us decided to climb down the waterfall, to see where it led.  I wish I had been able to take pictures during our descent and subsequent re-ascent, but I was afraid my camera would simply drown.  Judging from my own soaked state by the end of the day, I think I made the right decision.  However, Kelley and I did take a few pictures of the waterfall from the treehouse at the top, and I took a few of the stream itself.

Below, our group begins its descent.  We are mostly still dry at this point.

Climbing the waterfall was definitely the highlight of the day.  By the time we had been climbing for a couple of minutes, finding safe footing had become a much higher priority than staying even slightly dry.  Each cascade pooled into a “step,” which was significantly deeper directly under the falling water.  Because of this, safer footing could usually be found around the edge of the step, between parts of the waterfall, or on various logs and plants lying across the water.  Anyone who knows me knows that my “balance” is both comedy and tragedy, so threading my way over rocks and roots was a little tough; perhaps a better word would be “exhilarating.”

We had to rely mostly on vines, bamboo, and rotting trees for balance and support, which made the experience many times more exciting, since the trees were often so soft that they would give way immediately, and many of the vines were armed with jagged thorns.  At one point, as I tried to duck through some overly dense vegetation, something caught the skin of my shoulder – through my shirt – and wouldn’t let me go.  I was completely stuck while I attempted to wiggle my way away from the thorn that had firmly bitten into me.  Looking at my shoulder later, I could see two puncture marks, so I think reason for my thorough “stuck-ness” was that the thorn had hooked all the way through my skin and back out again.  I did manage to remove that thorn as soon as I was free, but I still have another one in my finger.

Time has assured us that the barbs were not armed with any deathly venom, at least, for which I am grateful.  That was not a ‘given.’  The whole experience was strange in this respect, because on the one hand it didn’t feel exotic at all; it felt like a somewhat grander-scale version of the muddy, woodsy, pondsy traipsing I used to do as a child, getting just as wet and muddy, and feeling almost equally adventurous.  On the other hand, when I stopped to think, I was struck by the fact that I really was climbing a waterfall in a tropical jungle.  The plants and even the fungus and bacteria were probably foreign to me.  In this climate I suppose I truly could have met a killer plant or animal, but it didn’t seem much riskier than similar excursions at home.  Ultimately, we were within climbing distance of the farm, and within driving distance – albeit somewhat bumpy driving – of help, and the climbing itself was tame enough for me to partake, so it probably wasn’t that dangerous.  Nevertheless, it is surreal to think that I am here, and that this is the way we “get away” for a day.

In accordance with that fact, the surrounding flora and fauna were beautiful and unfamiliar.  Unfamiliar to my old self, I should say.  I am actually getting used to them now.  Once again, I wish I had been able to take pictures farther down the waterfall, but my camera (and the pictures) probably wouldn’t have benefited from the attempt.  At one point on the way back up, Joe stopped ahead of me and said “this looks fake.”  He was standing in front of a wall of cascades, complete with clear water falling over rocks, bamboo and ferns and who knows what else shooting out in random directions.  And he was right.  It looked like an artificial background piece at a rainforest-themed restaurant, and even more like an environmental recreation in the rainforest section of a natural history museum.  But this was real, and we found it in the midst of a casual Saturday recreational excursion.

I did not want to come out of the water, but we had to leave eventually.  Here is the group of us, with Mr. Rodolfo in front.  The picture also includes one of our students, whose uncle owns the farm.

I should have mentioned that the bus we took (The school rented a bus, which was funny, since it ended up being very empty with just the volunteers inside.) dropped us off on the “main” [dirt] road, about of a quarter mile from the farm.  We had to walk in and out.  This experience was significantly funnier because the side road to the farm was showing the effects of the recent days and days of rain.  It was so muddy that you could easily sink right in, and parts of it were flooded completely.  The walk through the woods was pretty, though!

Yep, that’s the road:

We made it back to our bus in the end.  Please note that the bus is a painted, converted school bus, which is completely normal in Belize.

When we got home, still soaked and muddy, there were workmen in our house, wiring lighting and putting up new fans.  I was so wet that I didn’t want to sit down until I had showered, so I ended up standing around in the living room for probably close to an hour.  Finally I gave up and locked myself in to shower, not even coming out when I heard the men talking to one of the other girls in a way that signified their need to get into the attic…which opens into the bathroom.  They just had to wait.

I’m Still Alive…

I feel like I have to post these “contrary to popular misconception” posts too often.  Things have been crazy.  I am still buried under a mountain of grading and…so forth, but just to prove that I exist, here are some fun facts:

1. Belle (the dog) had puppies (if I hadn’t clarified that she was the dog, what would you have thought?).  I’m not sure how many there are because it was dark last night when she finally finished giving birth, and because she had dug herself a ridiculously deep puppy trap (did I say trap?  Hole.) under the outdoor staircase, making it impossible to get a good view.  Especially because the natural fortifications include mud and fire ants.  She couldn’t have chosen a more inconvenient spot if she’d tried (though I suspect she actually did try).I thought we should have convinced her to get up so we could see all the puppies, but that wouldn’t have been a very nice thing to do.

2.  My music lesson plans for the week involve listening to Tchaikovsky’s March Slave (from the 1812 Overture) over and over again, while my students write a story to go with it.  So far I have collected a tale of knights who get beheaded (I skipped to the end, so I don’t know why.), the story of a snake’s tender bond with her egg, a suspiciously familiar rendition of the Telltale Heart, and who knows what else?  My conclusion: all assignments should be this entertaining for the teacher!  On the other hand, I have no idea how I’m going to grade them.  All in good time.

3. I climbed a waterfall in the tropical jungle on Saturday.  Sentences I never thought I would write.  My life sometimes sounds way more epic than it is.  Or maybe it is more epic than it is.  Something to ponder.

Anyway, now is the time for teaching.  I will leave you with this.  More on puppies and jungles and waterfalls (with a bit of photographic evidence, hopefully) forthcoming.

Oops!

Meant to post this picture from the “fall festival.” Our blurry, but happy selves:

It’s the Second-or-Third-Most-WonDERful time…of…the Year…

Having finally downloaded (love me some past participles) the batch of photos that has been brewing for the last few weeks, I have two main events to share with you all.  Side note: these photos and more are currently uploading to Facebook, from which I had originally removed all the “people you were with” because I wanted to tag the photos individually.  I just went back to Facebook and discovered that it had re-tagged my post correctly with most of the people in the photos.  Creepy.  Anyway…

1. Last Sunday we had a Fall Festival for ourselves, because we all miss the season terribly.  The weather was cooperatively cool[er] and rainy, which may not have been true fall weather, but was a noticeable change.  We were happy with it.  We all baked in every spare moment over the weekend, which resulted in an incredible spread of…sweets.  Whenever anyone walked in the door (and we were even joined by both priests and one of the deacons) we would hand them a full dinner plate of dessert.  Usually the recipients’ reactions were equal parts delight and gasping for water, after a few minutes of eating.  Eric & Elisabeth contributed pumpkin bread and caramels which actually weren’t ready until after the event; Joe & Melissa made a chocolate-banana-peanut-butter-whipped-cream trifle thing, Kelley & Katie made something along the lines of apple crisp, Jen made peanut butter rice crispy treats, Jack & Robbie made a sort of peanut butter and chocolate shake thing that was essentially liquid sugar, and I made apple fritters and carrot cake.

 

As I was up to my elbows frying fritters in hot oil, I suggested to Kelley that we decorate the house.  She went to town on it, though I remained immersed in oil for most of the afternoon.  Therefore she gets all the credit for the following:

Yes, there are carrots in our flower arrangement.  Kelley called it her “Belizean Cornucopia.” 

 

When Jack walked in carrying the board below, he said “this is for the party, but especially for Monica because of something she said a while ago.”  He had remembered me saying that I missed fall, and stapled a bunch of leaves and branches to a board to make a fall tree for me.  It is still in our living room…  (unfortunately sideways in this picture)

There was warmth (too much warmth, considering that we all decided to wear our most autumnal attire) and laughter and food for many days to come.  It was indeed a cozy fall party.

2. Halloween: We had a big Halloween party at the boys’ house last night.  We branched out and invited all the Belizean teachers from the school, so the party did not consist solely of the volunteers, like usual.

We told everyone to dress, up, which resulted in the following (not everyone who came got into the picture, though):

 

From left to right, back row:

Aladdin & Abu, Catwoman, Batman, Robin, Homeless Guy, No Costume, witch with pink hair, no costume, masked lady, baby daddy (without his baby, since she was sleeping), random scary guy with a real machete.  Front row: oompa loompas, and two out of four pieces of the kitchy kitty puzzle.

Joe and I went as oompa loompas, complete with green hair (fingerpaint is the easiest green substance to rinse out ever!) and orange skin (though the orange/pink skin is a little toned down in this picture, which is probably not a bad thing.

 

I Am Alive.

(Sort of…)  No really.  I am.  This weekend was so busy that it hardly counted as a weekend, although some of the business derived from our little “fall festival,” which was at least pleasant.  I was baking in most of my “spare” time all weekend.  The outcome was delightful; more on that in a later post.

We also had to work a Catholic leadership convention of some sort at the high school.  Despite the fact that I spent precious hours Saturday morning ostensibly “working” (mostly just sitting in the staff room feeling guilty because I wasn’t grading midterms), I am still not entirely sure what happened at said convention.  But it took up weekend time.

The lack of free time on the weekend contributed to the craziness of this week.  Mid-semester grades were due last night, in theory, although I haven’t turned them in yet because they didn’t tell us how to get into the grade database until this morning.  I spent seven hours grading Philosophy midterms yesterday, after which I trotted to school and taught all my usual classes.  I was in such a strange place by the end of the day that I stayed up late entering my grades into my own spreadsheet (which had to be done before I could put them in the database anyway).  I still have to figure out how to make grades calculate accurately when I haven’t given assignments in every category, account for attendance, and enter them in the database.  Nevertheless, this is major progress.

And…we’re just going to ignore the fact that once the mid-semester grades are finished, I will have to catch up on all the other grading that has fallen behind while I focused on that.  Grades.  Whose bright idea were they anyway?

During class last night, I heard a collective gasp behind me as I faced the board.  I turned around to see a very large, bright green insect flapping around the room.  It alighted on the ceiling, which allowed me to see that it was something between a leaf bug and a grasshopper.  It was probably the length of my hand.  Thus disrupted, I couldn’t very well feign ignorance, so I asked them what it was.  The answers ranged from “night bird” and “something like a grasshopper” to “the jabberwock.”  

Which brings me to random fact number two: my students fell in love with Jabberwocky when I introduced them to it on Monday.  I brought it up during Philosophy, in reference to the conventional nature of language, but due to time constraints I ended up putting it on the board and reciting it during Geometry.  They were delighted. I wasn’t allowed to erase it until many of them had copied the entire thing in their notes.  To what academic end, I do not know.  Hopefully my point about language will stick, anyway.

 

Peaceful Moments Are…

…sitting in the office grading, while rain pours outside and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong take much of the sting from the midterms at hand.

…swinging in a hammock on the veranda, looking up at palm trees silhouetted against the reassuring bulk of the church in the cool moonlight.

…awakening to the sound of voices singing “Muy Buenos Dias” as they finish their morning prayers in the church next door.

…kneeling in a quiet morning mass, accompanied by birds chirping in the cool early mist outside.

…praying in the dark stillness of the adoration chapel late at night, while flickering prayer candles illuminate the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, mere feet away.

Not all moments are peaceful, but these little nuggets of calm glimmer in the corners of each day and week: reminders that all is well, encouragement to go on with renewed energy.

High School Music

It is getting towards a month since I took over my three high school music classes.  Since each class only happens once a week (although each one is a double period), that doesn’t actually mean I’ve seen as much of the kids as one would expect.  However, it has been long enough for me to see that the boys – both 1st and 2nd form – are easier to handle than my one group of 2nd form girls.  The girls are whiny and lazy, not to mention the fact that they chatter.  All. The. Time.  No matter what I do.  I split up pairs and groups, but they just find other people to talk to.  They also have no problem talking across each other.  There is only so much space in one classroom with which to buffer chatter.

The boys can certainly be rambunctious.  The 1st form boys especially like to talk, and also spend a fair amount of time wandering around the classroom at will.  “Sit down!  Be quiet!  Sit, sit, sit, sit, sit!”  “Miss, we aren’t dogs!”  “Well, if you act like dogs…”

But they can also be fun, and their antics seem to come so much more from wholesome high spirits than unengaged…bad attitude…that I am more willing to take them on.  It is also easier to be direct with the boys.

Anyway, yesterday’s 2nd form boys class (also the smallest high school group, at about 11 or 12 students) was probably the best music class I’ve had yet.  Even the normally unengaged boys were mostly interested.  One of the boys, who usually sits by the window and listlessly strums a makeshift guitar while saying nothing, surprisingly sat in the middle of the classroom, right in front of me, and participated with a will.  We learned piano keys, practiced drawing treble and bass clef signs, and worked on “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” a hymn I had started teaching them a week or two earlier.  I also had them listen to fancy version of the song with 9 cellos, which you can hear here.  They had told me originally that the song sounded like “funeral music,” so I thought they needed a bit of help seeing how exciting it can be.

 

I was rewarded at the end by this exchange with one of the boys, who is admittedly a sweetheart anyway: “Miss, are we going to sing this song?”  “Yes…?”  “I mean…on Monday?”  “Yes, we’re learning it.”  “Miss, it seems interesting.  It seems like an interesting song.”  Stamp of approval!

 

One of the quiet, but engaged and apparently artistic 1st form boys reversed that little ego boost this morning by telling me before the 1st form class that “this class is very boring to me, miss.  We don’t sing any music that we know.”  (I understood this as “fun music.”)  To add insult to injury – if I were really prone to receive either from teenaged boys – “Miss, they say a lot of things in Spanish that are very disrespectful to you.  I’m sorry for that.”  “Well, do you say disrespectful things?”  “Miss, have you ever heard me talk in your class?”  Fair enough.  He stays pretty quiet unless I call on him.

 

Sigh.  I was not surprised by this little relay of information.  I am also inclined to believe it, coming from this student.  C’est la vie.  I am in the process of deciding how to simplify “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” for the boys to learn as a more fun song.  This was suggested by a 2nd form boy, but I liked the suggestion, so I started to do some research.  It technically comes in six parts.  That is so far beyond our reach that I think I will boil it down to two.  In any case, I think both 1st and 2nd form boys can work on it.

 

In 40 minutes, I must wade into the slithering mass of whining and jabbering that is my 2nd form girls’ class.  I don’t think it helps that I teach this already difficult bunch for a double period at the very end of the school day.  I have been mulling for days over what form of hardcore discipline to employ today.  I need to make an impression, to get them under control.  I don’t like the idea of giving demerits in music class, since it is only an elective, but I may have to do so.  They can smell weakness, I think.  I will at least have to use demerits as a threat to back up some other form of discipline.

 

Junior college classes are a different kettle of fish, but I will save that for another day.  My parting salutation to you all, (2nd form girls being foremost in my thoughts) is: Ave, Caesar (et. al), morituri te salutamus.  Yes, I realize the number is wrong, but it’s a quote.

In Memoriam: Dr. McArthur

Yesterday morning I received the sad, but not unexpected news that a beloved teacher and family friend, the founding president of my alma mater, has passed into the next life.  Please pray for the peaceful repose of this great man’s soul, and for the comfort of his family and all who loved him.

I started to write this post at one point yesterday, and then gave up, only to return to it.   Although nothing I say will do Dr. McArthur justice, I think the attempt is worthwhile.

The story of Dr. McArthur’s life is inextricably entwined with the story of Thomas Aquinas College.  An almost painfully skeletal version of both can be found here.  However, this is not the Dr. McArthur of legend: the brilliant, benevolent, larger-than-life character who figured in my parents’ and grandparents’ stories all the years I was growing up.

Although Dr. McArthur taught both of my parents in college, his presence in their stories goes much farther back.  My maternal grandfather met him as a young man, when he studied under Dr. McArthur’s tutelage at St. Mary’s college.  Eventually they, along with a handful of other men, began the legwork involved in founding a new, radically unique Catholic liberal arts college.  The college probably never would have been launched without the extraordinary combination of Dr. McArthur’s clear vision of the importance of ideas, his deep love of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, and his intensely magnetic and persuasive personality.

From that point forward, Dr. McArthur was irrevocably entrenched in the stories from the early days of the college.  I think anyone who has heard these stories from any point of view knows how important he was.  Since my mom’s family remained involved with TAC, he looms large in their personal stories as well.  He was a fast friend to my grandparents, and became a sort of honorary uncle to my mother and her siblings.  In time he would teach several of them in college, a circumstance which would multiply the stories and memories of academic enlightenment mixed with practical jokes and classroom antics; but before things progressed that far, he became entwined in the stories from the other side of my family as well.

The year TAC was preparing to open its doors was the same year my dad’s only sister, Maryann, was looking for a college.  She and her parents saw an advertisement and wrote a letter of inquiry, but heard nothing until shortly before school was about to start.  My strong-willed Italian grandfather was characteristically protective about sending his only daughter (perhaps he wouldn’t have cared so much if she had been one of his seven sons) to an upstart school in California, clear across the country from New York.  However, everything about the school looked good – too good to be true, in fact – so he called Dr. McArthur, who was the president at that time.  No one really knows what was said in that conversation.  Afterwards my Grandpa consented to my aunt’s enrollment as a student in the first class, and in fact became a lifelong proponent of liberal education.  We suspect that he exacted a promise from Dr. McArthur; and if Dr. McArthur promised to keep a personal eye on my aunt, he was as good as his word.

My aunt had a life-changing (and indeed, family-changing) experience at TAC.  Three of her seven brothers (including my dad) eventually followed in her footsteps, each of them emerging with additional stories of Dr. McArthur’s brilliance as a philosopher and a teacher, his intensity and personal magnetism, and his benevolent teasing and good-natured thumping of anyone within striking distance to emphasize his points.  My grandparents’ house became the natural stopping point for Dr. McArthur on any east coast trip his presidency necessitated.  He remembered my grandmother’s apple pie years later, when I was a student.  “Your grandmother, now…she was a good woman.  A good woman.”  All of the early alumni, including many who now teach at the college, have similar stories.  Dr. McArthur was a legend by the time my generation arrived.

By then he was only teaching part-time, so my awe and excitement when I discovered that I had him for junior Theology were mixed with relief that I would get to take at least one class from him after all.  Due to his poor eyesight, he asked us to choose assigned seats at the beginning of the year.  I ended up sitting next to him, which put me in range for a full barrage of swings and thumps.  In particularly passionate moments, he would lay hold of me or the student on his other side and shake.  One time I lowered my head into the line of fire, catching a thump meant for my shoulder.  

“All right, everybody,” he would say in his gruff, blustery voice.  “Let’s take this text line by line.  It’s the only way I know how to read this stuff [St. Thomas].  Maybe someone knows a better way, but it’s the only way I know how to read this stuff.”  Off we would go, grappling our way through difficult passages until something would spark an incisive exposition from Dr. McArthur while we all sat quietly and listened.  He didn’t really notice what we were doing around him, which allowed us to do our fair share of shoe-passing and note-writing.  It also meant that he never seemed to notice when I would straighten out the dog-eared pages of his text as he expostulated; or perhaps he didn’t care.

Legend has it that Dr. McArthur used to take his own shoes off during class in the old days, though he never did by the time I was there.  Apparently the students of that day were adept enough to steal his gigantic shoes.  One time one of the girls even wore them out of the room, slipping them right over her own.  By my calculations, there would have been ample room in his shoes.

After Theology, he would usually kick back in his chair and start talking.  He might go off on some theological or philosophical tangent, but more often than not he would expound on the problems in today’s world.  His opinions were clear, enthusiastic, and, like everything else about him, vigorous.  If he wasn’t prescribing radical remedies for the ills of society or expounding on more abstract philosophical and theological themes, he was telling stories.  Since I sat on his left, and a daughter of a memorable alumna sat on his right, stories about various members of our families came quickly to his mind.

“In one of the first years of the school, back when we were at the old campus,” he said one day, addressing anyone in classroom who cared to listen, “you know, we only rented space at the old campus.  We weren’t the only group who did, and we had no control over who else could use the campus, which we didn’t like very much.  One of those times, there was a company shooting some ads on campus.  And one day, I saw a blond girl in a swimsuit walking down one of the colonnades.  And I said, I said” (at this point he raised his expressive voice to characteristically booming tones ) ” ‘Maryann! What the hell are you doing?’  And she turned around…and she wasn’t Maryann.”  And he started to laugh, remembering the old days of inconveniently shared campus space and classes the size of a large family.

Our next teacher would often come into the room during these post-Theology chats, but he never rushed Dr. McArthur.  Sometimes he would join us, sitting around the table and listening.  For a while I thought Dr. McArthur didn’t notice him, but one day he started teasing our teacher, who was in fact former student himself.  Neither of them seemed to care about the exact demarcations in the class schedule, a circumstance from which all of us benefited.

“Your dad, he liked to argue.  And we would really go at it, you know.”  Dr. McArthur never made any bones about his opinion, but he was so good-natured that I don’t think anyone really minded.  “You’re a good kid, but you’re dumb,” he would jovially tease a student who was not immediately seeing a point he considered blindingly obvious.  Then he would clap the student on the back and shake him in his seat.  

He was about 83 when I was a freshman, but when I was introduced to him, he peered down at me from the glory of well over six feet (even then!), put his gigantic hand on my head, and shook me benevolently in my shoes.  I have seen him treat grown men – other teachers, many of whom were former students of his – in the same way.

Towards the end of the time allotted to work on my senior thesis, I asked Dr. McArthur to take a look at it.  I needed another opinion, and knew his would be valuable.  A few days later, he gave my draft back with comments written in the margins.  He told me cheerfully “This is good.  You’re really thinking about this stuff.  I don’t know enough about it to know if you’re right in all you say…I don’t know that your conclusion is right…but you really made me think!”  From another reader, especially another one of such venerable status and weighty opinion, I might well have been horrified to hear the off-handed comment “I don’t know that your conclusion is right” mere weeks before the final draft was due.  I was happy enough to hear it from him, however.  My thesis adviser placidly agreed, and given that I passed, it seems that we were correct.

When I heard, the year after my graduation, that Dr. McArthur had had to retire from his teaching, I was sad.  While I am happy that the past couple years of health struggles have come to a peaceful close, and happy that he has begun the next stage of his journey to come face to face with the True, the Good, the Beautiful, the God for Whom he undertook all of his endeavors and yearned with all his heart, I grieve for the future generations of students who will never directly encounter his brilliance and charm.  At the same time, Dr. McArthur’s impact on individuals, on Thomas Aquinas College, and on the world will not cease to affect those generations.  Whenever they read the founding documents which express the ideals of Catholic liberal education with astounding clarity, they will be caught up in the timeless truths which moved his every action; whenever they study at the school he helped to found, whenever they are guided by Dr. McArthur’s own students, now turned teachers in their own right, they will reap the benefits of his intelligence, his dedication, and his selfless love.  His influence reaches beyond the sphere of a single school to other, newer liberal arts colleges which have wisely borrowed from his intellectual legacy, and even beyond, into the world where his students work tirelessly to apply the principles he gave them.  I do not think it would be too strong to say that, through sacrificing his life in humility and obedience, this man was permitted to change the face of modern education.  Thank God for him.  Eternal rest grant unto Dr. McArthur, oh Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.  May his soul and the souls of all the faithfully departed rest in peace.  Amen.