A Wonderful Progressive Eddy

“On your right is the building, yes that tennis hut, that my classmates and I built as our gift to the school.  We all worked with . . .”  Ahh, but no one particularly cares and no one is listening. Up ahead we are directed on to the lawn and shown where to park.   It is a welcoming day for parents and students at my old alma mater.  Fortunately, the first building we file into is the Collins Library, which was built long after I left and will be devoid of any hauntings from my teenage years.  That will come later.

On the wall is a photo of the school president.  I reacquaint myself with his first name as I suspect I’ll bump into his before long and minutes later, in the line to sign up for sports teams he walks buy and I’m well-prepared.   He was in Iceland for the summer.  I want to hear about Iceland.  It’s been fourteen years since I visited the place.

Upstairs we’re introduced to the woman who runs the Chinese language instruction and the liaison with international students.  We all speak some polite Chinese with her.  She comments that my daughter’s Chinese is “very good.”  I’d let the comment go with something obligatorily and appropriately humble if it were directed at me, but I can’t help but correct her in this case and let her know that this isn’t something my daughter’s picked up.  “It’s her mother-tongue.”

Later, there’s a queue for health forms.  We seem to have provided them all.  In the corner is a couple who can only be from China.  The nurse asks, and though the wife in particular speaks English perfectly well, we’re helping to afford some translation and generally connecting on matters Cathay.  They hail from Beijing and soon we’re down to neighborhoods and questions of laojia.  We exchange wechat IDs, of course.  I feel obliged to tell them that they, who are dropping their son off at the school as a boarding student, shouldn’t hesitate to call, if there is anything, we can do.  I can only imagine how intimidating this must be, to leave one’s child in a foreign land.  We sit together at lunch as well and once again I offer up, unsolicited, my assurances that Quakerism, is actually a wonderful, progressive eddy within the menagerie of Christian faiths.  Presumptuous of course, as they may be evangelicals, Christian scholars or, indeed, Quakers, for all I know.

Sunday, 09/8/19