I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about remembering things recently. I suppose for a lot of reasons. Time has been acting really funny of late, and I struggle to find myself in it.

I went to see a play in London (Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love) yesterday that had been one of my favorite plays in high school…I’d never seen it performed before, but I had read it many times, and I think I had done a few scenes in class. Or maybe not. I don’t remember that part. Similarly, there were some lines in the play which I felt as though I had read that morning; so clear were they in my mind, I could mouth them along with the actors, despite not having read them in at least 11 years. But yet, some of the very central concepts of the play were a complete surprise to me. Those of you who know the story know that there is one big shock, one big truth on which the entire weight of the play hangs, but watching it performed it was as if I was learning it for the first time. And it was so much realer, so much more relevant than it was in high school. Love lost, forbidden lust which is too strong to ignore, death, and hurt tied up with caring and destiny…all of these things were out of my grasp as a 17 year old, and so perhaps the lines about fingers smelling like pussy, and about drinking tequila or cleaning guns, were all my brain could process to the level of importance that would commit them to memory.

I guess I bring this up because of other things happening which bring the past to the front, in odd, inconsistent ways, with different emphases and different perspectives. What an awful shock were last weeks’ events in Mumbai, Israel, and Beirut. In many ways, they remind one of haunted pasts, but yet so much has happened since the last attack, in the world, but also for me. 15 years ago, or eight years ago, I didn’t have friends in Mumbai, in Pakistan, in Beirut, in Tel Aviv, and in Jerusalem. I didn’t understand what was going
On, I didn’t even know what it meant for someone to be Israeli or Lebanese or Indian…I had never really experienced it, and so, while I read and re-read article referencing the attacks and wars which are being dragged out of the filing cabinets to give perspective to these new horrors.

I guess the blessing of the diversity of our school has an evil corollary, which is that for every global atrocity, the chance of having one of our own affected is magnified dramatically. In a sense we are now all affected; we now longer can pretend that any of these things have nothing to do with us. So I send out my best wishes to all of you, wherever in the world you are, but particularly to those in areas which have been in the news of late, and wish safety and peace to you and those around you.