since i teach grammar and since most of my students are from what i call the kingdom, and since nineteen boys or the vast majority of the nineteen boys who blew up our towers were from this very kingdom, i'm always a little sensitive of the fact that if anything is going to disaffect these guys, and make them completely unable to handle this culture, it's grammar and our desire to have our language follow certain consistent patterns which apparently theirs doesn't demand, or demands in a completely different way. so it happens that at a grading meeting, where a certain guy had his reading/listening teacher absolutely convinced that he was an excellent student, i could come into that same meeting saying, no, in a test where you get fifty for just putting your name on the page, he couldn't even get a fifty. now it happens that a lot of these guys are socially adept, listening excellent, very fluent, charming even, but they have no concept of grammar, that's their weak point, can't even begin to study it and culturally have trouble picking up a book at night, or doing something that would help them get past that block. buy the book, yes, they can usually do that. show up for class and hear what i say, yes, they can usually do that too. but prove it by performing in a test, no, they probably can't.

so they struggle in the lower levels and we come to the higher levels where they slog through the readings now, still listen intently in class, and by dint of hard work often manage to master the material and pass; i had one gentleman, a rather quiet guy, but he passed, passed legitimately, and popped in on the facebook chat and we were talking for a while so i asked him about his hometown and he finally told me, a small village west of the capital, on the mekka road, so i looked it up on google earth, and i felt like i was flying over this vast saudi desert until it turned mountainous and got kind of interesting, and there were these small towns off the mekka road, and it so happened that we were so far out in the sticks that the towns were labeled in arabic but not english. so now i was in his area and he explained to me that his town was much smaller than mine but he did go into a nearby one every once in a while and yes, they listened to music occasionally and he even gave me a sample which was on youtube, in which someone played the ood which best i can figure is like a balalaika.

so now i listened to this distant far-off kind of folk music and its musical structure is way different from ours, i would have to listen to it dozens of times to really get it, but i kind of wanted to do that, go to this far-off place that i hear so much about and that, from the sky, looks somewhat like texas or south dakota or some dry place where they're not afraid to make flat roofs all over the place. i kind of liked the idea of being on the mekka road because i figured that as isolated as his life might have been, he'd occasionally see some cars coming by from the capital, mercedes and limousines, coming from the capital to the holy city for whatever reason, going a hundred or whatever you do out there in the desert, swerving to avoid an occasional camel in the road. if i were to really visit this guy i'm sure he'd show me the back roads, the high mountain trails, how it gets cool at night, how some young guys play ood out in the desert nights, yes there's some talk about the arab spring and all but overall you don't say anything bad about the king and besides that king provides almost everything for anybody but you know, it's the kind of place where the women are still struggling for the right to drive or be out alone in public, or show their face, and although some people still defend this as the protection of women, the more they see of the outside world, the more they begin to get the idea that human rights and equality will probably and inevitably bring change to their kingdom. i thought back to a time in class when this debate had come up and this same guy, in a kind of gentle wisdom, shrugged at the inevitability of such change and also the general idea that, well, one didn't want to say too much about a subject like this, since, by all accounts, change was inevitable anyway, and being to vocal for or against anything in a collectivist culture could only start a bad chain of events in play, whereas laying low was the way to pass through the gates of opportunity.

in the week or so before class finally let out today i heard a number of stories of vacation plans, since of course this whole business of sending packages, getting a tree and decorating, making cookies, lighting illuminaria and all is totally foreign to them, no reason to hang around a quiet one-horse town in the middle of cold-and-empty season, when even their friends are gone, so some are off to the kingdom, some are going to l.a., some are going south. only in the country for a few years, you got to see disney world, new york, l.a. for starters, just about any place you can get to; in the case of those going back to the kingdom there would be a slight layover in chicago where the nearest international flight takes off and some were looking forward to a what, thirty-hour flight experience, going back to japan, or the kingdom, or wherever they were headed, spend some time in the sun before coming back here for the spring terms. and i thought, i'm really living out on the edge here, all these people world-traveling around me, heading off to these remote towns and villages or big cities where the folks at googlemaps still haven't come up with an english name.

the hallway is a place where these guys mill together between classes, a lot of them smoke and head outside no matter the weather but the day i played fiddle they all found the sing and took a few pictures one of which i finally got my hands on, second one below, and this is how i'd like to see myself really, kind of bleak architecture and dark hallway colors all along, but an attentive audience and a bright ray of sunshine placed on the whole hallway at that moment, between classes. trouble was i kind of mixed up two audiences, i try to teach grammar so hard to one, then the other, i try to please musically, and it put a bit of stress on me putting together everything i know about them and their culture, and our holiday songs and all, and a couple of different ways to be hard to please. there's a gulf of differences between the two cultures, you see, and it's not just how they respect women, or how they get around, or how they speak a language that has grammar, versus one that may not see it that way, it's a lot more than that. one of the former students came back, he said he was doing well in classes, and socially having a lot of fun, lots of girlfriends for sure, but he said, i'd rather be all black or all white, than brown the way i am, as if he were given a curse to deal with out there in the social world. and i'm sure it feels that way, since once i saw a young woman, probably from a small town in illinois, and she'd twisted or broken her ankle outside on the walkway near our building and somehow found her way into the hallway where sure enough a passel of maybe six or eight of these guys surrounded her asking her if she needed help; one ran upstairs to get bandaids. they knew enough about first aid to be friendly and offer their services, and i knew them to be gentlemen who wouldn't hurt a flea under any circumstances but might be a little weak in the grammar department. but she was absolutely, completely terrified, almost couldn't be consoled. reminds me also of some of that stuff they say on the lowe's website or wherever they can, the people who spread scurrilous rumors about the nature of islam and how in its dark way it's trying to take over the world, as if christianity weren't in the exact same business. but the point is, when it's over, as i told one japanese girl, who was apologizing about her grades and her bad progress in the class, in the end nobody remembers your grade. you remember whether people were nice to you, and whether it was a decent place to be, and whether you heard any good music, or kind words. and what you hear carries a long way back, it'll last a thirty-hour flight or more, if you can make good friends, and manage, through facebook or any other way, to keep them.