An Ancient Wonder of the World: A Thanksgiving Story
I graduated in one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Have you ever kissed the tarmac of an airport? Have you ever been so happy to get back to your home country that you exited the airplane, kneeled on the runway, leaned over, and placed your lips on the tarmac?
I have. I did it in 1977 after spending six years overseas.
I spent my junior high school years in Heidelberg, Germany, and my high school years in Izmir, Turkey. These were the places my Army dad was stationed.
Exotic, you may think. Worldly, perhaps.
Well, how about deprived? That’s how the teenage me felt. I missed the Fonz and McDonalds french fries. I missed the 1976 Olympics in English, and really, any TV in English. I missed well-stocked, well-lit, warehouse-sized stores like K-Mart.
But now that I’m older I realize how special it was, how unique my opportunity. I got to experience something few other people will.
Among other things, I got to graduate in the 24,000-seat amphitheater of Ephesus, an ancient ruin, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the place where the Apostle Paul preached. We had our ceremony there. I walked across that ancient stage with a diploma in my hands. We did something in 1977 that would never be allowed in modern times.
Who can boast of something like that? Only 21 of us that year. (And a couple graduating classes before us.)
And it was all because of one girl. My classmate, Sabrina Newton. She spoke up; she argued that our ceremony shouldn’t be held in the dingy high school theater. She made the case that if we had to be in Turkey for high school, we should at least get to graduate some place exotic, like a marble theater, one that had been excavated, one sitting at the end of a row of Roman columns, one in the shadow of the Temple of Diana, the goddess of fertility, one that was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
But Principal Brown fought back. She argued logistics and safety and anything else she could muster up not to matriculate a bunch of seniors 50 miles away.
Thank you, Sabrina. After all these years, thank you for standing up for the other 20 of us. Thank you for thinking bigger. Thank you for turning deprivation into a blessing. Thank you for being an old soul, especially since you were only sixteen, among a bunch of knucklehead seniors. And thank you for standing up to Principal Brown (and I’m delighted she gave you props in her graduation speech).
As I look back on it now, I have no idea how you had that insight. But thank God you did.
(Me, Don Carruthers, Sabrina Newton and Paul Dillman outside the amphitheater.)
Sabrina texted me recently and told me she has colon cancer. She has had a sizeable chunk of her intestine removed and is having to learn to digest food all over again. I felt her pain.
When I asked her how she was handling it, I kind of had a hunch. In my mind, I suspected that she was better than most people would be. I guessed she’d be thinking bigger, she’d be looking for the blessing, and she’d see things others wouldn’t.
And guess what? I was right. Colon cancer sucks, but she’s optimistic, she sees the silver lining, and is waiting for the insight. She texted me, “I think I was just born with the positive outlook gene.”
Okay, fair enough, maybe it is a gene. Maybe her insight on Ephesus and her optimism with cancer is genetic. But still, I want to be that way. I want to see the things that she sees.
So, good luck Sabrina. Thank you for seeing to it that we graduated in one of the wonders of the world. And thank you for your soul in this world.
(P.S. Good news: the mass was recently removed from her colon and it looks like it hadn’t spread.)