A Respectable Chap

Recently I came across a letter that I had written to our children in the spring of 1998, describing our just-completed four-day archeological tour of Jordan. We were among 38 other participants, all supporters of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, most of us retirees in their seventies.

We spent a full day at the legendary city of Petra. As we were leaving, one of the participants, an old lady, told us that when she was 19, she and three male friends aimed to cross from Israel into Jordan with the intention of seeing the city. This was, of course, not only strictly forbidden but also extremely dangerous. Jordan and Israel were still technically at war. While a few Israeli youngsters succeeded in their quest, others set out to see the pink city and never returned.

The well or spring at which she and her friends had planned to refill their canteens turned out to have been poisoned by the Israelis to prevent Bedouins from crossing into Israel with their flocks. The four had water enough only for one more day. The Jordanian army was near. So they decided to turn back. The old lady told us that she was so reluctant to return than her friends had to physically carry her away. That’s when she knew, she said, what Moses must have felt as he looked at the Promised Land.

She told very few people about her exploit. Eventually, however, her children found out about it, which considerably reduced her moral authority in warning them against the various crazy things that young people often want to do. Now that she had finally visited Petra, she shared her story for the first time with relative strangers. As she did so, her eyes shone.

As I read that account, I thought about the crazy things I did when I was in my ‘teens and early twenties. True, I wouldn’t have been shot by the Jordanian army as an infiltrator had my adventures fizzled, but the consequences could have been dire. The story I told in an earlier blog post about riding on a ferris wheel at an African American fair, held in the segregated Deep South, provides a mild example.

Oh, I was like when a lad! sings the jury in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Trial by Jury,” a shocking young scamp of a rover, I behaved like a regular cad; But that sort of thing is all over. I’m now a respectable chap, and shine with a virtue resplendent, and therefore I haven’t a scrap of sympathy for the defendant! I too am now a respectable chap, but, unlike that chorus, I have plenty of sympathy for the boy I once was. I look at his energy, enthusiasm, and idealism and regret their loss. I won't say that his foolishness has entirely dissipated, but I am a great deal more sensible than he was. I was foolish, yes, but, like the old lady, I was lucky.