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October 9, 2011 by Cyrus Patell

L (Significant Birthday)

9 October 2011

6:15 a.m. Gulf Standard Time (GST)

The alarm goes off. I think to myself that back in New York, where it is 10:15 p.m. EDT, it is still October 8, and I am still in my forties. I remember that, when I turned 40, it was not even a month after 9/11. My wife and I had gone away to the Catskills for a weekend, leaving our not-quite-one-year-old son with my sister- and mother-in-law. The U.S. bombed Afghanistan that weekend. I discovered that ten years later my birthday would fall on a Sunday. I imagined that I would be spending the previous night having a large party in some dark downtown bar with loud music and a whole bunch of liquor. The party would just be kicking into gear at 10:15 p.m. EDT (6:15 a.m. GST). And Sunday, my 50th birthday, would be a well-earned day of rest.

Not in my wildest dreams, ten years ago, did I expect to be waking up in Abu Dhabi on the morning of Sunday, October 9, 2011 — which happens to be a work day in Abu Dhabi.

8:30 a.m. GST

I find myself in a classroom about to lead a discussion of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. I am hoping that there is not something uncannily prophetic about starting my 51st year talking about a book with that particular title. Full disclosure: it’s my least favorite text on the syllabus for my Cosmopolitan Imagination course.

9:45 a.m. GST

After a pretty lively class discussion, I find myself thinking that I might actually have started liking Things Fall Apart (as opposed to, you know, appreciating it intellectually).

10:00 a.m. GST

I am on an Abu Dhabi city bus heading to the American Community School, which my children are attending. The fare is AED 1 (that’s one “dirham”). I’m taking the bus because, for a New Yorker, there’s something pleasing about taking a new, air-conditioned bus and paying only $0.27 for the ride.

10:20 a.m. GST

I am at the American Community School, where it is goal-setting day for the second-graders. My son Caleb has been asked to come up with goals in three areas: academic growth, personal growth, and personal interest. He and his teacher will choose one of these goals; he will come up with an action plan; and when he has achieved his goal, he will describe his achievement to his classmates. Caleb wants to: 1) work on his multiplication skills; 2) learn to work better with his brother; 3) learn to do tricks on his skateboard. His teacher suggests that #1 will take place in school anyway and that #2 is something that Caleb will working on with us as a family. The two of them draw up a contract for the pursuit of #3. Caleb describes the trick that he would like to learn. His teacher nods sagely and then refers to it as an “aerial flip.”

This, apparently, is what Caleb has in mind:

He will work to pursue this goal and present it to his classmates in the spring.

11:20 a.m. GST

I am an in a meeting with other deans and the Vice Provost from New York who directs NYUAD Admissions. We are talking about the past year’s admissions cycle, generally agreeing that it was a great success. My counterpart, the Associate Dean of Arts, is calling in from New York, where it is, yes, 3:20 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

12:30 p.m. GST

I am at a luncheon with former UK prime minister Gordon Brown, some colleagues from NYUAD, and five thirty-something Emiratis who work for the Mubadala Corporation and are helping us forge links between NYUAD and the Emirati community. My colleagues and I sit mostly on the sidelines of the conversation, as Brown questions these comparative youngsters about the Abu Dhabi’s 2030 plan and Mubadala’s role in it. They, in turn, pick his brains about UK perceptions of the UAE and seek tidbits of advice about the perils of the global economy. He advises investment in Africa. It’s a fascinating exchange for me to watch, and it helps me to think about a course on UAE culture that I’d like to see added to the NYUAD curriculum.

3:26 p.m. GST

I discovered that I am now down to teach an additional course this spring. It is not, however, the “Classic American Literature” course that I have been planning:

I think, briefly, that someone in NYUAD IT has a wicked sense of humor and is poking fun at me. After that brief flash of narcissism, I think that’s it more likely a sign of a certain unreliability in the course catalog module of our site that colleagues have been reporting.

3:30 p.m. GST

Our wonderful Arts & Humanities Executive Assistant surprises me with cupcakes and candles and a gathering of staff to celebrate my birthday. Somehow, I manage to avoid having them sing.

4:15 p.m. GST

I arrive back home at Sama Tower bearing cupcakes for the tykes. A crew has repaired the ceiling in our storage room (the “maid’s room” according to the electrical panel), which was leaking for the second time yesterday. Unfortunately, we’d had a delivery from IKEA and had installed shelves in the room shortly before the second leak sprung. We’ve been here for 8 weeks, and our family infrastructure is still a work-in-progress.

4:30 p.m. GST

Facetime on the iPad 2 with my father in New York. He gets a virtual tour of our apartment and chats with the boys. They speak to him in tidbits of Arabic. Ain’t the 21st century grand? Thank you, Steve Jobs.

5:00 p.m. GST

I am bolting two additional CD shelves IKEA to the wall, across the doorway from 4 shelves holding DVDs. The new shaelves now house all of our opera CDs. Sadly, there are still six large boxes of other CDs awaiting disposition. I sense another trip to IKEA before too long.

6:30 pm. GST

I have elected to skip Gordon Brown’s lecture at the NYUAD Institute in favor of a birthday dinner out with the family. We go to Moti Mahal Delux about half a mile up Electra Street. My sons — incredibly picky eaters — liked the chicken tikka that I’d ordered from Moti Mahal a few days ago, so it seemed like a good bet for a controversy-free dinner out. And so it turns out to be.

8:00 p.m. GST

The candles from the office reappear on an ice cream cake from the Baskin-Robbins downstairs. My kids have been eyeing this cake for the past several weeks. They find it meets their expectations. And there are leftovers for tomorrow.

10:00 p.m. GST

An e-mail from one of my students suggests that they have discovered my secret and are planning something nefarious for our next class.

Not surprisingly, tomorrow’s weather forecast in Abu Dhabi calls for sunny skies.

***

Nope.

Not what I imagined ten years ago.

I wouldn’t change any of it. Thanks, everyone, for my wonderful day.

September 11, 2011 by Cyrus Patell

11-9-11

Here in Abu Dhabi (as in many parts of the world aside from the US) we write today’s date this way:

11-9-11

I like the symmetry of that, which won’t be repeated for another hundred years. It makes today special among anniversaries of 9/11.

The next 11-9-11 will be even more special, because it’ll be the 110th anniversary of the date that those two towers — each 110 stories tall — came to earth.

Early this morning, indeed in the very minutes after the day began, I lived through a symmetry that was (to quote the poet William Blake) “fearful.”

Just a few minutes into 11-9-11, my family and I found ourselves descending down a concrete staircase in a very tall building, smelling smoke. I was told later that some of the machinery on the 34th floor of the Sama Tower where we live overheated, causing wires to melt, burn, and smoke. Luckily, it didn’t turn into a major fire. The boys had experienced a couple of fire drills in our old building on 14th Street in New York, but in Abu Dhabi our apartment is on the 37th floor instead of the 15th, and in New York we’d never actually smelled smoke.

It was a visitation of the uncanny that give me, ever so briefly, just the barest glimpse into what it must have been like for those people on that day who walked down almost three times as many flights as we did. The lucky ones, who got down and got out.

Periodically, as we walked down with other members of the NYU Abu Dhabi community, the lights went out, but I had the comfort of knowing that it was simply because the switches were on timers, turned again on with the press of switch — not due to a catastrophic power failure. Walking down those stairs, I felt urgency, but never fear. Outside we discovered that some of the NYUAD students had thought to bring necessities that we hadn’t occurred to us: a guitar, a soccer ball. Thoughtful souls purchased bottles of water and gave them out to those in need.

The National, Abu Dhabi’s English-language newspaper, ran a brief piece today about the morning’s events:

Fire forces evacuation of NYU Abu Dhabi students and staff
Erin Conroy
Sep 11, 2011

A fire and smoke at a student housing building for New York University Abu Dhabi has forced the evacuation of hundreds of students and staff in the middle of the night.

Students were transferred from their dorms at the 46-storey Sama Tower to the university’s classroom building just after midnight, while some staff were forced to check into nearby hotels.

They were able to return to the building around 4am.

Classes today have been cancelled. The university’s second batch of students started classes last week.

We were among those who checked into the nearby Cristal Hotel. My 8:30 class was cancelled, along with all the others today, but my older son made it to school in time to take a first-period middle-school exam. Resilient like so many New Yorkers, my kids were mostly calm last night and only a little freaked out at the prospect of going to bed tonight. Mostly they were just tired.

Meanwhile, the National has been running feature articles for the past week about 9/11. The most moving was probably the first in the series, “The Day Our World Ended” (September 3), about a Muslim family from Bangladesh that was devastated when husband and father Mohammed Chowdhury died at the World Trade Center, where he worked as a waiter. Two days later, his son Farqad was born. You can watch a video based on interviews conducted for the article here.

Looking around the parking lot around Sama Tower early this morning and seeing students from all over the world gathered together, I was reminded of a moment from the documentary film 9/11 that my colleague Bryan Waterman and I have been showing on the first day of our Writing New York class since we began teaching it in 2003. It’s part of a montage of scenes from films about New York that begins with a clip from the documentary New York by Ric Burns. The clip describes New York as city devoted to “the exhilarating, often harrowing experiment whether all the peoples of the world could live together in a single place.” The montage concludes with a brief scene from 9/11, after the second plane has hit, when the filmmakers notice how many people of different races and ethnicities are standing in the street, aghast, sharing information and impressions, sharing shock and fear. We use it as an example of New York’s cosmopolitanism — and implicitly as an argument for the necessity of a pursuing a cosmopolitanism that can allow you to embrace rather than reject cultural difference.

In that spirit of cosmopolitanism, I’m pleased to say that one class wasn’t cancelled today at NYU Abu Dhabi: Elementary Arabic I for Faculty and Staff had its first meeting at 7:00 p.m. in Sama Tower as scheduled.

I was proud to be there.

[Photos taken earlier today behind Sama Tower in Abu Dhabi.]