A Memory of the Day We Left

“Aren’t you scared?”

It should give a man a strange feeling to pop over to the neighbour’s house for a tasty lunch of barbequed ribs on a hot summer day, wave goodbye, walk out of his backyard, get into a van and drive to the airport to fly away to another country for a year.

But in my case it was strange because I didn’t really have any feelings at all.

For weeks, people had been asking me questions like, “Are you getting ready to go?” or “Getting geared up?” or “Are you suffering stress-related diarrhea from moving to a foreign country where you will be socially isolated by language, culture and your lack of appreciation for beer?”

In each case I know that the questioner was not only poking me in my cage to see if I would drop into a fetal ball on the floor of Zehr’s and soil myself in terror, but they were also revealing to me their own fears.

It was obvious that those asking me if I was scared were themselves thinking, “I sure as hell would be,” and a number of those people admitted that they would never do it.

They’re right to feel that way, of course. It is bug nut crazy to up and leave like we were doing and I probably should have been on the floor there in the produce section, weeping in a puddle of my own urine.

But I wasn’t. All I was doing was buying bananas.

Don’t think I wasn’t filled with dread, but also don’t think that I was filled with dread specifically because we were moving away.

I am always filled with dread.

I am filled with dread from the moment I get up in the morning until I fall asleep at night.

I am filled with dread right now.

 

In my normal life, I don’t experience a very broad range of emotions. At most, in an average day I have about three feelings, counting fear. If hungry counts as a feeling, then I have four.

I think living with a constant background hum of fear and dread is pretty normal.

It’s not crippling, and it’s completely undeserved because my life is better than so many others’, but there it is nonetheless.

In fact, it’s there because I need it.

So do you.

Dread is the only sane response to a scary reality. If we didn’t have dread, we would all have been eaten by lions on the savannahs of Africa however many million years ago.

Dread keeps you alive.

You probably have it all the time yourself, and you may not really notice it until one of those odd stray moments where you have a sudden sense of weightlessness, a disorienting internal twitter from the lifting of that constant press of fear.

I get those moments as well, and instead of soaking it up for as long as I can, I cut it short with a pang of new concern. “What am I supposed to be worried about again?” And then I actually run through a bunch of problems; generate a list of my own petty torments to end my fleeting sense of inner peace and go back to worrying about having to go to a party in a week, or my next prostate exam or any one of a million stupid things that might be going on in a middle-aged life.

Moving to Germany is just putting another stone on the beach. Who’s even going to notice?

Every night before we left I fell asleep the same as always, slept until I was too sore to stay in bed, got up, ate food, worked out and did whatever I was told to do.

Just like a robot.

Just like any other day.

Just like everybody else.

Get up. Go to work. Have lunch. Come home. Make supper. Do dishes. Work out. Do homework. Indulge in leisure of choice. Go to sleep. Get up. Go to work…

Rinse and repeat.

All I had to do was add a couple more layers into the routine to get ready to move.

Pack up, clean up, roll out.

Wait a minute.

I’ve been lying.

I did have a new fear, something that made me scared about leaving.

Hugging.

Have you ever noticed that some people actively want to hug other people?

I’m not kidding. I’ve seen it firsthand.

There is a certain segment of the population that seems to enjoy grabbing onto other people, and pressing up against them and gripping them right in there.

It’s bizarre.

Do you, like me, wonder if any of those hugging people have ever noticed that some of the people they are hugging are fighting the urge to recoil and run away?

When I was a kid, I had this idea that all people should be colour coded.

All those who like to hug and be hugged, patted, ruffled, tousled, cuddled or coddled, they can all be a bright colour, like a flower, which would attract attention and pollination and all that.

Those of us who don’t enjoy hugging all the time can be a dark colour, like dirt.

Note: I am not a complete monster.

I am not totally against all types of hugging.

I believe that there are two kinds of body contact that should be allowed.

One is parent to baby.

Part of this is because babies can’t walk, and if you didn’t pick them up, they would just lay there and scream. And if you picked them up by the arm or leg, well, that doesn’t look good. You have to pick them up in a certain way and it’s basically a hug and there’s nothing you can do about it. Plus they’re so cuddly and soft and warm and cute and don’t they smell nice? Most of the time.

However, I believe that once that child gets to a certain age, then you have to stop picking them up and giving them free rides. Once they can walk, talk, and maybe shave, well then they have to move on to the next kind of body contact. With somebody else. It’s time for your little baby to fly out and get a nest of his or her own.

That second kind of body contact is the good stuff, what you were saving yourself for as you were growing up. As soon as you can find some acceptably attractive person who doesn’t attempt to flee when you grab onto them, do it. Grab on and don’t let go, even after they give in and marry you.

That’s what I did, and now I have two kids. See? It works.

But in spite of what I consider to be good policy, other people don’t agree. And when they see other people going away for long periods of time, they start warming up their biceps for some intense, protracted torso on torso action.

Maybe I was flattering myself, but I was concerned that some people would try to pack 365 days worth of hugs into what could be interpreted as an orgy of goodbye hugging.

That alone was enough to make me not want to go.

I can deal with being away from my friends and family, my house, my job, my town, my gym, the band room, the cats and a decent desktop computer for a year.

I can deal with unending months of cultural and social isolation.

I have no problems with constantly being the conspicuous outsider, the strange one, the odd man out in an odd new place.

I am fine with putting my wife and kids through a brutal regimen of international travel that would crush a weaker family.

I can handle the uncertainty, the unexpected, the incomprehensible and the unknown.

It’s the hugging that keeps me up at night, staring into the darkness, wondering if we could get away without anybody finding out.

TV Time

It has already been well established that I am immature and I am very sorry about that.

I am also sorry that I laughed out loud watching a German news report on drunk driving.

Don’t be angry!

Let me explain.

First of all, you have to remember that every German word I hear registers for the briefest millisecond as an English word. Over four decades of having pretty much only English spoken around, near, beside and often directly at me has created what I envision as deep ruts in my brain. German words fall into these ruts, and travel directly to the English receptors of my Wernicke’s Area or something. That sad, lost little German word bangs around in the folds for a millisecond or two, struggling to be English, and once it fails, falls deep down into the tiny, underdeveloped German receptor hidden in the bottom there, near the way out.

This process should be perfectly understandable, as you all perform a very similar task in your native tongue every day.

When you read the word “luggage” in this sentence, you probably “see” in your own little receptor place in your visual cortex some variation on a display of gray suitcases similar to a fine collection of Samsonite from a showcase in a 1974 episode of The Price Is Right.

That’s what language is: a means by which we can express our own brain pictures and feelings into words that other people can turn into their own brain pictures and feelings brain pictures. 

You can’t blame me for “seeing” the Englishness of a word before I can perceive the Germanity or Frenchosity or Greekaciousness or whatever.

My good wife in trying to break that pattern for herself and has begun hearing German TV shows while she irons, which figures prominently in this particular adventure.  

Note that I say my wife is hearing German shows, because I’m not sure how much actual listening is going on.

What she’s doing is probably in many ways related to what your cat hears when you talk to it. Every so often there is a word that makes an impact, but the rest sounds like somebody might be playing music backwards hoping to find Satanic messages. (there aren’t any, by the way – I checked)

The very fact that she is watching TV at all stands as testimony to how much fun ironing is because none of us in this family are what I would call TV people.

Instead, we are computer people, book and magazine reading people, game players and do-thingers.

During the normal run of our lives TV is so meaningless to us that, most of the time, it wouldn’t matter what language we were watching.

But then we moved to Germany and found out that this house comes with fully functioning British satellite TV.

For some reason, this created a lot of short term excitement.

During those first two months of living here, what with our struggling to deal with living in a new culture, I think we had the idea that British TV would give us some type of comfort and familiarity. It would approximate that feeling of driving out of The Chunnel and seeing signs we could read and leaping up and down with joy. “Look! That’s English!”

This is pretty much the only rationale I can conjure up to explain my six week addiction to Bargain Hunt. 

If you don’t know about Bargain Hunt, then your life is either much better or much worse than it could be, depending on how much you like crazy British shows. 

Bargain Hunt is one of what turns out to be a large number of shockingly cheaply made reality-based BBC shows that will often be copied by an American broadcaster, only Bargain Hunt is also one of those specific reality-based BBC shows that will never be copied by an American broadcaster.

The premise of this show revolves around a strangely compelling host called Tim with three hundred pounds of ready cash which he will dump in the pockets of each of two competing pairs of average British people who are to nip out into the surrounding area and buy up a few interesting antiques or collectible whatevers.

One they have collected their treasures, these items will be sold at auction.

The point of the show is clearly that these average British people are supposed to buy undervalued items and then turn around and sell them at an antique auction for a great deal of money, upon which time the host will allow each team to keep their profits and we the viewing audience will be vastly entertained and wish we could be so lucky as to become a contestant.

In theory, this is a fantastic premise.

In practice, it is a terrible, terrible premise.

It’s still good fun to watch, but that key concept driving the show is exposed daily as a complete failure.

The host of Bargain Hunt, who in some strange way resembles my dad in spite of looking almost nothing like my dad speaks with one of those hyperbolic British accents that SEEMS to EMphasize odd asPECTS of words and SENTences.

He gets louder and softer at random points in conversation and gives the distinct impression that he thinks of the average British people on his show as staggeringly ignorant, which of course, they do their damnedest to prove correct.

To combat the possibility of completely failure, each pair of contestants is teamed up with an “antiques expert” to help choose their undervalued items, which adds a certain amount of tension to the show as the expert warns the guests not to buy this shockingly overpriced Victorian tobacco bowl or that Baroque German hogshead bootscraper. Naturally, they always buy those ridiculous things, and always put up the defense that they should buy those things because they like them, regardless of what the expert advises. As if their liking something automatically increases its value to everyone else.

During one’s viewing of Bargain Hunt it becomes obvious that:

1. Most people are so blinded by their own simple opinions that they are unable to perform the basic function required to compete on this show and pick stuff that somebody else might want.
2. Those same people are so blinded by their own opinions that they are unable to understand that they are blinded by their opinions.
3. Watching people like that is annoying, yet can be compelling.

It is also obvious in each episode that nobody else could possibly want to bid on those hideous knick-knacks they bought at wildly inflated prices and every auction will be disastrous.

That may be why the auction is the best part of the show.

Before the auction, the not really much like my Dad guy consults with the understandably irritated auctioneer, who sniffs at  the items the guests bought and estimates a value, while the antiques expert and the average British people who bought the stuff watch this examination off camera in shock.

We get to watch the average British people and the antiques expert reduced to tears as the auctioneer savages their embarrassing choices, while the antiques expert, who has at this point lost all credibility, assures the contestants that the auctioneer just doesn’t understand.

During this valuation process the host snickers and adds his own ruthless commentary punctuated by a lot of eye-rolling and mugging for the camera.

At this point in the show even the least observant viewer realizes that everyone but the contestants is in on the joke and all the stuff they bought was crap, and we all know that the contestants are going to lose money at auction and if we don’t know it by simply watching what’s happening on a particular show, we can know it because that is what happens on every single episode.

The odd time somebody will make a few less-than-disastrous choices and the host will exercise much irony and pretend to be giddy with excitement as he tallies up their winnings, and triumphantly hands over their three pounds of profit, whereupon the average British people stand there with stunned expressions and try to forget that they booked off work for a sum total of three pounds in cash and a thirty minutes of eternal shame broadcast nationwide on the BBC.

If I was the host, I would not be able to physically bring myself to hand three pounds over to anyone.

What kind of a game show gives you three pounds? What kind of budget is the BBC running? Sure, it’s a government run company, but that is just offensive. They could at least hand out some added vouchers or board games or something. It’s not like they’re spending any money at all on production values. 

Looking back at what I have written, I can see that I might have given the impression that I did not enjoy this show, which is simply not the case.

I loved it.

But I didn’t love it for the faint sick of embarrassment I felt watching, either. It wasn’t some kind of sick Chuck Woolery Love Connection car crash fascination that made me want to watch.

It was hope.

When I watched Bargain Hunt, I watched it for the same reason a slot machine junkie can’t walk away from the machine that’s robbing him blind. It’s that random payout schedule.

Put a pigeon in a cage with a light he can peck to get food whenever he wants it, and that pigeon will only peck the light when he’s hungry.

Put a pigeon in a cage with a light that gives food at a completely random rate, and that pigeon will peck the light until his beak is bloody.

That’s me watching Bargain Hunt: pecking away at the screen, hoping somebody comes up with a seven pound oil painting that sells for a hundred thousand.

It was my love for Bargain Hunt that lead me into the German news.

On one particular day during my short addiction, my wife would not allow me to watch the British channels until the exact moment Bargain Hunt came on.

She demanded that we learn to watch the German channels.

“We are here to learn the language!”

Being blindly obedient to the Power of Wife, I switched over to the German satellite and steeled myself for the onslaught.

An unadvertised side effect of living in Germany, and perhaps any country with another native language, is a crippling weariness that comes over me when I listen to people speaking. It even happens when I’m listening to them speaking English. It’s like I’m constantly flexing some muscle that I never had to flex back home, and here I’m using it all the time just trying to figure out what’s happening around me.

As a result of this, I had assumed the Downward Facing Dog stance in an attempt to focus my chi as the first story flashed on the screen.

I didn’t have to understand German or see any graphics to know it was serious.

The music was all rhythmic stops and orchestra hits, the announcer’s voice pitched with intensity, and anyone who has seen old newsreel footage can imagine exactly how intense German can sound, loaded with fricatives and harsh guttural expulsions. 

I looked up at the screen just as they opened up with footage of a hideous car wreck all over the Autobahn, with a torn up Porsche and guardrails and a close up shot of that distinctive brown beer bottle glass all over the front seat of the car.

In rural South-Western Ontario, drunk driving is a huge problem, and anybody my age has had friends injured, maimed, paralyzed or killed. It is a hideous, horrible stupid thing that shouldn’t have to happen, but it has been a constant in my life as a child, a student, and now as a teacher.

Nothing about drunk driving is funny to me. Not in any way.

Not until I got to Germany.

It’s still nothing but terrible, perhaps even more so when you have driven on the Autobahn at 160 kph and had a car blow past in the left lane like you are standing still,  and you can imagine how much more dangerous drinking and driving could be in such an environment.

So how could it be that I looked up at the screen and laughed at this tragic image?

It was the text shot in shock-red font across the lower third of the screen:

“Alkohol Fahrt!”

Latest German Album Release

Currently number two on the charts under David Hasselhof’s “I’m Not Drunk, It’s a Hamburger.”

What About German Disneyland?

The first thing is that there isn’t one.

But if there was a German Disneyland, you wouldn’t know you were in it unless you ran into an angry, sweat-soaked teenager wearing a giant mouse head.

This is because the differences between the German realization of a theme park and the North American are not only enormous at times, but stand as a chilling indictment of the North American’s idea of “fun”.

When I was a kid, I would have cut off my left arm to go to Disneyworld. Well, maybe my sister’s left arm.

I was one of those kids who knew a lot about Walt Disney, read about Saint Walt’s life, knew the behind-the-scenes hoo-ha about his movies and his struggles to gain acceptance for his crazy idea (that would be feature length animation), and I would have had a hard time imagining any other place on the globe I would rather have gone than to DisneyWorld.

It becomes apparent that I did not come from a family of well traveled individuals.

When we were told, on one gray, wet fall morning in late 1976 that we would be going to Florida during the forthcoming March Break, I felt like my internal organs were going to explode.

My dad had this funny look on his face after we were called into the bedroom and then he announced: “We are thinking about going to see Grandma and Grandpa Lobb in Florida in March. But we’re just thinking! It’s not for sure.”

Elton John and Kiki Dee warbling through hiss on the clock radio.

A hot flush, a roiling wave of muscle weakness swept from my feet to the base of my skull.

My sister’s face a frozen O.

My brother’s eyes wide as he tried to process all those words that you just couldn’t imagine being in a row.

Me, struggling to maintain bladder control.

I had no frame of reference for that kind of excitement. Can plain old this side of town people like us just go to Disneyworld? Is such a trip a real thing that exists within the limits of possibility? Will I burst into flames upon initial foot contact with such hallowed asphalt?

All we had to do to find out was be good until March and pray that every farmer in Huron County suddenly decided to buy a tractor over the winter.

Somehow, we made it to Florida, and although my brother was sick and we were crammed into my Grandparents’ trailer like refugees, I remember Disneyworld with such a unique combination of perceptions that even now it seems like none of it could have been real.

I can smell the rides, each one distinctly itself.

I can taste the atmosphere, feel the tiniest change in the stage-managed Disney-made air that eddied across my face in the Haunted Mansion or Peter Pan’s Flight.

It was so visceral for me, so intense that I couldn’t believe it was happening even while it was. Each of my senses seemed to engage in a separate dream that were woven together by my brain into something enormously rich and powerful.

I didn’t see plastic and metal and fiberglass in the best of those rides, I was working on another level altogether. The sum of the parts was so much greater than the whole that I came away from Disneyworld a true believer. It really was a Magic Kingdom to twelve-year-old me.

This epiphany lasted for many years.

Then, in 1994, I went back, curious as to what would happen to my memories under the cold light of adulthood.

Of course, all my illusions were shattered.

I could still feel exactly what it was that I had felt back in ‘77, the rush of sensual overload a kid would have gone through, but it wasn’t magic. It was due to a combination of clever Imagineering and a complete lack of experience on my part. I hadn’t been anywhere, hadn’t seen or done anything, and wandering through an amusement park that was drum tight with calculated excitement and carefully thought out mass appeal was more than I could see through at the time.

As an adult, of course, the overall effect of that calculating and lock step crowd pleasing turned me off.

I didn’t dislike it exactly, but I was by equal parts annoyed, offended, amused and deconstructively analytical.

It bothered me to be lining up for as much as an hour for a minute and a half of vestibular punishment, enraged me to shuffle incrementally towards a thin payoff while competing for oxygen with a shambling mob of overfed and perspiring human beings smelling of deep fry and licking ketchup off their fingers.

I simply wasn’t deprived enough anymore to find the necessary level of suspension of disbelief to have the correct amount of fun.

Amusement parks were clearly part of this ongoing process of infantilization and cultured passivity that permeates North American culture.

All those places, from Disney to Canada’s Wonderland to Six Flags Over Pin the Dot on the City are plotted out for fat, soft stimulation junkies who don’t actually want to do anything.

We go to these parks to strap ourselves into buckets, seats, benches, chairs or carts, trams or trains and once safely planted inside we sit there like Jabba and soak up the jolts.

Why don’t they just give in and put all the seats in the middle of the park?

Everyone can walk straight through the gates to the center ring, collapse onto a thickly padded couch, flop down and watch everything go on at the same time. Ride the rides, watch the shows, hear the songs, pet the goats, marvel at the dancing, take pictures of the characters, indulge in every attraction from the same seat.

They can put troughs at every couch, fill them with sody pop and French fries, throw t-shirts and trinkets at us from the stage and later, after we’ve been dollied out to our cars, they can get the money that fell out of our pockets into the cushions.

Our theme parks reveal that for the most part, we don’t want to actually partake in anything, we just want to watch stuff happen. We want things to be done to us and for us and around us and at us. Blast us with lights and colours and sound and motion, pound us with sensation and send us on our way.

What has really made that clear to me was Kettelerhof.

Kettelerhof is a theme park of sorts about 45 minutes from where we live here.

When you drive there, and if you have your North American eyes on, you can’t quite believe that you are as close as your GPS says.

Where are the rollercoasters looming up out of the carefully groomed trees?

Where is the fake mountain?

How about the miles of parking lot, the concrete, the faux train looping around the periphery of the park?

Or why wasn’t there a billboard, an ad, even one puny sign along the road?

Even when we got there and drove into the parking lot we weren’t sure we were at the place.

There was a gravel strip in the trees, untended and wild. It looked like we had come to a run-down petting zoo in the middle of nowhere, and I would have thought even that was closed for the season if there hadn’t been a few people getting out of the cars around us.

It was a cool day, with that particular “is it raining or not?” German mist in the air and we walked through a gate in a rough hewn palisade that could have surrounded a bronze age hill fort.

We had been told something of what to expect, but it wasn’t enough to capture the truth of this park.

Yes, there was some asphalt, and there was junk food of a sort and this is Germany, so there were people all over the place, and in theory it was a theme park, but there was a paradigm shift so clear and obvious that we couldn’t quite process what we were seeing.

There was something this park had that was sorely missing from North American parks.

That something was interaction.

If you wanted to have fun here, you would have to run, climb, jump, crawl, leap, clamber, shinny, hang, swing, twist, balance and spin it up for yourself.

You had to go out there and get it. With your own two hands.

Imagine walking through the trees of a park to find an enormous structure of ropes, cables and platforms four stories high. There are no safety nets, no attendants guarding or cautioning, no signs posted with warnings or rules. (and this is Germany!) This giant structure is there for whatever you can think of doing on it.

My children ran to this thing, climbed up and up and up, into and through and around, leaping from platform to platform, hanging on rope ladders and swinging from handhold to handhold like apes.

It took some doing for my wife and I to stop ourselves from running forward in a panic and dragging them down to safety.

When you see your kid fifty feet in the air hanging her arms and legs down through a wide mesh net that she can almost fit her whole body through, it can give you some interesting feelings.

That was why I climbed up with them.

I wanted in on it.

Once I got to the top, after squirming around and hauling myself through the intricate cable works, I laid on the same thick mesh and looked down at my wife and laughed out loud.

This is what we are supposed to do with our bodies.

We are not meant to be tied down and subjected to upside down corkscrew rolls, slammed with g-forces and pinwheeling drops on the Death-Coaster Mega 5000. Yes, it can be fun for a while, just before you lose control of your bowels, but enduring that kind of stress is not what our bodies are designed to do. Especially not for fun.

We are creatures of muscle and bone and sinew, built to flex and pull and work.

We are made to go out into the world and make our own fun.

When I joined the kids at the top of that first massive structure, I was struck by their faces. They were red cheeked from exertion, eyes flashing with excitement and they were sweating. Not from fear or nausea or electrochemical response to simulated turbulence, but from effort. Playing is hard work.

“Do you like it?”

They did. They couldn’t get enough.

There was no electric power on this “ride”, no whirring of gears or blaring cheeseball 80s music. It was kids using their arms and legs.

If I could have anything in my back yard when I was a kid, and that includes having my own working Sherman tank with a flamethrower attachment, I would have had what we found at Kettelerhof: the greatest monkey bars of all time.

There was one after another of such equipment, all through the place.

Do you remember the jumping room that came in with the fair when you were a kid? It was a puffed up square of vinyl, maybe twenty by twenty, vaguely castle shaped and you kicked your shoes off and bounced around in there for two minutes trying to avoid getting stomped in the face by the psycho kid with the dirty tank top whose mom had to come in and get him when his time was done because he wouldn’t leave, plus he had a runny nose.

Well, the jumping room at Kettlerhof isn’t a room, or a crappy little castle. It’s the size of a school gym floor. And there are three of them side by side.

They are huge, twelve feet high in the middle and just planted out in the middle of a field with no walls on the side, no fences or guard rails. It is magnificent chaos.

Or maybe you prefer to reminisce about the pirate ship treehouse thing at the burger pit on the edge of town? It was about the height of your dad, with a ladder up and a sticky slide with a puddle at the bottom. Maybe a monkey bar. One.

Kettelerhof has a bunch of these things, many of them bigger than your house. The largest is five or six stories high, with rooms and ladders and tunnels and ropes and complex structures layered all throughout the interior.

You could also find a swing thirty five feet high, with two mounds on either side and a deep pit in the middle. You pull the swing up to the top of one mound, stick a kid on the disk on the end of the rope and let go. The kid looks like he’s on an upside down trebuchet, rocketing down into the pit and swinging up the mound on the other side screaming and laughing like a maniac because it is so fast and so high that he can’t help himself.

We spent a cold, rainy day soaked with sweat in this place, running from thing to thing (what else could I call them?) and loving every minute. I have never seen such good design at a theme park.

It’s not good enough for a place to have a subtle speaker placement and brilliant flow dynamics for crowds. I am tired of things that spin me well beyond nausea tolerance and have been since my sad pursuit of the Clinton Spring Fair Tilt a Whirl record in 1978.

I am tired of styrofoam cups and plastic containers. Why can’t we do as the Germans do and serve hot chocolate to customers in actual mugs? You pay 4.50 Euros for your hot chocolate, but when you return the mug you get 2 Euros back. No garbage.

Why do we always have roller coasters? If I want to go fast, I can rent a BMW and hop on the Autobahn. And if I want my ride to be crazy and out of control, I can drive in Italy or Spain.

Am I the only one who’s sick of the same old thing?

Don’t give me another generic Spiderman ride with a mock web car on gimbals in front of a big wrap-around screen. Give me a building I can climb, give me rooftops to jump across, webs to swing on and bad guys to fight. Give me something to do!

 

The last thing North American kids need is another place to park their fat asses and watch more stuff happen.

 

www.kettelerhof.de

Reader Request: Worst Teaching Day

Special Request from Nat the Cat: My Worst Day as a Teacher

(I have chosen not to write about one of my actual worst days as a teacher. In most cases, those worst days have to do with death and tragedy, and there has been enough of that to go around these days. Instead, I have written about my interview for my first teaching job, which was the start of my worst two years as a teacher.)

I graduated from teacher’s college in 1990.

Like many of my peers from Queen’s, I wasn’t going to take a safe breath that summer until I knew there was somewhere for me to go in September. As a result, I was hustling after interviews in the spring, and had narrowed the field down to two.

More correctly, only two schools were even remotely interested in me.

The first was a small rural school south of Woodstock.

On Friday morning I got up with the sun, covered my pudgy 1990 self with the cleanest clothes I could find, and drove off to see if this school held the key to my future.

I have never gotten get nervous before job interviews, so I didn’t feel any motivation to practice answering questions or generate prepared material for likely situations. Unless you count listening to The Cure.

For some reason, before a job interview I feel more than just completely relaxed. I feel good. Thrilled even. How exciting is it to be going into a room where you get to brag about all the wonderful things you can do without anybody being offended?

When I was a kid I spent untold hours trying to get my parents or any number of their friends to pay attention to me while I showed them how I had just learned to whistle or how strong I was, or how much I could sound like a toucan. Usually, nobody cared. Not enough for me, anyway.

The opposite is true in a job interview. Everybody in the room cares. They can’t wait to hear your toucan impression. That’s why they’ve come.

And I couldn’t wait to do it for them.

I got to the tiny school with half an hour to spare, leaped out my car and walked past a cluster of scruffy kids lounging around by the front doors of the school. They stared at me with a half-lidded combination of boredom and curiosity.

One girl, a sharp chinned little blonde with her bangs moussed three inches straight up off her forehead, jerked her chin at me.

“Hey. Are you a new teacher?”

I stopped and looked at her a moment. Stone faced. Kept my eyes on hers until she looked away.

“I’m a cop.”

I sniffed in her direction, cracked a smile.

“Catch you later.”

There were three women already seated in the main office, slumped over on the bench where you’d normally find rowdies who got kicked out of Math or something. They looked to me like they had already lost any jobs they were looking for. See in the dictionary under “dejected”. Shoulders were slumped, spines were curled, mouths were downcast.

If I hadn’t been so happy to be at the interview, I would probably have wanted to lay down and cry.

A secretary stood up from her desk and came to the counter with an expression of forced warmth.

“Are you here for the interviews?”

I thought about telling her that no, I was kicked out of Math for gutting my partner with a protractor, but thought better of it. Secretaries are gate keepers, and you always want the gate keeper on your side.

“Yes I am. Thank you.” I warm faced her right back, certain that my expression looked more believable.

She pointed at the bench, of which the beaten looking women were using every available inch.

“Take a seat.”

Where? On top of them?

I turned and studied the women sitting there.

“Okay, anybody got a spare knee?”

No laugh. Not even a grin. Just a lot of nauseous swallowing.

The job I was there for was an English position, and I had no idea whether or not the women waiting with me were going for that same position or not. They certainly didn’t look like freshly graduated English teachers bursting with energy. They looked like they were lined up for involuntary kidney donation. They made the dentist’s office look like a Grade One piñata party.

The principal’s door opened before I had to generate any more conversation.

A short, mannish-looking woman somewhere in her 50s came out, muttered something to the secretary and came over to stand in front of us with her hands on her hips.

She eyed us as though she though she had received word that one of us was packing a shank and I had the overwhelming feeling that I really had just been kicked out of class.

That particular year was one of those in which there were far more teachers than jobs and people were getting desperate. The chances were good that these women were coming back to school after long maternity leaves and maybe that was difficult for them, or maybe they knew something I didn’t about the principal, but not one of them would meet this stumpy little Principal’s eyes.

I would.

I looked right back at her and smiled. I had nothing to hide.

She frowned at me.

“Why aren’t you sitting down?”

Was I the only one able to see these three women jammed into the only available seat?

“I’m happy to stand.”

“Are you too nervous to sit?”

I shook my head.

“No. I feel great.”

“Is that right? Then you can go first.”

She turned on her heel and went back into her office.

I shrugged and followed her as the women on the bench nearly gasped in relief.

Inside the Principal’s office, another teacher was already seated on a chair beside the desk. She stood up as we entered.

“This is Cheryl,” the short woman grunted.

“Hi Cheryl.”

I shook Cheryl’s hand.

The Principal offered hers, but didn’t tell me her name.

Cheryl looked down at her notes.

“Um, are we going out of order?”

The principal snorted. “Who cares what order we take them? This one said he wasn’t nervous, so we might as well see what he’s got to say.”

She settled down behind her desk and pointed at the twin to Cheryl’s chair.

“Sit down.”

I sat, leaned back and waited.

Normally, job interviews for teaching positions involve the regular overview stuff, a few questions about your ideas on discipline, what you would contribute to the school, what extracurriculars you might be interested in running, and then some specific questions about how you would implement the prevailing educational theory of the day and so on.

They started off into that standard pattern by asking me the usual questions about myself.

Why had I gotten into teaching?

What was the deal with that Film degree?

Why did I leave my last job? Wasn’t that a more suitable career for me?

Why would I want to live in a small town?

Did I know what I was getting into?

I lied like a rug, of course.

I had no choice. If I told the truth they might have physically ejected me from the building, which wouldn’t help my chances for being hired.

After ripping through the explanation portion, they shifted into the rest of the typical stuff.

I dropped into autopilot, answering their questions with that strange push-me pull-you of modesty and boasting that interviews demand, smiling dutifully when necessary and nodding as much as possible to show I was paying attention.

Which I was in a way, because every shred of attention I have to direct was directed at them. Not on what they were saying so much as how they were saying it, what they were doing and how they were interacting with each other.

When you are in a job interview, and if you are smart, you will be trying to analyze the interviewers at least as much as they are trying to analyze you. Maybe moreso.

You want to get a sense of what these people are like, what they’re thinking, what kind of relationship they have with each other. Every morsel of information you can tease out of the interview will help you tailor your responses better, help you to manage the situation to your advantage whenever possible.

In this case, it was obvious right away that they were sticking with the good cop/bad cop strategy. Whether or not they were playing it on purpose wasn’t so obvious, however.

Cheryl seemed to be working very cautiously, sticking to her list and asking me questions that she had written down. Whenever I answered, she would tilt her head to the right and make a thinking face with a furrowed brow. She would nod at me as I spoke, and then when I would say things like, “You know what I mean,” or “But you know that already,” she would lean back a bit and nod much more vigorously, then smile.

This led me to believe that I was saying mostly the right things, and it also told me that the best thing to do with her was to keep getting her to agree with me. If she was going to play good cop, I would give her all the ammo she needed to feel that way.

The Principal had no list of questions, and generally didn’t start any topics. She wasn’t just playing bad cop either, she was living it. She was interrupting me while I was in the middle of a complex answer, kicking in with side comments, tossing barbs ands pointed follow-ups, all presumably to unsettle me.

Her body language was even more aggressive, with her upper torso leaning off her chair towards me, her head forward and chin down a bit, like a battering ram. Her jaw was tight, her lips a thin line and she didn’t blink enough to keep her eyes moist, for which I thought she might pay with an increased chance of glaucoma in later years. Either that or she had transparent nictitating eyelids like a crocodile.

Whenever the Principal broke into the flow of questions and answers, I would face her and acknowledge whatever she said with yet another nod, then angle my head to the left and raise my shoulders a bit as though ceding a point to her.

These constant interruptions appeared to make Cheryl increasingly uncomfortable. She smiled as though it was all in good fun, but her face was taut with strain. Her voice was crackling, too bright, and she laughed way too much, way too loud at the least provocation. I had the idea that maybe she hadn’t sat in on a lot of interviews, and her lack of comfort served to make me feel even more relaxed.

However, the longer I went without showing any sign of getting flustered, the harder the Principal stared at me, no doubt trying to melt the flesh from my face with only the power of her mind.

Suddenly, Cheryl got to the bottom of her list.

“Um, I think that’s about all I have…”

She glanced up at the Principal.

The Principal’s eyes flared with a millisecond of triumph, then she finally blinked, and I had the strangest feeling that I had somehow just been set up.

“Okay, why didn’t you go to Western?”

What?

When you make a habit of reading people, spending your entire life struggling to dig meaning out of the slightest tics and mannerisms of those around you, you get used to having a kind of social déjà vu, a feeling of inevitability as to what people say and do. Things tend to add up and make sense. But this question came so far out of nowhere that I froze for a second. I couldn’t find the thread.

Filler time.

“Western the university?”

“Obviously!”

She had a Western diploma framed on her wall, but what did that mean? Was she a rabid alumni supporter? What was she looking for out of this?

“Why didn’t you go there?”

I had the wildest idea. It might time to tell the truth.

I know. It’s crazy, and it occurred to me as I sat there that this might be the only time in job interview history that anyone has ever done that.

But I did.

“Well, I wanted to take Film Production, and it was either go to York, Ryerson or move-“

She literally snarled at me.

“I mean for teacher’s college!”

Oh.

Maybe it was time to start lying again…

And then I thought, no. I am going to take my pants off and let her spank me, if that’s what she wants to do. That’s what Gandhi would have done, and he aced every interview he ever had.

“When I applied to Aldhouse, they turned me down. When I called back to ask about the possibility of my discussing a possible appeal, the woman at Admissions laughed in my face.”

“Why?”

“She said that a film degree doesn’t give any credits that qualify towards any kind of teachable subject.”

“So then how did you get into Queen’s with no teachable subjects? Why would they take your film credits? Do you know somebody there? Did you pull some strings?”

“Not at all. They have a special teacher’s program for artists that guaranteed interviews so I called and asked if I could apply and then make my case for acceptance at the interview. They let me come in and when I did, I suggested that Film courses could be seen as being the same as Drama courses. They agreed and I was accepted.”

She got squinty-eyed, as if I had gone out of focus.

“You think you’re a pretty good talker, do you?”

“I can’t be too bad. You haven’t kicked me out yet.” I smiled, looking for a tension breaker.

She paused, and for a millisecond I wasn’t sure which way she was going to go, but then she laughed and looked over at Cheryl.

“He’s a smart one, he is.”

Cheryl gulped air. She must have been holding her breath.

“Maybe a little too smart!”

Awkward moment.

I looked at Cheryl for help.

Cheryl looked away.

The Principal snatched a handful of papers from a file folder on her desk and flapped them at me.

“What do you expect me to think about these?”

I had no idea what papers she was holding, but she was aiming them like a weapon. They couldn’t be good.

“I don’t know. What are they?”

She started reading from them, loudly, in an exaggerated tone, and I knew exactly what those papers were. I also knew for sure that I had been set up.

I knew why she brought me in first, I knew why she was so aggressive, and I was pretty sure now why she had wanted to interview me in the first place. And it wasn’t because she wanted to give me a job.

She wanted to make a point.

The papers in her hand weren’t the university transcripts that showed I had originally been given a zero in Cinematography. Nor was she waving around medical reports proving that I had a crappy short term memory and would forget to do almost everything she might have asked me to do scant seconds after being asked.

She was holding my practice teaching reports.

Every teacher wannabe goes through a very specific process to get their degrees, as far as I know.

They have to go to university (and not take film production) graduate, get themselves into teacher’s college one September and make ready to learn how to teach, only to find themselves scant weeks later being sent to a real live school where they are told that they will be teaching real live students. Right now. And then they have to do it again and again.

For many people, these are very trying weeks. Some teachers-to-be probably quit after their first practicum. Some go insane and disappear under cover of darkness, never to be seen again. Others gut it out through insane amounts of planning, preparation and marking, literally working their way through it by sheer force of will.

And then there was me.

I thought it was fun.

I had made it into teacher’s college by luck, and then lucked out again by getting three practicum sessions with three of the best teachers I could ever have imagined working with, so my practice teaching was awesome. I had never had a job so fun.

But I had been paying for it ever since.

After your each chunk of practice teaching, the associate teacher is called upon to write up an evaluation. Like everyone else, I had three of these practicum reports in my file, but mine had caused me to be called into the office of my observing teacher at Queen’s.

He had done something in some ways very similar to what the Principal was doing at that very moment.

He waggled those papers at me.

“What is going on with these reports?”

I could only shrug. “I didn’t write them. I swear.”

They didn’t make any sense to me either.

He had read aloud the same lines that I knew Principal was going to read aloud in my job interview as soon as I figured out what it was that she held in her hands.

It was the same two lines that I had read out loud in shock when I first got my evaluation back.

“Mr. Lobb is not just the best student teacher, he is the best teacher I have ever seen. It is unreal, the rapport he makes with the students.”

There were other selections she read, similarly puffing me up beyond all imagination. Selections that were so difficult to believe that they got me into trouble.

When the Principal stopped reading, she stared at me, incredulous.

I shrugged. “I didn’t write it. I swear.”

“What did you do to deserve this?”

That was a good question. One for which there was no right answer.

So I didn’t say a thing.

Neither did the Principal. Neither did Cheryl.

While we sat there in uncomfortable silence, I imagined that, when they were making a list of people to interview, they had gone through a pile of applications and came to mine. They saw those reports and thought, are you kidding me? What kind of an idiot would actually send these in his resume? Let’s call that guy in here and round him out.

Sitting in that office, it finally occurred to me that every teacher who read those comments was going to think, “Who does this greenhorn jackass think he is?”

Why hadn’t I thought of that before I included the reports with every application package I sent out?

What was wrong with my head?

How naïve was I?

The interview was fizzling out as quickly as my confidence.

The Principal abruptly stood up.

“We’ll be calling you, one way or another, before the weekend.”

I jumped up, desperate to get out of that office. “Thanks for having me in.”

The Principal turned to Cheryl. “Show him out and then bring the next one in.”

We were dismissed.

I walked out, past the scared women, into the hallway where students were starting to congregate, and I knew that I would never work in this school. Maybe not in any school.

Cheryl turned to me, speaking quietly.

“I think that went well,” she said

Had she not been sitting right beside me? It was a train wreck. I had been shanghaied.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The Principal seemed pretty angry.”

“Oh, she comes across that way. She’s just a little aggressive. I think she liked you.”

Liked me?

Maybe in the way that a cat likes the dead mouse it’s throwing around.

I drove back home with all the nervousness I hadn’t felt on the way to the interview.

I had to get rid of those reports. They were good for showing to your grandma, but all they were going to do was make me look smug and foolish and more than a little desperate.

When I got home, there was a message on my answering machine.

She hadn’t wasted any time.

I hit the playback, expecting to hear the Principal tell me that although I wasn’t right for her, or any, school, that McDonald’s was looking for the best fry man anyone had ever seen, ha ha.

Her voice was awkwardly quiet, like she wasn’t used to leaving messages. She left her name, and told me to call her back, because I was hired and after a pause, said one more thing.

She chuckled into the phone, low and throaty. “Boy, we can’t wait to see the best teacher in action.”

An icy pang shot through my chest, a crazy thought that couldn’t be true, had to be paranoia. She wouldn’t go through all of this and hire me to teach in her school for an entire year as part of some grand, sadistic scheme to try and humiliate me and crush my spirit, would she?

 

Yep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Groceries In Spain

You already know how much I love grocery stores.

Last night I couldn’t get to sleep because all I could think about was going to Zehr’s and getting a pack of Yves Veggie Dogs (chili flavour, and they better fricking have them in stock).

The only thing I could do to combat this insomnia was to come downstairs and look at a few select pics capturing some of the good times from the Eroski store in Velez de Malaga.

I hope mine is the first blog to present, for your viewing enjoyment, Wall Of Ham.

Note: That isn’t even 1/6th of the entire wall.

In general, the Spanish stores were fantastic, with excellent prices, amazing fresh produce, the reddest salami imaginable, and in many cases, clever brand names.

Many people want to lose weight, right?

How can you get more men into the grocery stores?

Calling them Ethnic Stereotype Noodles just wouldn’t be as catchy.