Have you ever wasted hours looking for something that you don't really need, but you know it's in the house somewhere (because no way would you have thrown it away), so you start randomly rooting through boxes in the basement, inhaling dust, disturbing spiders, until instead of finding the missing thing you find something else that sends you into an emotional tailspin?
The thing I was looking for was a picture from my senior prom; rather, a picture of me in my softball uniform posing with friends who actually went to the prom, which I did not. I was looking for the picture to illustrate a funny story.
I didn't find the picture. I did stumble across a graduation card from my high school German teacher.
I took German from seventh grade on; by my senior year, our class had dwindled to about ten students and we very nearly didn't get to have it. (It really wasn't fair; the only AP physics class was offered the same period, and about half the kids in physics would have taken German.)
Senior German was a good class, though. By then we had a pretty good grasp of grammar (like the dative case...I don't remember what that is, but I remember knowing it then), and our class was a lot of us sitting around talking in German. Frau talked about her husband and her pre-school son, we kids talked about SAT's and college visits and weekend parties. We read Bertolt Brecht and Günter Grass and Rainer Maria Rilke. We watched German tv shows that Frau's aunt in Munich taped. We played team Trivial Pursuit against the French class next door (the questions and answers in the respective language)...you can guess who won, I'm sure.
Frau was taking computer classes (this was the mid-80's; computers in school were a novelty) and we tested programs she wrote for teaching German. We actually hosted a competition for junior high classes who came in and took quizzes using Frau's program; the highlight there was the award dinner catered by a local German restaurant.
Food, yeah. Frau loved food. Our class was right before the lunch period, and whenever we could justify it, we had food in class: authentic German pizza, authentic German 6-foot-subs, authentic German Kentucky fried chicken. (In seriousness, we also did eat real German food, including field trips to the Bavarian Inn in West Virginia and Cafe Berlin downtown.)
I don't remember the dative case, but I sure do remember that class, and my teacher. I was lucky; the school system I grew up in was one of the best in the country, so I had a lot of good teachers. Even among the good ones, she was exceptional.
When we graduated, Frau gave each of us a coffee mug from a pottery in the town in Germany where her grandmother had lived. The note in my graduation card says "Vielleicht beim Lernen kannst Du Kaffee, Tee, oder Milch trinken - aber keine Wein Coolers!" (We had talked very openly in class about those weekend parties.) My mug was the only thing out of all my possessions that broke when I moved to Pensacola, but somewhere I have the pieces.
Three years after I graduated, Frau was killed in a car accident. It was a snowy day, she'd dropped her little boy off at daycare and was on her way to school. The road where she died is near my parents' house; it's been regraded and widened and it's much safer now. I occasionally take that route, and think of her when I go through the intersection.
Sometimes at work I get documentation in German; I think of her then, too. I imagine her shaking her head ruefully when I resort to Babelfish to translate. (,,Doch, Nic, Du kannst es lesen!")
Mostly I don't think of her, though. And when I do and I wasn't expecting it, it is a bit of a tailspin, even after all these years.
Posted by Nic at May 3, 2005 09:55 PM