Girassol

They're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone

I live in a historic house that predates the Civil War.  It's charming and quaint, sure.  It's also old enough that certain modern conveniences, like air conditioning, are out of the question.  The house is not built for it.  Not even for a window unit, as the electrical wiring won't support it.  So during the dog days of a Pennsylvania summer (90°and 69% humidity at lunchtime yesterday), I pull out the fans and sweat it out. I also live downtown on a street that gets enough traffic to send a good coating of dust through my windows daily.  The front wall of my house is right on the sidewalk, and with the windows open it is downright loud most of the time. I've gotten quite good at tuning out the dust, heat, and noise, and going about my business. 

Sometimes, though, things happen out on the street that I would never be aware of if I didn't live in this old house with the windows open, and it feels like the universe has just sent me a treat.  Like this morning.  I'm sitting at my desk, checking my e-mail, when I become aware that the traffic outside has stopped at the red light, and I can hear loud music blasting from someone's car.  Normally it's rap with the bass turned up so loudly that my windows rattle, or Nickelback.  The people in my traffic are exceedingly fond of Nickelback.  But this morning?  Billy Joel.  Specifically, the song "Piano Man."  Accompanied by some driver who is singing along with reckless abandon.  In a Jetta, with the windows down.  He's sitting at a red light, singing a Billy Joel song with his head thrown back and his eyes closed.  Singing badly.

You know the saying, "Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one's watching."  I'm going to add to it, "Sing like no one is listening."  Because that just made my whole morning.  Jetta Dude, we're all in the mood for a melody, and you've got us feelin' alright.

The Paris Hilton of the motorcycle world

Every summer, my town hosts a Bike Week, which is when something like 15,000 Harley-Davidsons meet here, cruise around on their choppers and participate in tattoo contests.  When I first moved in, I was nervous that it would be rough and scary, but it's actually a very community-friendly event, and the bikers are some of the nicest, friendliest people I've seen come through here.  Yet, they've still got that tough exterior thing going on.

So last night I'm driving downtown, and as I stop at a stoplight, I hear a dog yipping at me. I turn my head left to see what's going on, and there's a dude on a Harley (totally tricked out, with a trailer and custom everything), with his sleeves rolled up and his boots and his American flag doo-rag and stubble and everything.  And he's holding a tiny, fluffy bichon frise ON HIS LAP. And the dog is wearing a doo-rag and motorcycle goggles.

Awesome!

Reasons why I love Sheetz

1.  The ham Schmiscuit, with double egg, mayo, mustard, ketchup, sliced tomato, salt, pepper, and Swiss cheese.

2.  It's a Mecca of linguistic hilariousness.

        2a.  It provides a way to tell locals from out-of-towners.  We southern Pennsylvanians have the habit of calling it "Sheetzes" -- as in "Welcome to Sheetzes, pump two's on."  You don't call it Sheetzes?  You are definitely not from around here.

        2b.  This morning they had these stars hanging on the counter that represented donations to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. One donor had wished to remain anonymous, only on the star it was spelled, "Annoumys."  If I spelled that poorly, I would remain annoumys too.

3.  The blue-collar dudes who stop in there periodically throughout the day to pick up two things:
    
        3a.  A pack of Marlboros.

        3b.  Me. 

This morning when I arrived at Sheetz a guy opened the door for me, while holding his pack of Marlboros in the other hand.  He was wearing cutoff jean shorts and a t-shirt with the sleeves ripped out, and had a tattoo of a skull on his shin.  When I thanked him, he answered, "No problem, sweetheart."  Then his eyes followed my ample booty the entire way back to the juice refrigerators. 

Yesssss!  Someone thinks I'm hot!  Or, perhaps, someone is very lonely!    

Some people spend their summer vacation by visiting the beach or hosting a barbeque. These people clearly are not true Pennsylvanians.

Overheard this week at Curves:

Woman #1:  Where were ya at this mornin'?  I tried callin' ya ta see what time ya were comin' in.

Woman #2:  Yeah, we wasn't around.  We had ta go d'the taxidermist, ya know.  Fer our bear.

The Devil Went Down to PA

Satan is apparently a registered driver in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  Be on the lookout.  He drives a green Dodge Caravan.

Freaking Awesome News

You are reading the blog of the newest high school Spanish teacher in Pennsylvania's public schools.  I GOT THE JOB!!!!!

Two Job Interviews And A Funeral: Or, What I've Been Doing For The Last Week

So, the job interview.  Thank you for the good vibes -- I think they worked.

The interview involved me and a legal pad on one end of the phone and the superintendent, principal, assistant principal, curriculum director, and French teacher on the other end of the phone.  They asked me a LOT of questions, most of which I was able to more or less jot down while they were asking, which really helped me keep my focus and answer coherently.  Most of their questions were about my teaching philosophies and practices, along the lines of, "What are the elements of a good lesson plan?" and "What are some classroom management issues you have faced and how did you deal with them?" 

They also asked me at the end to look out my window and tell them in Spanish what I saw, and then to pretend I was seeing a little sailboat on the lake and describe how it reacted to the wind.  So I said a bunch of stuff about the boat rising and falling with the waves and the captain having to use the sun and shoreline to guide himself back to the coast.  Then the superintendent goes, "So how do you say 'sails' in Spanish?"  It struck me as an odd question because I realized I hadn't actually said the word sails in all of that, and I didn't think that anybody there spoke Spanish well enough to know that.  I wondered if they were just testing my vocabulary breadth or my ability to recall random words on the spot, or if he thought I was trying to avoid the word since I didn't know it.  So I go, "Velas, I believe."  And that was the end of the interview.

Well, sails ARE velas, and I wanted to kick myself for adding the "I believe" on there.   But apparently the interview went well enough overall, because they got in touch with me later that afternoon to let me know that they really wanted to see me teach a mini-lesson before they made up their minds about anything.  And this is where it gets interesting.

See, last Saturday (June 18th), my great-grandmother passed away.  I found out about her death and about the job interview on the same night, so I immediately started preparing a sample lesson plan to e-mail the interviewers and also started looking for an affordable plane ticket to get back to Pennsylvania on a moment's notice.  Plus, I had to work and get lesson plans together for my subs, and also the summer term started last Monday and I have to take a class.  It was a stressful week.  But when they asked me if I could get there and teach a mini-lesson, it couldn't have happened at a better time -- I would be right there in Pennsylvania and could easily get down to the school to do it.  It's just sort of cosmic the way this all happened at the same time, and so in a way I feel like Granny was stepping in as my guardian angel and orchestrating all of this somehow.

Granny was born March 25th, 1912.  She was 93 years old when she died.  She saw amazing changes in the world in those 93 years -- from a brother fighting in World War I to getting electricity and running water at home to seeing man walk on the moon to the invention of our friend, the Internet. 

Granny learned to drive when she was 60 years old.  She bought us our first Nintendo (except she misunderstood and kept calling it an Innuendo).  She went on her first roller coaster ride in her late 70's.  Around that same time she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy.  When asked how she was feeling after the surgery, she replied, "Well, one less thing to wash."

Granny wore a tie-dyed blouse and culotte set to my high school graduation because she just knew I would think it was cool (and she was right).  She was so proud of me that day, because she was never able to go past eighth grade and she just thought it was the greatest thing that I had made it all the way through high school.  On my graduation day, she gave me a sterling silver spoon ring that she had been saving to give me on that occasion.  I've been wearing it every day for years.

Granny fed a house full of relatives on Sunday afternoons for as long as any of us can remember.  She was an amazing cook (was a personal chef for more than 30 years), and because of her prowess in the kitchen I never met a pickled beet, chicken liver, or split-pea soup I didn't like, and have been spoiled to death through homemade pie crusts, REAL whipped cream, the creamiest mashed potatoes known to man, and fried chicken that is to die for.  I've spent many a late night down at her house with all the womenfolk in my family playing cards -- group Solitaire, mostly.  And as old and slow as Granny eventually got, she was still tough to beat.

This is a woman who was the fourteenth of fifteen children and whose mother died giving birth to the last.  Because she grew up with no mother, she made darn sure everyone in her family would be treated beautifully.  She mothered all of us in some way or another.

Over the last ten years or so, Granny's health had gone downhill slowly, but in the last year and a half she had another cancer surgery, a stroke, and fell several times.  She was living in a Catholic nursing center since the stroke.  It was strange to go visit her and see her eating food that she hated because it doesn't taste as good as what she would have made.  It was strange to look in her little closet and see not her usual classy slacks and blouses, but just a couple of pairs of polyester pants and a couple of shirts, all labeled, "Margaret Benchoff" in black marker.  It was strange that sometimes she didn't recognize us when we showed up to visit.  It was strange to know that that woman was no longer the same woman we all knew.

But because of these changes, we accepted a long time ago that Granny wouldn't be around much longer, and we've been grieving slowly since long before she was actually gone.  When I heard the news that she was gone (and I think the same could be said for the rest of my family), I actually felt relieved instead of sad.  No more morphine drip.  No more Depends.  No more thickener in all the food.  No more confusion and frustration and loss of control.  Just liberation from an aged, malfunctioning body and reunion with her mother and father, her fourteen brothers and sisters, and her husband, who've been waiting for her to join them for a very long time.  How could I NOT be relieved and happy for her?

So last Thursday I flew back to PA and spent the evening preparing my mini-lesson portion of the job interview.  Friday morning I went and gave the lesson and I thought it went really well (although it doesn't matter much what I think, does it?).  Friday afternoon I had a meeting with a professor at a PA school where I'll be taking my last few classes toward teaching certification starting this fall.

Friday night was Granny's viewing.  Saturday was the actual funeral, with all six of us great-grandchildren serving as the pallbearers.  The WHOLE family was there, which was wonderful.  We put together some framed posters with pictures of her life to display at the funeral home.  There was a Christian Wake service given by her priest, and once all the other people had left, the family members had a chance to say goodbye to her.  Before they closed the casket, we put a deck of cards in with her, slipping into her hands an Ace, because of how much she loved Solitaire, and the Queen of Hearts, because, well, it just felt like her card.

What You Should NOT Do At A Funeral

If you are the priest:

• Show up 15 minutes late to the wake.
• Say several times during the funeral mass, "Mawgaret's life has not ended.  It has just transfowmed!," making you sound just like that priest in The Princess Bride.
• Bust out of the intersection behind the church in your Jeep Cherokee and jump right in front of the hearse, causing everyone in the funeral procession to honk their horn at you.

If you are the funeral director:

• Misprint the birthdate of the deceased on the funeral cards.
• Admit that you don't know enough about computers to fix the date.
• Embalm the deceased in such a way that, although she was a mastectomy patient in life, she appears to be sporting a new pair of torpedo boobs in death.
• Halfway through the wake service, reach out from behind a partition wall like some specter or heavenly messenger or something out of a Monty Python sketch, and hand the holy water to the priest IN A DIXIE CUP.

If you are a family member:

• Wear Tevas and black socks with your suit.
• Fart.
• Giggle when you hear a fart.
• Turn around and ask why everyone is giggling, and when they tell you that someone farted, join in the giggling.
• Keep talking after everyone else has finished reciting the Lord's prayer.
• Snort when you hear your cousin go, "For thine is the kingdom and the... oh."
• Have a fight with your mother about the abominably redneck-like length of your hair.  Preferably right in front of your deceased great-grandmother's casket.
• Kneel in front of your deceased great-grandmother's casket for, like, ten minutes and poke her, like, a hundred times and then ask, "So what'd they do to get Granny's hands all hard like this?"
• Respond, "Um, it's called rigor mortis."

Saying Goodbye to Matt

On Sunday I went to visit the grave of a dear friend of mine.  I’ve known Matt since we were probably 10 or 11. He died on Sunday, February 13^th in a car accident on his way to Church. He had just turned 28 and was engaged to a great girl named Jayme. They had sent out their wedding invitations the day before the accident and had made an offer on a house earlier that week. Last Friday would have been their wedding day.

Jayme happened to be driving that morning, which was unusual, but Matt had forgotten his ID. They were on an Interstate on-ramp when she lost control of the car, overcorrected, went down an embankment and crashed into a tree. Matt was pronounced dead when help arrived, and Jayme ended up with all sorts of broken bones and awful injuries. They took her in an ambulance to the church where she had a private viewing on the day of Matt’s funeral. I can’t even imagine what she must have been going through.

Matt was close to my whole family and this was really emotional for all of us. My dad is the bishop of my home ward and he received the call about the accident and had to go to Matt’s house with the State Police to break the news to his mother and brothers. My sister and Matt had a very strong friendship, and his family asked her to give a eulogy and serve as one of his pallbearers. It wasn’t possible for me to go home for the funeral, but I did listen over the phone. My mom held her cell phone on her lap so I could hear the service from 3,000 miles away. It was beautiful, but still hard to take in as everything seemed so surreal. 

While I was home last week I thought a lot about Matt. I visited his mom and she’s doing really well, as is Jayme. It’s amazing how their faith has pulled them through losing someone so dear.

I’d like to share some of my favorite things about Matt.

He was one of the strongest people I have ever known. Matt decided to serve a mission for our Church when he was 22. Generally young men do this when they are 19, so it would have been very easy for him to say, “Forget it – I’m too old.” I have the utmost respect for his decision to go, and I know he regarded it as the best decision he ever made. Matt ended up serving the Spanish-speaking people in California, and I was serving a mission in Brazil at the same time so we  corresponded a couple of times. Once I got a letter from him with a statement I will never forget: “Work as if everything depended on you, and pray as if everything depended on God.”

When Matt had been on his mission for a little over a year, his father was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the time he was diagnosed he didn’t have a lot of time left, and Matt was allowed to take a few days’ break to fly home and visit his father because he was in very critical condition. His dad passed away on Easter Sunday. I was really impressed with how resilient Matt and his whole family were, and how OK they were with talking about it. His dad was a very positive, optimistic, upbeat guy, and Matt totally inherited that trait from him. 

The summer we were 14, our youth group did a week-long activity called the Pioneer Trek, where we walked all over the countryside pulling handcarts that carried our belongings, cooked over a fire, and had to dress like pioneers – bonnets and bloomers and everything. We weren’t even allowed to wear deodorant. Needless to say, many of us were exhausted and moody and really bothered that everyone stank and had greasy hair and all we had to eat was charred bread and beef jerky. People, I would NOT have made a good pioneer. But there’s Matt, just happy as a clam to be on an adventure, and reminding everyone good-naturedly about the rules for co-ed sleeping and peeing in the woods – “Bucks on the left, does on the right!” 

Matt did SO love an adventure, and he had this way of turning EVERYTHING into one. If we all went out for Japanese, Matt got the most bizarre thing on the menu (like the fluorescent orange codfish roe sushi in the picture above). One summer he and my sister and another friend decided to go on a road trip, so the very next day they set out across the country in a Ford Festiva with no air conditioning. They drove the whole way from Pennsylvania to Mexico, stopping all kinds of placesin between. Two years ago he came with my family to North Carolina for Thanksgiving, and we ended up going swimming in the ocean, although it was so cold that the fishermen were all wearing parkas and hats and staring at us like we were completely insane. One Christmas when his family was over at our house for a get-together it started to snow so much that they ended up staying overnight. We decided to go for a walk outside – it must have been close to midnight and there were nearly two feet of snow, but it was an absolute blast!

My favorite memory of Matt is the summer he took me on the BEST date I have EVER been on. We went to a little Civil War-era restaurant in Gettysburg where you eat in the stone cellar and there are just little lanterns on the table for light. Then we were going to go bowling but the lanes were closed. At this point, most guys would go, “Um, so what should we do now? You wanna rent a movie or something?” But again with the turning everything into an adventure, Matt said, “How about we go on one of those Ghost Walks?” We walked all over town on a tour where your guide is dressed up in some sort of Civil War costume and tells you all about what happened at different landmarks and the hauntings that have supposedly happened there. It was interesting and creepy, and so much fun to do something touristy right around home. 

Matt was the kind of person you could trust with anything and be completely serious with, but could also always count on to be up for having fun. I miss having him in my life.

For a person so utterly zealous about living to no longer BE living… His final resting place was just this rectangle of fresh brown dirt, surrounded by green grass covering the graves of people who have been gone for a lot longer. Going there provided me with some closure that I didn’t have since I couldn’t be at the funeral, but most of all I just felt this sense of peace and calm. While that spot of earth contains Matt’s body, his spirit is absolutely in a good place, and he has a bit more insight than we do as to why he died at such a seemingly inopportune time. Although it may sound totally cliché to say it, I know that Matt would want to know that people have been inspired to live better, happier lives because of his example. I know I have. 

So, Mista Soul Cracka, thank you so much for the great memories. Until we meet again…

Reasons Why I Will Likely Gain Back The 11 Pounds I Lost During Lent While On Vacation Back Home

1.  That Gryuere grilled-cheese sandwich.  And since then, several other occasions requiring the consumption of Gruyere cheese.

2.  Maryland crab cakes.

3.  Crab and scallop cheese dip on Ritz crackers.

4.  A Mint Whisper Sundae from the Velvet Cafe.

5.  Roast pork, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes.

6.  Herbal tea.  OK, not so much the tea, but the plate of cookies, scones, and curry pillow sandwiches they gave us at Tranquilitea.  And the half a box of Girl Scout cookies I ate at my aunt's when we had tea as a thank you for cutting her hair.

7.  My grandmother's spare ribs and scalloped potatoes.

8.  Coffee ice cream and freshly baked cookies.

9.  Two quarts of full-fat chocolate milk from Whole Foods.

10.  Chili cheese dogs.

11.  That caramel pecan tart filled with chocolate mousse that I ate at Starbucks since I don't drink coffee.  I'm beginning to wonder if that was really the healthier choice.

12.  Deep-fried mushrooms.

13.  Pad Thai and spring rolls.

14.  A Boston cream, a raspberry jelly, an apple cinnamon, and a dozen glazed holes from Krumpe's Do-Nuts.  At 11:30 at night.

15.  Coconut-battered shrimp with amaretto sauce and sweet potato fries from Little Havana on Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

16.  Symphony brownies.

17.  A meatball sub from Stavros.

18.  The package of Golden Oreos my sister just handed me.