granddad

When I get home from class, the email is waiting. I am not anxious because I know what it will tell me, but read it slowly, savoring the beautiful words my father has written.

A few tears slip down my cheeks, but I had been sobbed out days before. Then, I had felt peace. Now I am numb. My hand is shaking but I think it is from exhaustion – today, all day, I taught Shakespeare. And now sixty students are waiting to practice their English with me tonight. I have no time. I carefully step out of my teaching sweater and slacks, replacing them with one layer, and another and another against the temperamental March chill. Slip a photo into my purse. Check for my keys.

Walking down the street, tears silently inching down my face, I am immune to the normal stares. There are no double and triple takes today; one glance today is more than enough to tell anyone that my mind is as far away as the foreign places they see when they look at my face. The date is pounding in my head in time to my steps and all I can think is that it is exactly one month before Shakespeare's birth and deathday.

The bus creeps; time for my mind to smooth, my pulse to pick up its normal pace, cheeks to unsplotch themselves. My student friends greet me and I am desperately happy to see them, to talk about classes and weather over dinner.

After, I walk into a classroom, smaller than I am used to, crowded with students. Sixty heads swivel, one hundred and twenty hands clap, arms reaching to pull me towards them. “Hello” I say. “For those of you who don't know me yet, my name is Kristen, and I am a teacher here.”

Wild applause.
(They're an undemanding crowd)

"Before we begin today" I say quietly, leaning towards them, “I need to tell you about someone very special.”
I carefully take the photo out of my purse and hold it up.

“My grandfather was almost 90 years old.”
I pause for those cries of astonishment that I am becoming so good at predicting.
“He was married to my grandmother for more than 60 years.”
They gasp.
“He had four children and six grandchildren and friends all over the world. He made textbooks, and he traveled to so many places, and he played tennis until he was very very old. He loved to tell jokes, and he knew more about history than anyone I have ever met. His legacy… do you guys know the word legacy?” I pause to write the word in large letters on the board. “His legacy is one of intelligence and humor and a true zest for life. Zest. Z-E-S-T, a great excitement and love for.

I want you all to know this because my grandfather died today, and I miss him very much.”

Tonight we talk for two hours about travel. I think of the hundreds of students I spend time with each semester, and the entire student body of this country with the greatest population on earth, wanting more than ever to see the world, and unable to. We talk about all the places they dream of going to study or to work or most of all just to visit. We talk about the tiny handful of options some of them might someday have for doing those things. A few are filled with determination. All are here, on a Friday night, after a week of maybe forty class hours, practicing English so that, someday, they may have more opportunities.

I think: Here I am, on the other side of the world, living and teaching in the fastest developing nation on earth. I miss my family and I wish so much that I could have been home these last days, but...

And I respond to my sympathetic students as we leave the classroom “No no, it's alright. I'm very happy, and I think lucky, to be here. This is where my home and job are for right now, and you know, he was very proud of me.”