A Second Language Class

“I go to the bank on Wednesday,” I say. It’s completely untrue. In the eight months that I’ve lived in Wheaton, Illinois I have failed to open an account with a bank here, relying on cash-back gum purchases at Jewel-Osco for all my legal tender. But the refrain isn’t scrutinized by the chorus of would-be anglophones who have made long journeys from Burma, Estonia, Mexico, Nepal, and Vietnam to this Sunday school classroom in a suburb of Chicago in order to repeat the English phrases that I say as I stand in front of them. “I go to the bank on Wednesday,” they say, with nearly the exact same sing-songy pacing that I had unthinkingly used to make the sentence more manageable to their ears.

So it goes with each sentence. Like the initiation rights of some strange cult of the English language, we as a collective singular express that I go shopping on Thursday, I do laundry on Friday, and I clean the house on Saturday. We have only the tools to speak as a unity of the first person. It is an oddly coincidental expression of the fact that the tiny English vocabulary of the class has little more practical functionality than to create solidarity among them. But hopefully, after today, they can go shopping on Thursday. Or at least claim to.

I hope that I am for them at least some of the things that I felt I needed so badly when I was sitting behind that desk nearly three years ago, trying to learn a second language from picture books and an often moody instructor whose favorite Arabic lecture topic was my failure to learn Arabic. After a few months of that, he had been replaced by a cousin of the school’s director, a man who, although amiable, preferred to answer questions with one word and was fairly unconcerned about my goal of learning Arabic. I wonder if I am any better or if someone is composing a diatribe in Estonian about a painfully inept English teacher who seems fairly young and yet dresses like an old man. I can’t rule out the possibility.

I merely hope that in the coming months, as I walk into the classroom every Thursday and my eyeballs turn into little projectors splashing scenes of a North African classroom onto every surface of the Glenfield Baptist high school Sunday school room, I will let my experiences be a tool for the shaping of my identity into the likeness of One who understood our weaknesses because he had been through all the same things.

An Echo, needed and timely

For the waste of our flesh,
For the ways of solitude,
For the weight of doubt,
For the waning of life,
Let us pray to the Lord.

That we be healed,
That we be held in Glory,
That we believe,
That we be alive,
Lord, hear our prayer.

Perpetua

As my life moves slowly in directions of maturity I find, just now, that I am hard pressed for better metaphors for this becoming than that offered by font faces. I am easing myself into a pleasant appreciation of serif-fonts, whose little wings help my weary eyes glide over the puddles of white that separate sign from sign. Perpetua is my favorite, its name ringing with constancy. It is a book-font, and books are so much more constant than all I do here. It’s a font that I don’t even have on my computer, and that lack is what will cause these words to remain Tahoma for now. (I apologize for leaving the metaphor undeveloped. Account it to indirections of maturity.)

When I began to write all this, I meant to write about silence. It should seem obvious why that topic did not lend itself to discussion. Here is the question I have posed to myself today, and to which I hope the answer will have no words:

Why do I assume to be able to interpret silence in others when I have not first understood or loved it in myself?

The Lawn Party

Today the tall sloping lawn in front of Blanchard Hall is most anything that you could find a mind for. (And most any mind that you could find a thing for.)

Robert Frost is lying propped up on his left elbow about halfway up the hill staring at the trees; on two stools T.S. Eliot is playing a game of chess with himself. Poe is hunched against a concrete memorial to a dead president with his dark umbrella open against the blue sky, and a handful of English majors with ironic tattoos are gathered around William Blake, all crying at at the beautiful things he is saying as he converses with a fir tree which he believes is an archangel.

Franz Wright is pacing in circles in a northern corner, Billy Collins is chuckling to himself as a creative writing class parades by, and C.S. Lewis is looking out from his office window high above it all with a pipe in one corner of his mouth and a half-smile in the other.

And I am there too, the unwitting subject of a poem, a plan, polemic, or pun, which is to say, less simply but all the same, that I am there too.

Hello, September sunshine. I have come, and I will be staying longer than you, probably.

[un]August thoughts, unharmonized

I can imagine a day when I will learn to flick spiders away, rather than smashing them between my thumb and forefinger. I will even learn to live at peace with the sci-fi centipede creatures that dwell in this house and, occasionally, haunt my dreams.

sock ties, independent coffee roasteries, fava beans, basmati rice, curry curry curry, goat cheese, conjugations and declensions, train tickets, a bike path, live music, Nepali church.

waiting for an email that never comes, missing the last train out of Chicago, calling certain friends over and over, slicing vegetables in a new kitchen, visiting the same paintings every time.

my place in the universe “scarlessly closing like water.”

Plenty of things exist outside of my mind, including people. It’s just so much easier for me to deal with the versions of those things that only exist in my mind. Solipsism being the ultimate realization of sloth, to say nothing of greed, pride, etc.

When we hate something fallen, it remains fallen. When we love something fallen, we love it unto redemption. This is the power of Christ in us.

When I go into department stores downtown, I look through the clothing rack, examine the colors and patterns, run my fingers across the fabrics, take things off hangers and try them on, and then put them back and buy nothing. I am so glad that I did not do this with religion.