Posted by Ryan on September 6, 2005, 9:27 am, in reply to "Part 12: Baffling contradictions" Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say, All that summer we enjoyed it, I had asked her, “In England, are the summers THAT bad?” She chuckled and shrugged her shoulders. We thought it was a pretty song. Every morning I would see her That part reminded me of the time we were listening to it at the cafeteria at school, and she had said, “Oh, that’s so cute.” ...All the people stared as if I imagined holding her cheeks in my hands and gently whispering to her, “I love you. I wish you were here—or I could be there... with you, my darling....” That day when I got back to the center, I sent her an e-mail telling her how I missed her, telling her how I loved her and how, in a few more months, I was going to be back. But before I left the restaurant, I got into a conversation with two American men who were sitting at the table beside mine, because I had heard them talking in English. They asked me what I did there, and I told them about the charity organization I worked for. One of them asked me if I taught English. I told him I couldn’t because I didn’t have a degree. He said it didn’t matter. In this underdeveloped country, he explained, anybody who grew up in an English-speaking land is accepted as a more highly qualified English teacher than their own people who have university degrees in it. He told me it was what he did, and there was good money to be made in it. When I expressed some interest in looking into it, he gave me the phone number of the owner of the English-language institute he worked for. Back at the center, I got around to calling the number, and the owner of the institute invited me to come over to his house to talk about it. I accepted and went. Now we were out of the poverty; now we were in one of the upperclass sections of town, where all the houses were nice and luxurious (and must cost a fortune, I assumed). His uniformed servant girl came to the gate and welcomed me in, and he sat me down at the table of his elegant dining-room to talk, with her bringing us tea and waiting on us, while he began telling me about how he might be interested in giving me a job teaching English to his clients. When his little daughter came home from school and gave him a hug, he said to her, gesturing toward me, “He speaks English. Say something to him in English.” She turned to me, and with a cute, innocent look, asked me in English, “May I go to the toilet?” “She must learn her English from a British teacher,” I said to him. “Yes, she studies at a British school. How can you tell?” “It’s by the way she says, ‘May I go to the toilet?’ In England, ‘toilet’ means the room that is used for this purpose, whereas in the United States, it means the plumbing fixture itself.” “Oh, I see—so that in American English, it sounds a little more... not, perhaps, so refined a way... to say it.” “That’s why we use a different word,” I replied. “In the U.S., a child would ask, ‘May I go to the restroom?’ or ‘May I go to the bathroom?’ In England, they say ‘commode’ when they mean the fixture itself, and over there ‘toilet’ only means the room in which it is located. Sometimes people from England who are in the United States, who are trying to be as polite as they can, will ask someone, ‘Excuse me, where is the toilet?’ and people think, ‘Why, it’s inside the restroom, where they all are!’ But they just politely answer them and point out the way.” He chuckled. “So in American English, when you say it that way, it brings to mind exactly what it is one intends to do in there, rather than just asking in general about the location of the room itself.” “Yes.” I thought about how the peasant people in this country didn’t worry so much about curtailing their speech like that. I mean, if they just DID it out in public.... But now I was among the refined upper classes, where things were different. After some more conversation, with a pleased look on his face, he said to me, “Well, I see that your knowledge of your language is very good. I have teachers from the U.S. and from England working for me, and I see that you have a more exact knowledge of it than some of them do. You could easily teach it—and do a good job of it. The students like having real Americans and English people giving them their English classes—more than they like having our people teach them.” He offered me the job and I told him I would give it a try. When I went to his office, his assistant showed me the English textbooks I was to use, briefed me in on how to do everything, and got me started. I met some of the other teachers who worked there, some from the U.S., some from England, one from Canada and one from Australia. One teacher was leaving to go back home, and I was given his place. It was to a group of executives at their office in one of the buildings downtown. The people of the business classes in this country wore to work office attire identical to that of the business people of Europe and North America. Suits and ties on the men, business skirts on the women, etc. (except, when their businessmen were out walking somewhere, if they had to urinate, and if the area where they happened to be was run-down enough, they, like the peasant men, would just turn against a wall somewhere, unzip the zippers of their elegant business suits, unabashedly whip the thing out and go, never mind if there happened to be women walking by—or policemen, even). I went to the class, and they were all very welcoming to me, as I sat down in the conference room with them to begin. They spent some time with social talk, wondering where I was from and what I was doing in the country, and I spoke to them about it. I took them through the lesson in the book at the place where they had been with the last teacher, and followed what it said. For example, it would asked a question in English such as, “What is Paul like?” and give the alternative answers: A) “He’s my brother,” B) “He’s a teacher,” C) “He’s tall and intelligent” or D) “He’s from Iowa.” They would answer, I would tell them if they got it right, and whenever they had any questions about English syntax, grammar, spelling, meanings of vocabulary words or idiomatic phrases, etc., I would answer them. It wasn’t hard—and I do believe I was giving them correct answers about all these things, in spite of the fact that I didn’t have a university degree in English. Another question in the exercise said, “I told her what he was going to do, [blank] she didn’t believe it, and now she’s in trouble.” It gave the alternatives: A) “but,” B) “since,” C) “while” or D) “indeed.” The student whose turn it was answered with “A” (“but”), which was correct. (And I couldn’t help thinking to myself, ‘Hmmm. Sounds to me like she should’ve cross her legs...’ but I didn’t say that, of course.)
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(Originally posted November 7, 2003, 6:58 pm)
One day while I was sitting eating at a more-expensive restaurant in the upperclass section of town, I heard a song playing on the radio that Lynnette and I used to listen to, and it was reminding me of her. An old minor-key song from the British Invasion of the early sixties, even before the days when our parents were old enough to understand the idea of romance.
“Please share my umbrella.”
Bus stop, bus goes, she stays, love grows
under my umbrella.
wind and rain and shine.
That umbrella, we employed it;
by August she was mine.
waiting at the stop.
Sometimes she’d shop
and she would show me
what she bought....
we were both quite insane;
someday my name and hers
are going to be the same.... 
