Hola, ¿qué tal?

Oh Dios mío, no! I said to the walls of the bedroom. It was pitch black, but the curtains were fluttering. I immediately took that as a bad omen. The Pit and the Pendulum came to mind all of a sudden. What have I done? What have I done?

The last four words would have been out-squeaked by the tiniest mouse.

I was in so much trouble. I knew it would be impossible to survive what was waiting for me the next day. My heart was going to give out. This was suicide. The worst part was that I had done it to myself. There was nobody else to blame. The pit was deep and dark, and the pendulum swung lower and lower.

You see, without really thinking it through, I had applied to graduate school. The problem was, the only way to pay the tuition was by being a teaching assistant. A TA. I agree that the title, along with the abbreviation used by those in the know sounded so sophisticated, so professional. Except for the T part. I hadn’t the foggiest notion as to how to do teacher-like things. I didn’t want to teach. I just wanted to be a student.

Yet Dum Dotty here had applied and had been accepted into graduate school. Now I was doomed and I knew it. It was after midnight, not so late, really, but the walls of my bedroom seemed to sense I was in for a rough night. The semester started in the morning.

What had I done? What had I been drink/thinking?

All week I had been preparing, once I’d accepted my plight. I had made up a syllabus and revised it at least eight times. The grading was all clearly explained, all the quiz and test dates were indicated, the assignments detailed, everything was in place. I don’t think anybody held my hand while I was doing the syllabus, and in fact I seem to recall not having a clue as to how to put one of those things together. Hence, I can’t be sure that what I made up, er, assembled, would even qualify as a syllabus.

Still, there it was, typed up and printed out, no typos anywhere, all the indentations, underlining, and italics perfect, symmetrical. I still had no idea what I was going to do in class, but I had something to pass out. Students liked handouts. I’d liked them when I was a student. Not so long ago...

The walls of my bedroom were not helping, not one iota. They knew the pile of syllabi, nicely stapled and neatly stacked, lay on the (clean) kitchen table. Waiting. They didn’t pay attention to my pleas and prayers for help. Cold! Ironically, in Spanish they say las paredes oyen (the walls have ears), but they weren’t listening. I felt so wretched.

What have I done? 

The desperation I felt was increasing. I needed a really big hug.

Sometime during the night a couple hours of sleep must have found me. Otherwise, things would have gone even worse than they did. I jumped out of bed with dry, itchy eyes, wishing I had overslept, wishing there had been a Buffalo-type blizzard overnight (who cares if it was September, everybody knows Buffalo has rotten weather), wishing I weren’t twenty-five, just under five-foot-three and in very good shape, with nice-fitting clothes. Wishing it were my first day of kindergarten.

Wishing I hadn’t been born.

What had I been thinking?

Despite everything, I found the shower (it hadn’t moved since the night before). I also managed to dress myself, shoes on the right feet and all). The stack of stapled papers (say that three times, fast) greeted me with a ho-hum expression as I grabbed them from the kitchen and hurried out of my apartment to catch the bus to the new campus. On the bus, I looked around, trying not to be obvious. Half the seats were empty; the other half had occupants, all chatting away as if this weren’t the beginning of the fall semester. The beginning of the end for me, I told myself. I knew I was not long for this world. I felt like I was five and it was the first day of kindergarten. Except kindergarten had been fun.

Unfortunately, the bus did not have an accident and managed to leave me off at the stop exactly across from the building where I had been assigned to teach. It was a gray building, new, blandly frigid. (Maybe the September blizzard would materialize yet...) The class I supposedly was going to teach was mid-morning and it was the first day, so - horror of horrors - everybody would be there, in their seats, waiting for me. Staring at me. Why was making them so cruel, so bloodthirsty? I hadn’t done anything to them, yet there they would be - the lions waiting in the den for Daniel. For me, which was the same thing.

Nevertheless, I had come prepared. I was scared but I was armed as well. I wouldn’t go down without a fight. I had to make my parents proud of me. (How did they get into this?) I had already decided I would first go to the ladies’ room on a different floor than the classroom so I wouldn’t run into any students. 

Once I was inside, the heavy door had slammed shut, and there was nobody else in the world around to watch, I extracted my secret weapon from my purse. It was a two-ounce bottle of gin. You see, gin doesn’t have much of an odor, so you can drink it and nobody can tell, right? Don’t get me wrong. I know it wasn’t ten o’clock in the morning yet, and I never drink gin, I hate the stuff, but this was a dire situation. 

Gin to the lips, the liquid dripped into my mouth and made me gag. Like I just said, It tastes awful, and straight - well, it’s even worse. I almost threw up. I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t want to get the nice stack of syllabi messy. At least I had remembered to bring toothpaste and a brush so I could brush my teeth afterward, having stored the little bottle - still half full - way in the bottom of my purse. Yes, I had my wits about me. 

That wasn’t sufficient to steady me, though.

Why all the drama, you ask? Well, before we go into the classroom, maybe I should explain... it might help you understand...

When I was in sixth grade I was told by somebody fortunately forgotten, that I had to give a speech to the entire elementary school. That was my ‘reward’ because I was the top student. Nobody told me what to say or even how long I had to talk, but it was probably for five minutes. An eternity, no less. Do adults know how long five minutes are for a child? Well, just to be honest, they did tell me one other thing: I had to speak from memory. No using note cards or just reading the speech. A minor detail.

The result of the ‘reward’? I froze. Mind blank. No words. Tears. Close to PTSD, and I am not making fun of that condition at all. All I remember now, years later, is the trauma of the wordless mind, the defenselessness. The pit of the stomach. Childish? What did they expect? I was a child .

Do NOT laugh. That event broke my spirit forever. I stepped down from what must have been a podium, shuffled back to my folding chair, and huddled. My waist-long hair wasn’t enough to hide my face, but I knew , everyone knew, it was flaming red.

It was that very same sixth grader, abandoned by teachers and parents - by the entire world, actually - who had walked into the ladies’ room that Buffalo September, hoping an ounce or two of gin would solve her problem. It didn’t. Who thought it could?

With ten minutes to spare, I found the right room and tugged the door open, hoping it might be locked or something had happened, like maybe a flood on the second floor. Maybe I would tear a tendon in my wrist. Nothing was going my way. Stiff as a board, I entered, all twenty-five of my years along with me, and searched for the desk or table that would be my lifesaver. It turned out there was a huge, heavy, uglier-than-sin metal desk in the front of the classroom. Some things never change.

I threw the syllabi and the textbook on the ugly old table, laughing as all the papers slid out of alignment, forming a kind of stream across the desk. Note that it wasn’t the gin that was making me laugh, not hardly. It was my twelve-year-old brain warning me that it was about to go perfectly blank, thirteen years after the first time. Sometimes the person laughing is really saying, “Take pity on me.”

Before it could do that, though, I was determined to write my name on the board. I had seen how my nonchalant paper toss game had failed. My middle initial is N, but it does not stand for Nonchalant.

Show how tough you are. Write your name, big and bold, right up there for everybody to read. Big mistake, really big mistake. Never walk into a class, turn your back on the students, then start talking to the blackboard. Somebody is bound to notice.

Anyway, I remembered how to write my name (which was probably already on the syllabus so unnecessary), but my hand shook so hard that it came out as spook writing. Scribbled and wobbly. With at least one ear-splitting grate of the nail of my index finger across the green surface. I knew I was doomed.

At some point the conversation with the blackboard had to come to an end. Then, surprisingly, I had a few seconds of good luck. Only a few papers tumbled to the floor as they were being handed out to the two dozen students of Intermediate Spanish. Oh Lord, I said to myself, some are as old as I am, I bet. All of them know more Spanish than I do. They also look like they can hand out papers a lot better.

Knowing I was completely incapable of teaching that group a thing, seeing as how they knew more than I did, plus I was obviously brain-damaged, I did the only thing I could do: I sat down at the desk, barricading myself with the gray, sticky metal, in case any of the students decided to attack me. Which they might. 

When I sat down, I realized I had forgotten that chair legs can squawk when dragged across waxed linoleum. Scrittcchhh! I also hadn’t planned where I should put my hands. Under the table? Yes! (That’s because they were still shaking.) That made picking up the textbook and flipping through the pages a challenge. I really wanted to sit on my fingers because the damn twitching just wouldn’t stop. Scenes from The Wizard of Oz started coming to mind. I was the Cowardly Lion, not brave Daniel. Or the Scarecrow, but scared by all the crows in the field, aka classroom. I wanted to be the Wizard, whom nobody sees.

My nervous laugh, or giggle from those moments of hyperstimulation, is something that still rings in my ears. Pitiful. That is exactly what I was.

For a few moments, the chair seemed to sink into the floor, and briefly I hoped I’d just boarded a submarine and would drop out of sight. That didn’t happen. I shifted in the seat then while bringing out my hands and pressing my wrists on the edge of the desk. At one point I even considered raising my hand and asking to be excused to go to the ladies’ room.

I don’t know if you’re looking for a great plot twist or a big spike in the narrative arc at this point. I don’t have those to offer, but I will explain what happened and how I survived the torture chamber. (Oh, Poe!)

I took a couple of thoughts and used them, did what I had to do: be who I was, be twenty-five, not twelve. Be happy getting paid (not much, but enough to keep from starving) to do something that was my passion: speak Spanish. To hell with the syllabus and syllabi!

I got rid of the desk, forgot the papers with their eight revisions and my name and contact information at the top. With coaxing, a half-circle was formed. In Spanish, we said what we knew how to say about ourselves. Stuff that can be boring, but in a foreign language becomes an adventure.

Life after that was never the same. I never again carried gin to teach in the morning or ever. I never drank gin again, in fact. I told you I can’t stand the taste.

Forty years later, I retired. It broke my heart, but I did. They had gotten me in the classroom because I was desperate and they had to haul me out kicking and screaming and snarling, still desperate. To stay. I fought to stay in the classroom when the university had become a store that sold classes, while students had become customers. I fought to make the university understand how important languages are to a global community. I felt really desperate then, because all my smart colleagues with lots of degrees and bigger salaries than mine (I had the degrees, that’s all) couldn’t hear what I was saying. I guess it was like I was speaking a foreign language. Or Greek.

I never fought with a single student, however.

None of what went on in those Spanish classes had to do with verbs and nouns, conjugations and agreement. Not really. I guess you could say it was just a lot of talking and listening. And doing community service projects in the U.S. and other countries. And watching films, some about environmental or medical issues. Or doing radio programs for community radio. 

Which basically just means spending time with people you know, doing things you all like to do.

And I got paid my whole life to do exactly that, with a career I never wanted. I should have trusted those bedroom walls after all, I guess.