Day 156 - Canada Day

Independence Day image by Watson
Media, via Flickr.com

This is Independnce Day week. Not only is Thursday Independence Day in the United States, but also today, July 1, is Canada Day, Canada's Independence Day. Where the U.S. gained independence from Great Britain through war, Canada was given its independence from Great Britain in 1867, nearly 100 years later. Some might say the colonies' actions were like those of a rebellious teenager, where Canada's actions were more like a young adult who has earned trust, and therefore independence, from parent England.

Canada was the only foreign country I had visited before my move to Iran. My grandfather had emigrated from Minnesota to Canada before Dad was born to homestead. Several of his brothers also emigrated to the area near Medicine Hat, Alberta. Grandpa Wenner returned to Minnesota but his brothers stayed in Canada. Grandpa's parents had also left Minnesota and settled in Montana and five of Grandpa's siblings also moved there. Three of Dad's siblings followed. So when Mom and Dad took us on trips to visit Dad's brothers, sister, aunt, and uncles, we usually took a side trip north, to Canada, to visit relatives there. Those were the days when citizens of Canada and the United States could cross the border without passports. Answering questions about birthplace and citizenship was all that was necessary.

A few years later, still during the time when most Americans and Canadians traveled across the border on showing a driver's license for identification, I saw the differences between the U.S. and Canada up close. One of those Canadian students of my April road trip, John, asked me to marry him, so I had a few opportunities to travel between the U.S. and Canada. I flew to Toronto several times. I drove to Canada with John after we had both attended the wedding of Gayle and Roger in Pennsylvania. And I drove into and out of Canada with John twice. The contrast between the immigration officers representing the U.S. and Canada on those trips was remarkable,

Canadian flag image by Matzuda, via Flickr.com

I never encountered problems when I flew or drove to Canada. Even my last trip by car, the week before Christmas, when I was bringing a number of presents for John, his parents, his grandparents, and his brothers with me, I was asked few questions, I answered them, and I was welcomed into Canada. But things were never quite so simple on the way back into the U.S.

The first time I flew out of Toronto was after John and I had driven from Pennsylvania to Toronto. Toronto was one of the few airports at the time where U.S. Immigration and Customs officials were stationed outside of the U.S. Passengers flying out of Toronto had to clear U.S. Customs and Immigration before even getting onto the plane. I had no problems with Customs, but when I got to the Immigration desk, I was surprised by the agent's questions and attitude. Perhaps what was suspicious was that I was traveling from Canada to the U.S. on a one-way ticket, not a round-trip ticket originating from the U.S. Or perhaps it was that since I had been living and traveling overseas for so many years it was automatic for me to hand over my passport when asked for identification. Most Americans would have handed the agent a driver's license.

After handing my passport to the agent, he asked me where I was born, where I lived, how I had gotten into Canada, and maybe a few other questions. Then he asked me to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Now I had no objections to reciting it then, and I have none now, but it had been many years since I had recited those words, and I don't think I had ever had to say them alone. In the past, I had had at least a classroom full of other students around me as I spoke those words.

So I started. "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Is that enough?" I asked.

"No," he replied.

"I can't remember how the next line goes," I said.

He said, "And to the Republic..." and he paused, looking at me with expectation in his eyes.

"...for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

He stamped my boarding pass, handed it and my passport back to me, and motioned for me to continue. No "Welcome to America." Just a head gesture to indicate I should move on.

The next time I went to Canada, I flew in, but John and I drove out. When we reached the border this time, one of the questions asked was where we were born. For me, that was not so troublesome. "Fargo, ND," I replied. But for John, it was complicated. "Yugoslavia," he said. The agent then asked us to pull John's car over to a covered area to one side of the border inspection station. Once there, other agents asked us to get out of the car and give them our identification. I hadn't learned my lesson yet, so again I handed the agent my passport.

This passport was a normal tourist passport with 24 pages in it, but all 24 pages had been filled with entry, exit, and residence permits for my two years in Iran, my year in Romania, and all my travels in between. As a result, I had had to have extension pages added. These pages were folded into the passport like an accordion. When the last extension page was tugged on, the full set of 24 extension pages pulled out, like a trick done by a sleight-of-hand card dealer. Once the agent did that, he walked away from me and to a desk, picked up the phone receiver and started dialing.

At that point, other agents had removed everything from the trunk of John's car and were about to begin removing the side panel of the passenger door. I walked to the desk where the agent with my passport was sitting and explained to him that I had so many stamps in my passport because I was a teacher of English as a Second Language and that I had just returned from Romania where I taught on a Fulbright fellowship at one of the Universities. I also explained that John and I had met there while he had been a graduate student of ethnomusicology in Romania.

I will never know if he had already gotten information from whoever was at the end of the phone or if my explanation was somehow so overwhelmingly helpful that he was convinced John and I were not illegal immigrants, drug smugglers, Serbian terrorists, or simple identity thieves. But he did hang up as I finished my explanation, and he shouted over at the guy with the tools ready to take John's car apart that he could stop now. The agents put our bags back into the car and let us drive away.

Again, I don't think there was any "Welcome home."

So to all my Canadian friends, Happy Canada Day. Your country always made me feel welcome. I hope mine has done the same for you.

Day 155 - Traipsing Through Transylvania

Picnic lunch by the side of a stream on our road trip
John, George and Josie

In April, I finally had the opportunity to see more of Romania than Bucharest and Iasi. I had been invited by the Fulbright lecturer in Timișoara, a university town near Yugoslavia, to speak to her students. Instead of flying or taking the train, I rented a car and drove with three Canadian students of Romanian origin to see the Transylvanian Alps, tour some of the Medieval towns in the valleys, especially those associated with Vlad Ţepeș (pronounced tse-pesh), believed to be the model for Dracula, and visit friends in Cluj-Napoca along the way. The Canadians were two brothers from near Toronto, John and George, and a female friend from Montreal, Josie. The three of them had grown up speaking Romanian at home so they were excellent guides for me.

Imposing Castle Bran

One of our first stops was the town of Sinaia where the embassy had a cottage for its staff to use on weekends. John and I had spent a weekend there earlier with my friend Gayle, a teacher at the American School, and her boyfriend Roger, and a few others connected to the embassy through the American School. Sinaia looks like a movie set. It is perched at the edge of the mountains with all the buildings looking like they came from Heidi or The Sound of Music. We didn't spend time in Sinaia; our destination for that day was Castle Bran, an imposing building that looks like it was carved right out of the mountain it sits on. It has often been featured - from a distance - in films as Dracula's castle. But as imposing and dreadful its appearance is from a distance, Castle Bran is one of the friendliest looking castles on the inside. There were lots of narrow staircases, but none held the foreboding atmosphere promised by the exterior. The bedrooms looked cozy, bright and light. The bed in one of the rooms looked as though someone had just gotten up. The was a body-shaped indentation on one side.

The courtyard reminded me of what I had seen in films of Italian villas. There were curves and arches everywhere, with plants in cubbyholes that looked like they had been designed for just that purpose. When breezes blew overhead, an eerie whistling could be heard as if pipes for an organ were being played by the breath of the wind.

Staircase in Castle Bran with George
and Josie

But as charming as Castle Bran was, we couldn't spend the night there, so we headed toward the larger city in the neighborhood, Brașov, in search of hotel rooms. When we got there, we learned there was a conference in town that day so there were no rooms available, it was still light, so we considered our options for routes to our destination of the next day, Cluj-Napoca. There were two possible routes, one that hugged the northern edge of the Transylvanian Alps and one that hugged the southern edge. Once we set out on one of them, there was no opportunity to change our minds because there were no roads over the Alps to connect them. We choose the southern route, through Hungarian territory. All the signs on this road were in Hungarian, not Romanian. Suddenly it didn't seem that any of us had a linguistic advantage.

It was getting late with the sun nearly ready to set when we pulled into the first town that was big enough to have a hotel. In addition, we were getting low on gas, so the option of continuing to drive had expired. Our first stop was at a Tourist Center, the source for information about hotels and restaurants in the area. We were certain that the staff there would speak Romanian in spite of our being in Hungarian-speaking territory. Because Josie and I knew that women in Romania would likely be ignored, George and John went into the center. They returned with the addresses of the three hotels in town. We headed for the first one. This time, we all four went in to see if they had rooms. The clerk behind the desk barely looked at us and sent us away, telling us they had no rooms.

Balcony off upper floor of Castle Bran

On to the second hotel. This time George and Josie went in, figuring maybe four of us appearing all at once was overwhelming. They returned with the same news. There were no rooms. At the the third hotel, John and I went in together. Again, there were no rooms.

So there we were, in a small town in Hungarian-speaking Transylvania, in a car so small it would have been difficult for even one person to sleep in, without enough gas to be certain we would reach another town. We decided we needed to head back to the Tourist Center, this time to find out if there might be a house in town where we could rent a room for the night. This was a common way for students to travel throughout the country, but in recent years the government had banned Romanians from allowing foreigners from staying in their homes. But we didn't see any other choice.

Since George and John had gone into the center the first time, the only ones of us the staff hadn't seen were Josie and me. Since Josie's Romanian was fluent, she did the talking. Even though I couldn't understand everything, I could tell that there were some people in town who had rooms to rent and the woman Josie spoke with walked to a desk with a phone to make arrangements for us. While she was on the phone, Josie filled me in on the whole conversation. The house had only one room with two double beds. Josie had told her that we would be happy with that arrangement since there wasn't really any option. As Josie was filling me in, the woman realized that I wasn't Romanian. She put her hand over the receiver, looked up at Josie, and asked her if I was a foreigner. Josie told her that all four of us were foreigners. At that point, she hung up the phone and told us we had to stay in a hotel; we couldn't stay in the home of Romanians. Josie told her that we had already checked with all the hotels and none of them had rooms. In response, the woman picked up the phone again and began dialing as she told us that if the first class hotel in town didn't have any rooms, they woud have to make a room available, even if it meant telling guests in the room they would have to move out. She completed her call and told us we shoud go back to the first class hotel - the one we had gone to first - where they would have two rooms for us.

We went back to the hotel. And this time, they were happy to provide us with two rooms. Foreigners were more welcome as guests than Romanians, I guess.

Day 154 - Summer Solstice

I am a week late observing Summer Solstice, but it took me that long to give enough thought to pull memories together about how I learned to celebrate that holiday. As the descendant of Norwegian immigrants, from the land of the midnight sun, I should have been observing that holiday since childhood. But it took a move to Iran to learn the joy of celebration.

Our Assistant Director, Dick

The first summer I spent in Tehran, our newly arrived assistant director, Dick, and his wife Sharon, invited us all to their home to celebrate Summer Solstice. They let us know the day would involve lots of food, so much food we wondered how it would all fit into a meal. The start time was early enough for brunch - and that is when we enjoyed a meal in honor of Dr. Seuss, green eggs and ham - guacamole over the eggs made them green. While brunch didn't include all the promised foods, the start time led most of us to expect we would enjoy a pleasant brunch, perhaps a mimosa or Bloody Mary or two, and then wander away in our many separate directions. But we hadn't given enough thought to just what summer solstice is - the longest day of the year. Dick and Sharon had planned for us to observe the whole of summer solstice, not just part of it.

Each time someone took a step to indicate they thought it was time to leave, Dick or Sharon would bring out something new for us to enjoy. In the end, at least some of us ended up staying until sundown.

Sharon with Patty and Robb

Celebrating Summer Solstice with Dick and Sharon marked the point at which I learned how to have a good time. One important element was not to take ourselves too seriously. We played games, the yes/no game and if this person were a . . . game. We went to costume parties. We enjoyed, learned to cook, and then enjoyed again, wonderful food. Dick was able to come up with the list of ingredients for nearly anything he tasted. Then it was just a matter of experimentation to come up with the process to create the dish. I give Dick credit for my comfort with experimentation when cooking in Romania the following year.

Dick and Sharon bought a car in Iran, something none of the rest of us did. It was a 1940's or 1950's vintage sedan, big enough for three of us to sit across with room to spare, the kind of car my parents had to fit all eight of us in it when we drove to Leech Lake for a week of fishing and swimming.

In 1976, the U.S. Embassy contacted Americans in Iran to advise against any public observation of Independence Day, especially since it was the Bicentennial. To keep our celebrating low key, we decided to drive out of Tehran to spend the day. Since Dick had a car, he was one of the drivers. The other cars and drivers were rentals. Since Dick's car was nearly as old as we were, those in more reliable cars promised to keep Dick's car in sight along the way. For awhile, one car stayed behind us. But we were slow, so slow that the follow car passed us. So we decided to play a game. Dick pulled the car over and we waited. It didn't take long for one of the other cars to come back to check us out. When they arrived, we all smiled and then took off.

Of course, karma will be karma. Tne other car passed us and then something did happen to Dick's car. It stopped. And we were stuck. And this time, no one came back for us for a long time. When they did, we weren't smiling. Neither were they.

Somehow, someone got the car started again and we continued on our way, reminded of the boy who cried wolf.

Years later, when I was back in the U.S., I tried to recreate the magic of celebrating Summer Solstice in Minneapolis. I just didn't have the same ability to give the spark of wonderment that Dick had.  Many years later again I was able to attend the party Dick arranged for himself on the occasion of his retirement. Many of the NIRT crowd were there. We had all aged a bit, but Dick still knew how to make sure his guests had a great time.

Day 153 - Excuses

our front porch

I feel drained of energy today, enervated. And I have so many reasons, er... excuses, for feeling this way. But what I can't let happen is using those excuses to skip writing today.

Excuse number 1 - We have Bunk, Simon and Sarah's boxer, staying with us. And because of my allergies, I have to take a pill each day to avoid getting all congested and sneezy. Allergy medications make me sleepy so after finishing work today, I ended up taking a nap. I was so tired.

Excuse number 2 - But before taking a nap, I thought Bunk would enjoy spending some time outside on the front porch. So I took my current reading material, Dissolution by C. J. Sansom, and sat down at the table with hibiscus plants that Alex loves so much and read. Bunk followed me and took possession of a dog-shaped section of the porch and napped. It was 90 degrees out there today. That made me tired.

Excuse number 3 - Dissolution is so well written that as I read it, I feel the same things the characters feel, I smell the same smells, and I see the same sights. The section of the book that I am in right now is at a monastery in the sixteenth century in the winter. In spite of the 90 degree temperture outside, I felt chilled. And that made me want to curl up under covers to get warm.

Excuse number 4 - On Monday I attended a meeting of the San Diego Writers and Editors Guild where Jill Williamson talked about the evolution of her memoir, Confessions of a Love Addict. At one point, Jill said writers don't write to make a lot of money, they write because they have to. Writing to a writer, she said, is a necessary bodily function, like eating and sleeping and other things. And nearly everyone else in the room nodded their heads like they knew exactly what she meant. So I have been asking myself every day since then if I really am or could be a writer. Is writing really something I have to do? Or am I just fooling myself? Thinking about that makes me tired.

Excuse number 5 - I can't stop thinking about Dad and that he is gone. It has been more than a month since he died, but I still haven't written all the thank you notes I told myself I should write. All those in response to memorial gifts, plants, and flowers, the obligatory ones, have been written, but there are notes to the staff of Eventide, of Hospice of the Red River Valley, and to the members of Trinity who served at Dad's funeral. I should have written those letters a month ago, but I still haven't. And that makes me tired.

I started this project to get myself into the habit of writing every day. I have had to skip a day now and then, like the week Dad died and the two weeks we had guests, and yesterday because it was Alex's birthday and I wanted him to know he is the center of my world, but the rules for the project are my own so I can break them if I need to. I just hope I can avoid changing need to want. If I do that, I might have to concede that I am not, and never will be, a writer.

Day 152 - The Students Who Never Came To Class

empty classroom image by earthisthering, via Flickr.com

Another purpose for that big book in the English Department was to record grades of students. At the end of the first term, I learned that the members of each class would be listed in the book for the teachers to record their grades. Grades in Romanian universities ranged from 1 to 10 with 5 or higher passing.  Since my classes were Conversation or American Culture, the grades I gave were admittedly subjective. I didn't have tests or papers with grades to total up and average.

The first term, all of my classes were second-year English majors. The second term, only three of my classes were second-year English majors. One class was third-year French majors with English as their minor. And one class was a fourth-year elective course developing writing skills in English.

Three of those classes met in the evening. It was inevitable that some of the classes were held in the evenings, given the number of hours students spent in the classroom. It was challenging to get all the students to attend the evening classes. They followed a break of at least two hours, long enough for the students to get back to their dorm rooms or their apartments at the other end of town. Sometimes they just didn't make it back for that evening class.

The third-year French majors and English minors were one of those evening classes. Most evenings at least two of them showed up. Sometimes there were as many as five. Once none of them showed up, but I think that was one of the classes who heard I had gone to Bucharest.

It was very difficult to figure out what activities to plan for when it wasn't clear how many students would be in attendance. One of my favorite activities was something we also did in Iran called Dialog Cards. This exercise involved an ambiguous dialog written with only one half on each of two cards. The class would decide ahead of time if the dialog would be spoken by two men, two women, or a man and a woman. The class would decide which emotions the two speakers would put into their half of the conversation. The two speakers would look at one another while they spoke the words on their cards to one another, using the emotions the class had decided on.  The results were always hilarious. And the same cards could be used over and over again with different results just by switching the emotions and combination of speakers. But with only one pair of speakers, a class planned for this activity ended pretty quickly.

While I never saw them all at the same time, in all there were probably seven students in that class. I kept thinking about what I could have done during the term if they had all attended. So when the term ended and I opened up the big book to provide grades for those seven students, I was shocked to discover that there were 14 members of that class. Seven students came at least once. but seven more never showed up at all.

I gave them all 0's.

Within a week, one of those missing students came to the American/British reading library with a large bouquet of flowers and an explanation. She apologized for not attending any of my classes. She said she was married and had an infant. Once she got back to their apartment after her daytime classes, she had to take care of the baby and it was just too difficult to leave the baby behind for her to return to the university for the evening class. I asked her a number of other questions to get a better sense of her English ability. At the end of the conversation, I told her I would think about what she had told me and would consider changing her grade.

The next day, another of the missing students appeared outside the English Department and asked to talk with me. She said she had heard from her colleague that if she asked me, I would change her grade. I countered by explaining that her colleague had come to me, showing more courage than any of the other members of the class, that she had apologized to me for not showing me the courtesy of attending my classes, and that she had explained her reasons for not coming back to the university in the evening. Based on those factors, I had assured her that I would think about whether or not I would change her grade. I did not tell her I would change her grade. I told her I would consider it.

The following day, a third of the missing students appeared outside the English Department and told me she wanted me to change her grade. I was a bit surprised at the abruptness of the request so I told her I didn't have any reason to change her grade. Her counter to that was to tell me that if I didn't change her grade, she would have to retake the class in the summer and that meant that I would have to stay for the summer to teach the class again. I replied that whether she had to retake the class had nothing to do with whether I had to remain to teach it. But still she didn't give up. She said I had to change the grade because 0 wasn't a grade. So I replied, "And that is just what you got - no grade."

In the end, I changed the grade of the first student who came to explain and apologize, but I don't think I made it a passing grade. I didn't change the other grades. But I did add a note in the big book to explain why I had given the seven students who never came to my class a grade of 0. And I explained that I had been asked by some of the students to change that grade, but that I didn't feel I could in good conscience change grades of students who had never attended a class. But, since I didn't know all the implications of my decision, I would understand if someone on the faculty felt it necessary to change the grades in my place.

Day 151 - Rumor Has It

Rumor image by brookenovac, via Flickr.com

In contrast to my understanding that Iran is a shame-based society, I came to think of Romania as a rumor-based society.  One of the greatest sources of amusement and frustration for me in Romania was dealing with the fact that communication wasn't straightforward. I always thought of myself as saying what I meant and meaning what I said, but no one else seemed to follow that pattern in Romania.

More than once I went to conduct my class and discovered no one in the classroom. But later in the day, I would run into one of the students from that class. When I asked why no one had come to the class, the reply was most often, "We heard you went to Bucharest." My reply, "Yes, I went to Bucharest -- last weekend. But I came back to Iași in time for the class today."

I guess when most people traveled to Bucharest, they made a long trip out of it. The idea of flying - or taking the train - to Bucharest for a weekend was so beyond what was normal for my students that they assumed I wouldn't be back in just a few days.

Then there was that big book in the English Department where the teachers left notes for one another. I didn't leave notes in it often, but when I had a message I wanted more than one teacher to get, I wrote it down. I found it humorous - and also a bit on the annoying end of curious - that my British lecturer colleague Chris would end up telling me that the other staff members would ask him what I meant by what I had written. It seemed so clear to me  - I meant what I wrote. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Then there was the occasion of the death of the husband of one of our colleagues. The details of the funeral service were written in the book in the Department, for everyone to read. I planned to attend and as I was heading to the Casa Universitarilor for lunch, I ran into one of my Romanian colleagues who asked me if I was going to the funeral. When I told him I was, he told me the time had changed. It was an hour earlier. And that meant I was going to have to skip lunch in order to attend the funeral.

I reached the church where the funeral would be held in time for the hour earlier changed time, but I found the number of people in attendance to be very small. But I didn't know if that meant anything because this was Romania during the time of Nicolai Ceaucescu and the Communist party, so I didn't have much to go on regarding the number of people who would feel comfortable attending a funeral in a church. So I waited.

Churches in Romania didn't have plush pews to sit in. In fact, I don't remember any pews, plush or otherwise, to sit in. I recall standing while I waited. And I waited. And I waited. People trickled in throughout the time I waited. I felt a little conspicuous because I didn't know anyone else in the church. And I felt as though everyone was looking at me, wondering who I was and why I was there.

candle image by juliadeb, via Flickr.com

The service eventually got started about the time I had initially been told it would start. I recall feeling safe enough thinking I would just watch those around me to figure out what I was supposed to do since I didn't understand any of the service. It might have been in Romanian, but for all I understood it might have been in Latin or "Old Romanian" a variant of the language I assumed existed just as the King James' version of English was still read at times in modern church services in the West. Watching others was a good strategy for most of the event, but when we were all given candles that we held during the service, I noticed that mine was burning down much more quickly than those around me. As the flame got closer and closer to my fingers, I had to blow it out, not knowing if this was acceptable. Others kept theirs, still burning, until the service ended.

When I got back to the university, I realized another lesson about rumors: in a rumor-based society, everyone believes what they heard last, even if what they heard last happened earlier. The time of the funeral had been changed. But the time in the book at the Department was the time it had been changed to, not from. That explained the sparse group of mourners when I arrived at the church. It also explained the long wait before the funeral began. And it probably also explained why I felt people watching me, wondering why I, a stranger, had arrived so early, at the time close family members of the deceased arrived.

On reflection, it wasn't difficult to understand why Romania was a rumor-based society. It was a society where discretion, the need to protect your own privacy as well as the privacy of others, could be a matter of "freedom" or imprisonment, of life or death. In such a society, it is often important not to speak freely and directly but rather to speak in riddles or by leaving certain ideas unspoken. And that explained why the question of what I really meant by what I wrote was a normal response.

Day 150 - March in Iași

Sample mărțișor

By March, I had been in Romania for six months and had been living in the apartment on the plaza in the middle of town for two months. But I wasn't yet ready to say I was happy there. Life in Romania was much easier than life had been in Iran. It was as though everyone in Romania could sense when I had reached the point of wanting to walk away from a situation that had become too frustrating and then they would turn to me to ask what I needed. In Iran, I learned that when I reached that point, I had to patiently wait as long again unless I really did think walking away was necessary.

George, Sandra, and Ana in the park

But March first was the beginning of a change. According to the old calendar in Romania, March 1 was the beginning of the new year. Symbolically, observing March 1 centered around women and fertility. For this reason, my students all gave me mărțișor, small tokens or charms hung on twisted threads of red and white that are  pinned to clothing. It was a small gesture, but the first where I felt I was an individual, not the American lecturer.

The following week, March 8, was another holiday I hadn't known about, International Women's Day. On that occasion, one of my classes gave me a doll dressed in a folk costume of the region, Moldova.

Paul running to join us
in the park

Those two events were the beginning of my feeling welcomed in Romania. And that made it possible for me to take actions to enjoy myself from that point on.

Sandra in front of
a statue in the park

George in front
of a statue in the
park

One example was an expedition that Paul, the American Fulbright researcher, two of my students, Ana and George, and I made to a park in Iași on an afternoon. The park featured a number of statues of historically important Romanians. We wandered through the park, taking turns posing in front of the statues in the same poses as the statues and taking photographs. It was an enjoyable afternoon with no purpose other than to enjoy the time.

 My impression was that students in Romania spent so much of their time and effort just getting through the day that there wasn't much time left just to enjoy life. I am happy that I had those small opportunities to enjoy Romania with my students.

Day 149 - Genevieve

Row of Model Ts ready for instruction

The films we showed on Monday evenings were not normally ones seen in theaters anywhere in the world, with one exception: Genevieve, a 1953 British comedy that the British lecturer, Chris, got from the British embassy. The film involves two couples participating in the annual London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, not a race, but a drive in vehicles made during the veteran era which spanned the late 1880s to about 1904. Genevieve was one of the Veteran cars. a Darracq. The plot involves the competition between the two men which result in a number of tricks being played by one on the other. Most memorable to me was the result when the cancelation of their reservation in a posh hotel left Genevieve's owner and his wife having to check into a dingy local hotel. When Wendy, the car's owner's wife, discovers there was no running water in their room, she storms up the stairs, making it very clear that she is disgusted with how events are turning out. Her husband follows her upstairs rather sheepishly while one of the women behind the hotel counter asks the other, "Are they Americans?"

Even as early as 1953 we Americans apparently had a bad reputation overseas, even in a country where we shared a language.

This morning Alex and I got a taste of what driving Genevieve from London to Brighton was like. We were guests of the Histerical Auto Works of Santee, California, which offers an annual opportunity to learn how to drive Model Ts. This morning was this year's event.

Six owners of Model Ts brought their vehicles to the Histerical Auto Works and offered driving lessons. The cars were from 1912 through 1915. One was from all those years as it was built from donated parts.

Norm and his Model T

Norm was my instructor. Even before the lessons began, Norm was eager to show us all the distinctive features of his car compared to others. His was from one of the later years which was obvious, once Norm pointed it out, because the seat was lower than in earlier cars. Ford had moved the gas tank which in older models was under the seat to the front of the car. This was a strategic move by Ford because other cars with a lower profile were beginning to take a bite out of the car market. Norm pointed out that Gary's 1913 model with the gas tank under the seat and only one door must have been very inconvenient for any passenger because this model still had to be started with the hand crank which means either the passenger had to crank the car to life, or the passenger had to get out to allow the driver to do so. Since we had many opportunities to watch Gary crank start his car, we appreciated the amount of effort involved.

Norm's Model T had an ignition button on the floor in front of the driver's seat. All Model Ts continued to have cranks and could always be started using them, but later models didn't require cranking. For that I was very glad since I managed to stall the car several times during my lesson.

Sandra and Norm in Norm's Model T

Model Ts have two levers just behind the steering wheel, much like the turn signal and windshield wiper controls on a modern car, but their functions are quite different. The left lever is the spark lever which must be pressed before depressing the ignition button. The right lever controls the gas.  I could remember that until we approached an intersection where I had to make a right turn. Then I found my fingers heading automatically for the spark lever to signal my intention to turn.

There are three pedals on Model Ts. The right one is the brake. The middle one is reverse. And the left one is neutral, low, and high gear, depending on how deeply it is depressed. Norm described the gears as slow and slower. And then there is the lever that is part brake, part gears. I admit that I never did manage that one. Norm called is the brake at least once, but the right pedal is the brake. He kept moving the lever for me before I could accelerate, telling me it needed to be in the central position which I couldn't find - I only found two positions which never seemed to be the ones I needed.

My certificate, a bit of hyperbole

One thing I did learn is that if I needed to press a pedal, I needed to PRESS it. I kept hovering my foot over the brake, but then discovered my foot thought that pedal was the accelerator.  My feet wanted to do what my hands had to do and my hands wanted to do what couldn't be done.

I suggested to Norm that I might have learned as much as I needed to learn by that time. I was eager to get back to parking position which I knew meant that I was going to have to tackle the last pedal - reverse. It might have looked like a smooth landing to those on the sidewalk, but I was shaking inside as I backed up and then put on the brake.

Day 148 - Romanian Medicine

I told the members of the class that asked to remain with me about the theft of my soy sauce. I shared that I thought it would be funny to see the thieves' faces as they poured out and sipped what they thought would be some exotic liquer and instead got a mouth full of salt.  I had ordered the soy sauce from an international import company because it wasn't available in Romaia. My students told me there used to be soy sauce in the stores, but no one bought it because they didn't know how to cook with it. And that is when I invited them to have a Chinese meal for lunch one Tuesday. I not only had soy sauce, I also had oyster sauce. And with chicken and vegetables usually available, I was confident I could put together an acceptable Chinese meal.

milk bottle image by NickPiggot,
via Flickr.com

The morning of the lunch, just as I was getting started with the preparations, there was a knock on my door. When I answered it, two of my students, Miriam* and Elena*, from that class were there. I asked why they had come so early and because they didn't answer my question, it appeared to me that they had forgotten my invitation. Instead, they asked if I had milk. Miriam had a calcium deficiency and she needed a quick dose. I had milk, but I apologized explaining that it was sour. Miriam said sour milk was better for her because her system absorbed calcium from sour milk more quickly than from fresh milk. Each day she would have to drink a quart of milk to get the calcium into her system. But since milk wasn't pasteurized in Romania, it was necessary to boil the milk for a fixed length of time and then cool it down. That morning, the milk she boiled separated into curds and whey and she didn't have time to boil more milk. So she headed to the university for her classes. While there, she realized she needed a calcium injection and got one at the student clinic. But it wasn't enough. She was on her way home with Elena accompanying her in case she had more problems when they they realized my apartment was at the plaza where they were waiting for a tram. And that is why they ended up at my door.

Miriam drank my sour milk, but even that wasn't enough. So they decided they needed to go to a hospital and there was one just behind the plaza. They asked me to go with them. I don't know if they thought a foreign lecturer as a companion would speed things up. But I was curious to know what the Romanian medical system was like, so I went with them.

My first observation was that I coudn't tell the doctors from the patients. I saw people walking down the hall wearing slippers and what looked like bathrobes. I assumed they were patients. But one of those slipper and bathrobe wearers showed up to examine Miriam in the room we were brought into to wait.

hospital ward image by jbpic, via Flickr.com

That "waiting" was my second observation: there didn't seem to be either a waiting area or examination rooms because the room in which we waited had six beds, each with a patient, and no chairs for us to sit in.

When the doctor examined Miriam, she started by tapping her left cheek. I watched as the muscles in Miriam's face rippled across her face and then rippled back. I had never seen anything like it. Apparently that satisfied the doctor that Miriam was short on the required amount of calcium, so she got another injection,

When we left the hospital, Miriam apologized about missing lunch at my house, but she felt she needed to go home and rest. Miriam then spoke very quickly with Elena which I interpreted to be instructions to get to the university to tell the other members of the class that the invitation for lumch was for Tuesday, not Thursday. The names of the two days are very different in Romanian, marti and joi, but much too similar in English.

I went back to preparing a Chinese meal. At noon, many of the members of the class arrived for lunch. One did give away that she got the message about lunch being that day very late.

They all said they enjoyed the meal. But I doubt they would have told me anything other.

*names, not necessarily the right ones

Day 147 - Second Term

When the second term began at the university, one of my classes requested to continue with me as their teacher. I guess it was in part because of their choice to continue, I decided to give them some choice into how we would spend the second term. We had about 12 sessions during the term, so I asked them to list 12 topics they would like to discuss during the term. I told them I would decide how the topics would be incorporated into the session.

convoy image by Sangudo, via Flickr.com

One of the topics they chose was American music. Now I had been out of the United States for nearly three years at that point, which meant I wasn't in the best position to provide much information about what was most current on the American music scene. For the two previous years, I had been living in Iran where we had access to American Forces Radio and Television for the first year, but even when we could listen to American music, it didn't take long for it to become a mystery. For example, there was this craze in the mid 70's in the U.S. involving the use of Citizen Band radios. One of the songs to come out at this was C.W. McCall's Convoy. We heard it. We listened to the words. But we certainly did not understand it. The challenge of finding a way to discuss American music was bigger than my students understood.

Just before I left Iran, an American hit that was also a bit hit there was Hotel California by The Eagles. Since we had used the lyrics to that song with our classes in Tehran, I decided that would be how I would introduce American music into the conversation with my class. But after I played the song for them, provided copies of the lyrics, and we discussed just what in the world it meant, my students surprised me by wanting to do even more. Now it is important to remember that the year was 1978, long before MTV, but what my students suggested was that we do something very much like a music video. They suggested we take photos that could be synchronized with the song, a multi-media project. So we developed a story board of the scenes we needed to photograph to illustrate the song.

We took slides. I don't know if it was the title of the song that led my students to decide the perfect venue was a place on the edge of town they referred to as the Motel, but that was where we took most of the slides. And my students decided it was a perfect opportunity for them to take me, their teacher, out for lunch. They insisted, much to my dismay because I knew how much more easily I could have paid for all their lunches than any of them could come up with their fair share of my meal.

Hotel California image by Leo Uehara
via Flickr.com

Because there weren't that many of us, we brought extra jackets, coats, and hats so that we didn't end up with the same people in every slide. I had to send the film back to the U.S. for development and our hope was that we would be able to show the slides, synchronized with the music, at one of the English Language Social Club events.  I think we missed that deadline, but I know I turned the slides and the cassette tape over to my students, so I hope they were able to finish the project.

Another topic the class said they wanted to discuss was life of American university students. For this, I asked Mom to send me a course catalog from Moorhead State, NDSU, and Concordia. When they came, I broke the students into three groups and gave each group one of the catalogs with the instructions to come up with the courses a mythical English major would have to take during the usual four years of college.  I told them I would be available to answer their questions, but I wanted them to figure out the schedule as a group. It was an amazing experience to watch them read through the requirements and discover that American university students only had to take between 12 and 16 hours of classes in a week. They were in class between 32 and 36 hours per week. They also were surprised that they had to make so many decisions for themselves. In the Romanian system, once they were accepted into an academic discipline, they were assigned to a class which took all the same classes together for the following three years. All their classes were required.

None of the groups completed the task, but it was still a success. I learned more about each of those students in that one session than in the full first term.

Day 146 - Cooking in Moldova

lemon meringue pie image by texascooking, via Flickr.com

Cooking in Romania was a challenge in part because finding time to buy food was a challenge and in part because the range of what was available was limited. The shelves in the shops were full, but they were full of the same thing, not full of variety. For example, where in the U.S. the aisle with canned vegetables would have cans of all sizes and brands with corn, beans of all types, peas, asparagus, potatoes, palm hearts, tomatoes, peppers, and so on, in Romania a single shelf was full, top to bottom, left to right, of canned tomatoes - just canned tomatoes - in cans of the same size and brand.

The silver lining, of course, is that I could always find canned tomatoes.

Other items I could always get included chicken, lemon juice, sour cream, sugar, flour, a variety of soft cheeses, cabbage, onions, potatoes, cooking oil, eggs, and bread. That's about it. So I learned to take advantage of what was there.

For example, one of the types of cheeses I could always get was cașcaval, a moderately firm whitish cheese that was about the same consistency as mozzarella. And a common appetizer in the restaurants in Romania was cașcaval pane, or fried cheese. And I loved it. To prepare cașcaval pane, I needed an egg, a cup of flour, bread crumbs, cooking oil, and seasonings. With the egg, flour, and seasonings, I made a batter. After heating oil in a frying pan until it was hot, I dipped 1-inch thick slices of cheese into the batter, rolled the battered slices in breach crumbs to coat them, and then placed them in the hot oil to cook, turning each once to ensure even cooking.

I brought a variety of herbs with me which meant I had plenty of options for ensuring variety in my meals, in spite of the similarity - cașcaval pane with dill one day, with basil the next, with oregano the next, and so on.

I also brought The Joy of Cooking with me. While I could never find all the ingredients for any recipe, I could always get chicken so I worked my way through the poultry section of that cookbook, picking up whatever ingredients I could find and using what was available, mostly cabbage, onions, and canned tomatoes, as replacements for other ingredients.

cheesecake image by kitsunebabe, via Flickr.com

But my special favorites were lemon meringue pie and cheesecake. While there weren't lemons in Romania, there were always bottles of lemon juice. Using the juice, along with the eggs, sugar, flour, and salt that were always available, I was able to mix up the crust and cook up the lemon mixture for the pie.

Cheesecake was more problematic. There was no Philadelphia cream cheese available. There also wasn't any ricotta or cottage cheese. But there were a number of different soft cheese as well as yogurt and sour cream. On weekends that I stayed in Iași, I tried different cheeses and combinations with yogurt or sour cream in a Joy of Cooking cheese cake recipe.

Once I moved to the apartment that had formerly been the French lecturer's home, I had a friend nearby to help me test my experiments, another Fulbrighter, Paul, who lived in one of the two hotels on the plaza where my apartment building was located.

Paul's hotel suite was larger than my apartment, although he didn't have a kitchen. So I could count on getting a positive reaction from Paul when I offered to bring over some cheesecake in exchange for an hour or two of watching TV in his suite.

function image by Dallas Film
Society Images, via Flickr.com

Because Paul's suite was so much larger, he agreed to host a cocktail party in honor of the International Visitor whose visit was arranged by the Cultural Affairs Officer of the American embassy when the IV came to Iași for his lecture.  It was my introduction to the world of diplomatic functions, events hosted by ambassadors or their staff to entertain and network with other diplomats and contacts within the local population, something I became much more familiar with in future years.

During the event at Paul's suite, I learned a trick from the Cultural Affairs Officer's wife. She would look around the room in order to find the oldest person in attendance. She would then approach that person and begin a conversation. After a few minutes, she would suggest that the two of them find a more comfortable place to continue their conversation, at which point she would lead the guest to a sofa so that they could both sit down. I liked that approach. As an introvert, I was never comfortable mixing at functions. I figured out how to start up a conversation, but I was never comfortable moving on to another conversation. That sometimes meant I managed to start up a conversation with another introvert in the room, someone as uncomfortable with making conversation as I was and equally uncomfortable moving on. Those conversations were painfully long. But Mrs. Cultural Affairs Officer's approach had two big advantages. First, the oldest person in the room usually had the most to say, often the most interesting content as well. And second, sitting down is a much more comfortable position to be in if the conversation turned out to be one of those long and painful ones.

Day 145 - English Language Social Club

film image by thepodger, via Flickr.com

One of the advantages of having classes only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, was that I could travel to Bucharest each weekend to have time on Friday mornings to pick up books and films from the American Library in Bucharest for use the following week. The books I used in my classes. The films I brought back for the regular Monday evening film nights. The film nights had been going on for at least a couple of years before I got there. The American and British lecturers each had access to films from the cultural offices of our embassies. All we had to do was pick them up in Bucharest, let one of the Romanian staff members review the films to be sure they were deemed acceptable, and get them back to Bucharest later.

Having the films reviewed wasn't called censorship, but it was always amazing that the films I thought had the most interesting stories were deemed to be uninteresting by whoever reviewed them.

Most of the films I could get were in a series that had five segments of about five minutes each. The segments were about ordinary things, like county fairs, rodeos, restaurants. They were glimpses of life in the United States. They wouldn't have been exciting to an audience of American college students, but they were very popular with Romanian audience.

But most of the audience for film night were not our students. Instead, they were students in other disciplines where English was important - engineering and medicine, for example. And they were high school students and their English teachers. We were pleased to have a broader audience and started looking for other opportunities. Well, to be more accurate, my colleague Chris was eager to expand the exposure of English to our students and others. His idea was to set up an English Language Social Club one afternoon a week where the students could play board games, we would provide magazines and books for them to read, and offer opportunities for informal conversation. I was still too strongly influenced by the pessimism that two years of living in Iran had engendered in me. I was convinced it would take too much time and effort to accomplish Chris' idea. But Chris had been in Iasi the year before, so he had the details all worked out. All we needed was a room large enough for all those activities on Thursday afternoon, and permission from the English Department.

Chris managed to find a room in the same building where we showed films on Monday evenings, the Student Center. Thursday was the ideal day because it was the day most of the teachers had compulsory party meetings so there were no classes. Since our students had about 32 hours of classes every week, in contrast to the full-course load of 12-16 hours of American university students, finding a two-hour block when the majority of them would be free was a challenge. It also wasn't certain that our students would choose to spend two more hours with us since they had so few hours to themselves.

Monopoly image by Mike_fleming via Flickr.com

So we brought copies of Boggle, Scrabble, Monopoly as well as those magazines I had bought at Hornbachers and books from both the British and American embassies to the Student Center and waited to see if anyone would show up. They did. We set up the games throughout the room and helped each group get started with the games. I had expected the languages games, Boggle and Scrabble, to be popular, but after watching awhile, it was clear that those games didn't involve much conversation among the players. Monopoly on the other hand was a big hit. After we read the rules, the game began. The university had sent one of the Romanian instructors to the first session as our minder, we assumed, and we got him involved with the Monopoly game. He seemed to be the only player who seemed to think that playing the game just meant rolling dice and moving the tokens around the board. Buying property and demanding rent when a player landed on it seemed to be distractions to him.

Again, many of those who attended on Thursdays were students from other disciplines or high school students and their teachers. One week one of the high school students offered to show slides that her father had taken on a trip to New York. We were happy to give her the opportunity and fascinated at her presentation and the reaction. Her father had taken the usual picture of tall buildings and tourist sights, but those weren't the focus of her attention. Instead, she pointed out all those ordinary things - the traffic lights, the cars parked along the street, the length of the skirts the women walking on the sidewalk were wearing, the exhibits in the shop windows. And those in the audience asked her questions that she did an excellent job answering, given that she hadn't been in New York herself.

Day 144 - Father's Day

Father's Day cake by Jim, The Photographer,
via Flickr.com

This is the first Father's Day without Dad. It is also the first Father's Day with James in our lives. That's the circle of life, I guess.

At church this morning, Pastor Andy said in his sermon that he had been at St. Andrews Lutheran Church long enough that he has used up all the great stories of his father. So he told us one about a parishioner in his first church. Lilian* was in her 70s when she told Pastor the story, so he thinks the story took place in the early 1920s.

Lilian grew up in a very strict household. Her mother preached against playing cards, dancing, and going to movies, fearing that her daughter being involved in such activities would lead her astray. But Lilian, being a typical teenager of any decade, had a streak of rebellion in her. Not wanting to lie to her mother, Lilian stretched the truth a bit, telling her mother she was going to a friend's house for the evening. It was just stretching the truth because Lilian did go to her friend's house. But then she and her friends went to the cinema.

It was Lilian's first trip to see a movie, so she was very excited. Once she and her friends got settled in their seats, Lilian was surprised by a tap on her shoulder, but even more surprised when she turned around and saw her father in the seat behind her. In an instant, Lilian figured out what had happened. Her father had seen her with her friends as they were buying their tickets, but instead of approaching her outside the cinema, he decided to make the lesson larger by allowing Lilian to spend her money on the ticket and refreshments. Lilian didn't have much money, so when her father finally demanded that she pick up her purse and come out of the cinema with him, the lesson would really hurt.

But that's not what her father said. Instead, he said "I won't tell if you won't tell." Lilian remained in her seat in the row with her friends while her father remained behind her. And Lilian realized after that day that her father would always have her back.

Pinocchio by turbulentflow, via Flickr.com

Lilian's story reminded me of the first time I went to a movie. Dad took me to see Walt Disney's Pinocchio. I must have been about four years old. I remember the experience so well because I was absolutely scared to death of the  big waves and the storm in the movie. Instead of seeing Pinocchio learning the lessons that he should stop telling lies and start being kind and obedient to his father who carved him, I remember wondering why Dad would take me to see a movie that was so frightening.

Swiss Family Robinson book by
kayray via Flickr.com

A few years later Dad took several of us to see The Swiss Family Robinson. That one also had a few frightening moments in it, like a scene where one of the boys was caught in a giant spider's web, but I was old enough not to let the the frightening scenes distract me from the rest of the story. After we got home from the movie, Dad teased us about the movie. He asked us if we thought it was a good story or a true story. We all said it was both. But Dad insisted it was either a good story that wasn't true or a true story that wasn't good. I think I realized he was right, but I really wanted it to be a good story that was true.

I asked Dad not long ago how he met Mom. I expected him to tell me about the moment he first saw her across a room because I thought everyone would remember that point in time when they saw their love for the first time. Instead, Dad said he couldn't remember. He said he had always known who she was. Both his family and hers used to go to watch movies that were projected against one of the buildings downtown in Hitterdal, a precursor of outdoor movie theaters like the Starlight and Moonlight in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

Dad used to take us to movies at an outdoor movie theater now and then, especially when the entry price was per car, not per person. I always enjoyed those nights, even though I heard Dad complain to Mom about what went on in the other cars. I didn't know what he was talking about. I always watched the movies. I never looked at what went on in the other cars.



*a name, not necessarily the right one