Apple Picking

Each autumn, the apple tree in my garden drops mounds of ripe fruit on my yard. And every year I leave them to rot while I drive an hour west to pay for privilege of picking someone else’s apples.

 

I’m not alone in my desire to flee my neighborhood at the first hint of an autumn breeze.

 

Alongside a host of other nature-starved suburbanites, I descend on an orchard in rural Illinois. My wing-women and I jockey for position.

 

However, it’s always important to give advice to the neophytes.

 

 

 

Eventually, I end up with a peck of apples both inferior to and more expensive than the ones the orchard sells in their barn.

 

And like the true suburbanite I am, I return home to bake pies --

 

TULIPVILLE

When I was young, my attempts to draw flowers invariably devolved into a series of crude tulips set beneath a stylized sun.

Two decades later, my doodles show the dramatic progression of my art skills.

At the age of twenty-three, I took a job at a Christian Reformed school.

At the time, I knew nothing about the culture into which I was about to step.

Five years into my teaching career, I finally feel like less of an outsider.

It’s still a learning process, however. For one, I’ve never quite understood my colleagues’ reverence when they mention their spiritual home.

They’re not talking about the whole state, however – they’re referring to a specific region on the western side of the Lower Peninsula.

This week, my fellow English teachers and I attended a conference in this area.

Thus it was that took my first trip to the land of tulips and TULIP.

Our path there was guided by a pillar of cloud,

and we crossed a flowing river.

When we reached the Promised Land, I rushed through the gates.

During my sojourn, I had the eerie feeling that I was among these people but not of them.

Even so, they strove to make me feel included.

... usually.

Dutch people look alike. So do English types. This proved problematic.

To complicate matters, I kept recognizing people and then forgetting to greet them. From a social awkwardness perspective, this was probably the better option.

However, I was also welcomed by new friends.

Another commitment caused me to leave the conference early, and as we departed, my colleagues’ hearts were troubled.

I’m looking forward to my return – with a little penmanship, I’ll pass myself off as a native.

My Short-Lived Modeling Career

After a long day, including a classroom observation by an enthusiastic Chinese delegation observing our school’s international student program and a farewell visit with my parents’ moribund cat, I returned home to find a single flyer in my mailbox. On it was the loveliest figure in all of creation:

I’m not entirely sure how I was chosen as the poster girl for my grad school’s English program, although I suspect it has something to do with the vehement refusal of the first person they asked.

I didn’t find out about this exchange until later, however. By the time I learned of it, I had already given in to the increasingly desperate e-mails from the marketing people, who had cleverly avoided use of the word “photogenic.” Instead, they kept their message to the point.

I showed up at the specified classroom at the scheduled time, expecting to stand in front of a screen and smile. Instead, the photographer handed me a dry erase marker.

For you non-educator types, that’s the equivalent of telling a comedian to say something funny or instructing an athlete to do something athletic. It just doesn’t work on command like that. After a few seconds, however, I began lecturing on the Odyssey.

According to the photographer, it was one of the easiest shoots he’s ever done.

Then I met with marketing person assigned to interview me. Despite my request just to write my own statement, she insisted that it would be best for her to interview me and then write up what “I” had said. Eventually I persuaded her to share her summary with me.

Using my mastery of the English language, I carefully crafted a testimonial both positive and honest (a task tantamount to juggling torches while riding a rickety unicycle on a frayed tightrope suspended over a mob of clueless protestors). After this there was a vast silence.

Two months passed, and then one day I found an advertisement in my school mailbox.

Apparently the photo shoot didn’t work out as well as it had seemed. My hair was in lank curls, my shirt filled with rows of wrinkles, my eyes bulging from their sockets, and my mouth curved into a deranged oval.

Eh, I thought, they’re only mailing them to every English teacher within a hundred miles.

That summer, the marketing people emailed me to ask permission to put me on their website. I agreed, saying that I wasn’t fond of the picture but they were welcome to use it.

In the late fall, I heard yet again from marketing folks. The conversation went something like this.

Marketing Person: We’re doing another photo shoot, and I remembered you didn’t like your picture. Want to redo it?

Me: Meh. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Marketing Person: We’d really like you to update your photo.

Me: ...

Marketing Person: Pretty please?

Me: Oh, all right.

Marketing Person: Great! We’ve got you scheduled for the photo shoot and video portion.

Me: Video?

Thus it was that I found myself clad in a wrinkle-proof shirt and fake teaching Norse mythology for the sake of the camera.

That was the last I heard from the marketing people... until I opened my mailbox yesterday. There I am, in slightly less demented form, fronting a group of three former graduate students.

Maybe they think I’m photogenic.

Reunions Are Awkward

Yesterday was my five-year college reunion. Although many aspects of the festivities were quite nice, the gathering was fraught with any number of uncomfortable situations:

long gaps between events...

coping with campus alterations...

running into the same people multiple times...

unknown professors at departmental open houses...

encounters with vaguely familiar classmates...

... and a surfeit of babies.

Stay tuned for ideas on how to improve a reunion.