by It was playing tennis on a balmy early Saturday evening when I had another panic attack. Despite making far more unforced errors than normal I led Florin 5-3. In the next game I was about to serve, down 0-30, when it hit me again. It felt as though my lower body might give way. I soldiered on through that game in which I even had a set point, then to some relief I broke him to love in the following game for the set. Relief because that meant we could change ends. We restarted almost immediately and I staggered on through three games with great difficulty, feeling the need to support myself with the back fence after every point. Look, I’m really not feeling great, I admitted. “Are you dizzy?” Well that’s one way of putting it. He was sympathetic and with ten minutes of our session left we called it a day. I wonder what has brought this on all of a sudden. I can’t be the fear of getting behind the wheel; my first episode was before I bought the car. I’m glad to be going away for a few days – my trip might act as some kind of reset button.
This evening I had my 285th session with Alin and my last for a while. He told me he had to leave his job for personal reasons and would need to give up our twice-weekly meetings until he gets himself sorted. Normally when people say that I don’t expect to see them again, but we’ve built up quite a rapport in that time – a long journey through phrasal verbs, native-speaker podcasts, and a great deal of humour – so I’d put my chances at about even. Tonight we talked about cars and little else; he told me about his five-minute driving test in the mid-nineties. Yesterday I sent the mother of one of my students a message to say I could fit her son in before I go away. She replied to say that he’s too busy and by the way I’ve just cut my finger while slicing a carrot, with an accompanying picture of her bandaged digit. She’s into star signs and stuff so I then suggested that the full moon was responsible for her bad luck.
On Saturday morning before my long day of lessons (they continued after my truncated tennis session) I had a great chat with Mum, the best I can remember for a while. She had been picking Black Boy peaches from trees (pomi) outside the nearby preschool, wondering how all that ripe fruit was still there. I always wonder the same thing when I fill a whole rucksack with plums from the Mehala area of Timișoara. She gave me some tips on preserving fruit – I’ve been hanging on to my jars. Then we talked about our trip to the West Coast and the incredible weather we had, then the possibility of my coming back to New Zealand. My parents are putting me under no immediate pressure, and that’s just as well because while in theory NZ would be great, in practice I dunno man. For one, could I even afford it, and secondly I feel so alive in this place. Then Dad came on the line and we discussed cars. A recurring theme right now.
In my maths lesson with Matei we strayed (partly) off topic as we discussed the googol and its big daddy the googolplex. A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros, right, and a googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros. It took him a while, then bam!, mind blown. You can’t write it out because there aren’t enough atoms in the universe. Um, sorry what? That’s one thing I love about teaching maths. English is very cool, but you never quite achieve the bam! effect.
I loved this morning’s Romanian lesson. Most of it was spent discussing our teacher’s day-to-day experiences of living under communism. She told us about the summer of ’89, the Ceaușescus’ last summer. She was at university, sharing a tenth-floor room with three other girls. It was inhumanly hot and air conditioning was an unthinkable luxury back then. During an important exam period the only way she could sleep was by soaking bedsheets in water. There was a lift which sometimes left the girls stranded between floors. Escaping involved opening the door by disengaging a small wheel and then climbing up or down, at not inconsiderable risk, to the next floor. Occasionally the water supply would cease and they’d be forced to get water from a well (as I do now with my drinking water) and carry it in glass bottles (no plastic bottles back then) up those ten floors. Now she lives in a ground-floor flat. After those experiences I’d want to be close to the ground too. At the end of a lesson we played Taboo where I had to describe a word to Dorothy (or vice versa) while avoiding five forbidden words. On one occasion I had to guess “panic”. I play Taboo with my students; I created over 500 cards of my own, with just three banned words for each.
When I discussed my favourite vinyl albums of those I own (so far), I neglected to mention Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside. A masterpiece, and how she made it as a teenager I’ll never know.
