I like my job almost always. But there have been a few days which blatantly remind me why it is that I prefer teaching the entire middle school--hormones and weirdness and laziness and all--to my 50 minutes a day with a certain high school class.
And this is one of those days.
18 April 2012
14 April 2012
The Life and Death of Peggy Sue
St. Patrick's Day 2012: Sarah and I hopped a bus to Álcala. A magic bus. Kinda like the one Mrs. Frizzle used to drive around the universe and down the digestive system.
I can't really give reasons for why the outing felt so different than any other Álcala outing, except that perhaps leprechauns had sprinkled it with Irish love. We found a clothing store where things actually fit and were on sale to the point that we visited the dressing room two and a half times. We saw bagpipers in green wigs traipsing up and down Calle Mayor. And we definitely cried, "More Irish! Let's get 'em!" when an entire green-wigged posse slid through a side arch into a plaza full of Guinness drinkers and fiddle players. The best finds of the day were completely accidental.
And so with Peggy Sue's.
We met her on a side street off a plaza we never visit, next to an Irish bar promoting pizza and hot chocolate. We found her not far from the playground where a middle-aged woman appointed herself the playground police and yelled at us for using a swingset: "Son mayores, ¿no? Es para niños!" She stared us down with fervor, just stood there and stared. "Son mayores! Son mayores!" But Peggy Sue's comforted us. Peggy Sue's told us it was okay to be childlike.
Peggy Sue's was a corner diner.
She had pink walls with checkered tiles, bar stools and booths with their own individual jukeboxes full of hits from the 50s and 60s. She had a giant TV screen playing Marilyn Monroe and the original Ocean's 11. She had chicken fingers and Diet Cherry Coke and pizzas named "Elvis Presley" and "Frank Sinatra."
We officially made Peggy Sue's acquaintance the next Friday, joined by Adam and Emily. We ordered off the surprisingly small carta, not realizing that the cook would start the hamburgers and French fries at 8:30. (American fare, Spanish hours.) Emily tried ordering the banana ice cream (which the menu claimed was an American favorite) and was told that they'd stopped carrying it (apparently it's equally as favorite in Spain). We punched Ain't No Mountain High Enough and Nut Rocker into our mini jukebox, waiting for the music to take over the restaurant speakers. We ate our Marilyns and our Elvises and talked about how much we liked Peggy Sue's, how we were all going to bring our families here when they came to visit.
The following week, we asked Lynnette if she'd like to bike into town and do supper at Peggy Sue's. She called after her piano lesson with the heartrending news: Peggy Sue's was closed.
"Forever? Or just for today?"
"It looks like forever. Their facebook page says they closed on the 26th." Three days after we'd eaten there. The server really meant it when she said they'd stopped carrying banana helado; she failed to mention that they'd stop carrying everything!
Still, Sarah and I returned to that fateful corner once more, just to be sure.
Door covered. Booths ripped out. The fluorescent light in her eyes gone. Over. Dead. Just like that.
If only we'd had more time, Peggy Sue. If only we'd known. But it was too late.
So we walked around the corner and grabbed burgers from Buddy Holly's instead.
I can't really give reasons for why the outing felt so different than any other Álcala outing, except that perhaps leprechauns had sprinkled it with Irish love. We found a clothing store where things actually fit and were on sale to the point that we visited the dressing room two and a half times. We saw bagpipers in green wigs traipsing up and down Calle Mayor. And we definitely cried, "More Irish! Let's get 'em!" when an entire green-wigged posse slid through a side arch into a plaza full of Guinness drinkers and fiddle players. The best finds of the day were completely accidental.
And so with Peggy Sue's.
We met her on a side street off a plaza we never visit, next to an Irish bar promoting pizza and hot chocolate. We found her not far from the playground where a middle-aged woman appointed herself the playground police and yelled at us for using a swingset: "Son mayores, ¿no? Es para niños!" She stared us down with fervor, just stood there and stared. "Son mayores! Son mayores!" But Peggy Sue's comforted us. Peggy Sue's told us it was okay to be childlike.
Peggy Sue's was a corner diner.
She had pink walls with checkered tiles, bar stools and booths with their own individual jukeboxes full of hits from the 50s and 60s. She had a giant TV screen playing Marilyn Monroe and the original Ocean's 11. She had chicken fingers and Diet Cherry Coke and pizzas named "Elvis Presley" and "Frank Sinatra."
We officially made Peggy Sue's acquaintance the next Friday, joined by Adam and Emily. We ordered off the surprisingly small carta, not realizing that the cook would start the hamburgers and French fries at 8:30. (American fare, Spanish hours.) Emily tried ordering the banana ice cream (which the menu claimed was an American favorite) and was told that they'd stopped carrying it (apparently it's equally as favorite in Spain). We punched Ain't No Mountain High Enough and Nut Rocker into our mini jukebox, waiting for the music to take over the restaurant speakers. We ate our Marilyns and our Elvises and talked about how much we liked Peggy Sue's, how we were all going to bring our families here when they came to visit.
The following week, we asked Lynnette if she'd like to bike into town and do supper at Peggy Sue's. She called after her piano lesson with the heartrending news: Peggy Sue's was closed.
"Forever? Or just for today?"
"It looks like forever. Their facebook page says they closed on the 26th." Three days after we'd eaten there. The server really meant it when she said they'd stopped carrying banana helado; she failed to mention that they'd stop carrying everything!
Still, Sarah and I returned to that fateful corner once more, just to be sure.
Door covered. Booths ripped out. The fluorescent light in her eyes gone. Over. Dead. Just like that.
If only we'd had more time, Peggy Sue. If only we'd known. But it was too late.
So we walked around the corner and grabbed burgers from Buddy Holly's instead.
12 April 2012
Then I died and went to Switzerland
A 7:00 alarm on a spring break Monday morning is equally as pleasurable as awakening to a cat clawing the inside of your ears. I was still thinking about the awful number--7am--when my watch turned to 11 and we hadn't yet boarded our 9:40 flight.
In moments like these, the key is to casually glance around and make sure everyone else is as confused/frustrated as you are. The people directly in front of and behind me had tickets that said "Geneva," so it couldn't have been just me. I had already stuffed my book deep into my one piece of hand luggage, so there wasn't a lot to do other than sit on the floor, watching the other people in line get agitated. Then I reminded myself that this inconvenience was the result of having a long spring break and the money to travel--nothing like a good dose of self-degradation to put some perspective on first-world problems. Oh, and the guy in line behind me somehow lost his passport.
Once on the plane, the captain announced that there was a French transportation strike prohibiting us from flying over French airspace, meaning the plane was forbidden to leave until ten past noon. My thoughts as we taxied around: "Crap. I'm never getting to Switzerland."
Two hours later, I was in Switzerland.
I was scraping crust off the lip of a bug-killer bottle during daily chores when another student said, "You have thirty minutes for tea break. We work hard here, but we also rest well." And that was L'Abri: work and rest, a beautiful blend. I attended two different lectures and two "formal" lunches (wherein someone poses a theological question and we spend the meal discussing it), read in the basement of the Farel House library, and watched fog swallow up the Alps. For as much as I enjoy walking my feet off in new places to get to all the "cultural attractions," my favorite sort of vacation is one where I can wander and taste the nature. To have time scheduled into the day specifically for reading and study--the life ideal. If I'd known it was going to be so wonderful, I'd have stayed a few extra days. "You'll just have to come back again," they kept telling me.
Thursday was our free day--no lectures, no chores, sack lunches in the fridge. Someone suggested I check out Montreux, just down the hill. ("Just" includes a bus ticket for the horrifying sum of 6.40, a train ticket, and multiple occasions requiring French. In which I know three phrases, and I'm not sure about the third.)
Montreux sits along Lac Léman, seamed in by mountains. But the flowers! Oh, gosh, the flowers. They edged the lakeshore in precise color schemes and patterns, a gardener's love exploding in the hues. First-grade me erupted at the sight of all those flowers (by this, I'm referencing the six-year-old Shar who, after reading a story about Native American naming techniques, dubbed herself "Rainbow-in-the-Mist" and asked her parents about moving into an earthlodge). I might have gone a little overboard with the whole flower-love thing, but seriously: GIANT BRIGHT POPPIES. That is all it will take to convince me to miss a flight and conveniently stay in Switzerland forever.
I can't fail to mention my travel buddy here, but lest he ever develop an interest in libel cases, let's just call him "Bill." Bill left L'Abri a few days early because he hated the two-shower-a-week rule (hey, water's expensive in the mountains!), and also because he hated chores. To be fair, Bill paid 4 francs for a water bottle and 9 francs for a storage locker so he could wander Montreux with me, and he never said a word about the fact that I was photographing every single flower I passed. But poor Bill had two weeks left for sight-seeing in Switzerland, and with the way he spitefully clutched that 4-franc water, I sure hope his nerves lasted the rest of the journey.
We spent some time at the Chateau de Chillon, a fortress on the water which apparently inspired some of Lord Byron's tales. (His name is carved in the dungeon, though I forgot to look for it.) Most of the displays inside were about torture chambers and witchcraft--so, overall, an inspiring and uplifting tour. Especially when accompanied by Bill asking (twenty thousand times), "I don't know. Is this worth taking a picture of? It's picture-worthy, right? I mean, you'd take a picture of it, right?" Bill. You have a digital camera.
Also, I'm not sure if you noticed, but I'm kinda busy over here, taking ten thousand flower pictures.
By Friday, the temptation to skip my flight was peaking. The supervisor of Chalet Bellevue only furthered the desire when she mentioned, "We've got a place called the Eagle's Nest--it's as high as one and just as comfortable. I think the snow would probably come in, but we could get you a few extra blankets." I told her to look out for crusty hitchhikers breaking through the woods in the next month or two. I'd be the tall, shabby one.
I spent my last L'Abri day reading C.S. Lewis on a tree stump near a waterfall.
Switzerland is my new favorite place in Europe, perhaps in all of the world. So if I disappear mysteriously one of these days, you'll know where to find me. I'll be the tall, shabby one in the Eagle's Nest, repeating three French phrases over and over. Even if I'm not sure about the third one.
In moments like these, the key is to casually glance around and make sure everyone else is as confused/frustrated as you are. The people directly in front of and behind me had tickets that said "Geneva," so it couldn't have been just me. I had already stuffed my book deep into my one piece of hand luggage, so there wasn't a lot to do other than sit on the floor, watching the other people in line get agitated. Then I reminded myself that this inconvenience was the result of having a long spring break and the money to travel--nothing like a good dose of self-degradation to put some perspective on first-world problems. Oh, and the guy in line behind me somehow lost his passport.
Once on the plane, the captain announced that there was a French transportation strike prohibiting us from flying over French airspace, meaning the plane was forbidden to leave until ten past noon. My thoughts as we taxied around: "Crap. I'm never getting to Switzerland."
Two hours later, I was in Switzerland.
You know how you can visit a place you've never been and feel like you've belonged there all your life? That was Switzerland. I grew up far away from mountains...and oceans...lakes, kinda...okay, most natural landforms...so I don't know what it is exactly that is so inviting, so home-like about a mountainscape. All I know is that when I think about mountains, I am all ready to part my hair into two braids and go frolicking about with some goats.
And the Alps (the pre-Alps, really) were more mountainy than any mountain I've seen before. The mountains I've known have only been foothills to mountains I could see from L'Abri. For five days, there was an Alp staring down through my bedroom window, I slept in a wooden-walled cabin room that reminded me of camp, and it felt like home.
The village bells ring every fifteen minutes.
L'Abri, founded by Francis Schaeffer in the 1950s, isn't really a retreat center. It's more like a mountainside study center where you live and participate in the community--with some who've stayed all term, some just for a week. The Schaeffers' intent was to create a place to discuss life and Christ and the world--without necessarily trying to fit ideas into the narrow confines of cultural Christianity. A place to ask questions without being made to feel that the questions are stupid. A place where everyone cooks and cleans and sells their twice-a-week showers for extra pocket change.
We sat in the living room at night, talking about heaven and hell and why they even matter right now. Some were so certain; others, so uncertain, yet no one was panicking over the questions, trying to smother them with the right answers. The planes of thought were cutting through one another at odd angles. No one's thoughts matched exactly, in background, in interpretation. Yet a thing I love about God and brains is that He'll use one person's thoughts to pry open the closed spaces in another's. Everyone is teacher and disciple, everyone is stepping forward together. It's nothing profound, really, but it was striking in its distinct visibility at L'Abri. At, I suppose, any place where people are willing to be real.
I hope so.
Thursday was our free day--no lectures, no chores, sack lunches in the fridge. Someone suggested I check out Montreux, just down the hill. ("Just" includes a bus ticket for the horrifying sum of 6.40, a train ticket, and multiple occasions requiring French. In which I know three phrases, and I'm not sure about the third.)
Montreux sits along Lac Léman, seamed in by mountains. But the flowers! Oh, gosh, the flowers. They edged the lakeshore in precise color schemes and patterns, a gardener's love exploding in the hues. First-grade me erupted at the sight of all those flowers (by this, I'm referencing the six-year-old Shar who, after reading a story about Native American naming techniques, dubbed herself "Rainbow-in-the-Mist" and asked her parents about moving into an earthlodge). I might have gone a little overboard with the whole flower-love thing, but seriously: GIANT BRIGHT POPPIES. That is all it will take to convince me to miss a flight and conveniently stay in Switzerland forever.
Also, I'm not sure if you noticed, but I'm kinda busy over here, taking ten thousand flower pictures.
By Friday, the temptation to skip my flight was peaking. The supervisor of Chalet Bellevue only furthered the desire when she mentioned, "We've got a place called the Eagle's Nest--it's as high as one and just as comfortable. I think the snow would probably come in, but we could get you a few extra blankets." I told her to look out for crusty hitchhikers breaking through the woods in the next month or two. I'd be the tall, shabby one.
I spent my last L'Abri day reading C.S. Lewis on a tree stump near a waterfall.
Switzerland is my new favorite place in Europe, perhaps in all of the world. So if I disappear mysteriously one of these days, you'll know where to find me. I'll be the tall, shabby one in the Eagle's Nest, repeating three French phrases over and over. Even if I'm not sure about the third one.
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