foreign life in literary snapshots.

i.  piano trills--rapidly (think the wings of a hummingbird) played notes a half step apart--took me years to learn.  for the first time, my fingers seemed to realize they were independent appendages.  executing (truly the most apt verb in this case) trills felt foreign and always forced.  i had to learn to let go of control.

***

over frothy brews and midnight hors d'oeuvres back in dc, a foreign service officer told me her vomit-to-surrender story (these two metaphors [for the beginning and the end] will keep me awake many a night).  "during my first tour, i couldn't stop vomiting for the first months.  every day i struggled with living as a foreigner.  six months later, i broke.  that breaking point was my surrender.  and i woke up one day to a different me.  i had adapted."

***

two seemingly unrelated paragraphs.  the underlying correlations: time.  giving up.   i can grieve my way into adaptation.  i can pray my way into adaptation.  i can cry my way there.  but i can never force my way into adaptation.   

ii.  it falls, always, like cold water on skin, the pelting, unromantic realization: it is harder to forgive the ones i love than the ones i call enemies.  even more harrowing--love without forgiveness (i-am-just-like-them) is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

iii.  for some reason, despite the usual hum of uneventful routines, that day hangs on to my memories.  the window, pouring enough light to read my father's distinctive, illegible scrawl on the paper before me.  without vision, people perish.

iv.  beginnings have always been the hardest for her.  not for one moment did she feel herself to be anything other than wallpaper--antiquated, pasted to a world she couldn't (or wouldn't) escape from, mute.  always mute.  she felt voiceless, and if ever her voice was heard, it was becoming less and less her and more and more them. 

v.  here in benin, i find myself more and more daydreaming into normality.  i do this so i might escape reality and the abnormalities that haven't yet become palatable.  this, in itself, isn't the problem.  the problem is when i don't let myself do this in a compassionate way.  i am only human.  and i am in a place where the language (almost everything here is in french), traffic patterns, dress code, sanitation, religion, food, weather, recreation, time, social mannerisms, expectations, etc. have all shifted from what i've known my whole life.  daydreaming, for now, might be normality.       

vi.  "homecoming feels like vinegar in the wound.  it's a reminder of my failures: failure of foresight; failure to survive abroad; failure to love and be loved."  -koren zailckas.  ironic, these words are, coming to me during the days when i idealize america as the only bandage for my wound.  the wound--is it possible that the wound has nothing to do with location but with my perspective?

vii.  speaking to a native in their own language--albeit in tentative, disappointing, crude attempts--is one of the most rewarding surprises i've discovered here.

viii.  i am teaching again, turning the same pages, ritualistically driving the logic behind whole notes, bar lines, decrescendos, etc. into their open, slap-happy (right now) minds.  i am remembering the philosophy of my favorite educator John Holt (his How Children Fail is a must-read for any teacher)--if the teaching method doesn't work, throw it out right away.  and though i'm not one for change, their furrowed brows, robotic movements, and hopeful guesses tell me what i've feared:

• Elvis' Guitar Broke Down Friday and Good Boys Deserve Fudge Always (the acronyms for the treble and bass clef lines respectively) simply does not work for the majority of children.  Their minds are too imaginative, too spontaneous to understand the concept.  And the reason why ineffective teaching props must be discarded immediately: the child before me, in discouragement, doesn't blame the prop; she blames herself.
• The two most important aspects of music--emotion (when to indulge in it and when to restrain) and technique--i cannot teach.  these must always be, first and foremost, self-taught.