You Meet the Darnedest People
Having been a teacher for seventeen years I could say I know a lot of people. Senior classes consist of an average of twenty students per class per year. When you multiply that by five for the number of classes and then multiply again by seventeen you get some idea of what I’m talking about. Of course, no one can possibly hope to remember the name of every one of their past students, but even in this regard my memory is woefully inadequate. I have endured more than a few embarrassing moments in a bustling shopping centre or in line at a movie theatre. Of late, when someone has said ‘Are you …?’ I’ve been inclined to say ‘No. I have a double. You’re not the first person to confuse me.’ To cloud the issue, more than a few of my ex-students have originated from the same family, so that I have ended up referring to them by his or her brother’s or sister’s name. Imagine the disappointment when someone who has featured so prominently in your life can’t even remember your name. It happened to me once and I didn’t like it.
Perhaps to compensate for this memory flaw I have been gifted with foolproof recollection when it comes to faces. I never forget a face. Though when you take in to account my egregious lack of recall with names my perfect ability to identify faces means whenever I see someone I recognize I usually duck into a shop and hide behind the fixtures until they’ve passed. The last thing I want to do is upset them.
Being a teacher you can expect to constantly run in to people you know. In fact, so regularly does it happen a friend once asked me whether I knew everyone in the world. I told him it’s one of the drawbacks of having a job where you work with lots of people. Anyone involved with the public knows this.
For me it gets a little more complicated. It seems it doesn’t matter where I go in the world I run headlong into people I’ve somehow been acquainted with.
The first time it happened was in England almost thirty years ago. I was standing at a bus stop in Sutton just south of London. I’d been out shopping and was waiting to catch the bus back to my boarding house. Though it was only mid-afternoon the sky was already beginning to grow dark. My hands were buried deep in the pockets of my Swiss army jacket; great clouds of condensation formed in the frigid air when I breathed; I could feel the cold insinuating itself through the soles of my boots. Eventually I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head to warm my ears. That and to keep out the noise. The constant stream of traffic rolling by was deafening – English streets being what they are means there’s nowhere for the sound to go but through you. Motorbikes, cars, the rumble of trucks all leave their mark. Yet above all this din I could hear a steady battering sound like some amateur handyman frenziedly pounding a nail into a wall a few streets away. It was relentless and pulsing, it paused only occasionally before resuming its even drumming. Eventually the man standing next to me tapped my arm and when I looked at him he jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate I should turn around.
Behind me stood a dingy looking café, its insides all aglow, though it wasn’t in the slightest bit welcoming. Formica tables, relics of the 1950s, stood chipped and uneven, their tops marred by ancient coffee rings and obscure food stains. The chairs – steel frames, plastic cushions – were glossy with overuse. The cushions themselves were split along the seams. It looked the kind of place where you’d find, among other horrors, egg and chips and bad coffee at cut-rate prices. You expected to see students riding up on motor scooters, parking them on the pavement, going inside – though not before swallowing their last scrap of pride and darting furtive glances along the street to make sure no one was about to accost them with fixed expressions of concern. I imagined the students groping the lapels of acquaintances and forcing out of them a promise that mummy and daddy wouldn’t be informed, the acquaintances coughing self-consciously and saying, ‘It’s for your own good.’
The show window was filthy. It appeared that, amongst other lapses of care, the window was never cleaned. The café owners probably didn’t bother with cleaners; they cost too much money; they could do it themselves. The only trouble was, they never got round to it. Besides, the café was way beyond cleaning. It reminded me of botulism with walls. The only thing that could have saved it was demolition.
A girl stood silhouetted in the window, her features obscured by glass-grime and yellow backlight, the fingers of her hands were pressed against the glass. When she saw me looking at her she waved excitedly and hurried towards the door, here and there pushing the odd chair out of the way.
‘I think somebody wants to see you,’ the man standing next to me said. ‘A girl, looks like.’
‘Oh right,’ I said. A smart fellow indeed.
‘Might be your lucky day.’
‘Why?’ I asked, and he looked puzzled.
Once outside I recognized the girl immediately. It happened that only a few months before I’d worked with her sister in a department store – on the other side of the world! In Adelaide, South Australia, to be exact.
‘Hi!’ she shouted, grabbing my arms with her bare hands. She was absolutely astonished that we’d run in to each other. ‘When you think of it,’ she said. ‘You waiting for this bus, me sitting inside this café. What are the chances?’
I was more astonished we were both in the same city at the same time and her sister had mentioned it to neither of us. I vaguely wondered if there was something in that.
We chatted for a few minutes. She brought me up to date with news of her family. I was reminded of the numbers of times I’d been introduced to her when she’d come in to the store to have lunch with her sister. She was, she said, backpacking through Europe with a couple of friends who at that moment were at home with the flu. I nodded politely and smiled a lot. It was a lovely way to spend a couple of minutes. The only trouble was – you guessed it – for the life of me I couldn’t remember her name.
At last my bus arrived and I managed to clamber on board without actually having guaranteed I would meet her in a certain pub on Friday night for a drink. Though I think perhaps she might have waited for me.
Perhaps to compensate for this memory flaw I have been gifted with foolproof recollection when it comes to faces. I never forget a face. Though when you take in to account my egregious lack of recall with names my perfect ability to identify faces means whenever I see someone I recognize I usually duck into a shop and hide behind the fixtures until they’ve passed. The last thing I want to do is upset them.
Being a teacher you can expect to constantly run in to people you know. In fact, so regularly does it happen a friend once asked me whether I knew everyone in the world. I told him it’s one of the drawbacks of having a job where you work with lots of people. Anyone involved with the public knows this.
For me it gets a little more complicated. It seems it doesn’t matter where I go in the world I run headlong into people I’ve somehow been acquainted with.
The first time it happened was in England almost thirty years ago. I was standing at a bus stop in Sutton just south of London. I’d been out shopping and was waiting to catch the bus back to my boarding house. Though it was only mid-afternoon the sky was already beginning to grow dark. My hands were buried deep in the pockets of my Swiss army jacket; great clouds of condensation formed in the frigid air when I breathed; I could feel the cold insinuating itself through the soles of my boots. Eventually I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head to warm my ears. That and to keep out the noise. The constant stream of traffic rolling by was deafening – English streets being what they are means there’s nowhere for the sound to go but through you. Motorbikes, cars, the rumble of trucks all leave their mark. Yet above all this din I could hear a steady battering sound like some amateur handyman frenziedly pounding a nail into a wall a few streets away. It was relentless and pulsing, it paused only occasionally before resuming its even drumming. Eventually the man standing next to me tapped my arm and when I looked at him he jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate I should turn around.
Behind me stood a dingy looking café, its insides all aglow, though it wasn’t in the slightest bit welcoming. Formica tables, relics of the 1950s, stood chipped and uneven, their tops marred by ancient coffee rings and obscure food stains. The chairs – steel frames, plastic cushions – were glossy with overuse. The cushions themselves were split along the seams. It looked the kind of place where you’d find, among other horrors, egg and chips and bad coffee at cut-rate prices. You expected to see students riding up on motor scooters, parking them on the pavement, going inside – though not before swallowing their last scrap of pride and darting furtive glances along the street to make sure no one was about to accost them with fixed expressions of concern. I imagined the students groping the lapels of acquaintances and forcing out of them a promise that mummy and daddy wouldn’t be informed, the acquaintances coughing self-consciously and saying, ‘It’s for your own good.’
The show window was filthy. It appeared that, amongst other lapses of care, the window was never cleaned. The café owners probably didn’t bother with cleaners; they cost too much money; they could do it themselves. The only trouble was, they never got round to it. Besides, the café was way beyond cleaning. It reminded me of botulism with walls. The only thing that could have saved it was demolition.
A girl stood silhouetted in the window, her features obscured by glass-grime and yellow backlight, the fingers of her hands were pressed against the glass. When she saw me looking at her she waved excitedly and hurried towards the door, here and there pushing the odd chair out of the way.
‘I think somebody wants to see you,’ the man standing next to me said. ‘A girl, looks like.’
‘Oh right,’ I said. A smart fellow indeed.
‘Might be your lucky day.’
‘Why?’ I asked, and he looked puzzled.
Once outside I recognized the girl immediately. It happened that only a few months before I’d worked with her sister in a department store – on the other side of the world! In Adelaide, South Australia, to be exact.
‘Hi!’ she shouted, grabbing my arms with her bare hands. She was absolutely astonished that we’d run in to each other. ‘When you think of it,’ she said. ‘You waiting for this bus, me sitting inside this café. What are the chances?’
I was more astonished we were both in the same city at the same time and her sister had mentioned it to neither of us. I vaguely wondered if there was something in that.
We chatted for a few minutes. She brought me up to date with news of her family. I was reminded of the numbers of times I’d been introduced to her when she’d come in to the store to have lunch with her sister. She was, she said, backpacking through Europe with a couple of friends who at that moment were at home with the flu. I nodded politely and smiled a lot. It was a lovely way to spend a couple of minutes. The only trouble was – you guessed it – for the life of me I couldn’t remember her name.
At last my bus arrived and I managed to clamber on board without actually having guaranteed I would meet her in a certain pub on Friday night for a drink. Though I think perhaps she might have waited for me.
posted by Chris Snape @ 11:49 AM
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