Stupid Questions, Guilty Pleasures

Every time I teach a new course, as I am about to do starting tomorrow night at the local community college, or a version of the same course in a new place, as I have recently done at the fine-arts prep school up the mountain, I have to invent the wheel all over again.  And every time I catch myself doing it, I'm surprised.

I root around in my files and pull out notes from former students--"Thank you for letting me love to read again"  "Thank you for being funny"  "Thank you for being strict"  "Thank you for not letting those stupid boys run the class"  "Thank you for noticing me"--they're all love letters, in one form or another.  I have hundreds of them, and each one reminds me that I really AM--by anyone's measure--a teacher.  All pumped up, I then fearlessly design the new course or redesign the old course in a new place, and I make a syllabus that says, somewhere, "There is no such thing as a stupid question.  The only stupid question is the one you don't ask."

I'm lying, and I know it, because once--just once--in 20-plus years of teaching, somebody asked me a stupid question.  Not about something I'd covered ten minutes earlier, while his brain was napping--that's not a stupid question, just an invitation to repeat myself--but a truly deeply stupid question so stupid I nearly choked.  Here it is:

"Um, Doc, here's something I've always wondered about, and I hope you can answer it for me because it bothers me a lot:  is the word 'cheese' singular or plural?"

This was at the big red school back East, in a night class populated by working adults.  I realized this person had something wrong with him long before he asked this unbelievably dumbass question, but you always get a few weirdos in night classes, so I hadn't thought much about him beyond noticing he was an obviously gender-conflicted flight attendant, deeply invested in advertising his affiliation with the big red school; he had founded something called the Harvard Skydiving Association and had a shiny satin jacket advertising same.  I often thought how readily I would jump off the Eiffel Tower without a parachute rather than even go up in a plane with this guy.  And now he's asking me if "cheese" is plural.

With one eye on the class epileptic, who is inclined to have fits whenever the going gets rough, I reply, "What."

"I mean, Professor, ah . . . um. . . people are always asking me to serve them 'cheese,' and we have all these little pieces on the trays, and I wonder whether each one is a 'chee,' or what.  Can you help me?"

I survey the sea of adults before me and discover the ceiling is paved with their eyebrows.  Even our epileptic is horrified and looking at me to see what I will do next.  Oh fuck oh dear, I think, this is even worse than that time I fainted in class back in San Francisco and had to drop the chalk so I could stoop over and pick it up.  "Well-l-l-l-l," I say as if I'm actually thinking.  "Um.  Ah.  Yes."  I decide to play it straight.  "Actually, no. . . ah , no, there is no such thing as a 'chee.'  A piece or the whole thing, it's all 'cheese.'"

"Thank you, Professor!" he says brightly.  The rest of us blow big sighs of relief, and we move on. 

Nothing this bad could happen in the class I'm about to start teaching tonight.  Right?

At least in part because I am a girl with a guilty secret that reared its snarky little head yesterday.  As I was about to turn the corner from a heavily-traveled main road onto a relatively remote stretch of desert nothingness, I happened to notice a 1965 Ford Cobra 427 in my rearview mirror, gearing down.  I haven't seen one of these cars in years.  "[Gasp!]  Oh please oh please," I prayed, "PLEASE take the corner with me.  That's all I ask.  Oh PLEEEEZE--"

And he did!  He rounded the corner behind my jalopy, then immediately stuck his foot in it and passed me.  I ran down my window just to hear the Cobra moving through its gear changes.  I waved and hollered "Woo-HOO!" but the driver never noticed.  Or maybe he did; who cares? because he was hitting about 85 within five or six seconds.  "R65 SNAKE" said his license plate.  I emoted in response, I bounced in my seat, I levitated.

It's a sickness with me, this car thing.  It's visceral.  I've always had it.  Don't know what it's about.  Not just speed:  I couldn't care less about motorcycles, think NASCAR is for morons.  But really fast cars on the street--not lowriders, not dragsters--just cars that pass for Just Cars but can actually pin your ears back whenever they like . . . oh dear.  We have History, those cars and I:

A purple '59 427 Chevy, flat out on the dirt roads in the walnut orchards of the East Bay, no lights, me at the wheel--

A '65 Shelby Mustang, no speedometer, just a tach, me burying the needle in the red in all five gears, alone in the dark in the desert--

A '63 XKE convertible, me in a bikini driving fast one hot summer night southbound on Farrell Drive in Palm Springs, double-clutching the curve by instinct, pulling it out just in time--

And rumbling across the Golden Gate Bridge one 3AM, hearing a mosquito-like noise behind me, running down the window of my '67 Mustang just barely in time to watch a Lamborghini pass me "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE---nyyyaowwwww!" at about 150 mph.

I don't know, I just like that stuff.  I like the edge, wherever it is.

   

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[dale]

:-)

[Trey]

You're a complicated woman.