full fathom five

Cereusly beautiful

My husband and I recently got back from a week's visit to Islesboro, a beautiful island in Penobscot Bay.  When we came into our sunroom to check how the plants had fared while we were away, we noticed this long, ugly spent bloom hanging down from the top of our cactus like a short, black snake.  Typical, I thought.  We've had this ugly, scabby old thing - a gift of unknown variety that started out at only about six inches tall in a normal (little) pot - for thirty-two years, and it's never bloomed.  That's probably because I've tried to throw it out many times, but my husband, who seems aesthetically challenged re. colors and some plant shapes, always rescues it from the compost-heap.  He thinks the bulbous, prickly old thing's beautiful!    

The morning after our arrival home, we woke up to this unusual fresh-air smell wafting into our bedroom.  It was a clean smell, like a good, non-perfumed oatmeal soap.  We got out of bed and followed it to the sun-room, and on the other side of the cactus, toward the window, we found this bloom, big as a breakfast plate! 

I ran and got a step-ladder, and we took turns sinking our noses into the long, sweet filaments.  Their anthers left little peachy dots of pollen on our upper lips and bridge of the nose, and the curious impression of lesser fragrance than when we pulled away about a foot or so. 

   We looked it up on the internet as the dear flower closed green leaves over its white plumage during the next hour.  I thought we were witnessing some rare night-blooming centurion plant that only blooms every fifty or hundred years (I wasn't stopping to calculate), but we found out that it's a Peruvian Apple night-blooming cereus.  By about nine am., the thing was closed.  The next day we had another bloom, and we watched it over coffee.  And then they were gone. 

    This plant is smart, epitomizing the "leave 'em wanting more" trick, which totally won me over.  I mixed up a gallon of my primo fish-and-kelp fertilizer from the cold, nutritious depths of the North Atlantic, and rewarded our glorious beauty with the first meal of her life.  Then I marked the calendar, so I can feed her faithfully every two-and-a-half weeks.  I'm ready to slavishly follow the fertilizer instructions, which no other plant - even the chocolate-scented oncidium in top photo's left - has ever moved me to do.    

Notes on Teaching: dark and light

A longtime friend who teaches sociology, and is thus keenly observant of group behavior, tells me that the smaller the pie, the more intensely people fight over it.  So academia is a place known for turf-wars, where individuals and groups fight for ownership of concepts, plans, and other intangibles in place of big salaries.  And now that I've left university-teaching for the even smaller pie of adult education programs for immigrants, I'm not surprised to see individuals there clawing even harder for what little power is available.

    Unpaid tutors start out as educators, and are quickly drawn into advocacy for troubled  refugees, championing new immigrants through the bureaucratic labyrinth to citizenship and legal sponsorship for the remainder of their families to come to the U.S.  This is wonderful work, and rewards tutors with the victorious feeling of effectively overcoming bureaucratic obstacles to dramatically transform lives, but they can become blinded to their students' flaws in the process.    

    I've only recently discovered this myself, after working as a Literacy Volunteer with an Afghani refugee for four years to help him regain his profession as a family practice physician.  A. had to take the first job he could qualify for when he came here: drawing blood from patients in the local hospital, which he's kept to uncomplainingly for three years. 

    I was so taken by A.'s positive spirit, courage, and perseverance, that I quickly crossed the line from teaching to advocacy in starting him on the path to re-licensure as a physician in the U.S.  I did everything the current theory of adult education and English-for speakers of other languages (ESOL) advises: to take the student whereever they're at.  That meant, in our case, to start A. learning English through studying for the physician-relicensing exam, rather than by focusing on phonetics and grammar separately.

   But in my zeal to restore A. to his profession, in my belief in him, I lost my objectivity, became blind to the fact that as he gained knowledge of medical terminology in English, he lost his grasp of basic sentence structure.  I realized - only after he failed the exam - that grammar and syntax must be their own focus.  I should have taken him through a couple of years of that alone, before starting him on the sample test materials.  So now we've gone back to basic English. 

    We're also looking at less lofty career-options in the medical field.  In describing the training program for being a surgical tech., I read the brochure in front of us aloud: "It's six months of classroom study, and six months of hands-on training in the operating room, emergency room, etc."  A. stared at "hands-on," and I explained that it was like putting your hands on a microscope in the lab, learning by doing.  He said "Ahhh, I am thinking hands on ends of arms, that required in program."  I started laughing, couldn't help myself, and A. added, "I am thinking, no amputees in program," and collapsed in laughter.  It was the first time we'd ever shared a joke, something almost impossible across languages.  But it also showed me how far we have to go in basic English.
     And that's good, to be looking at A. more realistically now.  I no longer am his blindly loyal champion, so now I'm freer to ask him hard questions about his culture and sensibilities. "How 'bout this shooting guns in the air to celebrate?" I asked him the other day, about the middle east tradition that we see on the news whenever there's a gathering of young men in the streets celebrating a coup or burning enemies in effigy.  A few weeks ago, they were doing it in Baghdad after the soccer victory; a handful of people died from the bullets coming back down.  "I don't understand," I said, adding that besides being dangerous, and besides having to temporarily forget gravity, it would seem that people in such war-torn cities would be sick of gunshots and explosions. "Why do they do it?"
    "Because they stupid!" A. said.  "They have brain of chick," he pointed at his head, "not human."
    It was good to hear that I hadn't been A.'s advocate without reason, that we share the same sensibility I'd suspected when I first met him, the same bone-weariness with violence.