The Retired

Woke up with the sour thought that I was being required to attend a 3 hour class on a Saturday! What an absurdity! They were forcing us to meet with some old retired teachers, supposedly to cheer them up under the guise of ‘improving our Chinse’, hit two birds with one stone sort of thing. So I grumpily got out of bed checked email, made tea and ate some cookies that I had made the night before with real butter and vanilla!! (a rarity in Haerbin). I waited until the last possible minute to leave the dorm without being too late (fashion can only get you so far), and walked over to the one western restaurant on campus, oddly called ‘Family’, which serves the worst food on campus (another reason for my building anger).

I arrived with teachers greetings at the center of the floor and a groups of ‘Old people’ sitting to the left, students huddled to the right. It was like those 6^th grade dances where the boys crowd to one side and the girls crowd to the other, and a few brave or maybe just ‘nothing to loose’ sorts dance a bit, awkwardly in the middle.

I sat and then decided to actually say hi to these Oldies and was surprised to find one of them to be in the shape of my Cooking class teacher. In fact it was my teacher, mouth gaping in between words and eyes twinkling. I said hi and he gave me some pictures that we had taken last week. The night before he had mentioned that his wife had not done a very good job at the taking the picture and someone might have been missing a arm or half a body. Of course she thought she did a splendid job, and went as far as to say that it was very artistic! In fact it wasn’t poorly shot… but on closer look there was something missing, not just a arm or part of one’s body but all but a few strands of hair from Nicholous, one of the students. And it wasn’t because the camera view was too small, because instead of Nick there was a nice empty space of wall on the opposite side of the picture, just big enough to fit a full grown person… so I guess she just decided to make an artistic decision and take poor Nick out of the picture.

After Ma Laoshi got me warmed up to talking to Old folks, the Teachers introduced themselves and told everyone how great we were and then explained that we needed to pair up. I chose a old but not too old lady who to my surprise was very energetic, expressive and very willing to give out compliments. We talked nonestopped for over an hour and in fact she had me talk for most of the time, just about life in America, in China etc. But I did get her to admit she likes to cook, so we discussed our favorite tastes and ingredients. Oh it turned out to be a blast and I was so close to being a complete grentch about it…..