Celia's Big Day

There was one thing that I was 100% certain that I would never, ever do with my life, even on the brink of starvation: teach. The daughter of a gifted and dedicated college teacher, I spent years watching my mother make a deeper and deeper indentation into the couch. I heard her describe weekends in terms of how many grocery bags of papers she had graded, saw her single-handedly keep the Bic company in the black by purchasing red ink. By the time I knew the alphabet, I was put to work grading multiple-choice tests, and had memorized the curricula for most of her classes before I was ten. Each semester, our family "adopted" a few hundred teen-agers who weren't prepared to go to college any further away from home ("only child," my ***). Each year it seemed like there was more unpaid overtime, and more budget cuts to her program because football needed ______ . (a new bus, new practice facilities, additional assistant coaches, more scholarships, etc, ad nauseum, ...) No, I would never become a teacher.

The problem was, what would I do? The only thing I really loved was to read books, but no one could give me much hopeful guidance on a steady, five-figure income from nothing but reading. (I did come close during my stint at the library patron services desk, but minimum wage wasn't what I had in mind long-term.) I tried history, but that little affair ended as quickly as Romeo and Rosaline; for me Juliet was the field of economics. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, Eastern Europe was upside down, and I fantasized of helping rebuild the region with the blessings of free-market capitalism. Alas, it was not to be. The daggar of my misfortune was calculus. I had an unnatural affinity for language structure and grammar (which nine out of ten English teachers will tell you, puts even them to sleep), but I could not "translate it into numbers," and a professional economist must be fluent in numerology.

Expediency prevailed: love of grammar + fascination with Eastern Europe + two and half semesters of college already down, with no option of starting from scratch, = Russian Language major. A year abroad was completed as scheduled, and I hadn't even finished unpacking when the requests started rolling in: "Miss USA, please teach my children English." I learned two things rather quickly: 1) I didn't know English nearly well enough to teach it, and 2) if I could learn this skill, I would always have a job. As luck would have it, the head of the Slavic Language Dept. aslo taught most of the linguistics classes, and one way to keep those classes full was to make them a graduation requirement for all his Russian students. So, I did learn this skill, and I have used it for fairly steady employment for more than ten years.

Celia? No, I haven't forgotten her. I met Celia my first week at Boston College, when I took a job in the Dunkin' Donuts franchise of college dining services. In Boston, I learned that the race I had always called "White People" really only exists in the Mid-West. At Dunkin' Donuts, there were no other "white people"--they were Irish or Italian or Greek or Portuguese, working alongside of El Salvadorans and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and you better not mistake one for the other or you may incite an international incident. Celia was a Phillipino woman in her early forties who came up to about my elbow. She had a limitless supply of energy and equally limitless supply of smiles. I had known her for over a year before I ever saw her frown. On that occasion, I would have been frowning too, for she was on her hands and knees scrubbing up a particularly nasty spill of some vaguely-recognizable bit of food goo. "Joo know," she spat out viciously, "in Phillipines, I am teacher. Yes, yes- teacher!" She looked at me before glaring down at the floor again, just inches below her pug nose. "Here, I do dees work."

Over the next few years, as I taught English because it paid the bills, and because I was qualified, and because I was, with experience, actually becoming pretty good at it, I met several more people in similar roles. Colombian doctors whose credentials didn't transfer, a Bulgarian physical therapist, an El Salvadoran lawyer, and countless others without professional backgrounds, but without the English skills to train for more than menial jobs-- why did they do it?

I have one other memory of Celia, from my senior year. She arrived to work late--the first time anyone could ever remember--and dressed in her Sunday best. We couldn't believe she was going to work in that get-up, but she plunged right in, as always. She grabbed my arm in passing, leaned over, and hissed in my ear, "I did it! Today, I citizen!"

When studying King Lear, our lit teacher explained that banishment was a particularly harsh legal sentence because, as Gloster explains, "It hath cut my tongue out." I help my students recover their voices, their power, even a sense of self-worth. I love what I do, and I find plenty of time to read books (but for free).