French class was well attended, even though Nick, the instructor, had had a hernia operation the previous week, and even though none of us was quite sure he was going to be there at all. When my mother had a hernia operation, the wound got infected, and she ended up going back in the hospital and then to the nursing facility, with family members uniting to agree that they should not have to do anything and I should have to quit my job to take care of her, so I was illogically nervous.
Yet there he was, cheerful and pseudo-cantankerous as always, though he told us he felt “middling.” He was going to take an aspirin in the morning, he told me, but he couldn’t remember if he had already taken one, so he didn’t take any. He is really the most sunny character in the world, cloaked in a pretended peevishness.
We marched through his usual dire and ridiculous lesson plan. As usual, he told us we had gotten our answers wrong, even when we had gotten it right, and he interrupted us constantly. We interrupted him right back.
The difference this week was that I was sick. Not actively infected; it’s just that have mild asthma, so whenever I get a cold, I start coughing and wheezing for weeks afterwards. I feel lethargic. From time to time, I just give up.
I put my head down in class when the feeling hit yesterday. Nobody paid any attention. It’s nothing unusual, because we’re all old in that class, including the instructor. (Howard, the genial, vague, balding gentleman who sits up front next to the Russian woman, is in his 90s, and we have agreed that he is the oldest).
The instructor asked me a question, I said, “I have no brain,” but he waited for me to answer anyway, so I did.
And then we moved on to some expressions he is doggedly trying to teach us for some reason. One is “chercher la petite bête,” which means to split hairs. Another is “chercher midi à 14 heures,” which means to look for problems where there are none.
That precipitated a raucous argument. One of my classmates said, “I don’t understand. They’re the same thing,” and then everyone was talking at once.
The instructor didn’t understand what we didn’t understand, and demanded to know what “splitting hairs” meant.
“It’s what we’re doing right now,” said someone, and that settled, we moved on. We only have three classes left in the semester, and I’m going to sign up for the same class in the spring, as well. I don’t know that I’m actually learning much French, but somehow that doesn’t matter.