We had our last class of the senior citizen French course yesterday, a make-up for the time the elderly instructor couldn’t clear the snow from his car and couldn’t make it. We met in the program’s nicely-stocked library, which was warm and stuffy, because all the other classrooms were being used for a charter school’s standardized testing. Everyone had brought food for our post-class pot-luck; my contribution was some Pennsylvania Dutch bread-and-butter pickles, but I wasn’t planning to stay because I had a UPS delivery coming.
Class was the usual. We were supposed to have written sentences using the 50 most common French verbs, and people squeezed up to the boards in the tight space to write. The instructor commented peevishly on how small people were writing, and meanwhile asked me to look at his phone because he was getting a message that he had no Internet access when he was playing solitaire. I don’t know why he needed Internet access when he was playing solitaire, and neither did he.
The gentleman with the COPD and the sniffle was there again; I asked him how he was feeling and he said, “The same.” He told me he had just come from the pulmonologist. I said I knew how that was, with my asthma, and next time I looked he was wearing a surgical mask. I made no comment.
A woman was there I didn’t know. She kept looking perplexed.
The instructor picked apart the sentences everyone had constructed, because people had tried to translate word for word from English and French doesn’t work like that, as he kept explaining. “You can’t translate ‘mot pour mot,'” he said. He completely reconstructed one woman’s sentence, which had several relative clauses, and she was getting more and more frustrated at the board because she didn’t understand what he was saying. I finally got up and helped her figure it out; it’s not that my French is good but that I spent quite some time teaching myself how to diagram sentences when I was teaching English, so I knew how the subjects agreed with the verbs and why.
The stranger raised her hand. “Forgive me, but all of this doesn’t seem very idiomatic,” she said.
“That’s the point I’m trying to make,” said the instructor, and they went back and forth with her insisting that it wasn’t very fluent and him explaining that he was saying exactly that, until she finally gave up.
Periodically, as usual, he interrupted himself to complain about the low-level chatter that was going on in the room as we explained things to one another.
“Excuse me, I have to turn my hearing aid up,” I said, and got out my phone.
“You have a hearing aid?” demanded my table mate, whom I’m friendly with.
“Yeah,” I said. “Two,” and pulled the back-of-the-ear things away from my head so she could see they had tubes going into my ear canal.
“I had no idea,” she said with absolute wonder, and I looked around me and wondered if anyone else in the room had hearing aids. It didn’t look like it. That would explain a whole hell of a lot about this class and how it operates. It might also explain why I don’t get in trouble that much, contrary to my usual experience of school. If I’m the only one who can hear clearly, that gives me quite a leg up.
The strange woman I had never seen before asked another student, Janice, if she could move so the stranger could see the board. Janice rolled her eyes and moved. The stranger didn’t need to see the board. She was just being peevish.
My sentence on the board was “Je ne crois pas que cet homme soit un saint,” (I don’t think that man is a saint) and the instructor chuckled.
“I know who you mean,” said my friend.
“Yeah, the original sentence said “cet homme politique,” I said, meaning “that politician,” and everyone laughed.
I left early to go home for my delivery, which arrived on time.* I’m taking the French class again this summer. I’ll keep going until the teacher falls apart, which could be any time now.
*Yes, thank you, I got home in time to accept the UPS delivery, so the guy hanging out and smoking a cigarette down the block, waiting for the delivery so he could steal it, was thwarted, and walked away after the truck drove off.