Wait For It

January feels like a time of waiting. Waiting for spring, waiting for a thaw, waiting for the days to get longer. 

I had a longer than usual break over the holidays, so I’ve also been waiting to get back to a normal routine. And we’ve had some difficulty with a remodeling contractor at our home, so we’re waiting to get our kitchen put back together. 

The worst part about this January waiting syndrome is that eventually there’s a rebound. The equal and opposite reaction to my beginning-of-the-year time warp is a rushing forward, usually in February. That shortest month tends to zip by at breakneck speed, making up for the indulgent lolly-gagging of the first few weeks of the year. Once my time freeze thaws, the days tumble over each other like a snow-fed spring cascading down a mountainside. 

I had given my ESOL students some homework over our winter break. They were to read and listen to a story by an American author from a website (manythings.org), then present that story to the class. I had wondered, during the long radio silence of our hiatus, whether anyone would show up at this first class in January. I imagined I might have scared them off. I don’t often assign homework, and I didn’t include any written requirements. On the one hand, I understand how stressful it is to give a speech or presentation, but on the other hand, a big part of successful conversation is good storytelling. If you can tell a little story--about your life, your day, or something that happened to you--you can engage in good conversation. 

My students did not disappoint. 

Van started us off recounting a Mark Twain tale, “The Jumping Frog of Calavaras County.” As with most of Twain’s work, it has a story within a story, so it can be a little challenging keeping the narration straight. Van did okay, though. She laughed nervously a few times, so I had to ask her to repeat a few things, but she got the basic plot of the man who would bet on anything, his investment in training a frog to jump on command, and his eventual loss to a con-man who feeds the frog bullets to weigh it down. 

Next, Regina regaled us with Ellis Parker Butler’s farcical “Pigs Is Pigs.” She had fewer difficult names to deal with than Van did, and she did a great job of explaining the story to us.

“It’s a story about misunderstandings,” she said to begin.

Then things got a bit more serious when Yuwei recounted a couple of Ambrose Bierce stories: “The Boarded Window” and “A Horseman in the Sky.”

When he was done, he said, “I never realized that Americans like ghost stories. China has a lot of them. China is not a religious country, but we believe that when a person dies, he is a ghost, and can come back as a new person. When someone is born into a family, that person can be the ghost of someone else, from long ago.”

Regina concurred that this view is similar in Korea. “Because our views come from Buddhism, we believe that life is a cycle, that sometimes a person can come back again as someone else.”

“If a person has been bad and he dies,’ Yuwei said, “he can come back as an animal. Then if the animal works hard and is good, it can come again as a person. China is full of ghosts.”

I was struck by an image of China’s hills and valleys and The Great Wall teeming with whispy, white ghosts, and of Chinese women giving birth to their aged ancestors.

Yuwei started to tell us about a third story he had read, but he couldn’t quite remember all of it, so I finished it for him. It was my favorite Ambrose Bierce story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek.”

That one gets me every time. It’s about the seemingly infinite moment between knowing you are dying and facing the reality of your death.

One could look at life as a brief period of time in which we are all simply waiting. Waiting to grow up, waiting to start a family, waiting to get rich, waiting to retire, waiting to die. We wait in lines and for the bus and on hold and on tables and for the world to change. We can hardly wait for spring to arrive.

Stories keep us occupied while we wait. They can help us remember our past, prepare for our future, and navigate the time we have here. Stories help us feel less alone in this cold, expanding universe. They help us make sense of our chaos and make connections with each other. 

The story of my ESOL class is beginning again this year, but it is also continuing from last season, like a TV series that took an extra long break. The stories I hear from my students will help me be patient as I wait for the new season of House of Cards to arrive on Netflix. Which will be just about the time February kicks us all into a higher gear.