Love Story

We’ve been talking about love a lot lately. 

Last week, a friend of mine from college, Amy, came to teach my ESOL class as a guest, one of the requirements of the TESOL certificate she is completing along with her MA in Composition.

The main thrust of her lesson was having our group read a short story together.  She eased us into the story with a series of statements about love that we could agree or disagree with and give explanations for our responses.

“Every person has a pre-selected soul mate,” read one. “Love is enough to make a relationship work,” was another. “It is important for people in a romantic relationship to share the same cultural history,” generated the most conversation.

We all pretty much agreed on our answers to the first two statements. Yuwei spoke about his own relationship with his wife, Ying, to explain his opinion.

“We were attracted to each other at first, yes,” he began, “but over time, we built trust and respect. The relationship becomes deeper and more meaningful over time. That’s love.”

I was impressed by the maturity of his response, given that he and Ying are only in their late 20s or early 30s.

Luz Alba had some experience to share in regard to the third statement.

“I have had relationships, both here and in Columbia,” she said. “And it is always difficult, from the same culture or not. That can help, but it is no guarantee.”

As we all nodded in agreement, it was clear to me that none of us has many illusions about love.

Even Van, who is in her early thirties but has not had much experience dating, had wise things to say.

“I don’t agree with the term ‘pre-selected,’” she said. “Because maybe you love one person and it not work out or maybe the person die. You can still find love with someone else. I’m sure it happen all the time.”

The most eloquent comment came from Yuwei, in response to this statement: “Teenagers are not capable of experiencing true love.”

“Teenagers understand love,” he said, “but they do not understand life.”

That one hit home. Remember that boiling, urgent feeling of love as a teenager? That total certainty that if one particular person didn’t return your feelings, the world would absolutely cease to exist and everything you knew would simply crumble into dust? Or the absolute certitude that no one in the world, ever, anywhere, has ever felt the kind of all-consuming passion you were feeling just then?

Yeah. Me, too.

But those feelings subsided, the world didn’t end, and we all went on to have other relationships and live long, productive lives.

I clearly understood a certain kind of love in my teenage years, but I knew nothing of the reality of life.

I gave my students a homework assignment at the end of Amy’s lesson: write me a love story. It could be about romantic love, filial love, fraternal, parental, material. Just a love story.

Only Van and Santos came to this week’s class. And only Van wrote a story for me. In fact, she wrote two. And they were good.

The first was called “Good-byes.”

“It was love at first sight,” she began. “When Andy looked into her puppy eyes, he knew it....He wanted to rub his face in her soft, brown hair, and, indeed, he did!”

I was a little confused by this until we came to the end of the story.

“Twelve years later, in an unknown office, she lay her head in Andy’s lap...She licked his face as he cried, as if to say it would all be okay. As if to say she would see him again someday, on the other side. Then they said their final good-byes.”

Clearly the story was about a young man and his dog, but Santos had a very hard time getting it. Van and I had to do a lot of verbal gymnastics to get him to understand. He just kept getting stuck on the pronoun ‘she,’ which he was convinced could only be used for human females, not animals. 

Van’s second story was even more oblique, with a dying tree speaking as the narrator. It was quite beautiful, almost allegorical.

“That would make an excellent children’s book about the environment,” I told her. Van’s response was to blush deeply and giggle nervously.

I didn’t write a love story for my class, but I’ve been living a great one for more than twenty years. And this week, my love was tested by one of those awful, very adult rites of passage. A cold, sterile medical test that involved fasting and embarrassing conversations.

Everything is fine, of course, but when the term “pre-cancerous” is mentioned, thoughts of mortality always follow. 

We are in mid-life now, that age when we look in the mirror or at each other and wonder how we got so old, where the time has gone, how much time do we have left. Inside, I still feel like an eighteen-year-old, full of doubt and awkwardness and aspirations for how my life should be. My body doesn't always agree, however, slowing me down with aching knees or extra belly fat or an inability to stay awake past eleven pm. And those aspirations are now tempered by responsibilities and realities, though a few dreams persist.

This is the dividing line between youth and old age, the crest of life where I can see both the long slow ascent behind us and the frighteningly fast descent that awaits us. Now is the time to savor and appreciate the moment, for the moments are slipping by so much faster than they ever did, and I want them to slow down. 

That acceleration of time I knew was coming has bowled me over with its velocity. I feel like a bug who was blithely floating in the breeze above the expressway, happily admiring the traffic below, until the wind-sheild of a tractor-trailer came zooming up behind me. What used to be a welcome thawing of frozen time in spring has become a juggernaut.

I’ve been extremely lucky in my life. I had a couple of brushes with death in my misspent youth, but mostly my life has been comfortable and filled with love, My parents and siblings, my friends, several deeply passionate lovers: love has filled my life in many ways.

But nothing can compare to my relationship with my husband. We celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary this year, and sometimes I cannot believe that much time has gone by since we said our vows in our back yard and jetted off to a whirlwind honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest. Sure, we argue and disagree like any married couple, but there is at our core a deep respect, understanding and acceptance that I never could have imagined as a teenager. I would not trade one second of our solid, dependable, surprising, ever-evolving marriage for a hundred years of the palpitating urgency that was teenaged love.

Both my grandmother and my mother spent many years as widows. The men in my family have a habit of dying too young. But Dave's family is different: his grandfathers lived into their nineties, and his dad is already eighty. There's an average in there somewhere that I'm hoping will find us, a mean of longevity that could even out with the help of some of our healthier lifestyle choices.

I am no longer a teenager, and I understand love and life much better now. So I'll do my best to keep up with this ever-quickening pace of middle-aged life and make the most of what time we have. You never know when your time is up until it's up. "Pre-" anything isn't really anything, be it a preselected soul mate or a pre-cancerous mass. I know I can't count on much in this life, but I’m still counting on twenty more years of life and love with Dave.

The Tense of Regret

Yuwei frowned at the white board, and I knew I hadn’t succeeded yet. 

We were working on some verb tense exercises I had given my ESOL students a week earlier. They had sentences and short narrative paragraphs wherein the verbs had been replaced with spaces to fill. My students had to choose between simple present or simple past, present or past progressive, and present or past perfect, depending on the context.

For the most part, these exercises were easy for my students. Yuwei mentioned while we walked in together from the parking deck that these were similar to exercises he had done in his fourth grade English class.

That oblique criticism made me question the appropriateness of assigning them, my ability to gauge my class’s needs, and, indeed, my qualifications as the teacher of this class. 

I usually feel like an impostor in this class. Sure, English is my mother tongue and I have a master’s degree. But my degree is in creative writing, not pedagogy. Truly, my only qualification for teaching this class is my willingness to do it without pay.

Nonetheless, I sallied forth with the rudimentary verb conjugations. I had no choice, really, because I hadn’t prepared any other lesson. 

And, honestly, when I was studying French, I spent countless hours filling page after page with verb conjugations, even while I was in upper-level courses. Tattooing the minute details of different tenses onto my memory made it much easier for me to express complex ideas in French prose, ideas like how Camus and Sartre differed on Existentialism or how digital technology influences culture.

It turns out that the other three students--Van, Luz Alba and Santos--really appreciated the exercises and had lots of questions about them.

The sentence that was vexing Yuwei grew out of a question Van brought up. She was having difficulty differentiating between the present and past perfect tenses.

“If I say, ‘I am at the grocery store,’” she began, as I wrote her words on the white board, “do I follow it with ‘I have been here for five hours,’ or is it ‘I had been here for five hours’?”

“Good question, Van,” I said. On the white board, I left a blank space where the verb should be in the second sentence. “Which one is it?”

I paused while everyone stared at the board and furrowed their brows.

Yuwei was the first to speak up.

“It is have been,” he said, “because the first sentence is present tense.”

“Yes! Present perfect indicates something that began in the past but is still happening, is still true right now.”

I went on to use the example of ‘I have lived in Ohio all my life,’ a sentence that indicates I still live in Ohio as of the moment of speaking.

“That’s a funny one, right?” I said, noting Luz Alba’s somber expression. “Because it’s using lived, which sounds like past tense, to indicate something in the present. Weird, right?”

Luz Alba nodded, clearly vexed by this apparent contradiction. I explained how French uses the simple present to express the same sentiment and asked if Spanish does as well. She and Santos both nodded.

“So, in English, it’s the tense of the helper verb, have or had, that indicates whether the action is still ongoing or completed.”

“So, when do I use the other one?” Van asked.

“Okay, so the past perfect is about going further back in time when you’re already in the past,” I said.

I drew a horizontal line with an outward-facing arrow at each end on the white board. 

◀-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------▶

I use this visual strategy a lot when I’m tutoring American students who have trouble getting verb tenses right, and I’ve noticed lately that many of the ESL students who come for tutoring benefit from it as well. I started using the linear drawing with Asian students, especially, when someone told me that Chinese has no verb tenses at all. Time is indicated purely by context clues in Chinese. My head nearly exploded when I heard that. 

“This is the future,” I said, indicating the arrow at the right end of the line, “and this is the past.” Here I indicated the arrow at the left end. “And this is now,” I said, making a mark on the line just before the right-hand arrow, “when you are telling your story. This is the past, when you were at the grocery store.” I made a mark a little to the left of the ‘now’ mark. “And this,” I said, making a mark a bit more to the left, “is even further in the past, when you had been there for five hours.” 

I paused to let that sink in. Most brows were still furrowed, but heads were beginning to nod in burgeoning comprehension.

“So you use the past perfect when you are already talking in the simple past, and you mention something that happened even further in the past: ‘I was at the grocery store--in the past--and I had been there for five hours--even earlier in the past.’ Get it?”

Van actually looked happy; I think she may have understood this tense for the first time in her life.

“So what about this one?” I said, writing two more sentences on the board. 

I was feeling very encouraged by how unexpectedly well things were going. I love playing with verb tenses and explaining how they work. We had spent a lot of time in French class working on if/then causes, which require great agility of verb tense. 

I wrote on the board: If I had had time, I would have stopped.

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

Silence.

Van cocked her head to one side and ventured a guess. “Does it mean you would only stop sometimes, only when you had time?”

“Not quite,” I said. “Anyone else have an idea?”

Santos had a little half smile on his face, as if he were enjoying the discussion, but he kept quiet. His English is not quite as good as the others’, so I’m not sure how many details he was catching. Luz Alba shook her head.

Yuwei frowned.

“This is called the ‘tense of regret’ because it has to do with hypothetical situations in the past that never really happened,” I said. “It’s saying that if I had time back then, which I didn’t, I would have stopped, but I couldn’t.”

After a moment, Yuwei spoke up.

“Isn’t it the same to just say, ‘if I had time, I would have stopped’?”

“No, that would be wrong,” I said. “‘If I had time’ means you are talking about a real moment in the past when you may or may not have had time. ‘If I had had’ means that I never did.”

I wrote the sentence ‘if I had time, I would stop’ on the board to illustrate the difference between it and my original example.

“This sentence indicates that at some very real time in the past, if there was time, you stopped, and if there wasn’t time, you didn’t stop. But this sentence,” here I pointed to the had had/would have stopped combination, “indicates a hypothetical situation, where you never did have time, so it was impossible for you to stop. Does that help?”

Yuwei continued to frown at the board. Van’s brow furrowed, and her head cocked to one side. Luz Alba studied the board with an intense expression. Santos continued to stare at the board with a bemused little smile.

“I don’t see the difference,” Yuwei said, through his frown.

“So this one,” I said, pointing to the simple past tense combination, “is about reality. There was actually a time when you were, say, driving through the countryside, and there were little roadside markets here and there, and if you were on schedule or ahead of schedule, you would sometimes stop to buy something. Other times, you wouldn’t stop because you needed to get somewhere by a particular time.”

I let that settle in the silence for a moment. Beads of sweat trickled down my back. I felt I was losing them.

“This one, on the other hand,” I said, pointing to the had had/would have stopped sentence, “is not talking about reality at all. It is talking about the fact that you never did have the time to stop anywhere, even if you wanted to. That’s why it’s called the tense of regret.”

Van cocked her head to the other side and said, “I think it the word if that make it hard. I think saying ‘when I had time, I would stop’ make more sense.”

“Okay, yeah,” I said, happy at least part of it was becoming clear. “The word if here is what indicates the idea of sometimes i stopped and sometimes I didn’t. But you’re right, the word when could be used as well.”

I waited a beat.

“So, do you see how the one is talking about real events in the past and the other is talking about stuff that never happened, that was never possible because you never, ever had the time to stop?”

There was a brief moment of silence where I’m pretty sure I held my breath.

Then Yuwei smiled.

“When Yuwei smiles, I know I’ve done it!” I said.

We all laughed, though mine was a nervous laugh of relief.

“Yes, I see now,” Yuwei said. “I understand the regret, the never really happened. And it’s not that; we just don’t smile as much as Americans do.”

That moment of realizing that you have helped someone understand a new concept is a unique sensation. I often glimpse it when I’m tutoring, but it mostly eludes me in this ESOL class. I think it’s because I don’t feel the pressure of teaching when all I’m doing is tutoring. Arguably, they’re the same thing. But for some reason, I view them very differently. 

I like tutoring because I’m basically helping someone navigate the experience of being a college student. I’m not necessarily teaching them anything specific so much as I’m coaching their decision-making process. I do teach an average of five students a week how to apply the four most common comma rules to their own writing, but that’s second nature to me. I can teach anyone those four rules in about five minutes.

However, the students I tutor are very different from those in my ESOL class. Van, Yuwei, Luz Alba, and Santos are all college graduates, working professionals who just need to improve their spoken language skills.  I am often so intimidated by their collective smartness that I freeze up. 

Over the past year, I’ve had a lot of conflicting feelings about my MFA degree. While I was job hunting, the degree began to seem embarrassing, like an old merit badge for macrame: cute and maybe artistic, but humiliatingly worthless. Which was really confusing because for two of my undergrad years and all three of my years in the program, I knew without a doubt that the MFA in creative writing was exactly the right thing for me, and that the NEOMFA was the right place for me. Then, as the rejections from publishers started piling up and the job offers failed to materialize, I doubted. I doubted my abilities as a writer and editor, my potential abilities as an employee in a corporation, my decision to spend three years studying something so entirely useless as writing, and my choice to forgo teaching English Composition and tutor writing at the law school instead. 

Through all those doubts and inner conflicts, I kept volunteering in ESL classes at the International Institute. And I contacted Project Learn to see about volunteering with them, too. 

Then the university called me and offered me not a position as an adjunct teaching English Comp, but a position as a tutor in the writing lab. Then Project Learn offered me my own ESOL class, albeit without pay. 

If I hadn’t earned a master’s degree, and done it by going with tutoring instead of teaching, I wouldn’t have the two jobs I love now. And I wouldn’t get to make Yuwei smile, which is the best grammar lesson of all.