Feeling Thankful.

By Jacqueline Millstein

On Thursday, November 20, I had my weekly scheduled meeting with Maria, a woman I tutor in English. Maria, born in Peru, has lived in the U.S. for over twenty years but still has difficulty with pronunciation and vocabulary. I design worksheets for her every week that she keeps in a binder. Together, for a few hours a week, we sit in the corner of the lobby of an offsite location of a local college and go over new material as well as some of the old.

This week I was teaching her about words that rhymed. I explained that songwriters use rhymes in their lyrics. We also spoke about poets and poetry. I asked her if she was familiar with the Beatles. I got a very enthusiastic yes, as she had once seen them in concert. We started singing our favorite Beatle songs and then we were interrupted.

A woman wearing a badly torn coat, with dirty tangled hair under a dirty knit cap walked over to our table. She had been sitting in the lobby across the hall, presumably to warm up, and I was expecting her to ask us for spare change. Not even close. She heard us talking about the Beatles and wanted to join the conversation. Her name was Carol, and she really knew her Beatles history. She talked about Lennon’s poetry and how the Beatles’ music was still relevant and their songs probably would still be sung a hundred years from now. She talked at length about the poetry of Dylan and Springsteen.

Then she tested our Fab Four knowledge. Did we know that Lennon went to the Quarry Bank High School ,and that was why The Quarrymen was the group’s first name. She went on to explain that a quarry was where you would dig rocks, and according to Rock and Roll folklore, the expression digging rock and roll had its origins in the quarry work in Liverpool. Whether or not this was true was immaterial. She was well educated, articulate, intelligent and lonely for conversation.

When she left, Maria and I just sat quietly for a few minutes. Then Maria started crying. She equated her own struggles with learning a very difficult language, so that she would be taken seriously in the workplace, with our unfair preconception of Carol. People mistakenly thought Maria was uneducated, even though she had been an engineer in Peru. It was beyond sobering.

I found out that Carol was a regular visitor who slept at the local homeless shelter. Since the occupants have to vacate every morning, ostensibly to seek work, she had nowhere to go to stay warm.

This weekend I will be purchasing a coat, wool gloves and a hat which I will leave with the security guards at the school. I will ask the guards to give them to Carol the next time they see her as an anonymous early Christmas gift.

On my way home, I stopped at the supermarket to get a few ingredients for a recipe for Thanksgiving. I bought a $20 bottle of organic vanilla extract and a $30 bottle of extra virgin olive oil. I am keeping my receipt on the bulletin board in my office as a reminder of just how lucky I am. I have a warm home, a full refrigerator, and the financial freedom to donate my time to help a lovely woman learn to speak English. Some would call that rarefied air.

Have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

Jacqueline is an accomplished woman and a good friend of Lustre.