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The job was this: I went to a beautiful house and turned pages, pronounced words, kept watch until he had finished, or maybe even fallen asleep.

It was my second semester of graduate school. In some haze of unemployment and reverse culture shock after a year in France, I had accepted an offer for a teaching assistantship and free classes, all intended to end in a master’s degree in French literature.

My first semester teaching was a stroll though an emotional minefield as undergraduate students trampled my best intentions. On the other hand, I wrote my own papers that were deemed brilliant, or at least pretty good. The editor of a literary journal invited me to be her assistant. The graduate advisor asked me to stay for my doctorate. The juxtaposition of experiences was dizzying, especially in the wake of the advances attempted by a former professor and employer (I babysat his children). That moment he smoked pot in his car and grabbed my hand was a sexual harassment moment that I scarcely recognized at the time, much less attempted to address. In fact, I was convinced that I had mistaken that strange event afterward, glad still that I had grabbed my hand back before he put it where he had apparently intended.

Instead of dwelling on what may have happened, I buried myself in books and music—live music that had become amazingly accessible to me when I started dating one of the pop music critics in the area. I buried myself also in that music critic, a tall, unshakable, wonderful guy with a way of making the world go away, a guy who remained childlike and may still have that capacity, as I imagine him still working in a record store, turning new music on his turntable and his head and his words. Most of all, I knew that he adored me—a mutual feeling—and we explored the city as if it were brand spanking new.

The next semester, after a summer of successful teaching and a multitude of private students who paid very well, I found myself in a pedagogy seminar—something that would have helped enormously in my first semester. My private students and the income they brought were gone, so when the pedagogy professor announced a tutoring gig, I ran up after class to learn the details.

The student was one of hers, an intermediate French grammar and conversation student who was housebound at times. I collected the assignments, and made the call.

K. was twenty years old, a friendly kid with his own passion for music and a weekly radio show. K. was not doing so well when I met him, though, and I talked to his sister while I waited for the pastor to finish his weekly visit.

K. had a protective family, to say the least. When he had been diagnosed with leukemia five years earlier, the family gathered, and decided that the cancer would never win. With love and laughter, they endured, keeping the world at bay. K. was indeed still alive, very much so, despite the recent chemotherapy treatments that had prompted me to his home that day.

We looked at the current chapter of French grammar, and at some point, inevitably, K. changed the subject. His real love really was music, and he could talk about that for hours longer than he could conjugate irregular verbs. I took my boyfriend once, which thrilled them both. We attempted some conversations in French, and I brought French pop music, which K. did enjoy. In fact, the reason that the university was providing a tutor in French, and not some other subject, was that K. dreamed of going to Paris. He loved the French language, and kept that thought of travel as a bright light at the end of an exhausting and sickening tunnel, a beacon of hope for recovery.

The treatments were grueling. Sometimes K.’s sister or mom called me to say he was not up to that day’s session, and I did not see him. He was hospitalized at times, and then, finally, he returned to his real class. My job ended.

Our intermediate French classes had the distinction, the true honor, of reading a literary masterpiece. Not only did our students read the masterpiece, but they put on skits about it with a distinguished audience: the author himself.

Alain Robbe-Grillet died recently, a fact that may well have been rejoiced by some intermediate French students from those years. Some surely remember the book that they struggled through, certain that it would prevent them from earning the A they had strived for all semester. They struggled for sure, wondering at first if it was the deficiency of their language skills or the excessive amounts of alcohol from the night before that made the book such a bitch to read. At a point, they realized that it was the book itself–a cruel joke–that was so impenetrable. Thought provoking, it was, and the thoughts it seemed to provoke in my own students seemed to be ones of anger, perhaps even violence. The language is relatively simple, in fact, but the story is an endless loop of beginnings, slight changes, and frustrations. The question and answer session for the author ended, as I recall, with the author shouting at undergraduates who meekly asked him what he intended in the book. “Have you never read your own authors?” he challenged them. “Have you never read Faulkner?”

And despite that, K. did perform the skit for the great author, and the author laughed. I could barely believe that this was the same kid who could not hold his head up for most of the afternoons that I spent with him.

I saw him again, on his twenty-first birthday, celebrating at a club with a band he loved, joking that he was going to have a drink—a real no-no, he told me. He energetically remarked also that he had planned that long awaited trip. His sister was going with him to Paris. He was in remission, and had been for a long time by then.

My career at the institution of higher learning unraveled in unpredictable ways… unpredictable to me at the time, but damned obvious now in retrospect. I had left, quite shaken, and never set foot in the halls that I had once loved, vowing never to see some people again in my life. And I have not.

Several months later, my brother tossed a newspaper on my plate. “Hey, isn’t that the kid you tutored?” he asked.

K. had gone home, the obituary said, for Christmas holidays after treatment following a minor relapse. His doctors had thought that the benefits of being with family during holidays outweighed the risk of leaving the hospital. He went home one last time, and caught pneumonia, and he died.

I found the funeral home, and wandered in, hoping selfishly that I would not see anyone from the university. I had to go, though, knew I had to. I saw the young body, laid out in a suit and tie like some wax figure representing K.—and not well. The life was gone, and life was what K. had always had.

The family was visibly shaken, there only in body—hollow ones, it seemed. For all the time that I knew them, they never allowed themselves to think that K. might die, and for so long, they were right. His father saw me. “Why?” he sobbed to me. And I didn’t know why.

I had no idea what to say, and I also knew that at those moments, it never matters, because words mean nothing when life is stripped bare. All that matters are the souls that remain, that remind, that wound, yet repair. All that matters is time, which will move forward, painfully, persistently farther and farther from the physical presence of the ones we loved, until they can come back to us—we realize they never left—through the love that remains in our hearts.

The last straw is when we run out of milk. No cereal. No healthy teeth and bones. No decaf lattes from that beautiful Expobar sitting in my kitchen.

So, having managed to get my son on the school bus for the fifth time since his hospital stay, I celebrated by heading to the grocery store.

Now, before I continue on down to the corner market, a bit of an aside. I hesitate, although only slightly, in revealing this much here, of all places. I mean, I have to wonder if there is a feeling of shock and dismay—or worse, pity—at the idea that I cannot get my older son to go to school many days because of his mental health issues. He is smart (which is how he still managed to get on the honor roll), funny, and not noticeably impaired when things are in the right balance… Still, I have found it much more difficult to bring myself to talk about him than it is about his brother, whose disability is developmental, intellectual, obvious—and not stigmatized in nearly the same way. Ah, but in not talking about the bipolar stuff, I stigmatize, too.

Stigma is a term that fits well when you consider the Latin/Greek origin: “tattoo indicating slave or criminal status”. I wish I could say that things have changed much in our world today. On the contrary, I find that when my son with developmental disabilities missed nearly thirty days of school a few years ago, it was at the insistence of the school staff that he stay home because they could not do anything with him. For my son with mental health issues, though, numerous absences (despite the school’s patience and help) may quickly become a legal matter, a crime… like so many other things. A psychiatric admission to the hospital is nearly impossible without entrance through the emergency room, and for so many, a call to 911 following an act of violence, self-injury, vandalism. A crime… but in these cases, a desperate plea for help, an acute illness demonstrated in frightening ways. What more can we do?

There is attention to this problem, but also resistance. Many posts ago, I mentioned a neighborhood’s resistance to a group home for adults with a Prader-Willi syndrome, more in the realm of developmental disability. What I learned later is that the owner of the house is a group that also provides homes and services to adults with other disabilities, including mental health issues. If some neighbors were only wary about any sort of developmental group home inhabiting the nearby real estate, they were positively aghast at the thought of recovering substance abusers or mentally ill individuals living next door. Again, the stigma, and in a world where in normal houses live the teenager who parties incessantly, the aunt who has lavish parties for weeks then retreats for even longer, the many among us who hide our afflictions, for fear of being different, of being noticed, of being shunned… And is it any wonder, when we ourselves fear those who are considered different?

If we do leave the denial, if we have to, finding help is not easy. I know this well, after repeated calls to try to restore services lost in a struggle—services not so easy to get in the first place. Calls to overburdened state agencies go unanswered, even as the calls turn to letters and move up the chain of command. It takes calling a representative and a commissioner, and then, for what? Psychiatrists who prescribe and then never return phone calls for day after day; others who are afraid to take on patients who present too great a risk—a liability; others who do not even take insurance. And then again, a few gems among them. But while we are on waiting lists to see the gems, in my frustration, I wonder again if omega 3s and martial arts and better feng shui could really be a cure-all instead of all this nonsense.

I go through this all in my head, and then turn to the things in my car, the less cold breeze in the parking lot that takes me back to summer breezes I remember so fondly. My car has made its way to the Market Basket, and life is good.

I really do enjoy my trips to the Market Basket. For one thing, it is far cheaper than the supermarket that is closest to my home. For another, I enjoy seeing so many different people. On most trips, I hear little English, but today’s trip was noticeably populated by older couples, most of whom did speak English, and most of whom were quite friendly, although I did notice a few strange looks when I turned around the coffee aisle just unable not to sing along with Andy Gibb.

You know, I still cannot get the song out of my head, and also cannot help thinking of another way to do it. I pondered that this evening, too, again imagining something on the back of a piano, but alas, a torch singer I still am not. “I Just Want To Be Your Everything” is a great song for shopping, though, and it really hit me as I found myself wanting to chant “Come On Eileen, too-loo rye-aye,” that supermarket music has certainly changed since I used to drag along with my mom through Vince’s IGA in Yorkshire Plaza, right on the corner of Laclede Station and Watson Road (which is really Route 66).

Grocery-store music then was characterized by rearranged Beatles melodies, even though most of the ones chosen barely needed it (“Yesterday,” “The Long and Winding Road”), and other pop songs that were rendered nearly unrecognizable by the arrangements… until in a sickening moment in the dairy section you finally understood that it really was a string version of “Havin’ My Baby.” Trips to the store are different now, and maybe a bit more disturbing.

Still, I am fascinated by the selection of tropical produce: chayote, malanga, batata. I like paying $.99/pound for apples instead of $1.49. I love being there with all the boxes moving around the aisles, and the woman in the electric cart asking me if I could reach and grab a can of Folgers off the top shelf, and the man who is telling the butcher not to hand him that hamburg because he’s on a fixed income and that he just doesn’t know about Hillary, and the woman telling her daughter, “Mira, ven aqui,” as the little girl sheepishly puts a box of vanilla wafers back on the shelf.

These grocery adventures are pleasant in themselves, but the soundtrack is part of the experience. Still, although I enjoy the tunes, I’m not really supposed to acknowledge that I actually noticed them. The music has a more insidious purpose that is really unmentionable. I realize this is a fact. The whole brainwashing thing, innocuous enough, it would seem, because it is everywhere. In the midst of it, though, I realized that I was barely noticing at all how happy I was that my kid actually left the house without a fight, and gave me a hug before heading down the street to his school bus stop, on time, and that the day was warm, and the other fifty thousand things that were going on right in front of me in that store because it had a soundtrack that kept me in a certain frame of mind, somewhere in the late 1970s to mid ‘80s, and made me not notice so much else. Well, Muzak’s philosophy is for me to ponder later, or to leave perhaps to the New Yorker, where it has been pondered already (by David Owen, “The Soundtrack to your Life,” 4/10/06).

It does make me think about comfort level, though. How does it feel to go into somewhere with so many people, all ages, nationalities, abilities, all collected there to hunt down the foods that celebrate our differences.. and yet to hear a soundtrack of my young adult life in the Midwest? I wonder.. what if they added a few different songs, something different, from another country, something I have never heard, just thrown in? something else… or perhaps, just no music. Just real people and real food, together. What a concept.

When I was twenty years old, I quit school. I was at a large state university, which was nice in many ways, but frustrating to me in others. Frustration won. One day, I was enraged (not an adjective that describes me often) when I flunked an accounting exam. I was hardly a whiz in the class, but had a B+ average up to that point, gained only through a lot of hard work. Somehow, finding out that my dad was going to die really took the energy out of studying. My professor refused to change the grade. I ended up with a B in the class, in spite of the lousy test score, but I swore that I would not stay in a school that only knew me by my student number.

So I went home. Misfit that I was in high school, I had had the job of compiling attendance reports after school for my junior and senior years. I could hardly complain about it: everyone was nice to me, I got to learn something about early 1980s computing, and I always had a job in summer, too, in the summer school. It was a fine job, but when the principal (the same principal that Jonathan Franzen writes about, same high school, and no, I never knew the writer; I am just name-dropping) offered me the chance to stay all year full-time, I told him thank you, but no. I was going to work in translation.

I did not actually have a translating job at that point, and about a month later, after going door to door to hand resumes to nearly every business in the St. Louis area that I could find with the word international in its name, I was beginning to question my decision to turn the principal down. One evening I came home, and there was a message for me.

It turned out that one of the translating companies I had visited (there really were only three) had just gotten a huge RUSH interpreting assignment and needed extra help editing and putting together brochures in four languages for a conference. Could I help temporarily?

Yes, of course I could.

My world was never quite the same after that. I went from my boring life in the suburbs to the cosmopolitan life I had always dreamed of, at least for that week. I know a lot of people identified with the movie Breaking Away because of the bicycle racing, but I had always found so much in common with the whole language and culture theme. My life may not have been Indiana. My dreams may not have been Italian. But I wanted a bigger life, too. I wanted to be French in high school. And now, I was working somewhere where I spoke it, better than I realized I could, on a nearly daily basis.

I also started learning some Spanish. The owner of the company was from Bolivia, and the other full-time translator was from Peru. That first day that I went in, I watched, my heart racing as freelance translators rendered texts into French, Italian, German. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen, and there I was, in the middle of it, not in class, but the real thing.

No one in my family had ever even left the United States, but I was full of ‘satiable curtiosity, maybe from too much whimsical reading, or possibly from being that misfit. In high school, exchange students stayed to our house, for a week if not for a year, and my dad suffered nightly through three full hours of French television that I pretended to understand when cable made the world available in our living room. The exotic lives of my pen pals fascinated me, and writing to them must be how I managed to test out of most French in college.

When I started college, I never considered teaching. The thought of trying to force students like my high school classmates to have some interest in a foreign language was nearly as depressing to me as the idea that I might end up stuck in Missouri for the rest of my life. I wanted more, as in United Nations more, but honestly, anything more. Yeah, I guess I was a snob, or ambitious, depending how you look at it. I was, in fact, determined, and there I was, in a translation agency, doing what I had dreamed of doing, if only temporarily.

The conference I was hired for was a success, after hard work that I personally had never loved so much. A month later, I had a job, a real, full-time job. It was pure luck, I figured out soon after, as I went through the stacks of mail, new resumes every week. I didn’t even have a degree, but I had the job.

I learned a lot about the nature of translation, talked daily to people who were as passionate about language as I was, and found interest in topics (botany, sewing instructions, grocery store displays, camping gear, etc.), searching for the right word and the right person who knew what it was. The world grew around me in so many ways, not just in my eight hours, but after, in classes, in things I noticed, in people I met.

Yes, I loved my job. Sometimes I goofed. Once, a client was in a hurry for a sign he wanted to use for a conference in Belgium. Normally, we insisted on receiving the translation in writing, but in days before email, Roger called in the two-word translation for “Distributorships available.” Somewhere between his phone and mine, a c became an f, and I sent it to the typesetter. We received a call from Brussels. Our client was not amused when he realized why everyone was laughing. It turns out that “Confessions disponibles” has a vastly different meaning than “Concessions disponibles.” I was humbled, embarrassed; I learned a lot that day, most days, in fact. It was grand.

After a while, though, new doors opened, and I looked through them. Something in the Uruguayan poet I had met tempted me into a world I never realized I loved more: literature. I applied, was accepted, did well, ran out of money, went to France, finished school, looked for work, did not find it and went to grad school in Missouri.. I kept going back home. I taught. And there, even there in the Midwest, the world was there, and ever growing.

But unlike Dorothy, one day I let the tornado take me away, not afraid, but riding it for all it was worth, and I never returned, never tried to. The world still expands, albeit not without so much right here to do, too. Munchkins afoot, poppies distracting me from time to time… Oz, I think I am still looking.