Disputing Dates With A Darling Dawdling Dotard

One common gripe about being an ALT is that the questions we end up posing to the students are trivial, pointless and inane. It’s been a year into class and I find myself, like a Puss-In-Boots-Licker, unctuously praising students for being able to answer, “What is your name?” or “How old are you?” When, in reality, they should be clobbering me for not knowing their name by now.

As an assistant ESL teacher in a land where English is generally despised by the standard student, one ends up asking daft questions such as, “How did you come to school today?”, “What day is BEFORE Monday?”, “What time do you wake up?” and “What day of the week is it today?” These are all questions that, generally speaking, no one is ever going to ask these children should they go abroad. They’re going to hear, “Cash or credit?” Or “How much money do you have on you?” Or “Give me your wallet.” Or “Why are you so small?” Or “Could you PLEASE STOP taking photos now, for the LOVE of PETE.”

Nor are these questions that they will ever pose to locals. They will never ask someone what day it is because they will have a prepared meticulously charted itinerary of travel plans nailed down in military time to the nearest millisecond. More useful questions might be, “Does anyone here speak Japanese?” Or “Do you have change for a hundred dollar bill?” Or “Why are these western toilets so incredibly dirty?”

The questions that are posed to them in English class tend to be of the sort that, unless one has been stuck in a time warp, an old folks’ home or a correctional institution for the past twenty years, one is not going to hear. After all, knowing the date and day of the week seems to count as common knowledge for most people.

Or so I thought.

I stand waiting for the bus. It’s dark. A shadowy figure inches towards me. It’s walking along a bike at a slow, deliberate pace. The figure stops next to me as the homebound traffic whizzes by me on Route Eleven.

A little old lady’s smiling face is illuminated by a combination of the passing headlights and the ghostly glow of the nearby vending machines. She begins prattling on in Japanese allowing me to catch a word here and there, but not enough to completely make sense of it. I catch, “day” “week” and some other odds and ends meshed into the local Niihama dialect.

“I’m terribly sorry. I don’t understand.”

She looks at me in surprise and chuckles, “Oh deary me. You don’t know either? Aren’t we a pretty picture. Is it the nineteenth? The twentieth? The fourteenth? What day could it possibly be?”

“Ah. I understand now. It’s the twenty-fourth.”

“The twenty-fourth. You don’t say.” Her eyes grow large as she realizes how many days she has been wandering around in a dateless cloud sans watch or calendar. “And what day of the week is it?”

“You don’t know what day of the week it is? Really? … Ok, it’s Thursday.”

“Thursday. Well now. It’s Thursday is it? Well you know how it is. No job, no work, you lose track of the days. I just wander around here on this here ol’ bike in the evenings. And it seems I’ve been doing this for a good five days straight now. Fancy that. You’re waiting for the bus are you? Where are you going?”

“Just going home. It’s a ways over there.”

“Alright then. Have a good evening!”

And as I call after her, genuinely telling her to “BE CAREFUL, VERY CAREFUL,” she walks her bike down the block, stopping at the nearby rundown video store to scrutinize a poster of a recent Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant film.

I wait for her to return to ask me the year, the identity of those peculiar white people on the poster and perhaps to check to see if she’s wearing any trousers.

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Published:
10.24.07 / 9pm
Category:
amusing incidents, what i call life, unschoolish