Chapter 1: Sunday Blues
“Becoming a teacher was the dumbest idea I ever had,” I said, sitting at my kitchen table while editing essays. The most recent one had one grammatical error after another. I still had a hundred and forty-nine to go.
Stephanie, my wife, paused from making scrambled eggs, turning her head toward me. “But honey, you’re such a great teacher.” She resumed her stovetop symphony. “Your students love you.”
After ten years of teaching, I’d gotten over academic love. Besides, a student’s admiration of my services is easily supplanted, traded any day for time on a smartphone. Grading work has got to be the crappiest thing I could be doing on a Sunday morning, I thought, shaking my head. “Yeah, thanks babe,” I said indifferently, slashing words with a red pen. The paper was a murder scene in the making.
Stephanie turned the stove off. The scrambled concoction hissed its final gasp. “I’m serious,” she said, tilting a frying pan, dumping curds onto a plate. She grabbed the dish, and walked toward me, stopping at a drawer for a fork. “What you do for those kids is remarkable.”
“I wish these darn essays were remarkable,” I said, circling a promising thought. “But here they are, very markable, and sucking the life out of me.”
“Well, here,” she said, gently placing the food down, “this will give you life. Stop for a bit and eat.”
I released the pen and looked up. There she was, smiling, wearing comfy bright pajamas and all washed up, as natural as the fall morning elapsing beyond my patio glass door. “You, I mean it looks delectable,” I said jokingly.
“Nice one,” she said. “Join you?”
“Absolutely,” I said, clamping together the stack of assignments.
