Monday, February 8th, 2010...5:39 pm
Things™
My high school English/Latin teacher, Mr. Eisenhart, used to have to physically restrain himself from clocking us when we used the word “thing” instead of stating the name of what something actually, specifically was.
Of course, calling him my high school English/Latin teacher is the equivalent of saying “thing,” because that’s only a vague, lazy approximation of what he was to me — on paper, anyway. In reality, he was my whole world for two solid years. I ate, drank, breathed Mr. Eisenhart — slept, studied, read, dreamed him. I had him for three periods — a full third of my day, every other day — and even then it wasn’t enough.
I remember one year my mom came home from the annual Open House, and as usual she came into my room to say goodnight and relay to me which teachers she’d seen, and vaguely what — if anything — they’d had to say about me.
“Let’s see, I saw Mrs. Goldberg, Mr. Kujawski…”
“Yeah, yeah, and?”
“Mrs. Santo… Mr. Eisenhart, Miss–”
“REALLY?WHATDIDMREISENHARTSAY?”
“Well! HE said… let’s see…”
And I swear, I remember this so distinctly, because it was one of maybe five times in my pre-adult life that she let on even remotely that she was laughing at me on the inside: my mother ever-so-faintly smirked when she replied, “Mr. Eisenhart said that you have an affinity for languages.”
I cannot tell a lie; those were her exact words. I can and have easily forgotten, like, what I had for breakfast this morning, what my cat’s name is, and what the last book I read was about, but that sentence is permanently tattoed onto my psyche and no amount of boozing or keeping track of what trashy romances the Vietnamese are interested in this week will erase it:
You have an affinity for languages.
Mr. Eisenhart said.
Affinity for languages.
Affinity.
Of course, I immediately — or, more likely, an expertly timed five or ten minutes after my mother left the room and thought I’d fallen asleep — jumped out of bed and yanked my giant red Random House dictionary off the shelf to look up the word. I mean, I could take an educated guess as to what it meant, but I needed to read every possible definition and commit them all to memory for future daydreaming purposes, KTHXBAI.
Affinity (n.): Relationship! Kinship! A natural liking for or attraction to a thing, idea, etc. SEE: ATTRACTION!
As soon as I got to school the next morning I told my friend Sangi, and she almost died: “He USED the WORD AFFINITY? The word affinity means MARRIAGE in some languages. Mr. Eisenhart used a word that means marriage to describe you. Ergo, Mr. Eisenhart thinks of marriage when he thinks of you.” We jumped up and down and squealed for awhile and then I ran off to look up the word again in several more dictionaries.
Keep in mind that I was taking three languages at the time: French, Spanish, and Latin. They were the only three my high school offered — nobody to my knowledge had taken on all three before, simultaneously, ’til then — so in his defense, what do you say to such a student’s parent at open house? Your child is a moronic psychopath and has no lunch period? Your daughter is taking three languages solely to win me over, and it’s kind of a pity since she’ll forget them all completely a semester or two into college? Your kid and her friends are obsessed with me, like every other impressionable English majory gal and her wannabe-boho literati pals to cross my classroom’s threshold since *yawn* approximately 1967 *yawn*?
No, you say: Your daughter has an affinity for languages. And then the mother is pleased with her offspring’s natural inclination toward something other than drama, and you’ve bought the daughter months‘ worth of blissful ecstasy spent furiously scribbling out Shakespearean sonnets in perfect calligraphy on parchment scrolls to hang on her walls — instead of throwing irons at her sister over breakfast and sneaking out to woods parties in the middle of the night. Everybody wins.
So I’d show up day after day in Mr. Eisenhart’s classroom, I and my *cough* affinity *cough*, and I’d just sit there and inhale whatever it was that he was teaching — it didn’t matter what, specifically. I suppose in the end it could have been Math or Physics or, like, Participation in Government, because, see, that’s the other thing I always say that secretly isn’t true: that “Mr. Eisenhart was who turned me into a writer.”
I’ve been saying it for years. It’s easier to say because it makes the most sense and prevents me from having to explain, but the truth is: I’d been writing all my life. I’d always written, always preferred it over any other means of artistic expression, always been better at it than any other method of communication. To say that Charles Eisenhart got me to write is a blatant lie — and I’m actually a little offended that nobody’s ever done enough of the math to call me out on it — but even to say that he made me love writing is, while partly true in an indirect way, more than just a bit of a misleading understatement.
It’s just as much of a copout as calling something a “thing,” because, reader? He did much more than teach me to love writing.
He taught me to love living.
I didn’t have an affinity for languages; I had an affinity for him.
And what I would give to consult Mr. Eisenhart — another past chief adviser in my life, right up there next to my grandmother on the list of people I wish I had on hand at all times to tell me What to Do™ — or just to be magically transported back through time to a desk in the back of his classroom, to close my eyes and breathe in the vapours ’til the Oracle reads me my prophecy.
What I would give to be able to summon him here to advise me on Things™.
Commentary
February 8th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
A few comments:
1) He didn’t die did he? Whenever you do something like this, I’m afraid the person has died.
2) I was looking through old papers a few weeks ago as we reorganized file cabinets. The only papers I kept from high school were Eisenhart’s. I forced Jen to read some of his comments. I loved Eisenhart. She was tremendously bored, but I loved every minute of it. I was once more mortified by the errors that he had exposed so harshly.
3) I hope they have a parade or something, I want an excuse to see Eisenhart again.
4) Gladio vulneratus
February 8th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
No, he didn’t die, thank god, knock on wood, insert sign of the cross here. If he were to die, you wouldn’t be reading about it or anything else here for a very long time, because I’d be on hiatus in total seclusion — in, like, a van down by the river, under a vow of silence trying piece back together the fragments of my soul to reinvent myself. Or something.
Or something. Hee hee hee…
OMG, my stepfather sees Mr. Eisenhart every goddamn month at the Goshen Diner for some retirees luncheon they have, and every time the man’s name comes up, he acts surprised, like, “Who, Charlie Eisenhart? Well, I’ll be damned, I see that son of a bitch all the time!” And I’m like, CAN YOU PLEASE FORTHELOVEOFGOD TELL HIM I SAID HI THX!” And he always assures me he will, and then forgets about the entire conversation .5 seconds later.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Tell em Joseph said hi too.
February 10th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Lol Oh Mr. Eisenhart. And BESS you clearly DO have an affinity for languages.
February 11th, 2010 at 10:15 am
Ok, I spent my entire highschool career trying to avoid the man that you are now telling me is/ was the reason you live. Why was I never told, when it mattered, how great he is/ was? Maybe I wouldn’t be slashing is/ was if he taught me! Maybe I was in his class and I forgot too!!
I was personally enthralled with history and mr Donache, whose name I probably spelled wrong.
He was an upstart and I identified with that.
Bess, my advice to those who feel they have no current advisor is, listen to yourself. You know what to do, and sometimes doing nothing brings as much change as doing something.
February 11th, 2010 at 11:59 am
Hahaha… Lauren, you wouldn’t have cared since you were always, like, a decade ahead of us all, maturity-wise. You were nowhere near the Drama Snack I was. Plus, I kinda viewed Mr. Eisenhart as MINE and didn’t want to share him with anyone. Of course, half the schoolgirl population in the US of A was of exactly the same mindset, and none of us realized how un-unique we actually were until, like, a day ago.
OMG, you just reminded me: remember in Mr. Kalin’s class when you & I were the ONLY ones who EVER did ANY work? And even then, we just did the absolute minimum so that we wouldn’t be viewed as total nerds! All year, the only thing each kid was responsible for was eventually doing that oral presentation on a famous person of our choosing, and every single day Mr. Kalin would ask if anyone was ready to do theirs, and every single day no one was ready. All year! He’d ask as nicely as can be if so-and-so was ready that day, and just be met with a shrug and a simple “no.” That poor man.
February 13th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
I wish I had more time to respond, but all I can say is:
1) nice reference to Participation in Government, and
2) “Judas Priest!” remains one of my favorite exclamations when I need to call attention to blatant stupidity.
Miss you, Bessica.
February 14th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
It was either Participation in Government or Music in Our Lives, Amy…
I would like to take a moment to point out the fact that Goshen’s official Class of ‘95 senior superlative winners in the category of “Most Likely to Succeed” visited my web site within DAYS of each other: Amy Romano and Harold Bien. I think that means I deserve a Webby Award or something!
I may have scared Harold away, though, with this entry.
February 15th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
I so wish I had done all my homework for poor Mr Kalin!! Yeah, why would no one do any homework in that class, it always perplexed me.
I actually wasn’t ten years ahead of anyone, but just happened to be hanging out with men with beards who advanced me into a world I preteneded to know something about. Wish I had slowed down and enjoyed teachers like Mr Eisenhart instead of skipping school and drinking old English. Ahh but even now my husband is 10 years my senior, so I guess somethings never change, but I definitely have found a love of education that I was missing in highschool.
February 16th, 2010 at 5:45 pm
“Mr. Kalin… yeah!” <– sung to the tune of Arrested Development’s “Mr. Wendell”… remember? Hee hee.
I always forget that my boyfriend is ten years my senior as well because he totally doesn’t act it — which I guess kind of defeats the purpose — but then suddenly he’ll start fondly reminiscing about a commercial from the 70s, or, like, how he remembers seeing the first Violent Femmes record album when it was first out in stores and knowing nothing about them but buying it just because it looked like a cool cover. Or he’ll be going on and on about where he was when Pan Am flight whatever was hijacked, and how he & his friends skipped class and were at a bar drinking the day that Air Florida crashed since the drinking age was 18 then. And I’m just like, dude, one of my first memories in LIFE was going to the airport to see The Hostages(tm) come home. I was 4. He was in high school.
Remember when we used to listen to that selfsame Violent Femmes album when WE were in high school? WE discovered it, goddammit.
February 28th, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Since we’re all declaring our love or Mr. Eisenhart here, might I add that my choice of colleges (Muhlenberg) was LARGELY due to the fact that it was his alma mater.
Now I don’t feel like such a loser
February 28th, 2010 at 11:22 pm
Hahaha! Stacey, I was so secretly jealous when you ended up going to Muhlenberg. That was my “reach” school! I toured the campus and had a pre-pre-pre admissions interview & everything. And then didn’t Mr. Eisenhart go to grad school in Iowa or something, or am I totally making that up? Because I remember at one point it was seriously a tough judgment call in the early days of being obsessed with everything the man did or was doing, thinking, “Hmm, I could definitely get into the U of Iowa, I think… but can I really bring myself to spend four years… IN IOWA?” That might have been a bit of a wake-up call for me, actually. Not going to Iowa might have been my first conscious movement away from following whatever some boy did.
Of course, I’ve since learned that Iowa is a wonderful place and lots of fantastic people live there, but at the time I was just picturing a big cornfield under a perpetually overcast sky.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:45 pm
Ok,…. I am officially thee only female that did not like him. In fact, I don’t even know if I ever took his class. That is seriously how little I thought of him. Did we have to take Eisenhart’s class? I feel more left out than I did in highschool ….. Hehehe! I do remember our “security” guys by their first names though. John and Chris ….because I spent all my time trying to escape. I did go to mr kalins class everyday though. The mr Wendell song brought tears to my eyes!
I still hate the fact that I remember so little of our time in highschool. I was totally trying to just get by so I could leave, now I wouldn’t mind going back.
Wait, we didn’t discover the violent femmes!?! Same on your man for totally taking our music discovery!
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Sorry for my spelling mistakes, I always use my phone to use the Internet and it autocorrects my bad typing. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes nit bug I love smartphone access
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:43 pm
EFFING A, I just wrote a NOVELLA-length response to this, including the only halfway cohesive recap I’ve ever penned of The Incident that made me realize I was in heart with Mr. E., but Wordpress ATE IT.
*@&#$#@(&*$@(#$)(*!*@)*(#$
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:59 pm
Technology, love to hate it!
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