Sincerely About Us. Искренне о нас - страница 2

You took us swimming and gave us a ride in a canoe, let us run in your garden, hide behind berry bushes, play in a small garden pool, climb trees, and eat wild berries from their branches. You always had a joke up your sleeve and a broad smile on your face, even when your eyes showed how tired you were.

Mom said you were in a rush all the time: in a rush to live, to work, to spend time with your loved ones, to enjoy as much of this life, of its big and little moments as possible – as if you knew you didn’t have much of it ahead of you.

You were gone way too early for such an amazing man, but I will never forget how much you loved your family and how much you loved life.

When I first entered your classroom at the tender age of 10, my classmates and I were welcomed by the most radiant person I had seen at school so far. That alone seemed like a promising start to tackling this new unknown “monster” in my schedule called French.

Surprisingly enough, after I’d been placed into the French one third of my class, my parents didn’t object to the school’s decision. They must have believed it was way better than studying German, while also planning for me to learn English, which was becoming more and more popular, as an extracurricular class. For me, it was all the same at first as I didn’t understand the importance of one foreign language over another. However, it soon became clear, even to my young self, that I’d ended up in the right group: ours was much smaller than the English one, so we received a lot of individual attention, and we actually had consistency in this class while English teachers came and went, often leaving their students rather confused about what they were trying to learn.

I often looked forward to your lessons. You were always gentle and had the kindest and most charming of smiles. I didn’t consciously realize it, but I could definitely feel that you had a deep love for your subject, you were immersed in the French spirit and, most importantly, eager to share it all with us. And it WAS contagious. Although memorizing those endless verb endings and noun genders was sometimes very difficult, I was inspired to go on by the immense happiness I saw in your big brown eyes.

One of the most fun things you did was match our Russian names to their French equivalents. I became Claire, of course. This was the first time in my life that I had been called a version of my name that sounded unusual, allowing me to show a slightly different side of myself. The biggest challenge for me was the French R sound. I just couldn’t – or didn’t want to? – get it right for several months. However, you were always very patient with me and never pushed or pressured me. And so then, one day, it finally happened. Not only did I learn to pronounce the R correctly, but I also felt like something else changed inside me; I guess, in that moment, I shifted from learning the language analytically to acquiring it with all my being: feeling and sensing it rather than thinking. That’s why, even to this day, I consider sound and speech imitation to be crucial steps toward mastering any language.

Many years later I accidentally bumped into you in our old neighborhood and to my surprise, you looked as young and dazzling as you did in our first lesson. Eventually, you shared with me that you had indeed been fresh out of university when you started working at my school; and fresh out of a couple of trips to France, which definitely contributed to you embodying its spirit. It turns out, even at such a young age, my intuition was right.