DOWNLOAD, Part 1

For the last two months, I've been in an altered state of what feels like a deluxe version of PTSD--a kind of all-consuming, wonderous, exhausted stun.

It started after the nine consecutive days I taught in mid-March, over spring break. The mountain was especially crowded and my classes were bigger than usual. One day I had 12 kids, which I know to veterans is not a big deal, but I'm still new at this so it was challenging. Just counting heads all day long to make sure everyone was with me took extra energy. But what was even more challenging was the weather, which was unseasonably, punishingly hot, and the rule is, we are supposed to wear our full uniforms at all times, no matter what. Because as we all know, rules are rules, and apparently this rule was made before anyone could conceive of global warming, or skiing in 60+ degree weather in heavy, insulated pants, jackets, gloves and helmets.

So for nine days, there I was, leading my large, easily distracted, overdressed flush-faced groups of variously capable charges (who hailed from places like Florida and Kentucky and Texas and Oklahoma, and were understandably confused by the tropical mountain that was frying them to little crisps), through icy melting slush while simultaneously trying to stay one step ahead of the maddening crowds and also losing 10% of my body weight in water. This meant a Whole New Order of priorities. They were:

1. coming up with a lesson plan that was appropriate to conditions, crowds, and the wider skill levels and shorter attention spans of larger classes, while
2. paying extra-special attention to basic survival (no one hurt, no one lost, no one seizing from heat exhaustion) and
3. maintaining a cheerful, can-do attitude.

I'm not sure how I managed to do all of the above, but I did. Then, when I woke up on Day 10 with nowhere to go and nothing to do, I went into a stupor. It was like my whole entity was wondering what the hell I had just been through.  It didn't help that somewhere around day 6, in my rush to get to Morning Meeting in time, I slathered what I thought was sunscreen all over my face and neck, only to find out that late afternoon that it was just lotion. I was so sunburned that it hurt when my bedsheets touched my skin. And I'm just now shaking the last of the of it off.

BUT, it was also amazing. So many, many, many things I learned. They fall in these basic categories, so I'm going to right about them this way:

• Girls
• Boys
• Fleeting Unrelated Experiences 
• Little Misfits

Girls first. Next time.

xo,
Granny

FIRST CLASS

Each day starts with Morning Meeting, on the snow at 8:45. Instructors stand in a big circle, with a supervisor at the 12:00 position. The supervisor, who's holding a clipboard of notes, greets us and gives us a quick State Of The Resort: expected crowds, safety concerns, weather conditions, and theme of the day. 

Next, we do a half fun/half humiliating warm-up exercise ("Bring it aroouuund town!"), set to intentionally corny music played from a boom box. 

And finally, the supervisor announces instructor names and assigned class levels. In terms of type of class (semi-private to group lesson) and level (1-9), it seems as though first priority goes to veteran full-timers, and then, in descending order, to veteran part-timers, new full-timers, and new part-timers. Once assigned, each instructor goes to the corresponding designated area, and, for the next 20 minutes, as their students stream in, they greet and sign them in.

On my first day, six of us new part-timers weren't called. Our supervisor asked us go greet guests at the lobby doors until they knew where we were needed most.

At this point I should mention that I'd been up since 5:00 a.m. studying my PSIA handbook, trying to commit to memory the different skills, lifts, terrain, games, and activities appropriate for the five levels of ability I'm qualified to teach. Also, the two emergency numbers to call: one for when you lose a kid (BUT NEVER LOSE A KID) and one for when a kid gets hurt (BUT NEVER LET A KID GET HURT). It was all kind of jumbled in my brain, and I felt conspicuously fraudish: yes, I was wearing the uniform of an expert, but I didn't feel like an expert at all. Honestly, I felt a little scared.

So when our supervisor told us to go greet guests at the lobby doors, it was like I'd been bought some serious time. ("Yes! Put me at the lobby doors, coach! I got this!") And with a song in my heart, I skipped over to those lobby doors and got right to work, mixing it up like a pro: "Good morning! What a great smile! Have a great day out there!" "Hi there! Good to see you! Ready for a fantastic day?" "Look at you in your crazy purple jacket! Love it!" I was in a zone, in a groove, relaxed, happy, owning every ounce of authority my uniform conferred. Then, all of a sudden, my supervisor came up, said they were splitting up a Level One class that had gotten too big, and asked me to take half the kids.

Level Ones (aka "Never Evers") meet in a small fenced area. Two instructors were dividing seventeen kids, all between 7 and 10, except for one 15 year-old girl named Rita. Rita was one of four siblings who needed to stay together (the other three were boys, age 7, 8, and 10), and also, who looked like she wanted to kill herself. 

Right off the bat, I saw three things that totally justified Rita's complete hatred of her life at that moment:

1. She was one foot taller and five years older than all the other students. 
2. Her littlest brother was crying. 
3. The instructor I was taking her and her brothers from was a 22 year-old, drop-dead gorgeous guy, Romeo, from Argentina, or Italy, or some foreign country where they make excruciatingly handsome men with curly black hair, beards, and big brown eyes. So here she is, on a ski vacation (COOL!) with her three little brothers (NOT!) and just when the first non-lame thing appears on the horizon, in the form of a very cute, very foreign instructor, along comes Granny Flanders: "Hey there, kids! Who wants to have some fun?"

After this super-inspired greeting, I took a moment to assess the group: Rita was scowling into her iPhone, the littlest brother was crying, and the other two were staring at me with expectant, but doubtful, expressions.  And my mind went completely blank. I had no clue what to do next. None.

But just as my super-cheery smile started morphing into a panicked grimace, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the other Level One instructor, Glen (also bearded and handsome, what are the odds, Rita? Haha! Again, so sorry!). "Dude," he whispered. "What do you do when one of your kids refuses to put on his skis?"

And there it was: the very act of providence I needed. Glen believed I knew what I was doing, which somehow turned me into someone who knew what I was doing. Someone named "Dude."

The little boy he was pointing to was leaning against the fence, defiantly staring off into space, arms folded, legs casually crossed, skis on the ground next to him, kicked off to the side. His face had "Double-dog dare you to try and make me ski, you giant douchebag," written all over it.

"Take him aside, get down on his level, and ask him if he'll give you just one hour to show him how much fun this can be. Tell him if he's still unhappy after an hour, you'll call his parents and he can quit. Make a deal. And if that doesn't work, ask a supervisor for help," I said.

"Thanks, man."

When I turned back around, I was looking straight into Romeo's gorgeous eyes. "Your little one--the crying boy?" he said. "I have to tell you: his bindings is not the right size for his boots. He cannot put his skis on. You need to fix."

And this turned out to be how it went. There was no luxury of time to worry about the best way to manage things--things needed managing, so they got managed. After we had the bindings adjusted, I took the kids in for cocoa to warm up and talk about our plan for the day. Then, I sat next to the crying boy and asked him why he was sad. Looking up at me with pitiful tear-filled eyes, he said his legs hurt, that he'd played hockey six days in a row, he was tired and he wanted his dad. 

"Aw. I'm sorry," I said. "You know, sometimes, when I ski a bunch of days in a row, the next day I go out my legs are so sore I think I can't do it. But then, after about an hour, they feel better and I'm having fun. Would you be willing to give me just one hour and see if that happens for you? I want you to have fun, so if you're still hurting after an hour, we'll call your parents and you can go back and rest. Does that sound like something you'd be willing to try?"

Miraculously, he nodded his head. (Boo-yah!) 

And--surprise--he turned out to a lightning-fast learner and amazing little skier--his skating experience gave him a huge advantage. Seriously, he was paralleling by the end of the day, zipping around, having a great time, and really proud of his progress. The other two brothers were fun and sassy, and came up with an affectionate nickname for me based on the silly helmet cover I wear (see BUT NEVER LOSE A KID! above). I even eventually won over Rita, to the extent that 15 year-old girls can be won over by middle-aged women wearing embarrassing headgear. We bonded over having little brothers, and I made a joke about her Handsome-Romeo-for-Granny trade, which evoked surprised laughter and a shadow of a smile. Anyway, I must not have totally sucked, because two days later, the parents requested me for a second lesson with their kids--this time, a private one. Huge honor, major points.

So, I feel good in my uniform now. Am I an expert instructor? Hahaha, don't make me laugh! Not by a long shot, not even close.

But I want to be one someday. And in the meantime (and finally, at this age!) I'm okay with--proud of, even--what I am now: someone who's willing to learn, wants to help, and is doing my best.

And, who also happens to be a kick-ass greeter.

THE SHADOW, Episode 3

On my final day of shadowing, I was sent to meet up with Hank. 

Hank was bearded and thirtyish, with a world-weary way and gruff, resonant voice that sounded exactly like Seth Rogen's, making everything he said seem whimsically ironic. (This turned out to be a welcome touch later, when the going got rough.)

Another instructor was shadowing the class, too, a man from New Jersey and closer to my age. I’ll call him Murray because he looked like a cross between F. Murray Abraham and Steven Van Zandt. He had a way that was also world-weary, and his voice was also gruff, but without the whimsical quality. To be honest, he was a little bit scary.

There were seven kids in our Level One class, and it was a good thing there were three of us to teach it, because they spanned an unusually broad spectrum of skills. Particularly, the three siblings from South America: two brothers, 8 and 10, who were Level 4 skiers, and their 14 year-old sister “Monica,” who had never skied before. Their parents wanted them all together in the Level One class because, as they'd told Hank in their broken English at the beginning of the day, Monica was “clumsy” and needed her brothers’ help.

After we watched the kids ski a short line on the beginner slope, it was obvious that Monica needed much more attention than any of the other kids. To say she was struggling is an understatement: just glancing in her general direction seemed to cause her to fall over and pop out of her skis. Hank asked me to stay and work with her one-on-one, and he and Murray took the six younger students over to the larger magic carpet area several yards away.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that Monica was more than "clumsy;" what she had was a significant cognitive disability.  Perhaps "clumsy” was an off-translation for the actual word her parents intended, or maybe, in hopes of engineering a carefree day of togetherness for their three children, they'd intentionally downplayed the situation. I also figured out pretty quickly that, unlike her brothers, Monica didn’t speak English.

It had been snowing since early morning, and the four inches of fresh powder on the ground, combined with the fact that Monica’s bindings had been set to an impossibly low DIN, made our tricky situation even trickier. Monica would slide a yard forward, panic, cross her tips, fall, and pop out of her bindings. When she’d stand up, the bottoms of her boots instantly caked with big sticky clumps of snow. Each time it happened, I had to bend over and, with my handy dandy scraper, scrape the snow off her boot soles, one at a time, holding her leg the way you'd hold a horse's leg if you were shoeing it. Then, one at a time, I'd position her feet back into the bindings and click her back in.   

Monica was sweet as anything, but between her cognitive challenges and our language barrier (none of the Spanish phrases I know—“Dos mas mesas!” “Muy caliente!” “Gracias para los tenedors!”—had any practical application here), I was at a loss as to how to move us forward, figuratively or literally. Even if I had been able to speak Spanish, the point of what we were doing was beyond Monica's grasp, so using the right words to explain it wouldn't have changed much of anything. I tried pantomime, but exaggerated arm gestures and super-surprised facial expressions didn't seem to resonate with her, either, though they did inspire a smile or two. So there we were, doing this silly snowy dance that wasn't much fun for either of us: me holding Monica steady while she’d slide three feet down the hill, then picking her up after she’d fall and pop out of her bindings, then scraping the snow off the bottoms of her clumped up boots to get her back in her skis, then starting all over again.

After about a half-hour, Hank came back to check on us, which was a good thing because by then I was completely exhausted. While bending over and scraping the bottom of Monica's boots for the 25th time, I tried to bring him up to speed on the situation, but I was gasping for breath and could barely talk.

“Tell you what. You take a break. Go ski a lap and I’ll figure this out,” he said.

I stood up, nodded, and slowly, slowly walked to my skis, giving my heart rate the opportunity to go back to normal. Then, I put on my skis, and slowly, slowly began to make my way down the mountain, taking big wide turns and long greedy gulps of oxygen. 

The snow was dumping at this point, which created a quiet, solitary effect, a sort of freeze-frame for every moment that passed. As I skied along, an unexpected wave of relief, shame, and hurt feelings washed over me, and I flashed back to a Saturday morning about forty years ago, when I was a clumsy adolescent myself. My mother, who'd gotten a bee in her bonnet about something or other, had mandated a Father/Daughter Day Of Industry. "Go help your father in his workshop," she'd said. "You two need to spend more time together."

My father's "workshop" was the dirt-floored, low-ceilinged, dingy basement of our five-car garage, filled with ancient cars in various stages of disrepair. Piles and piles of tools, oil cans, car parts, rags, and other things I hoped I would never have to touch were haphazardly strewn atop a long narrow counter that ran the length of one wall. Above the counter was a row of grimy, cobweb-covered windows that let in just enough smeary bits of sunlight to remind me there was a bright, clean world out there, where carefree people were laughing and having fun. After about an hour of me sulking, limply accepting some grease-caked implement from my father, holding it the wrong way and making whatever we were working on harder to do, my father had enough. “Oh, forget it!" he finally snapped. "Just get out of the way, I"ll do this myself!” Victory! (sort of.)

When I got to the base, I shook off my melancholy, popped off my skis, got on the gondola, and chatted extra-amiably with the guests in my car, trying to better represent the resort I'd been miserably failing thus far.

At the top, Murray and a supervisor were standing with Monica, waiting to ride the gondola down. “Where’ve you been?” Murray asked. “Hank's been looking all over for you!”

“He told me to take a lap.” I said.

Murray looked at me with a “that does not compute” expression. “We’re taking Monica to get her bindings reset,” he said. “Go check in with Hank.”

“Where’ve you BEEN?” Hank asked when he saw me, still sounding exactly like Seth Rogen.

“You told me to take a lap—I took a lap.”

“Where—to the BOTTOM?” 

“Yeah.”

“You went to the BASE?”

“Yeah.”

“I meant take a lap up here, right here, a short one, on the magic carpet! Just to catch your breath! You skied all the way to the BOTTOM?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh man,” he said.  “We were looking all over for you. Okay, my bad, should've been more clear. So, Monica’s obviously got some cognitive issues that her parents didn’t quite explain. But that’s okay, there are three of us here. I couldn't find you so Murray said he’d work with her—but we need to adjust her DIN first. You and I will just work with the other kids—you okay with that?”

“Yeah.”

And after that, the day was great. Off in the distance, every now and then, I caught sight of Murray, who had an amazing, gentle patience (who knew?). He'd extended his elbow to Monica, and she held on to it as he walked alongside her, down the hill and up the magic carpet, a hundred times. They didn't talk, he just steadied her, smiled at her, and picked her up when she fell (now that her bindings were properly set, she wasn't popping out every time).

Hank and I worked with the other kids. Among them was another darling Scottish boy named Wilbur who, all limbs and sinew, had trouble controlling his speed and spacing. 

"Wilbur!" Hank barked at him after he almost crashed into the boy in front of him the fifth time. "Who's your best friend in Scotland? What's his name?"

"Harry," Wilbur said.

"Okay, so imagine Harry is between you and Jake, the kid in front of you. And if you get too close to Jake, you'll hurt Harry. Harry is your best friend. So leave enough space for Harry, okay?"

"Harry's quite fat," Wilbur said, in an act of full disclosure.  

Hank startled, and laughed for the first time that day. "Even better. Leave enough space for your fat friend Harry," he said, shaking his head.

At the end of the day, Monica's parents were visibly relieved and very, very grateful when Hank described how Murray had taken care of her. I realized how much they must have wondered, if not worried, about what kind of day she would have. Without mentioning her disability, Hank strongly suggested Monica take a private lesson the next day, since she responded so well to the individual attention we were able to give her because of the extra instructors. (They ended up taking his advice.)

While I was riding the bus back to my car, I thought about the hazards of engineering togetherness. Sometimes, we wish so hard for some idyllic scenario that we ignore what we know and try to make it happen by just throwing people together. Usually, it blows up in our faces. But every now and then, a scary guy from New Jersey is unexpectedly tender, and it works. Maybe not the way anyone intended, but it works.

I also thought about communication, and how, while mighty handy, words are not everything. But mostly I thought about how ironic it is that though our childhoods are so long gone, life goes by so, so fast. And here we are today, this age now, not exactly where we thought we'd be, and still trying to figure out our next move.

THE SHADOW: Episode 2

The next instructor I shadowed was, in a word, delightful.

When I met Ricky (fake name fake name fake name everyone in this blog has a fake name), the first thing I noticed was that he is at least ten years older than me. (And I am very old, so that makes him very, very old.) And I was worried. There's just no other way to put it.

I'd been sent by my supervisor to join him, and I found him at the base organizing the three boys in his Level 4 class, or, should I say, trying to. We have a lot of pockets in our uniform jackets, and there are lots of things we have to keep in them (class lists, lunch vouchers, kids' stickers, PSIA books, Band Aids, sunscreen, pens, and, for those of us with selectively fading vision, glasses) and Ricky was having trouble locating the particular thing he was looking for at that particular time.

He was muttering to himself while patting his right chest pocket with his left hand, his lower left pocket with his right hand, pulling his glasses from one side pocket while looking for the class list, taking the pen out of the other while looking for his glasses, dropping something in the snow, bending over to pick it up, which would make something else fall out of another pocket, so he'd bend over again to pick that up, stand up and start again (hey, Macarena!). Flailing like a hapless mix of Mr. Magoo and the panicking robot from Lost In Space, Ricky did little to inspire confidence. And the kids, who, motionless in their helmets and goggles, looked like a row of frozen multicolored fireplugs, were standing and watching, surely recalibrating their expectations for the day. This whole scene wasn't just a little bit amusing to me, and though I did my best to hide my giggling under my gaiter, it was hard. I've always had an embarrassing weakness for the slapstick misfortune of others: people tripping, slipping, fumbling, falling, bonking their heads--this is the manna of my mirth. If you're thinking I'm just mean, please know I got exactly what was coming to me two weeks later, when I stood before my first class of Level One kids (who may or may not have been giggling under their gaiters) doing the exact same thing. Yeah, karma's a bitch.

Anyway, right when Ricky finally got it together, a supervisor came up with a new girl, Emily, to join the class. Her dad whispered in my ear, "She's much more comfortable with women. Also, if she could get her hockey stop down today, that'd be great. It's the only thing keeping her from Level 5." I put my arm around Emily and smiled. "We'll be buddies! Let's stick together!" and she leaned into me. "I'm just in training today," I told her dad, "but I'll pass that on to Ricky."

Two more girls came to join, and Ricky did his "Danger, Will Robinson!" dance two more times, trying to get their names on the roster and stickers organized. As the rest of us stood by, doing our best to telepathically will Successful Item Location, I noticed that Emily was plastered to my side. Every step I took, even a small step to the side to shift my weight, Emily took, too. It was very sweet.

But then, when we were finally on the gondola, Ricky transformed. The doddering administrator was gone, and a relaxed and warm expert ski instructor emerged. He laid out a plan for the day, told a couple of funny jokes, talked about how much fun we were going to have and where we were going to go. While he watched the kids ski their first run, he took me aside and assessed each of them, describing where we were going to take them, what we were going to do, and why. He showed me a really fun game to play on a wide blue run below a slow chair: slalom around the chair shadows to work on linking turns. He also let the kids free ski a lot, which turned out to be a great thing to witness and understand the value of.

There was a little boy from Scotland in the group named Rory who was so damn cute it hurts to remember him. He was the smallest one, very small for his age, but also the best and most athletic skier, which is an endearing combination of traits. His crowning characteristic though, to my mind at least, was that accent. Drop-dead adorable. At lunch, I got a conversation started about what we were each most scared of, and Emily told me she was most scared of Bigfoot. I asked her if she knew the other names that Bigfoot-like creatures were called, she said no, and I told her about the Yeti. Then I asked her if she'd ever read any Tintin books; that there was a great book about the Yeti.

Little Rory piped up, his head barely higher than the tabletop, "He's quite scary, the Yeti." (Jesus Christ, did that little guy just say "quite?" I could barely stand it!)

"Yes," I said, "At first! But then when you get to know him, he turns out to be very gentle, right?"

Rory mentioned that he had all the Tintin books which gave us plenty to talk about, because I do, too, and we talked about our favorites, and we talked especially about the The Black Island, as it not is only set in Scotland, but also features another beast who is scary at first but then turns out to be gentle.

The rest of the day was the combination of things I am discovering this job regularly offers, in varying degrees: fun, educational, humbling, and heart-rending. At its the end, for example, Emily's father was visibly disappointed that Emily had not mastered her hockey stops, and I watched her go from proud and happy to self-consciously slumped as she stood listening to him demand Ricky explain why. But this was at least somewhat mitigated by the fact that a moment later, when we talked about poles (which the kids get when they reach Level 5) Rory turned to me and asked, "Is it quite difficult, skiing with sticks?"

THE SHADOW: Episode 1

So, my first day of shadowing a veteran ski instructor, which happened about a month ago, was one of the most personally and professionally gratifying experiences of my life. I'm not exaggerating.

When I met the instructor (whom I'll call "Mary") before the class, she brought me up to speed: "What we're going to have today is Day 2 of local elementary kids." (The company treats local underprivileged kids to two days of free ski lessons every year. She'd had this same group of six Level One fifth-graders the day before; this was her second day.) "Just so you know, I had one boy who was trouble all day yesterday. He was disrespectful, didn't follow rules--I'd tell him to ski down to a certain spot, and he'd go past it--he was fighting with another boy, punching him. At the end of the day, I told him and his bus driver that he had two chances today. If he blows it, he's going down to the base and he'll sit inside by himself. I can't have him disrupting the class like this and ruining everyone else's time."

When I met the kids (who, by the way, were adorable in their mismatched thrift store gear, their friendly enthusiasm, and their lack of self-consciousness), it was easy to see who the troublemaker was. When Mary started with "Today, kids, we're going to head right up the gondola and start our fun at the top of the hill," Juan (not his real name) said, loudly, "Fun for you, maybe, but not fun for us. You just tell us what we have to do, it's not fun." The instructor looked at him and said, firmly, "Juan, we talked about this yesterday, remember? If you keep being disrespectful and negative, I'm going to have to remove you from the class. You have two chances and you just used up one." Then she turned around to lead them to the gondola, and when she did, I saw Juan punch Manuel (also not his real name, I'm not using any real names, okay?) on the shoulder. I thought, "Man, it's going to be a short day for Juan if things don't change soon."

We rode the gondola up and Mary chatted amiably about what the kids had learned yesterday, what they would build on today. I had my eye on Smoldering Juan. I decided to try to be a useful shadow.

After we got to the top, the kids put on their skis and, single file, followed Mary, who was at the head of the line, to the bottom of the run. Juan was last in line, and I was behind him. "Hey, Juan," I said, "nice turns." I said this because it was true, he had really nice form, and also because, in my long history of interacting with high-maintenance misbehaving kids, I've witnessed the redirecting power of honest positive feedback. He turned to look at me and smiled brightly, "Thanks!" he said.

Here, I'd like to fully disclose that my hopeful intention was to somewhat mitigate his aggression and hostility. I thought that, maybe, with a little positive attention unrelated to his previous behavior, he might relax a little bit, shift focus, tone it down, and have fun. I had zero expectations for what actually happened.

"I'm not kidding," I said. "Those are really nice parallel turns you're doing. How many times have you skied?"

"It's my second day," he said.

"Ever?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said.

"Wow, that's amazing!" I said, not blowing smoke. He looked so comfortable on his skis. "Do you play other sports?" (We are slowly skiing in a line down the hill as we talk, and he's turning around to answer me and smiling shyly every time.)

"Yeah, soccer and baseball."

"Oh, well, that explains it. You're an athlete, so this comes naturally to you."

(Skiing in silence for a few beats.)

"So, Juan, what's your favorite sport?"

"Skiing."

(My heart kind of breaking.)

"That's wonderful. It's mine too. And you're so naturally good at it! It took me a LOT longer to get as good as you are after just two days."

One of the girls in our group fell down. Juan goes over to her and says, "Here, let me help you up," extends his hand. (Mary shouts from below, "Thanks, Juan, but let her try to do it herself. She needs to learn how!")

Juan steps back. "That was very nice of you to offer to help," I say.

Next ride up the gondola is convivial, we're telling jokes and coming up with nicknames for each other. At the top, while Juan is putting on his skis, he looks at me and says, "You're a really nice person."

Again, I was expecting--no, not even expecting: hoping for--a subtle change in Juan's behavior, nothing more. His direct and transparent gratitude took me completely by surprise.

"Well, thanks so much for saying that, Juan," I said. "You are, too!"

He looked surprised. "You think I'm nice?"

"I know you are!" I said. "We had a nice chat on the way down, I watched you offer to help Cynthia up when she fell. Sometimes people only see one side of us, and they think that's all we are. And that makes us feel bad and even act bad. But I see the real side of you and I know you're a smart and nice kid."

He stood there for a moment and then said, "You really get me."

(Again, heart kind of breaking.)

Mary shouted up from the lead of the line, "Juan, it's your turn to be the leader! Come on up front!" (The kids rotate who's at the head of the line skiing down, so everyone gets a turn being first and last.)

"That's okay, Mary. If it's okay, I'd like to be last again so I can ski with Granny!"

"Fine!" she said.

Juan winked at me and smiled.

As we were skiing down the second time, we chatted about school and food and things we both liked. Another group of kids from the same elementary school, with a different instructor, skied by. "HI JUAN!!" about four smitten girls called out in sing-song. The picture became clearer: what we have here is a 21st century, ten-year-old James Dean.

"Looks like you're pretty popular with the ladies," I teased.

He smiled and winked at me again. Hilarious.

At lunch, we sang "I'm All About That Bass" and had a dance contest, which I won. The kids said I didn't win because they didn't vote for me, and also because it wasn't a contest, but I reminded them that when one person is so completely awesome and so obviously the winner, contests and votes are unfair to everyone else, and also, not necessary.

Manuel The Punching Bag came up to me to speak to me privately. "Juan has anger management issues," he told me, watching for my reaction through thick glasses. "He can't control his temper sometimes."

"I saw him punch you this morning and you could have told Mary, and he could have been thrown out of the class. But you sucked it up. I heard he was mean to you all day yesterday. Why didn't you tell on him?"

He shrugged.

"Well, kudos to you for not fighting back. It's not fun to be picked on."

"He seems better today," Manuel said.

"Good," I said.

And that's how the rest of the day went. We skied, we had fun. Juan was chivalrous and charming to his classmates and even Mary. On the gondola rides, we told jokes. To add to the conundrum of this whole experience, here's the joke that Juan told:

"A neutron goes into a bar. 'How much are the drinks here?' he asked the bartender. The bartender says, 'For you, no charge.'"

Hugs at the end of the day. Heart full, head swimming.

Don't get me wrong, I have no illusions about what I'm doing here. There is nothing altruistic about teaching an exclusive, expensive, and somewhat ridiculous sport that only a small percentage of the population has access to, let alone can afford. 

But on this day, I was reminded once again there are millions of ways to make a difference in someone else's life. And on this day, Juan made a big difference in mine.

ORIENTATION, Part One

Wow. December was intense. I have never learned so much, been so humbled, and felt so successful all in one month before. 

There were four parts: orientation (indoor), on-the-snow training, shadowing, and teaching. I'll save "shadowing and teaching" for next posts, here's my slightly traumatized overview of the two former activities.

Orientation:
Basically two days of sitting in a room finding out about how smart you were to apply for the job, how much fun you're going to have, and what things not to do, or your ass will get fired. There was one "getting to know" you exercise that was particularly memorable, as each new hire was asked to stand and state name, place of origin, and unique thing about him or her. The woman who started showed her unique thing: thumbs that pointed at right angles in the opposite direction of her fingers. This inspired a chain reaction of physical anomalies, building in remarkable intensity to the guy who said he can make smoke come out of his mouth, and he did. Just by puffing his breath and holding it for what seemed like a long enough time to cause serious brain damage, he eventually forced smoke out of his mouth in little signal-like puffs. He was the star of the group after that, and made my ability to wiggle my nose seem kind of stupid.

On-The-Snow Training:
We broke into random groups and were toured around the mountain for six days by a trainer who explained terrain, teaching elements, ways to deal with various crises and challenges. He was great. My group consisted of five under-25 year-old men, one 23 year-old woman, and me. We were bonding and laughing and having such a great time I forgot completely about the age difference until one day, when when we were sitting around at lunch and our trainer was talking about communication; specifically, the different things you say to 7 year-olds vs 12 year-olds, what will be most effective with each group, and why. He said, "Younger kids like being singled out and praised individually, but teenagers don't, so general feedback is better with them." 

I inserted a joke: "Just FYI, Trainer, I never outgrew loving being singled out individually," and everyone laughed appreciatively. 

Then, a few minutes later, he said, "You have to think of parents, too," (gesturing to me with a kindly pat on my shoulder) "I don't know about you, but some older people are really unfamiliar with the internet, and the tools we use to track our students can be confusing to them." 

Short awkward silence, which I quickly filled with: "Just FYI, Trainer, when I said I liked being singled out individually, I meant with praise for how awesome I am, not speculation about the things I might not understand because of how fucking old I am."

Everyone laughed appreciatively, Trainer put his head in his hands sheepishly, and it would have been best to stop there, but I could not resist: "Also, this is definitely going in my blog."

So there it is. 

Love you, Trainer!