Radiators

All notions are tinted with memory. The Mariners are tinted with Dad's moustache. Lincoln Park is tinted with the hazy memory of napping with my mom on a blanket on the rocky beach. The Greece to the Czech Republic bike trip is tinted with Roman's rolled Drum.

Spanish is perhaps the most tinted of all, and it pleases me that in Spanish, red wine isn't vino rojo, but vino tinto: clarity obscured and enriched with color. My Spanish is tinted with Neruda, plaza Anibal Pinto, Flamenco, San Sebastian, le musee Picasso, the Pacific Ocean, the Morelia zocalo, the greased Pinochet-esqe hair of the Chilean Navy, the Spanglish of my student Flor.

Spanish has enchanted me and enamored me, and it continues to do so. I know why: its beauty, the cultures linked to it like branches to a tree, the memories I've grown from those branches.

Yet the tinting of Spanish for me was as domestic as can be: it began in high school.

While I still associate high school Spanish with the absolutely bizarre bee husbandry stories of Mr. Abrahamson and the saltwater, ear-infection stories of the Brazilian, Zahajko, the origins of my Spanish are tinted most with the sounds and steam of radiators.

In the southwest corner of my high school, I sat at my desk, the back of my chair hitting the radiators behind me. I wore the uniform of 90s adolescence: baggy jeans, pimples, running shoes.

The radiators clanked, hissed, and choked out of their metallic, serpentine forms. The windows above them steamed up so that none of us students could see 23rd Ave. nor the skippers smoking cigarettes with the French teacher, M. Prevert, nor the rain that obscured and enriched everything. On one side of me sat Chris Scallini, a weird guy, a little guy, a weird little guy, and on the other Chrissy Regal, a fellow West Seattleite, who had bum knees at the age of 14.

B.F. Skinner, who I largely dislike and find creepy, said, "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."

And: I don't remember what I learned in this class. I don't remember the subjunctive; I don't remember the preterite exercises or the vocabulary building exercises. But: I do remember my education. I remember glancing at pictures of Cartagena; I remember looking at Don Quixote's sillhouette; I remember trying to pull out words from Gypsy King songs; I remember the hippyish girls in the room whose clothing was flowy and spoke with Ms. Patricia in private about her journeys in El Salvador. I remember the photo of Marquez looking down on us students. I remember his eyebrows.

The classroom (the images, the texts, the music, the myths) taught me this: Spanish was full of purples, parrots, paella, and parties. It was also full of, yes, love and passion and siestas, and I could get down with all those, and I still can. These are qualities I demand from life.

The world of Spanish was Utopian in my mind, and it still is: an ideal that has guided my choices, values, and goals. What I couldn't find in the culture of English, I have often found in the culture of Spanish, and it didn't matter if some of that culture was my own imaginary creation. In Spanish, I have found warmth, value of the present, utter indifference to authority, family. In Spanish I have found balms to heal the clawings of materialism.

(I have lived in Chile and Mexico, traveled in Spain and Argentina, and even with the realities I've seen, some of which matched my high school ideal and some did not, the ideal survives. The purples and parrots survive in my mind.)

My education was this: love for Spanish. It was not mastering the present perfect that did this, it was the language itself. The thing itself.

As a teacher, I sometimes think it's impossible to assess what matters to me most as an educator: the experience. How much learning is done by being and observing! Yes, my skills in Spanish have permitted me to have the lives I've wanted. But the carrot that pulled me through that hard work was love for the thing itself: español.

And when I think of español, I think of radiators.