Read Online After the Parade by Lori Ostlund - Free Book Online

National Occupation. “Why are you studying English?” Aaron had asked each student earlier, and Leonardo had explained that it was his first step toward becoming a pilot in China.
    â€œChina?” Aaron said. He had not meant to sound so surprised. “Why China?”
    â€œIs big country,” Leonardo said.
    â€œYes,” Aaron agreed, waiting for the explanation to continue, but Leonardo, he would learn, did not believe in explaining a point to death. He considered others capable of connecting the dots: a big country required lots of planes, planes required pilots. Leonardo’s reticence would not benefit his English, but Aaron could not help but think that circumspection was attractive in a pilot. Aaron did not like flying, particularly the life-and-death bargaining he did with himself each time he got on a plane. When he imagined the people who sat in the cockpit, he did not want to think of them as chatty sorts who cared about entertaining one another. He wanted to think of them like Leonardo, less enamored of words than flight.
    â€œYou have a question, Leonardo?” Aaron asked.
    â€œYesterday,” Leonardo said, “I hear my coworker say to my other coworker, ‘I hope the boss wasn’t mad.’ ” Leonardo leaned forward. “Is correct?”
    â€œYes,” Aaron said apologetically, for he could see the point in question. “It depends on the situation, but yes, it is correct.”
    â€œWhy?” Leonardo demanded, almost angrily. “Why he is saying ‘hope’ when it is past tense? Hope is about the future. This is what we always learn.”
    The other students nodded, asserting their collective will. Aaron could feel their frustration and beneath it their distrust, for they had been taught, rightfully, that hope described the future, yet here he stood, telling them that this was not always so. In just one hour, he had taken away more knowledge than he had supplied.
    Aaron had discovered his love of grammar as a boy, when he first observed in these structures and symbols a kind of order, patterns that allowed words—his first love—to join together and make sense. He saw that he could open his heart and love grammar almost more, the way one loved the uglier child best because it required more effort to do so. He was known for explaining grammar in ways that made sense, for filling the board with sketches and equations and even cartoons that his students eagerly copied into their notebooks. He turned now and wrote: I hope he wasn’t mad. Below the sentence, he drew atimeline, the past on the left marked Know, the future on the right, Don’t Know .
    â€œHere we are, between the past”—he pointed to the word Know —“and the future, which we don’t know.” He looked at them encouragingly. “Okay, now let’s say one of the drivers mixes up a very big pizza order, and the next day everyone is wondering whether the boss was mad when he found out, but nobody actually knows whether he was mad because he came in after everyone was already gone. How would you say that?”
    â€œI wish that he weren’t mad,” suggested Katya, the lone Russian.
    â€œOkay,” Aaron said. “Except that means he was mad, that I know he was mad.” A few of the students nodded. “In this case, the boss’s reaction is in the past, but we don’t know it yet. We’ll learn about it in the future, so we have to say, ‘I hope he wasn’t mad.’ ”
    He looked at them, they looked back, and then several more nodded. He was relieved to be back in the classroom, where he felt clear about what was needed from him: his knowledge and his steadying presence. But teaching provided something he needed also, a period each day when his own life receded.
    â€œIf there are no more questions,” he said, “let’s take a break.” He pointed one last time at the diagram