Rapunzel

The teacher incident reminds me of Rapunzel so this is perhaps a good time to talk about her. It was just a few months ago actually that it occurred to me what a schizoid, destructive experience it was attempting to deal with her. On the surface she was usually playing the good grandmother role, happy to see her grandkids and all that. She was subtly disdainful of me when others were around of course but when we were alone she really let me have it. It was as much a question of attitude and tone as anything else but as I grew older it became worse. There are a couple of incidents that I recall but there is one in particular that I can relate that should bring things into focus.

I was living in Vancouver and had come home to see Mom and “Gramma Ho” who was there for a visit. Things were not going that well for me at that time on any level and I made the perhaps ugly mistake of hinting to her that she might remember her in her will.
She told me to “go back to the ditch where I came from.” Mom can perhaps attest to this as she was sitting in the car with us at the time. We were driving to the ferry, it was night and we were just passing Elk Lake. I remember it like it was yesterday.

You would think that I would have gathered myself at that point and recognized her for the cruel person she was, at least in relation to me, but I didn’t because, for a lot of reasons, I had already internalized her assessment. She told me to go back to the ditch and that is essentially what I did. She went back to the pension that she collected for thirty five years.

She did bestow on me though the following little ditty: “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” If she were alive today I would point out that the “with” in “put up with” is not strictly speaking a preposition, it is part of phrasal verb, and therefore probably acceptable even by the Latin grammar upon which the original “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition rule is based.” I would go on to point out that in the entire history of modern linguistics I appear to be the only one to have noticed this. I would point out also that given a translation dictionary, a notebook, pen and a day or so to prepare I could explain all of this in Mandarin, with examples, thereby proving without a doubt what a total and complete fool I am. The song says that there is a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in but I am sure there was not a crack in her disdain for me. It was pure and complete, and I bet she was a lousy English teacher.