Higuruma x son's teacher
Part one:
I find that though I am proficient in four languages and have two degrees, the weight of my intelligence is not enough to combat the faces people make when I say I work with children.
“A teacher?”
I can always feel the judgement immediately.
“oh… must be rewarding”
Translation: that’s not a real job.
I’ve had the same conversations various times in different ways with different people – same facial reaction, same unease.
Though there’s perhaps one person who’s never done that.
Hiromi.
It began at parent’s evening last year. I set up my station, mentally practiced in my head a hundred times how to deliver the good and the bad, how to say it all with a smile of assurance.
“Just a little bit more effort-“
Your child is lazy.
“I’ve seen some progress-“
I’m tired of babysitting your 15-year-old.
“Your child sure has some interesting ideas”
Utterly useless.
This time though? This year we had a new student transfer and the boy – Subaru Higuruma. He was a scholastic marvel. There wasn’t a subject he didn’t excel at, though his manners never slipped – not an inch. An absolute pleasure.
And so this parent’s evening I found myself somewhat excited, excited to meet the boy’s parents and tell them how wonderful their son was. It’s not often I ever got to deliver that kind of news. That’s the meeting I’d planned in my head the most.
I’d expected two parents, a mother and a father. But that wasn’t what I got. Instead, I got a hot flush and nervous finger tapping, something I thought I’d trained out of myself in high school. Probably serves me right for being so presumptuous about nuclear families – how stupid of me … and very unprofessional.
No there was one parent for the boy.
Hiromi Higuruma.
A tall frame, dark brooding eyes, the smell of dark coffee, a strong bitter roast, a lingering aroma of parchment paper – maybe ink?
His suit was perfectly pressed, the tie in an amazingly symmetrical middle between the openings of the suit jacket. His hair was dark, as dark as his eyes. Come to think of it everything about him was dark and gothic, even the hook of his nose bended just so, to create a dark shadow on his upper lip, hovering over light stubble like a phantom.
Everything about his tall stature made me itch. Made me feel silly and childish in my bright clothes, like a chilly breeze breaking through a summer heat, unnerving, a warning of something colder to come.
During the meeting his tone was succinct, careful, not too generous, not too cold, monotone, calculating. He nodded to everything I said, a measured nod, listened and when the meeting finished, he muttered a soft appraisal to his son, a managed thank you to me, and disappeared before I could even think.
The boy said his dad’s a lawyer. All his careful management of tone makes sense to me now.
Suddenly I felt very stupid for being excited for the meeting. It was just like any other and to be frank, his father practically ignored me. He listened sure, but listened as if I was a talking machine Everything was so procedural, no warmth.
What a wonderful, charming boy.
But what an obtuse and unfeeling father.
