An Examination

I just spent a frustrating time invigilating the most badly designed examination I have ever had the misfortune to participate in. The main problem was the food, but even the way the thing started and finished was badly handled. We had to march the students down hallways in an unfamiliar part of campus to the examination rooms, a process during which I got lost and had to ask for directions from an uncooperative Sikh who was engaged in an animated conversation with a friend. Once I found the room where my French class was to be examined, we all had to wait around for some of the more unreliable colleagues to arrive. The time allowed for the exam had been extended to take account of this problem, but some of the students were understandably annoyed about sitting there anxiously for over an hour while their invigilators trickled in.

To make things worse, some of my colleagues, teaching other sections of the same course, distributed the papers to their students without waiting for everyone to arrive, and although in theory students were not supposed to start until everyone had a paper, this was not announced, in fact nothing seemed to be announced, and so some students had more time than others to complete the work, and there was a lot of noise from the mutterings of the others. You could hardly hear yourself think. Things were not helped by the fact that the sections were all mixed up, so you had to know your students pretty well to be sure you were handing the exams out to the right ones.

Once the papers were distributed, we had to pick up a sort of attendance sheet for each of our sections and go around distributing the food, which the students had chosen previously and written down on the sheets under their name. So for example I would have to stock up my bag and be sure to give Alex a can of tomato paste, Donna a straw, James a kilo and a half of mandarins and Jihad a case of beer. As I passed, and students saw what the others had ordered, some of them wanted to change their minds - there was a lot of demand for mandarins - and in other cases I had a hard time remembering who was who, so Poppy might miss out on her artichokes, or Winston on his steak. In addition, as I went around, I realized I had not really properly prepared everything: there were whole Cosco-sized packets of pork chops for example clearly marked with instructions to cook before giving out to the students, and here they were slopping around in blood, looking unpleasantly raw.

As I was going through the produce and other foodstuffs, which we had to pick up from bins which were not at all well lit, I became angrier and angrier at the fools in the examination committee who had agreed to this. Why on earth had they not insisted on cooked foods, for example? Why were the students in each section not all together, so we could find them more easily? How had so many students managed to order beer, which was prohibited now even from faculty gatherings and celebrations? Fortunately, Ahmed had a coffee stand. He accepted the package of ground Arabica from me with a grateful grin which made all the mess somehow worthwhile, and then served me a cup of steaming coffee on top of which he added a thick treacle-like substance which for some reason I had to eat all in one go. It was disgusting, and I spat it out, only to realize that some of my students were watching disapprovingly.

Honens People

The Honens International Piano Competition is held in Calgary every three years and provides career development and a very substantial prize for the winner. For Calgarians it's a chance to hear some of the best young pianists in the world, playing alone, as accompanists, and with an orchestra. The format includes some free noon-hour recitals and this year I decided to go to one, in the foyer of the Jack Singer Concert Hall in downtown Calgary. I was excited.

Things didn't start off all too well because being October, a nasty wind had blown up during the night, the temperature was now just below zero and there was a good amount of snow blowing around me and a small, ginger-headed guy with a single front tooth, as we waited, stomping our feet, for the bus. We had to wait a long time because the snowfall in the early hours had made the roads difficult, so the bus, which supposedly comes every half an hour, was half an hour late. Every fall, Calgarians and their beloved City crews take months to get used to the idea that it's going to be cold, snow will come, and roads will be icy or impassible, especially in the morning.

Anyway, we finally boarded the bus and the one-toothed guy, amazingly, got off at the next stop. He could have walked there in five minutes. But of course you never know when a bus is going to come, so you stomp and wait in hope. The bus was cool inside for some reason, so I shivered a little, and when I took my seat in front of the beautiful shiny black piano in the foyer of the Jack Singer Concert Hall, my body was still warming up. There was an older lady in front of me who kept looking around for someone, and finally recognized an even older lady sitting next to me, heavily wrinkled, who must have been in her eighties. As I waited the twenty minutes or so for the recital to begin, they chatted happily across me as if I wasn't there at all, so I discovered where they'd parked, what groups they belonged to, what they were planning to do in Banff on the weekend and how the first lady's spouse's seventy-seventh birthday had gone, without having to ask anything, though being so closely involved, so to speak, I occasionally had to suppress the urge to request clarification about some detail. Funny little old ladies, I was thinking, filling their retirement up pleasantly and yet emptily somehow, with groups and clever parking tips and trips to Banff. I tried to tune them out, but they were so close and articulated so clearly that I had to listen to everything.

Then there was a change. The one in front started relating a dream, which of course is always more interesting than talking about real life. Then, in the dream, suddenly she was improvising and incredibly, she said, moving from one key to another with no reason. "I'd be in C sharp minor and then it'd be D major, can you imagine?" "No! You can't do that." "Well, that's how it was, and you know, I was thinking, when you try to analyze what Philip Glass is doing, well, in some ways it's the same thing, like..." And off she went into a complicated technical analysis of the music of Philip Glass, an avant-garde minimalist I had never imagined little old ladies could have heard of.

The other lady by my side appeared to follow the analysis easily, agreeing and commenting liberally, as I was finally able to tune out, since I didn't understand any of it. I looked around at the other people in the audience, many of them older women, dressed similarly and chatting happily. It occurred to me that my two were probably music teachers, and I now imagined that I was surrounded by dozens, perhaps scores, of present and former piano teachers, all much more familiar with music than I, all more capable of appreciating the pieces and assessing the qualities of the pianist. Because I'm old now, I didn't feel the deep humiliation I used to suffer in my younger days when I realized my sad inferiority in situations such as this, but I did feel humbled and a little ashamed. But then the two women segued smoothly into quilt-making and once again I was able to follow the conversation.

The recital, by the amazing Ukrainian pianist, Sasha Grynyuk, ended with Gulda's brilliant, jazzy Play Piano Play. As the last note sounded and Grynyuk slumped back, the lady at my side jumped up like a five-year-old, clapping and shouting something that sounded like "Yow, yow". I struggled to get to my feet - arthritis - since everyone else was up now, and turned to look at her again. "Yow," she was screaming, laughing,  applauding furiously, "Yow, yow".