How does the common complaint from school kids go? I’ll never use *this* in “real life” so why do I have to learn it? The truth can go beyond the logical answer of that it teaches problem-solving skills and the ability to think about things from different angles. You just never know what connections will occur as a direct result of the things you are forced to learn in school.
My senior year of high school, I had advanced English with Mr. Day. He would assign challenging books for us to read, write analytical papers on, and then discuss. I could not get into Waiting for Godot, but Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka was definitely my all-time favorite. Little did I know, this would frame an important moment less than 5 years later.
In unpacking some boxes from this last move this morning, I came across my love letters from Bob. I actually have quite a few as we wrote to each other every day while he was on a 5-week business trip overseas near the beginning of our relationship, and then later on, we decided to forego gifts to each other at Christmas time and our anniversaries in lieu of love notes and “experience” gifts. This is a practice I highly recommend. I picked up a random letter to read, which turned out to be from our anniversary of 2000, our 7th. He described the moment when he knew he wanted to know me. “You were sitting on the floor and you knew Kafka.”
You see, I was just a friend of his sister’s, about 10 years younger than he, and visiting my friend to watch a movie, which just happened to have a trailer for “Kafka” at the start.
Elizabeth Said So 