Mme. Gardinere

I attended a small school in Haiti. There were approximately 360 students from Pre-Kindergarten to 12th grade. It was like a family, in some ways. My French teacher's name was Madeleine Gardinere. Most students disliked her and were afraid of her. She could definitely be scary. She was tough and sometimes mean in her corrections of our French. In a way, she was right. We butchered the language. Grammar was so difficult, I still have trouble with it.

But I liked her. I saw elements beyond her hard exterior. She was always dressed in clean but fussy suits and always over-powdered her face, so that it looked like a ghoul had been pasted on top of her otherwise dark skin. She was not an expert in the makeup department, but it always gave us something to talk about.

She had terrible bunions on her feet and I couldn't help imagining the pain she must have experienced at the mercy of fashionably uncomfortable heels.

It's her history that intrigued me. There was a bitterness in her actions and words; but I saw the deeper sadness sitting at the back of her eyes. A sadness that I think stemmed from her aloneness. She had traveled around the world, seen and done so many exceptional things and I admired and wondered what it would be like to do the things she had done. But she was in her 60s and had never been married, had never had children and I think that this is where that bitterness stemmed from, why the sadness was there.

Perhaps she had regrets. I remember thinking she must have had a great love and she had lost it somehow; I was never to find out who or why or when.

Today I look at my life and the experiences I've had and I think of Mme. Gardinere. I wonder if I'm headed in the same direction. I'm traveling around the world, accumulating experiences that are priceless. They will forever be my own precious jewels that I carry on me. But I, too, am alone and my life seems to follow the same patterns of loss locked in a never-ending loop, like a suffocating necklace.

Mme. Gardinere, I love you and what you taught me. I will always be grateful for what you taught me. But forgive me, I do not want to end up like you. I don't want to expel that stench of bitterness. I don't want what you had.