Gifts for the class

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, our German class is coming to an end all too quickly. And like most of the other classes I have had at American River College, it will be sad to see it end knowing that there's a good likelihood we'll never see each other or the teacher again. She will not be teaching the second semester of German so even if any of us continue it won't be with Ms. Martin.

So it was with surprise and delight that we accepted some "remembrance gifts" from Ms. Martin. She had studied German literature in Germany and the texts for many of her classes came in the form of small (4 x 6 in) booklets originally costing about $1 to $1.50. They were inexpensive so that students could afford them and small enough that you didn't get a backache from carrying 4 or 5 around. She brought it a pile of maybe 20 of these booklets - more than enough for each of the remaining 14 students to have one. Before she gave them out, though, she pointed to me and said that she wanted me to have a certain one. If I didn't like it, I could trade.

This is the one that she held out for me: J. W. Goethe's "Satires, Farces, and Clowning Around." I feel very honored to be singled out for a specific book, especially one that is by a noteworthy writer and philosopher such as Goethe and one that is specifically about humor. (Now I once had a friend tell me that the shortest book ever written was "500 years of German Humor" but I don't believe that's true. It's just that German humor is not American humor any more than British humor is. Isn't that interesting?)

Anyway, she said we probably wouldn't be able to read our little booklets but I'm finding mine easier to read than I expected. Thank you, Suzannah Martin, for a wonderful class and for this small remembrance gift.