Tribute to Teacher JM.

As Heather Morris puts it in his work The Tattooist of Auschwitz , “If you wake up in the morning, it is a good day.” Nonetheless, I've seen better days than others. Moreso, in the last 2 years than the rest of the years I have been on this planet..this is not to say I don't like life. I treasure it..in fact, I'd give anything to have it extended as much as humanly possible. The scene is at our place, one of the apartments on the 3rd floor of Riviera court in South B in Nairobi, It's one of the few times I volunteer to do the dishes. I'm almost done when I am stopped abruptly by some inexplicable force and this particular memory plays: It's around 7 pm on a Sunday evening and we're just playing soccer with Evan, Fay, and some friends. My mom's voice suddenly disrupts, ' Chiri lapat KapBamuru iibu mwaita nekiilegei ', now, I don't even have to ask for cash, since 'Bamuru' was kind enough to let us 'take-stuff-on-credit-and-pay-later', a phenomenon I was very familiar with growing up, having grown up in a small, impoverished village where money was a very hard concept, leave alone job or business. Now, I'm running as fast as I can to get back as soon as possible, to continue playing..as you know, tomorrow being a Monday meant no play as much as I'd want till the next weekend. The shop, which is approximately 100meters from home, is wooden and painted black with a blue railing, white rusty sheets, and in a complex shape that's out of my class-3-math scope. I get there heaving and running short of breath, and bow my head to help get the air in my lungs without disturbing the peace that currently envelopes the place and also avoid looking like a deer caught in headlights. I should have stopped outside for a sec to recover. JM is sat on one of those bar-high stools, with his back hunched forward towards a kerosene lamp that's dimly lit because of all the layers coating the glass case in order to read the newspaper in his hands. I am also familiar with this scene. I don't think I ever went to JM's shop without finding him hunched over with a daily nation newspaper. Now, I'm buying time to get my English together because JM never talked to me in any language other than the Whiteman's, and it's been a while since I used it, seeing as it was a weekend. For a class 3 pupil in a village, it's damn long. 'Hello, how are you?' he asks once he's lifted his head from the paper he was engrossed in, now I feel guilty for disrupting him but we need Armis for school tomorrow, 'I am fine, thank you!' 'How is the family? How is your mother? Is your father at home?' are some of the most common questions he'd ask me, and almost always it was 'Everyone is okay, Mother is fine, Father is not home'..after this small talk I would ask for Armis and then I get Deja Vu that I might have mispronounced the word coz he'd corrected me on the same the last time I was here. " It's not Armis..It is Arimis, as in A-r-i-m-i-s " he would unabashedly correct. I would quickly nod and repeat it correctly ' Arimis! ' He would go ahead and take it from the shelf and hand it over, not forgetting a minty sweet as a reward for the little lesson we had or for the entire interaction or owing to the fact that I was a kid and kids love sweets..I think it was for the latter. I really appreciated the sweets nonetheless. Do you know how rare these luxuries were then? Yes, I grew up with the philosophy of 'if you can live without, it's a luxury . He would then go ahead to tell me some vocabulary he's just come across, how it's spelled, the pronunciation, and when to use it. He would show me the crossword he's just used the word in. At this point, I am no longer in a hurry to go back to play, coz he's had my full attention immediately he handed me the sweet and I'm wondering how long he's been reading the paper but deep down I know he's been reading since morning and I've been playing and repeating the same mistakes of mispronouncing Arimis for the 100th time. For those who didn't grow up in a Kenyan village, good teachers who would go out of their way to teach or correct you were hard to come by. In fact, you wouldn't know one was a teacher outside of the classroom. Now, I'm slowly walking back home with Arimis , the sweet having finished coz I'm a kid and kids literally chew a sweet in under 1 second, while re-thinking my 'life' choices with an added vocabulary that the whole school would know about in the next composition-writing session. Now, I am no longer psyched about finishing up the dishes. I'm now stuck in a headspace re-thinking my 'life' choices with no added vocabulary. I am 26 for God's sake! or is it 27? Been in and out of life for a while now. Exactly 15 minutes later, we receive the phone call , life stops, monstrous ineluctable fate seems inevitable, it's a very cruel awakening, the room darkens and turns super cold..and now it all makes sense except it doesn't. I can't account for the time and events after till the final farewell. I finally found peace and acceptance and I hope Kapmais as a whole also did. And so you know, my English is no longer shabby thanks to you and a few other great teachers I have found along the way. In all honesty, I can attest to the scarcity of teachers who are not vain, who are not proud, who are not impervious, who are not pompous and yet necessarily unyielding. Dad JM, It's been a year+, been trying to put words together, It's been a while since I penned..life has been crazy. It's been a universe of 'perhaps I wouldn't have turned around, not even for a second'..all the missed visits, missed vocabularies, and missed smiles and laughter. I daresay I'll turn around now, coz my days have never been brighter, so intimate is my conviction that I'd preserve my memories of you and perhaps share with anyone who runs short and in need of them along the way. Perhaps the sun will always shine. And we will always try again. Keep resting in eternal peace .