Murder Most Foul

On my students

Photo by Zach Lezniewicz on Unsplash

The aspect of my day job (technically it’s a side hustle—I don’t do it full time—but I love the phrase “my day job” and use it inappropriately to refer to things I either do part-time or don’t do at all) I enjoy the most, hands down, is teaching writing. I get to teach adult humans how to think.

One of my students stumbled on a crime scene while walking her dog this evening. Some poor bastard either fell or was pushed from a high cliff, bounced off some rocks, and went into a body of water.

For context, two years ago, before we started working together, she would have had the fucking vapors. I know without a shadow of a doubt she would have affected mild hysterics and called everyone in her phone book, babbling a mile a minute about the senseless tragedy, like every other rubbernecker present. She might have sought therapy.

This was not the case today.

I first learned of this gruesome episode when my text message alert revealed that she’d sent me three of the video clips she had dispassionately shot over the half hour—at a minimum—she’d spent watching Emergency Services do their jobs. The clips are amazing. As the SAR helicopter hovers overhead, lowering a diver to recover the body, you can hear her muttering about how “the goddamn promontory makes it so I can’t see where he landed.”

My student was a highly strung, melodramatic lady of a certain age when we met. She is now a focused, methodical language arts pit bull who engages in the kind of task-oriented civil disobedience required to Get. The. Story. without a nanosecond’s hesitation. It’s been like watching a time-lapse video where Kitty Forman from That 70’s Show metamorphoses into Kinsey Milhone.

I am so proud of her.