BLOOMABILITY

LESSONS

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At first, Dinnie didn’t see the opportunities that were all around her in beautiful Switzerland.

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“Later I would be able to look at this view and to see it and appreciate it, and it would affect me profoundly. But on that first day, I could only see what wasn’t there: my family” (24).

 

“I was thinking about the two prisoners. It was a story that a boy, Guthrie, had told me the day before: There were two prisoners in a jail cell. They looked out the same small window. One prisoner said, ‘Man oh man, what a lot of dirt!’ The other man said, ‘Man oh man, what a lot of sky!’ … Beneath my feet was a crumbling stone path, splattered with rotting persimmons. Pieces of the orange fruit were stuck to my new shoes. Wasps dived in and out of the fruit, and a lizard darted along the edge of an old stone wall. What did the lizard see? Could he see only the path and rotting persimmons and wasps? Then I looked up, like the second prisoner must have done. Ahead were palm trees lining the path, a blue sky with puffs of white clouds, and hills rolling toward the blue lake. Switzerland curled along one shore, and Italy sprawled on the other” (27).

 

“Guthrie was like the one who only saw the sky, and Lila was like the one who only saw the dirt. I wondered where I fit in. Was I somewhere in the middle, seeing the in-between things?” (233).

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Guthrie is kind, upbeat, and not afraid of adventure.

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When he got buried in an avalanche, he knew that people were out there praying for him, and he even chuckled thinking about how the Japanese classmate Keisuke pronounced “stupid” as “stew-pod”. After he got rescued, he was in terrible shape, but he retained an optimistic attitude and caringly asked how Lila was recovering (since he also saw her get buried).

“I understood exactly what Guthrie meant when he shouted Libero! It was a celebration of being alive” (229).

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Lila is a pessimistic spoiled brat who openly complains about her problems, blaming others for her unhappiness.

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• On the second day of school, Lila persistently demanded a roommate change (since she got assigned to live with a Spanish girl who she said she couldn’t understand). Lila didn’t understand how the school intentionally mixed up kids to be with kids of other nationalities (so that they can expand their worldview). 

 

• Lila repeatedly complained about the Cafeteria food, demanding for “real” American food to be served.

 

• Lila skipped mandatory community service, claiming that it was slave labor.

 

• Lila demanded for the school to hire another tennis coach (since the tennis class was all filled up and she got placed in the swimming class, which wasn’t her first pick).

 

• Lila gossiped about how rude it was for the Japanese students to not look her in the eye when they talked (even though the opposite behavior could be considered rude in their home country).

 

• Lila complained about how she couldn’t tell all the Japanese apart (and thought that it wasn’t possible for Japanese to not be able to tell Americans apart).

 

• Lila thought it was rude that the Italian students were loud and dressed too “flashy”, as if they were showing off their money.

 

• Lila complained that it was rude for the German students to answer all the questions that the teachers asked in class before she had enough time to think of the answer.

 

• Even though Lila got rescued from the avalanche a lot sooner than Guthrie (and thus wasn’t in as bad of shape), she complained about how bad her injuries looked, complained about not having a private hospital room, and demanded for the nurses to bring her American magazines.

 

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Expanding our worldview can put our problems in perspective. However, this awareness doesn’t do any good until it affects our actions.

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“We knew about disaster from our previous schools and previous lives. We’d had access to televisions and newspapers. But the return to Lugano [after Winter Break] marked the beginning of Global Awareness Month, and in each of our classes, we talked about disaster: disaster man-made and natural. We talked about ozone depletion and the extinction of species and depleted rain forests and war and poverty and AIDS. We talked about refugees and slaughter and famine… An Iraqi boy from the upper school came to our history class and talked about what it felt like when the Americans bombed his country. Keisuke talked about how he felt responsible for World War II, and a German student said she felt the same. We got into heated discussions over the neglect of infant females in some cultures, and horrific cases of child abuse worldwide. We fasted one day each week to raise our consciousness about hunger, and we sent money and canned goods and clothing to charities” (147-148).

 

“In classes and in the dorms, all around her, [Lila] heard people complaining, just as she had used to do, but they were complaining about real trauma. She couldn’t revert to complaining about the food, because people were afraid to eat it, thinking of all the starving humanity, all the millions of starving people in the world” (155).

 

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Dinnie’s teachers also challenged the students with more interesting discussion topics.

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“‘Why do they have military practice? Switzerland is neutral --’. ‘Neutral doesn’t mean you don’t have to be prepared to defend yourself’” (38).

 

“‘Remember after Bork was expelled and your uncle gave that talk? Remember? He asked us that question: What would you do if you knew you wouldn’t be caught? What a question! And didn’t he say you could judge someone by what he would do if he knew he wouldn’t get caught? I think about that all the time.’ And so she and Mari talked about what they might do if they wouldn’t get caught. Would they steal a wallet? A television? Would they sneak out of the dorm? Would they kill someone?“ (139).

“What would you sacrifice for someone else? This was a rowdy topic. We went crazy with this one. At first people said things like, ‘I guess I’d sacrifice my stereo if my friend wanted it,’ and ‘I’d sacrifice my allowance in order to save up for something I wanted.’ Then I said, ‘But what about food? Would you sacrifice food if someone else was hungry?’ Keisuke wanted to know exactly how much food I was talking about. ‘And what about a kidney, say? Would you sacrifice a kidney if your brother needed it?’ Guthrie asked. And finally, ‘Would you sacrifice your life?’” (175-176).

 

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Learning languages can help you connect with more people and cultures. But that journey can be difficult.

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“How did you figure out which words were masculine and which were feminine? Why was a car feminine and a boat masculine? Why wasn’t everything neutral?... I’d picture a car with lipstick and a boat with a moustache, in order to remember which was feminine and which was masculine” (58).

 

“According to my teacher, I had told her I went to bed at seven hundred o’clock, and that I was three hundred and thirty years old. She said I’d just asked my classmate How much does the time cost? and I want six hundred potatoes, no thank you. Had my Grandma Fiorelli really spoken this language, and had she really not known any English when she’d come to America, and had it been hard for her to learn English? I wondered about these things from time to time. And then I’d wonder about all the foreign students in this American school -- all the Japanese and Spanish and French and Norwegian and Indian and Saudi Arabian and Iranian and German and Dutch and Chinese -- how could they study whole subjects like history and algebra and science in English, a completely different language from their own? When they asked me ‘How to discover them gym?’ or “Do you habit America?’ they were making more sense in English than I was in Italian” (59-60).

Just like how Eris says “bald trees”: “[Keisuke] mangled English, but the words he substituted were often better than the right ones. Plumpy seemed a better description than plump, and bloomable sounded much more interesting than possible. When he said running in my ears the bells, we knew exactly what he meant, and it seemed exactly the right way of saying how the St. Abbondio bells echoed in your head after they’d stopped ringing” (101).

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