He passed, but I'm about to pass out

Late August, Doug was informed that he had passed the written examination, he felt more comfortable telling people. It was all so futuristic and based on “if” (if he passes the orals, if he clears security, if we pass our physicals) that the conversations carried a dreamlike quality with them.

If the applicant passes the written exam then someone at the State Department looks at their application (the one he had turned in months previous). If they find you acceptable on paper they ask you to sign up for an oral assessment which takes place in either D.C. or Atlanta. Doug signed up for his oral assessment in March to coincide with my mission trip to Belize. The oral assessment is an all day experience. Each applicant is teamed up with 4 or 5 others and given sample projects to present to the group. The group is given a budget which will only allow so many of the projects to be funded. You must sell your project while recognizing that one of the others may be more important and, therefore, ready to concede your own. Translate: do you work and play well with others? You are interviewed one on one. The nice thing about the orals is they give you the result that day. You’re either in or you are out. Those who fail the orals must begin the entire process again with the initial application. Those who are in begin security screening.

In addition to my 38 piano students (I lost two due to a job loss in their family), I started back to teaching the junior high students each Sunday morning at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church with one change: this year, the senior high teacher quit and they asked me if I’d take on junior and senior high. Together. In one room. In the early morning. For some reason I agreed.

First I had to find a topic that appealed to a sixth grader as much as a senior in high school. I chose money. There’s a wonderful book called “The Richest Man in Babylon” by It is written in a series of short stories following a few characters around ancient Babylon learning the secrets to great wealth from a friend and from other chance acquaintances. I wanted to keep up the storytelling format I had used last year so each week I told the story of each chapter then we discussed it. Then we held debates. The juniors chose the topic of student selected curriculum in school and the seniors chose lowering the drinking age. Last year I wrote my students during the week to keep their minds on what we were discussing in class. That, unfortunately, happened very little this year.


With Doug having been back to work for a while, I decided to return to St. Thomas for a piano class - this time private piano, one of the pedagogy requirements. The teacher, Kathy Faricy is smart and tough.

We did not even touch the piano during the first lesson. We talked of posture, of sitting at the instrument and of my basic make up as a person. The second lesson I played one key at a time with one finger at a time using a new technique – a technique, for the duration of our time together that only Kathy could spot as being correct or incorrect.

She assigned me a Bach Invention, a Clementi Sonata and a Chopin Prelude. I was to record my practice each day – exactly what I practiced and for how long. I was to practice one measure at a time, one hand at a time until I could play each three times in a row correctly. Then I was to practice it hands together until I could play it three times in a row correctly. And thus I was to proceed through each piece. If I got through four measures one day, I was to begin at measure #5 the next day and not back up until I met a goal of x number of new measures. I took to that method of practice much better than I expected.

The Bach Inventions are just plain hard. They are sort of like playing a round with yourself; one hand begins then the next hand begins a few beats later. And I don’t like them. They are impressive. I wish I could play them. But I don’t like them even when I hear them well played. The Clementi was not too difficult but it was boring. And it would get stuck in my head for the day the way a bad commercial jingle will. But the Chopin I loved. It did, however, take a lot of focused time and, as things were beginning to move quickly toward us relocating, that became extremely difficult. What with the wedding and all . . . I didn’t mention the wedding, did I?

I was hired to play piano for the wedding of the daughter of one of the women in our church. I played one wedding a long time ago. I’m not a wedding pianist. The bride-to-be called me and told me that I came recommended. I tried not to laugh when I asked her who had recommended me. It was a woman from our church. There is only one thing I can figure. When Doug was Senior Warden for a year at St. Anne’s I would occasionally go to the church with him on Saturday and play on the grand while he worked in the office. Once or twice the altar guild ladies were there setting up for the next day’s service. I must have been playing one of my better pieces when this woman overheard me. Anyway, it was a good challenge for me; one I took on before we knew Doug had passed his exam. It was just too much work to perfect the wedding pieces (about ten or twelve) while learning these three new pieces with the new technique Kathy was teaching me. I approached Kathy about dropping the Bach, Clementi and the Chopin in consideration of all this and working on the wedding pieces. She said okay. A world of pressure was lifted from me.

Doug passed the oral assessment yet still the Foreign Service was not a certainty. We still had to pass security and medical screenings. The process of the security clearance began. This involves filling out somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 papers requesting current phone numbers for everyone from your pre-K class to the guy you asked directions of when you were in Moscow 19 years ago to someone in a suit knocking on the doors of those individuals, your neighbors and your employer and asking lots of questions about you face to face. Meanwhile we each went to Mayo for physicals for the medical clearance.

The period during the security and medical clearance was the most difficult for me. It was highly emotional. I have always had clean examinations with one exception decades ago. Just two years ago, Mayo was singing my praises; I was so healthy! Then came the one exam that made a difference and I had trouble. In just about every part of me that makes me a woman, I had trouble. Fie! (That’s old world speak for “fuck”, which would upset my mother and piano students if they read this, and I’ve decided to rid myself of such speech. As a side bar, since I’m posting this months after the facts, I have succeeded in ridding myself of such base speech as part of my personal boot camp. More on that later. )