Moldy Cheese Day

Americans love October and celebrate it with jovial boldness. How? (1) Decorating with wreaths and centerpieces reflecting Mother Nature’s colors. (2) Hosting bug-free campfires and serving pots of chili. (3) Creating traffic on usually isolated backroads wearing hoodies and ooh-ing and aah-ing at the vivid landscape and the wildlife that call it home.

I’m not following suit with praises for the usual. Instead, I invite you to commemorate with me an obscure holiday celebrated on October 9. The holiday is meaningful for nostalgic reasons related to my time as a French teacher.

Sunday, October 9 is Moldy Cheese Day!

Catching a glimpse of that holiday instantly triggered a replay of an innocent question from a student at the start of a normal day. ``Madame Lee, how do you say…?” was asked often - too often. (I am to blame for that. As many beginning foreign language students do, they spent a lot of time looking up words of an English sentence in the English/French dictionary). That was BEFORE they heard about verb conjugations and the inverted word order of most but not all adjective/noun combos. Until they learned how to conjugate and make adjectives agree in number and gender with the nouns they modified, they’d JAT - Just Ask Teacher.

“Comment-dit-on… (I encouraged them to begin the request in French.)..The cheese is old and moldy?” Oui, that is an odd request. I worked diligently throughout my career NOT to show surprise when interacting with high school students.

We constructed the French sentence together. Nouns are among vocabulary taught first so they knew ‘cheese’ and the word for ‘is’ was tricky, but we could get there. Those predicate adjectives were trickier, but, hey, it was a teachable moment.

The second time I was asked, I assumed there had been a tête-à-tête over lunch perhaps. I may have rushed the teachable moment still using my matter-of- fact expression, I hoped.

By the third time I heard it, I was nonplussed and no doubt it showed. Then it became a battle of wills. Obviously it was an attempt to stall the start of class, and I wasn’t falling for it..again. “Go ask…” became my response the multiple times it came my way that day.

Then there was a twist to the question. “Is…(garbled syllables that mostly meant nothing)...how you say “The cheese is old and moldy”? But I wasn’t falling for it. “Go ask…” Some random nonsense was not going to deter me from the entire lesson plan for the day.

So when I glimpsed the name of the holiday celebrated on 10/9, I googled it immediately to see what I might have missed all those years ago.

Turns out plenty! The whole quote is “The cheese is old and moldy. Where is the bathroom?” said in Spanish. How to ask directions to the bathroom is a typical beginning foreign language staple, right up there with “What is your name?” and “What is the date?” They already knew that part. I will celebrate Moldy Cheese Day by watching Encino Man.

(For the 10/05/2022 PN)