Oprah

They're working on homework: it's algebra (always algebra) and bio and geo and chem; histories of conquistadors and doughboys running concurrent and intersecting, as so appropriate, with graphic reports on STDs.  


It is, on a good day, a "How do I?" from one corner, "I don't get it," from the other and idle blank looks spotted from across the room.  It is multi-multi-get-them-on-tasking, but I am accustomed to leaping from equation to definition to question; it's high school: it's not that hard. 


But sometimes I am thrown.  Sometimes it's chemistry-- I've drawn the line--or a neuron misfired or just a blank in my less comprehensive-than-they-believe knowledge. But sometimes a question is so unexpected that I must pause and gather my wits. As in when a girl nine years removed from Mexico poses this particular query in the most American of accents: 


"Who's Oprah?" 


I falter. "What?" 


I am generally expert in explaining the most mundane of mundanities without a trace of detectable, "Really?"  


But near a decade in Oprah's world without the slightest notion? I'm not a fan, but I'm fascinated, and for the moment, stumped. 


"She's on TV. . .she's made movies. . .she has a magazine. She's really rich. . ." I trail off, consider. "She's Oprah," I want to say. 


For a few seconds more, I try to define through example and fact: Chicago, celebrities, crying middle-aged women. She looks at me like a foreigner. I turn the laptop to display a screenful of Google images; she blinks blankly. I don't bother to mention the weight.

She shrugs, incrementally informed about one more random American thing, and returns to whatever she was doing;  I scan the room for the slacking or perplexed as I exit a page full recognizable-to-most-but-not-all faces. Irrelevant? Not to me.  It's one more example of all the references surely missed in conversation and reading and lecture. No wonder, I think to myself in reminder. 


They're not as Americanized as we think.