TUESDAY: The First Time: A Memoir

BY DAVID TOPPER

Copyright is held by the author.

NEARLY EVERY life has a series of “first times,” no matter how long or short one lives. The first day of school, or the first bicycle — these quickly come to mind. Probably because of the deep and wide reading I’ve been doing for a story I wrote, I recalled another “first” in my life. It came to me with the same chill up my spine as on the day it happened. And that was long ago.

I’m now into my early 80s and this event is from the late 1960s when I was finishing my PhD, which required that I pass a second language test. It was the last essential test, since I was finishing up my dissertation. In the early 1960s, as an undergraduate, I had taken German for the language requirement and naturally I opted for German for the graduate requirement too. Relevant here is the fact that of all the undergraduate courses I took, the only subject for which I had poor grades was — you guessed it? — German, where I got less than As and Bs.

On the day appointed, I walked across campus to the German department and took the test. The task was to translate a page of text. I can’t recall the content or anything about it. But the result was sent to me and — I suppose not surprisingly — I didn’t pass. I was informed that I could make an appointment with a member of the department to go over the test and to get some tutoring to help me prepare for another try.

But where is the “first in my life” that this memoir is all about? As said above, I only recently recalled this “first.” The trigger was a newscast that Yale University professor Timothy Snyder was moving to the University of Toronto because of the recent presidential elections in the USA. This caught my attention because his monumental book, Black Earth, on the Holocaust in the shtetls of Eastern Europe during World War II, was so crucial to that story I wrote. Thus, my subconscious kicked in and that newscast led me back to when I met the tutor.

Frankly, I don’t remember much about that day. Not the time of year, or the weather. Except that I again walked across campus, this time to meet my German tutor. Even so, I only remember three things about the tutor — beyond the fact that it was woman. She was much older than me and she spoke with a thick accent.

We sat at a table, she to my left, and in front of us on the table was my translation sheet covered with corrections in red; the original German text was beside it, to the right. Slowly she went over my translation, pointing out my mistakes. I sat, focusing on what I did wrong and listening to her suggestions for what I should have done — when, for a brief moment, she reached across my sheet to point to a German word in the original text. With her left hand and her bare arm right in front of me — I saw something on the underside of that arm.

At the time, I knew about this. I had read about it. But back in the late 1960s I had never seen it for real — in the flesh. Really. Yes, “in the flesh” isn’t a metaphor. Indeed, I’m getting the same chill now just thinking about it, as I did when I saw it — for the first time.

On the inside of that arm, she had a tattoo — a very simple tattoo — just a five-digit number. Nothing else.

I was so rattled by this that I couldn’t focus on what she was saying anymore. The tattoo blurred out much of everything else for the rest of the day.

Fortunately, this happened near the end of our meeting, and I apparently absorbed enough of her help so that when I did take the test the second time — I passed. And here I am: a retired professor after many years of teaching.

Even today, that first tattoo is still seared in my mind. Oh, and that’s the third thing I’ll always remember about the tutor who helped me pass that key test on the road to my PhD.

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David R. Topper writes in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has appeared in Mono, Poetic Sun, Discretionary Love, Poetry Pacific, Academy of the Heart & Mind, Altered Reality Mag., and elsewhere. His poem “Seascape with Gulls: My Father’s Last Painting” won first prize in CommuterLit‘s annual poetry contest in May 2025.