Everybody let's clap it up for Kevin where is he Kevin! So I've always
considered myself a very blessed, good family, good health, educated, and I never
thought about how lucky I was day to day until I studied abroad in
France and I met my friend Mark and his lack of luck just kind of highlighted my
abundance of it. My host family had this apartment in the center of town and a
block away from school near all the hotspots and his family lived about an
hour and a half away by like a commuter train. The college hosted one day skiing
for us and at lunch on the mountain I met this beautiful girl and he got food
poisoning from the beef bourguignon and then he slipped and he got really badly
injured on the ice and almost missed the bus on the way home. But things changed a
little bit when we started taking classes. For some reason Mark and I
decided to sign up for a class that was all about this obscure French poet so it
was already hard enough to take classes in French let alone like French poetic
language so I'm not really sure what our thinking was but this little professor
kind of conducted class the same way every day. He'd read an excerpt from the
poem from homework the night before, he'd give his analysis, and then he would go
to his class roster and just kind of look up and down and he would choose a
name and he'd call that name and then for the next 30 minutes you had to be
the one to have a conversation with him and that was half your grade so
Mark and I would sit terrified during the 15 seconds while he scanned the list
and both of our names ended in M so when he would pause around the middle that
was especially scary. But it was always a good day when he would kind of look up
and down, "Ah, Julie!" or "Gustav!" because that means it was going to be a French
student and we could kind of sit back and exhale and we weren't going to
understand any of the conversation anyway so so we got through about half
the semester until my day came and he looked up and down his list and he was
like "Hello, Kevin!" so I was like "Oui?" like hoping maybe he had a different
question for me but he didn't and so I mumbled my way through like 30 minutes
of nothing I threw in a couple of like "uhhhh, donk" because I heard that that's
what French people do I think when they're supposed to be thinking about
stuff and then like there was still time to kill so I just started reading
passages from the poetry I was like I don't know but at least this is like
coherent and by the time it was over like some of the French students kind of
nodded at me sympathetically on the way out and yet somehow Mark in all his bad
luck made it all the way through almost without ever having his name called.
There were only 20 of us in the class, some of the French kids had already been
called twice. You had to be prepared and yet Mark made it all the way, he couldn't
believe it, until the the final class and he and I are sitting there, I'm thinking
I'm I'm good because there's only one name that hasn't been called yet
and the professor looks up and down his list and it was almost like
shock to him "Ah, Mark!" Silence and I'm sitting next to Mark and him like I
didn't want to elbow him, I didn't want to draw attention but he just sat there
"Mark Mancini?" Nothing, it was incredible, it was heroic, I couldn't believe it
he just pretended he wasn't there.
He was gonna defy this life of just bad luck and he was like "Screw it, I'm I'm
just gonna stare straight ahead." I
couldn't believe it and finally the professor called the name just one more
time and then he was like "Okay, d'accord" and went back to his list he was like
"Kevin?"