Echoes from the Past: Trauma, Hope, and Jacket Potatoes
Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy took control of my body, but not my promise for the future
A baked potato.
In turbulent times, my mind goes back to a baked potato served with fillings and condiments: butter, gravy, baked beans, prawns, cheese, and my favorite — tuna. In America, I had baked potatoes with butter, but as an American in London, England, I became acquainted with “Jacket Potatoes,” and fell in love.
I’m beginning to forget their exact taste after over 15 years back in Chicago, just as I’m forgetting how it feels to not see a wheelchair or walker next to my bed, required whenever the signals my brain sends through my body don’t reach their destination, much less accompany me safely across the Atlantic Ocean with a nervous system on the fritz.
In 2016, long after my London experience, I was diagnosed with CIDP, an autoimmune neurological disorder. The fading memory of taste scares me because this is my ticket to freedom, with or without an illness, and so I revisit the potato experience often.
I would love to taste the independence those Jacket Potatoes from the Victoria Tube Station in London brought me. I used to walk by that station nightly, on the way home from my Teaching English as a Second or Other Language (TESOL) class to pick up school supplies, people watch, sit at the food court and just…be. Alicia Keys played on the giant screen TV…a lot. “No One.” I didn’t have much money for frivolities, but those potatoes tasted far better in that cold, vast tunnel, than the ugly taste of trauma the previous year had left in my mouth.
I left my first full-time teaching position mid-year. My professors taught us how to teach, how to protect our students from dangerous situations, and trained us to recognize trauma, but the one thing they didn’t teach us was how to protect ourselves. I was a 23 year old young man charged with the education and well-being of 120 students ranging in ages from 11–13. I was the only male teacher in that musty, old building with the broken heater in my classroom that banged incessantly.
-I read to the students. Bang.
-I told them to free-write. Bang.
-I decorated our classroom with them for Halloween with spooky skeletons, cobwebs, and spiders. Bang.
-I directed them in “A Christmas Carol,” as we all sang. Bang.
-I listened as two 7th graders accused me of inappropriate conduct after handing out my first and last set of detentions for disrupting the classroom.
Bang.
I did not know how to defend myself from the emotional trauma an accusation of this nature brings while still teaching six classes a day. I was so young and did not have the skills to articulate my emotional needs to friends, family, and to an unsupportive principal. I only knew that I needed to get through each lesson until winter recess without breaking down. My taste for teaching and life were gone, just as swiftly as the students came forward, admitting to lying in retaliation for the detentions. I told my classes I would not be returning after winter break and I broke the cardinal rule: I sobbed with them, and the heater banged.
Several months later, before heading to O’Hare Airport, my mom sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” to annoy me and she cried, though we knew I’d be back after a few months after my TESOL course. It was a rigorous, yet safe segue back to finding control. I needed some semblance of the Jonathan I’d lost, back, and I couldn’t find him in the old familiar places, so I traveled across the ocean looking for something I couldn’t see.
A baked potato.
It seems so simple, but it remains with me, blocking out that broken, banging heater. Those jacket potatoes filled with cheese and tuna felt so good. So freeing. No one to ask me why I was eating tuna and cheese or even beef, on my potato. It was my choice. Alone. And I was no longer Jonathan, Jon, Big Jon, Jsauce, Sauce Man, Mr, S., or Mr. Saucedo, because I didn’t know who those people were anymore. One day of accusations had taken care of that.
In London, I was at the height of my sophistication eating those hot potatoes. They were everywhere, like hot dog vendors in Chicago, and there for my taking whenever I wanted one. That was all I needed and truthfully all I could afford besides the free B&B continental breakfast as I ran out the door of the Park Hotel each morning to get to Victoria Station and Tottenham Court Road. I’d never been so free.
I made a friend, Sarah with the long dark hair and southern accent from Tennessee, who came bumbling into the classroom still dragging her luggage from the airport on that first day of class looking the way I felt from the year before in the States. And over the course of that summer, we decided we were going to find our way back to that life in London while we were still young, come hell or high water. I could have stayed forever, but with no work Visa, we knew a return to the United States was inevitable.
Over the coming weeks, I began to spring out of the B&B with more pep than the previous day, and more confidence. Each day brought less noise and more freedom. I was not tethered to my trauma; I began to find my survival skills in a foreign country where I had no choice but to fend for myself. And the country was good to me. The sound of the banging heater began to dim in my memory, replaced with images of Saturday afternoons spent at Covent Garden and the gentle sound of a busker with his guitar crooning: “I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again…” What were the odds? I still have his CD, 15 years later, but no CD player.
One day I felt ready to return home, knowing I would be back.
I wish I could taste those jacket potatoes again. In London. They have to be there. What popular singer now blasts through those cold, echo filled tunnels — Alicia Keys? Do those Jacket Potatoes still taste as good as I remember? I think of these things as I practice going from a seated to a standing position in physical therapy. I remember walking up the stairs in the train station with my backpack over my shoulder, ordering those potatoes and writing lesson plans for my TESOL program. I remember what it feels like to walk more than a few feet, or hold a fork in my hand without flinging the contents onto my shirt when my hands spasm.
Potatoes with tuna and cheese are messy. I remember this when I feed myself…in the teachers’ lounge of my new school. I’m back, but there’s a taste that still lingers in my mind.
I promised myself I would return to London. Sarah made it back. I’ll have to ask her what it looks like now and if my potatoes are still everywhere I remember. I wonder if she has a British accent now. Her kids do.
I wrap myself in these piping hot memories when doubt over the future begins to creep in as my body malfunctions. I found my way back to myself once before, and whenever someone hums “…leaving on a jet plane”, I remember I have a friend, a potato, the skills and independence to find my way back to myself again, here or in London.
There is no more banging. I only taste freedom.
