DeAnna Woolston

I love catching people’s little slices of life. I’m the lady who when walking through your neighborhood in the evening will look in lit up windows to see a tiny piece of your life unfolding. (You’re welcome—I love your wall hangings and your dinner smells delicious.)

A couple of times a week, I walk the dogs through the gates at the far side of my favorite dog park and into a large field. If I stay on the edges, we can squeeze a couple miles out of it which is enough to take Puzzle’s border collie crack high down a notch. On the far side of the huge field is an elementary school and just after 8 am every weekday morning, they blast the announcements inside and outside the school. I’m sure the neighbors in a mile radius also look forward to the announcements as a sort of morning alarm to startle the coffee out of their hands. At some point a kid will get on. Probably a popular little guy on the ASB; he speaks too loud and too close to the microphone. He will share a few upcoming events with the rest of the school and then tell a very bad joke. He has to be popular otherwise he’d end up stuffed in a locker for days with how terrible the joke is—which he inevitably follows with a loud HAHAHA! I’ve only caught the joke twice because ridiculous things like dropping Ari and Luke off first and cleaning up after my dogs gets in my way. Hearing that kid is like a beaconing call for me though—I try to rush over and usually just catch his voice and not what he’s saying. Both times I heard the joke though, it made my day.

I love it because of the HAHAHA and it makes me think of my own kids at (an admittedly way less fun) school where jokes are probably banned in favor of talking about character traits and working hard. Having a good sense of humor is not a character trait promoted at my kids’ school. 

I love hearing the morning announcements because it also reminds me of when I was in elementary school. They were mostly not happy times because I was super shy, always in my head and was a new kid or a kid about to move again most of the time. I spent a lot of quiet time endlessly drawing, or talking to myself (sometimes not out loud…which is probably why I didn’t have a ton of friends), or reading, or thinking up alternative futures. I’d like to say I created Harry Potter level worlds, but more than likely my fantasies were of a fictious farm filled with rescued factory farm animals far away from people. There were probably vegetarian restaurants everywhere in that fabled place and the only magic was that the crunchy waitstaff didn’t smell of B.O.. 

There were school highlights—-like when in Germany they did an elementary school Halloween parade of costumes through the entire K-12 school and I was sporting a Miss Piggy outfit my mom made complete with a blond wig attached to a mask made of a pink hand towel with a Dixie cup sewn inside for my snout. For that parade (and probably for the first and last time in my life), I was so damn popular. 

The two years in Singapore during the 80s were my favorite times in school. Singapore has been this strange little magnet through the years—where I’ve collected random people (in an un-serial-killer way) who also lived on that small, strange little island. Just this week, volunteering at a food bank, I met a couple (who were regular volunteers) and recently came back from living in Asia for 18 years (6 of them spent in Singapore). She worked in embassies! Talk about a dream job. I could totally live in cool countries while rocking ugly pant suits, not brushing my hair, doing political intrigue/espionage type of things and hanging out with Rufus Sewell’s hazel eyes (like in The Diplomat). I’m sure real life as a diplomat is exactly like that since she mentioned there was a floor in the embassy in South Korea where nobody was allowed to talk about what they did. Sign me up. I could not talk about my interesting work for ages.

SAS or the Singapore American School was this melting pot of privileged kids from around the globe. It was the best school I attended in terms of teaching and it was the one place I sort of fit in. My closest friends were part of the Bukit Timah Saddle Club, where we rode horses a few times a week. But I also had school friends from all over SE Asia and Europe. For a while I ate lunch with a group of girls from Finland and Norway who had the same sense of humor as Ari and Luke’s school—dry, cold and non-existent. They were longggg lunches. Even though I don’t remember if we had morning announcements at SAS, those garbled announcements I caught this morning were a portal into bright blue skies, swimming pools and palm trees. 

They brought back my polyester uniform, outside lunchrooms and hours of homework. Pushy grandmas in grocery stores and the long tropical snakes that would sun themselves from one side of the road to the other. The chattering monkeys who would chase us on horseback or watch my brother and I play badminton in the front yard. Skinned roasted ducks hanging by their necks like umbrella handles in windows. Bargaining to get bootlegged cassette tapes for 99 cents or watching American movies at a theater that were so censored large chunks would just be a black screen (even the VHS tapes my brother ordered of NFL games were censored before he got them). Being tricked into thinking popcorn would be salty when instead it was sickeningly sweet and jello would be sweet when it was sickeningly salty. The taxi rides to the saddle club, where the driver would ask me who to bet on for the horse races and I would tell him Nicholas Silver and LuLu (two Shetland ponies in the horse yard that very much did not race or really do anything you asked). Feeling safe to walk around the city late at night as a young teen, but then being unsafe with our swim instructor at school. The rain storms in church that were so loud we couldn’t hear anything at all and would instantly flood the streets. The morning call for “Glose-lees” where my mom would tell the man what groceries she wanted and they would be delivered later in the day like door dash before door dash. Pockets of Indian culture and Chinese culture with their rich holidays and fragrant food. Lee Kuan Yew was the leader and was brilliant, but authoritarian. Singapore was loud with the good and bad of life and one little school announcement brought me there.