Instructor Annabelle Johnston, as I read her name from her black belt, seemed to tower over me as I walked into the small dojang, or training room. As if it weren’t evident from her black uniform next to my gray, from her clear smiling face and well-kept brown ponytail next to my awkward, zit-pocked face and blond tangles, from her five-foot-eight height next to my five-foot-four, or simply from the two gold stripes on her belt next to my one, Instructor Johnston was my superior. Additionally, she was my elder––and, if I happened to be helping a taekwondo class she taught, my boss. Despite all those disparities in rank, it still felt odd to have her teach me one-on-one when she was a student herself. Our black-belt classes taught all ranks from first degree onward, so regardless of these disparities, I trained alongside her every week.
“Hi, T. I. Pietsch!” she welcomed me, managing to make the clunky title, short for Training Instructor, sound calm and breezy. “Nice to see you. Feeling excited to test for your second-degree black belt?” She immediately got to the heart of the matter, the same in her teaching as in everything else. I had never seen her waste a second during training, being the fastest off the mark during drills and stretching for minutes on end before we even began officially warming up during classes. Her shoulders were broad, her posture was perfect, she stood straighter than any teenager I’d ever seen, and her voice was strong without being over excited. The minimum age for instructors was fifteen, but I took her to be much older.
“Yes, ma’am,” I responded dutifully. Instructor Johnston had been assigned as my mentor while I prepared for my second degree, and I felt extremely apprehensive about whether I would be ready by the deadline several months away. I couldn’t keep my forms straight in my head and definitely wasn’t prepared to crush blocks of cement into powder as I’d seen the older black belts do at their graduations.
Still, I trusted her to prepare me effectively for the test. The lesson began, and much like the Grinch’s heart growing three sizes in a day, I felt my respect and awe for Instructor Johnston soar during those thirty minutes. As I watched her demonstrate a front kick, I thought how much more intense it was in this moment than when I caught the same technique out of the corner of my eye in class. She bent her knees just so the hems of her pants pooled at the floor, and with a loud crack from her uniform, she seemed to rocket up toward the ceiling all at once, her foot flying out to snap an imaginary opponent’s head backward.
Our master’s favorite adage was that what you put into your training, you got out of it. I wondered, watching her leg shiver slightly from the force of the extension as she held it at 60 degrees to the floor, what kind of training she did to have a kick like that.
“Try it for me,” she instructed gently. Now I wondered if a part of the instructor’s uniform was a voice modulator that made you sound as soothing or as commanding as need be. (No, I told myself, Instructor Tracy’s voice cracked so hard last week when he was teaching that he had to stop class.) “You know the move; just remember these techniques and it’ll be so much stronger.”
The process continued much the same over the next few months. Instructor Johnston managed to consistently pack a full hour-long class’s training regimen into half that time. We warmed up with long sequences of blocks and kicks; then she watched me practice my forms, only stepping in to help when I faltered. I would then stand still, wait for her to come at me with a punch, a grab for my wrists, or a choke hold, and do my best to turn things around and pin her to the floor. Finally, she held out a callused hand or a thick kicking target for me to practice board breaking techniques on, and I felt an odd sense of pride every time she gave a long whistle and shook her hand like it had been burned. Every week I came in feeling apprehensive, and every week she managed to allay my fears almost too easily, never showing visible frustration. I began to talk with her almost casually (although we still had to call each other “sir” and “ma’am”) and eased into things more, becoming more receptive to her teaching.
One week before the test date, I felt like a well-oiled machine. The clean crack of thick practice boards, which we used to prepare for the brick breaking on graduation day, rang out through the dojang again and again.
“Awesome,” Instructor Johnston told me, a smile and pride clear in her voice. “I think you’re ready; that last one was about as tough as the bricks they use.”
“Thanks, ma’am!” I grinned at her, straightening up from where I’d dropped to a knee. “I’m…”––my eyes dropped to the side––“…still a bit rusty on my last forms though. Can we go over those, please?” Despite everything the past months had taught me, I still worried she might get frustrated with me for no better reason than my own anxiety.
“Okay!” She subverted my expectations again, her calm response knocking the wind out of any notions of fight or flight I’d had. “Let’s work through them together.” She stepped over to my left and raised a fist to her shoulder, poised to move into the first block of the form. “Ready?”
“Sure.” My shoulders relaxed and my eyes returned forward. I tried to hide my surprise that she’d responded so readily and willingly, watching her heavy, focused strikes at the air and subtly altering my stance to match her own.
The test came at long last, and Instructor Johnston watched me perform form after form competently, if not confidently. The bricks broke the moment my hand touched down, and a week later I was awarded my second-degree black belt.
Nearly three years passed without my seeing much of her, apart from one test in October of my junior year when I watched her crush three bricks into powder, testing for her third degree and the title of senior instructor. One day in the following July, I walked into the building ready to start work as a counselor for our school’s summer camp and saw her wearing an oversized, dark-blue shirt with STAFF written on the back.
“Emma, it’s fine,” she hushed a child who had the uniform look of despair that all little kids seemed to wear, one that made it impossible to tell whether she had had her Oreos stolen or been told her family was dead. She was sitting on the edge of a hurricane, a chorus of glass-shatteringly high shrieks and the thunk-thunk of foam dodgeballs hitting their targets resounding from the dojang floor. The voices of several people in dark-blue shirts rose above the rest, trying to subdue the kids who were getting more of an energy outlet than they needed. “Everyone gets out! You’ll get to play again in the next round, all right?” She spotted me and waved, taking her attention off the girl next to her, who already seemed to be cheering up. “T. I. Pietsch! Are you working too?”
“Hi, ma’am!” I smiled and waved back. “That’s right. Any chance you know where I can get a shirt like that?”
“Follow me,” she indicated, walking into the back toward a closet of spare uniforms and gear. As I traced her steps, I noticed I was nearly eye level with her. My eyes flicked to the enormous water bottle swinging from her fingers, emblazoned with stickers reading GO CRAZY, AAAAH, GO STUPID, AAAAH and ROAD WORK AHEAD? I SURE HOPE IT DOES. “Aaaand, here you go!” She handed me a shirt, and I unfolded it to discover it was the same size as hers.
During a break one day, I sat in the staff room struggling to focus on a thick book and block out the ambient shrieks of kids competing to see who could find the most violent way to play with Legos.
“Hey, sir!” The door swung open and Instructor Johnston walked in, swinging her backpack off a coat rack and onto her shoulder. “What’s that you’re reading? Is it for school?”
“Oh, hey,” I returned her lively greeting. “Yeah, it’s summer stuff for AP Euro.”
“Really? Nice, I took that this year! Is it fun?”
This year. She took AP Euro this year?
“Enough.” I gave a sideways thumbs-up to show my enthusiasm, which distracted from how blown away I was by the fact that she was only one year older than me. It had been a fifteen-year-old Instructor Johnston who demonstrated such a blistering front kick for a fourteen-year-old me, and it was an eighteen-year-old Instructor Johnston chaperoning a whole group of kids and breaking up a fight a minute while a seventeen-year-old me helped on the sidelines in classes and refereed dodgeball games. I tried again to focus after she left, but was so dumbfounded that the words seemed to slide all about the page.
One year? Really? I continued to wonder to myself, barely noticing how my front kick went as high as her own, as we demonstrated for students on opposite sides of the room. She’s so much more accomplished than me, I thought as I talked down two sulking kids on a playground bench while she watched to see which member of her group would be the first to do something dangerous on a swing. There’s no way we’re on the same level in anything, my internal monologue ran as we laughed and talked completely naturally and informally on the camp bus to a hiking trail.
In the beginning of August, our master held a meeting to talk about working hours for the month. “So,” he began, “Instructor Johnston will be out of town here in week seven. We have fewer people here than normal during most time slots.” He set down his clipboard and swept his eyes around the room full of black- and gray- uniformed staffers sitting straight-backed. “We need someone to fill in that week. Five full days, 9 till 5.” Most of the instructors were already working longer shifts than I was, or taking on more work by leading the groups. For a while I had been wondering whether my work was worth it for the camp. I came in for three hours a day, five on rare occasions, to watch over breaks, classes late in the day, and the chaotic recess as the kids waited to be picked up. Instructor Johnston had worked full days since the beginning of the summer.
“Yes, sir,” I piped up. “I think I can do that.”