Foreign Tongues

I was 18 years old the first time I awoke among native speakers of a foreign language.  The TWA airplane I was on had stopped for an early morning refueling at de Gualle Airport in Paris.  The plane was packed with college kids like me.  We were on our way to a village outside of Vienna, Austria, to spend a semester at an overseas campus of the university I attended.

We had touched down just before dawn.  A portable stairway was wheeled up to the plane and a cleaning crew came aboard to carry off garbage and tidy the bathrooms.  The cold morning air trailed in behind them, waking those of us who sat near the doorway, including me.  I unscrewed myself from the tortured posture of airline sleep to peer out at the wet tarmac, damp with fog.  The conversation among the uniformed workers had the smooth sexy rhythm of a Maurice Chevalier soft shoe number.  Of course, I didn't understand a word.  But, the fog, and the picture in my groggy travel-weary mind of the airport scene in Casablanca, and the coverall clad workmen with their nasal laughs and easy banter made me take notice--for the first time in my life--of what I might be in for, venturing outside the safety of the familiar.

The other thought I should have entertained--but did not--is how poorly I had prepared myself to take advantage of the opportunity I had been given; to do much more than peer, slack-jawed, at the interesting strangers I would meet, the art and culture and history I would encounter.   As a result of the choices I had made in my life up to that point, my adolescent frame of reference was what could be politely described as "limited," and my inclination at the time was to push out of my mind or make jokes about things unfamiliar or discomfiting.

I'd like to blame someone or something for my lack of interest in refined subjects and international affairs--my parents, my lower middle class circumstances, Joseph McCarthy--but the fact of the matter is, it was my own damn fault.

I had not paid attention to the opportunities I had been given.  True, up until that moment, the only foreign soil I had touched was some gritty pavement in Tijuana, and that had been under strict parental supervision and limited to a 30-minute border crossing during a family trip to Disneyland in 1957, just so we could say we had been to Mexico.  But, my parents had sacrificed to make months of payments on sets of both the Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book, and I might have followed up that visit with by reading an entry or two about Mexican culture.  I chose instead to lay awake nights dreaming of pitching a no-hitter in the World Series.

Years of Lutheran Sunday School exposed me to bible stories oozing with history and lessons on social justice (and injustice).  I chose to view the characters of the bible as mythically remote, actors in a time and place that no longer existed.   My mom served as Den Mother in Cub Scouts and my dad assisted at Boy Scout events, both supporting my expedition towards Eagle Scout.  Merit badges for Art, Architecture, and Music were there for the taking, but I chose Fingerprinting, because I could earn the badge from the local sheriff, whose collection of pickled fingers in evidence jars stimulated my ghoulish imagination.

My loving parents provided all the food and fishing and car trips to Nebraska and trailer camping in the summer that a lad could long for.  They instilled a strong sense of right and wrong and personal responsibility.  From them I learned that if you want something done right, you do it yourself.  Mine was was the upbringing of a good worker bee, which is a noble thing on which to hang an identity.

But it was not an identity that valued points of view or experiences which might upset their staunch Protestant determinism.  For my mother, topics beyond the weather and gardening and pinochle were taboo.  Politics?  Confusing and mostly irrelevant.  The affairs of others?  Impolite topics for public conversation.  Feelings?  Never shared, always contained.  Friends outside the church or our white bread neighborhood?  None, although there were many within the safe circle of the like-minded.

My dad's gaze was set, from the age of 14, on earning an honest living and not squandering what chances he might be given, like his father had done.  He always worked two or three jobs to keep the family finances afloat.  If it was practical and useful and didn't harm anyone, he was all for it.  As a tradesman, he was bent on getting the job done.  And if you worked hard and believed in the same things he did, you earned his respect.

My parents tithed out of a sense of thanksgiving, not obligation, and volunteered often at church and in the community.  But in the end, theirs was a mixed legacy--of generosity and love, of insularity and uneasiness with people and places beyond their ken.

What I responded with was rebellion.  When it blossomed in my late adolescence, it was petty and too often hurtful--growing my hair long, smoking cigarettes and dope, questioning organized religion, and refusing to do the "ordinary" thing, being different for difference's sake.  One of the cruelest examples of that impulse was my refusal to take photographs of any of the sights I saw during my six months in Europe, except for a roll of film exposed on a jarringly dissonant, languid late-summer afternoon at Auschwitz.  Instead, I brought home a collection of toilet paper I had cadged from public bathrooms around the continent--hardly the kind of memorabilia you shared with family or friends eager to know about a grand adventure they would never experience except vicariously.

The sad fact is that I should have known better, but I was immature and my parents were themselves unprepared to know what I could learn from foreign travel.  Give them credit, though.  At some level they must have understood, when they wrote the tuition and travel checks that paid for my half year in Europe, that I would benefit from a semester abroad.  And I did, despite my immaturity and ignorance and stubborn refusal to learn at least one European language.

(More to come . . .)