The Year of The Spanish Fever. Post 4
The old American’s years of hiking in the Rockies were behind him. Hips, mostly.
“Now what?”
He started searching for something that would be rigorous in a different way. The possibility of spending a good length of time alone in a foreign city, without knowing a soul or speaking the language, seemed intriguing.
He had never imagined doing anything like that. He wasn’t a particularly cosmopolitan kind of guy. He had southern Ohio table manners.
It dawned on him that enrolling in an intensive-language program would place him in the company of interesting people for a good part of each day. With that safety net in place he was sure he could handle the rest of the time on his own.
If he hated syntax and vocabulary, he figured he could fake it. Besides he could skip classes whenever he wanted. He didn’t owe the language a damned thing.
| LOST IN TRANSLATION | To “consult your pillow” means to sleep on an idea.
Out Among HumansIt was as much a sacrament as a picnic for the Afghans once…
The men of their generation grew up bracing for a fight. They would learn soon…
At the Lincoln MemorialLincoln’s words were etched in stone so they couldn’t be erased from…
People at a coffee shopThe Dutch visitor speaks the King’s English with a brogue that…
They weren’t dog people. They weren’t cat, gerbil or goldfish people either. They were simply…
People at a coffee shopDictators can intimidate the courts, institutions of learning and the free…
