The Language Barrier

To enrich our home school education and taking into consideration we lived just hours away from the Mexican border, it was decided by the powers that be that the Stallings children would begin taking Spanish lessons. As neither of my parents spoke a word of anything besides the Queen’s English, calls were placed, arrangements were made, and that’s how we met Mr. Chow.

He looked exactly the way I had expected him to look. An enormous man of indeterminate age, he had acquired the knowledge of five or six languages and now spent much of his time tutoring struggling high school students and performing in local plays. I secretly suspected that he did little else other than learn the words of foreign lands and eat lots. Enthusiasm during his lessons produced an alarming amount of white spittle in the corners of his mouth, a problem my little mother tried in vain to alleviate by providing him vast amounts of water.

That is not to say that he was not kind, he was. Just the same, nobody in the family looked forward to Tuesday mornings. 

We sat in the kitchen, Mr. Chow and my mother anchored on opposite ends of the dining table, four small students filling the middle.  Mr. Chow’s first order of business was to give each of us what he considered the Spanish version of our name.  Apparently there was no translation for the name of Tyler, so Mr. Chow simply called him “Tigre.” Referring to the boy as a striped jungle cat was actually a remarkably appropriate moniker as my 5-year-old brother was going through what my family now affectionately refers to as his “animal” stage.

For the better part of his toddler years Tyler had faithfully worn boots, a cowboy hat, and moved only with the aid of a stick horse. Just as this phase started to fade, a more startling one began to emerge. It began with Tyler’s imaginary friend, Jack, who just happened to be a horse. Tyler and Jack, the imaginary horse, could be seen talking together and galloping around the backyard for hours.

Soon, Tyler stopped speaking for extended periods of time, choosing instead to sit silently, giving us wise, knowing glances in response to our questions. When provoked, his animalistic instincts would lash out.

“Pick up that mess!” My mother would scold.

“Grrrrrr” Tyler warned, doing a remarkable impression of a rabid wolf. He might emit a few high-pitched yips at her after she turned her back.

Tyler possessed an extraordinary ability to mimic the sounds and mannerisms of all sorts of animals. Dogs were much too easy and commonplace, he soon branched out to dinosaurs, horses, even squirrels.

He seemed to hold a certain fascination with birds, particularly with the idea of hatching out of an egg. He would sometimes cover himself with a blanket and then slowly, very slowly, he would begin emerging. First an arm- a wing, then his nose, a sharp little beak punching through his birth capsule to the air. Once he was released, he would gather himself, perching on the sofa, ruffling his feathers and breathing deeply, as hatching oneself is quite a lot of work. The little bird would look around the room, jerking his head with quick sharp movements, examining his new surroundings.

The most startling thing about Tyler during this stage was the way he moved. Not content to crawl on his hands and knees as most children do in imitation of a four-legged animal, but instead he adopted the mannerisms of a gorilla. Crouching on muscular legs and powerful forearms, he would propel himself at alarming speeds.  A knee-level speeding flash of animalistic fury.

“He has quite a lot of muscle mass for a five-year-old.” I remember the pediatrician saying, a little worried, as she palpated the bulging biceps of the kindergartener.

The rest of us had normal Spanish names, but then again, the rest of us did not act like animals. I was called “Christina.”

My mother had initially set out to learn Spanish with us, but she too grew bored by the repetition of Spanish verbs and being constantly berated for not learning the vocabulary and soon she disappeared all together.

“Will you be joining us today, Jaime?” Mr. Chow would ask, expectantly. His Spanish pronunciation of my mother’s name sounded like “Hi-May.”

“Oh, not today, Senior.” My mother would beg off, “so much to do.”

She would avoid eye contact, not daring to meet the looks of her betrayed children who were forced to endure the lessons that even she could not bear.

For reasons I do not remember, Mr. Chow eventually faded from our lives but my education in Spanish had just begun. A number of home school families began sending their children to Spanish classes with a retired teacher. She turned out to be an all-together unpleasant individual who specialized in turning the wonders of learning another language into unadulterated drudgery.  Our parents never believed us, but she also kept a gun by her backdoor.

“It’s probably just a pellet gun.” The carpool mom would say, as if this was a perfectly plausible and acceptable explanation.

These lessons were much more intense, scheduled twice a week in two-hour intervals. I remember very little about these classes other than the fact that I hated them. However, to her credit, the gun-woman did teach me something by faithfully playing a cassette tape that featured a rather catchy jingle that spouted off all of the South American countries with their respective capitals.  I can still remember most of it. Caracas, Venezuela. Caracas, Venezuela. Bogota, Columbia. Bogota, Columbia…

To escape the boredom, I would take quite a few bathroom breaks that became increasingly longer as the class progressed.

After an especially lengthy absence, the teacher would inevitably speak to me about it upon my return.

“What?” I would ask, puzzled.

A deep sigh, then she would repeat the phrase, this time in English. “What took you so long?”

“Oh, that. I’m not feeling so well” I would attempt to adopt a doleful expression. “Maybe I should call my mom,” I would continue, weakly.

Of course, even I knew this was no use. My mother would never come pick me up early, no matter what the circumstances. That lady had all of her errands carefully planned to the minute around all of her children’s extracurricular activities and she would not tolerate an interruption. On more than one occasion, I would jump out of the suburban at tennis practice, walk to the rear of the vehicle to retrieve my racket from the trunk, only to watch the car squeal away as my mother fairly peeled out, racing to her next destination. I would go running for the pro shop to use their phone to call my mother and beg for her to come back. It was common knowledge that once she reached the highway, there was no way she was coming back and I would be forced to sit on the sidelines, racketless and forlorn.

No, there was no chance my mother would come early, but sitting idly on a toilet somehow seemed better than sitting in that class.

To fulfill my foreign language requirement when I entered high school, I thought it prudent to extend my Spanish education. Granted, my previous experience had equipped me to do little more than decipher the menus of the local Mexican restaurants, but surely all of those hours of struggling through verbs and vocabulary would leave me in good stead to endure a couple high school level courses.

Spanish 1 was taught by the beautiful Coach Furgison. A tall man with broad shoulders and the owner of strong biceps and jaw line that captured the hearts of many. He did however have one rather significant physical shortcoming- he only had one hand.

That’s not exactly true, I suppose he did have something attached to the end of his arm that for all intents of purposes was supposed to be a hand, but the shortened fingers and lack of mobility gave the poor man the unfortunate appearance of a claw and that’s what most of us referred to it as behind his back. The claw.

Despite being marred at birth or perhaps mauled later in life, Coach Furgison was blessed in his looks in every other way and several of my classmates were thoroughly enchanted, but I would hear none of it. The man had a claw.

Concerned more with his duties as assistant football coach than our verb conjugation, I learned very little that first year. However, Spanish class was very interesting because he would translate whatever phrase we could think of. Thus, our Spanish final consisted of ten inappropriate phrases as suggested by members of the football team, such as “who’s your daddy?” and “I did it all for the nookie.” Since our abbreviated final afforded us with at least another 90 minutes to kill before we could leave, we watched Tommy Boy (in English) to cap off our foreign language education experience for the year.

I was more than a little concerned about being automatically promoted to Spanish 2 when I in fact knew absolutely nothing. Granted, I had made perfect grades due to dutifully studying my Spanish phrases and not getting on Coach Fergison’s nerves, but surely this would not cut it in Spanish 2. Surely you must know how to do something in Spanish 2.

As it turned out, I was wrong.

Coach Stroud was the boy’s Head Basketball Coach and thought of himself as a very important person because of it. He also considered himself to be a very intelligent individual and he had me fooled for a little while, too. He would often make bets with the class that we could ask him any question out of the Trivia Pursuit box and if he got it wrong he would give all of us 100s on our tests. What that pompous imbecile didn’t tell us until the end of the year was that he had memorized the whole box of questions. I suppose this was something else he thought would give him an air of cleverness, but in actuality I think he had more in common with Mr. Ed the “talking” horse, who was also a fake.

Like Mr. Chow before him, Coach Stroud also insisted that we adopt Spanish names. I chose the nickname of “Mary Juana” which I still think to this day is rather clever, even though Stroud said that the Mary part didn’t count as Spanish.

During one of his many absences, we were once forced to join a neighboring Spanish 2 class for the day. These were truly superior students, equipped with the Spanish vocabulary to name every object in the room, nailed down or otherwise. They could rattle-off insightful phrases such as “will it rain today?” or “where are my shoes?” without hesitation. They also could sing a number of Spanish songs which their teacher recorded by means of a small recorder. Shoeboxes of cassette tapes lined the wall and I have no earthly idea what she did with them.

After trying unsuccessfully to incorporate us with her brood in a number of Spanish exercises, their teacher was exasperated. “Don’t any of you know anything?” she cried.

Despite these shortcomings, Coach Stroud will forever have a soft, safe place in my heart thanks to his creation and unwavering support of the 105 Club.

The 105 Club was a group of exactly three members, varsity athletes of one sport or another that for whatever reason, Coach Stroud sympathized. I was honored to be a member of this elite organization.

As a high school athlete who lived in the middle of nowhere, we all missed a good portion of our afternoon classes as away games usually required a significant road trip. Most of our teachers required that we complete our work before we left, or at least come in early the next day to get caught up.

Not Stroud. Upon our return, he would ceremoniously inform us what we missed the previous day. Usually just the usual homework, but often a quiz or test as well. In mock seriousness he would call us, one at a time, to his desk.

In a judicial tone, he would inquire. “If you had taken that test, what do you think you would have made on it?”

We each had our own methods when responding to this. I took the thoughtful approach. After much silent deliberation, I would pronounce, “Well, a 105, Coach.”

“Just as I thought,” Stroud would agree. With a flourish of his red pen, he would write “105” in the grade book and I would go sit back down.

Despite my participation in the 105 Club as a high school student, you will be surprised to know that this did not translate into academic success at the college level.  

I currently study Spanish via the highly acclaimed Rossetta Stone program with little success.