language

Mama, do the Our Father in French tonight. He whispers his request as he burrows under the comforter, eyes flashing bright in the dim of his bedroom draped in night. Of course, I agree. And in an instant we're off. I close my eyes and start to sing, and for a moment I drift back. The cold stone church, frigid even in summer. The rows of plain wooden chairs with ancient woven seats. The prayers of the Mass turned to poetry in another tongue, the words I committed to heart to keep from flipping through my missal every moment like the obvious outsider that I was, even after a year. I've forgotten so many words from that time - the names of strange vegetables at the market, the polite way to ask for directions, the slang on the corner store magazines. But still the language lingers, if not on my lips then deeper. Even when I thought I'd left it behind. . . . Some choices seem definitive. I dropped the journalism minor when I fell hard for the humanities. I left the English major behind … [Read more...] about when a calling comes full circle