Sailing the Oceans Blue

When I was a child, I talked alot. Preferably while dancing, running and singing. I don't think I noticed I was speaking two languages until I wasn't anymore. Now I know that I spoke English with my parents and brothers, Spanish with Hilda, who lived with us and took care of us in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. I do remember teasing my mother about her Anglo-Spanish; her accent was ridiculous to me, and made me laugh. I played dolls with Nilsa, across the street, in Spanish; with Natasha, up the street, in English. 

I remember  Hilda  writing out an address to her parents on a small envelope with a stubby pencil: she held her fingers tight and close to the point, forcing it to her will, turning the pencil in her fingers after each small curved mark, tentative, uncertain, connecting each letter in careful Catholic script. It took her a long time. Inside were pages of pencil script on lined school paper, all written the same, determined way, and I wondered how long it had taken her to get it all down after the long days of caring for us four children.

I, on the other hand, didn't give writing much thought. I did it as needed. What engaged me was reading, which I did any chance I could, escaping into a multitude of worlds, in a million voices.

Speaking, though, was a complex affair in my family. My mother worked as an editor, fixated in a literal way on language and how it was constructed. To her, language was the portal to the world, and speech was the first step. Speaking reflected everything: your family, your manners, your comportment, your background, your position vis a vis others, your passport. She rode our language skills like we were horses. "You are citizens of the world," she would tell my brothers and me. I understood this to mean that I needed to learn all languages, and quick. I had Spanish in school and outside, English at home. But my books told me Japanese was a truly different language, as was Chinese and Russian and Hebrew and Arabic, and I was frankly concerned about my abilities to absorb all of them. Gulp...

My father, on the other hand, wrote about music, so language was a plaything, a game, an endlessly amusing tool to tickle and challenge. We climbed over each other verbally at the dinner table to make him chuckle; we built language pyramids higher and higher, to see when it would all topple.

Now, looking back, I don't know what to think about my relationship to language. I have never forgotten a bus ride when I was seventeen, arrogant and angry, sitting next to a middle-aged union organizer.  I chewed his ear with my tirades about humanity's stupidities, and finally he turned to me and said, "When you no longer speak in right angles, you will have found your voice." That shut me up. I have been trying to rid myself of right angles ever since.