Speechless

“What's the English word for someone who speaks two languages?” my translator asked.

“Bilingual,” I answered.

“And three languages?” she asked.

“Trilingual.”

“And just one language? Wait I know – it's American!” She smiled innocently and took a dainty bite of her khachapuri.

At age 23, Sopo spoke English with a barely detectable accent, also German, Russian, her native Georgian, and her grandmother's native dialect – Migrelian.

I can say good morning, thank you, I want a beer, and where is the toilet in English, Spanish, Georgian and Armenian now, but there are a surprising number of situations that call for more sophisticated communication. A half dozen years ago Sopo and I were having lunch in a refugee town close to a Russian Military outpost when a teenage kid grabbed her purse – which contained several hundred dollars in travel money and her personal cell phone – and took off running.

I chased after him and started to yell something, but I got stuck. For the life of me I couldn't think of the Georgian word for stop or thief or anything else that seemed appropriate. I decided to shout “No!” but as soon as the word “Ori!” left my lips I realized I'd just yelled “Two!”

With nothing to say, I just kept chasing and the thief kept running, and running, and running – out of the business district, through a park where kids were playing ping pong and old men were playing backgammon, between three-story apartment buildings and toward the soccer stadium. The kid kept looking back over his shoulder and I kept making hand gestures that were probably as meaningless in Georgian as they were in English.

People gave us quizzical looks as we passed. I'd been training for a marathon so I could run for hours, but I soon started having second thoughts about keeping up the chase. I became more and more aware that I was the only person in sight not dressed head-to-foot in black, and I was getting farther and farther from the only other English-speaking person I knew within 50 miles. The kid was local, I was obviously not, and we were heading into a bad-looking neighborhood.

I half expected to round a corner and find myself surrounded by heavily armed gang members, saying things like, “Them khaki pants sure is purty, stranger, why don't you just give them to us raat now.” (In my nightmares, bad guys always talk like hillbillies.)

So I tried to think of ways to mime, “Back off, I represent a nuclear power.”

It actually felt a little anti-climactic when the kid finally got tired of being chased and dropped the purse.

When I retrieved it, an old woman standing nearby gave me a big smile and a few other people who'd seen what had happened gave me friendly, atta-boy looks. The town's assistant police chief, who happened to be driving by, gave me a ride back to the restaurant in his car. He spoke to me in Georgian as if I knew what he was saying. I smiled and I nodded as if I did and made hand gestures to give him directions.

At that point I started wondering how I would react if some non-English-speaking guy in funny clothes came chasing a kid through my neighborhood. I suppose a lot of my neighbors would wonder why the hell he hadn't bothered to learn English before stepping on our soil, and some would suggest he shouldn't be allowed here at all.

Communication problems are a fact of life in most of the world where it's never more than a couple of hundred miles between cultures or tribes who speak different languages. Language provides an easy way to distinguish between “us and “”them” and a thick wall that discourages communication. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian is no longer taught to all school children in the Soviet Republics, and that translates into the loss of the single common language in much of Eurasia. It's blamed for an increase in tension in countries such as Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia where there are a dozen native languages and dialects.

When the Georgian coordinator of the project I was working on heard I'd chased a purse snatcher, she scolded me. “In that awful town,” she said. “He could have had a gun.”

“I don't speak Georgian,” I said. “I wouldn't have understood if he'd had one.”

She started to say something, then she stopped and stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.

The thing about being poor is . . .

“The thing about being poor,” my friend Mitch is prone to say, “is that you never forget how to do it.” As he was growing up, Mitch – a fellow Missourian – had to go out and shoot something for dinner with some regularity.

“If it is a possum when you kill it,” his mother once told him, “dress it in the field so that it's a rabbit when it gets to the house.” Country people had pride. Eating rabbit was one thing, eating possum was another.

My father grew up in Kentucky and he knew about being poor, despite the fact that both his parents ended up with master's degrees. Mom was fairly well off by Coffee County, Georgia standards, which meant they had hogs to butcher, hides to cure, fat to render into soap.

When my sister cleaned out the family's house after Mom died, she found 500 or more aluminum foil pie tins, washed and saved for re-use. Aluminum foil got re-used, plasticine bread bags were re-used as sandwich bags, jeans were patched, there was an on-off switch on their shower so you didn't have to waste water while you soaped up.

Dad scrounged scrap lumber from the University's industrial education shop and made things – shelves, toys and knicknacks – out of it. He wasn't cheap, he wasn't poor, he just couldn't bear to see anything wasted.

Later in life he fell in with the environmental movement only because conserving, recycling and re-using was a way of life with him. His vegetable garden was a raised bed, all of 20 square feet.  But it produced a mother lode of fresh veggies – and anything that was trimmed off or left over got composted and ultimately put back into the soil.

I've played at that kind of thing. After moving to my present home, I found some scrap lumber and built a couple of saw horses strong enough support an elephant seal, took a shipping pallet apart and built a raccoon proof cage for my compost (so they can't eat up all of the good stuff before the rats get to it) and a broom holder in which I take an inordinate amount of pride. Recently I moved the worm composter that I built this summer indoors to keep the little fellas warm and turning leftovers into soil for my 16 square foot vegetable garden.

We drive a Prius and yes, we average more than 40 miles per gallon. We wash and reuse the sandwich plastic bags with the zippers on top.

A handyman recently did some work remodeling our kitchen and built us a cabinet  using drawers left over from another project, and he used a piece of granite left over from another project to create a work surface. Now he's using the drawers from the cabinet he replaced in our kitchen as part of the closet organizer he's building for us – mostly out of re-used material.

A cousin of mine in Georgia is living in an amazing house built with beams and boards she and her husband salvaged from an old tobacco barn and an abandoned cabin on the family farm.

Mom's line about how they used to use everything from the pig except the squeal wasn't original, but it was close to the truth. Yes, Virginia, people do eat those parts of the pig. The parts that don't end up as pickled pigs feet, snoot, or chitterlings (chitlin's) are called sausage. And while hams grow on the south end of a north-bound hog, what about the extreme southern tip? Check out www.seriouseats.com/2008/05/how-to-cook-pig-tails.html – if you dare.

Mom used to cook her own chicken pot pies in those aluminum foil pans that originally came with the store-brand variety dad had bought on sale, five for-a-dollar, when she went back to college. Unlike the store brand, hers were good. Now my wife has taken to doing the same thing.

I spent the first half of my life trying not to turn into my parents. Now it seems that I'm spending the last half trying to catch up to them.

Walking a Black Dog in the Dark

Marv, our black Lab, likes to begin his morning walk in the dark so he can watch the sun rise. He  dances in small circles and fetches one toy after another until finally he finds the totem that will lure me away from the smell of coffee and buttered toast and into the misting rain. There are no streetlights where we live and cars seldom travel our road after midnight, so when the moon retires for the night, it leaves a pre-dawn darkness as deep and cold as black water.

As soon as we step out of the door, the darkness slips over Marv's sleek coat like a cloak of invisibility. Beyond the narrow beam of my head lamp, his glowing orange collar floats, unsupported, above the ground.

When we pass out of the wooded area where we live onto prairie of the neighboring national park, Marv gallops in arcing circles, and chases winding scent trails – tracking weasels or foxes, or perhaps a Snuffleupagas. If his collar disappears, a short whistle brings it back over the top of an unexpected hill, bouncing toward me until the head of a dog finally appears in my small bubble of light. Marv takes a treat off the palm of my hand with a wet swipe of his tongue and checks to see if I need anything else before he brushes past my leg, back into the darkness where he can shed his body again.

Curious amber eyes reflect the light of my headlamp as we follow deer trails across the prairie. Some eyes blink out quickly, others float eerily above the ground, circling us, until Marv's orange collar begins to bound toward them. The eyes of a fox become a streak of light that disappears with the whoosh of soft fur brushing a thicket.

Deer amble by, their neon green eyes almost at my eye level. During the day, Marv will run with them if they dare him, but in the dark they respect each other's invisibility.

Heavy wings whumpf in the dark. Owls are bulky, powerful creatures wrapped in an unsettling Zen-like calm. Surprise an eagle and it will shriek its battle cry and take wing in an explosion of feathers and talons. Surprise an owl and it will stare you down, silently.

Walking in the dark with a black dog is an act of faith, if faith is belief in things you cannot see. Belief that the terrain that is there during the day exists when it can't be seen. Belief that the glowing orange collar dancing in the darkness is still around the neck of the creature you put it on, that the wings beating overhead belong to a bird, not to a demon searching for a soul.

Things chirrup and bark, and sometimes crash and scream in the brush. A rooster crows in the distance like a banshee with a toothache. Raccoons tussling over ripe figs sound like fighting wildcats.

As the rising sun melts the darkness, Marv materializes inside his orange collar. Darkness clings to Mount Baker and the Olympic Mountains while the horizon lightens behind them. The colors of the day begin their dance across the Salish Sea.

Marv has watched the world reappear and he is ready to go home. There will be another day – more things to sniff, a trespassing cat to chase, perhaps a friend will drop by and challenge him to race. A day at the office lies ahead for me.

But sometimes the sun comes up before we're ready. Darkness is a playground for the mind and leaving it can be hard. Maybe that really was a demon that passed overhead; and those neon eyes could have belonged to a herd of camels, or perhaps unicorns that are as invisible by day as they are by night.

Marv probably believes his early morning dance and the offerings from his toy basket are what opens the door to a place where magic is still possible and the world is reborn every day.

He may be right.

Crazy

Last week I shouted a couple of unacceptable words in the hallway outside my office, hung a bright red “Danger” sign on the door to my office and closed it for nearly an hour.

A few minutes later I was one of the half-dozen recipients of a terse email from an attorney. It read, in its entirety, “I want a conference call Monday.”

I hit “reply all” and responded, “And I want a pony and a bunny rabbit.”

What I found interesting were the repercussions from my childish behavior: None.

True, nobody knocked on my door while the danger sign was up, but otherwise – nothing, nada, no comment, business as usual.

This isn't the first time nothing happened. Several years ago on another job, I responded to a particularly egregious act of managerial hubris by screaming a passage from Revelations and throwing my desk chair down a stairwell. I spent the next several months working on the floor of my office, using a toy robot to carry papers out to my secretary.

I got some sideways glances, not so many invitations to lunch, but mostly it passed without comment. To her credit, my boss did offer to buy me a new chair.

Don't get the idea that I act crazy often. It's actually pretty rare, but I can see why it happens and how some people get addicted to it. I fully subscribe to the Star Trek wisdom, “In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane.” My crazy fits happened because I didn't know how else to act. What do you do when you find yourself in a world where the familiar rules of the game disappear?

Imagine, for instance, you are quarterbacking a team in an ordinary football game when you realize the scoreboard says it's 5th down and 10 light years to go, and the referees are riding camels and are waving bratwursts at you. What play do you call? I don't know about you, but I'd say junk the SALT agreements and go nuclear.

There have always been a few people around who never quite understood what was going on. Ever since I can remember we've had a colorful, slightly scarey, lunatic fringe that added spice and – occasionally foresight – to our society. For instance, I never believed the conspiracy buffs who thought a multi-national corporation, owned by a foreigner, could overtly put American politicians on its payroll and dominate the news and opinion business. That was ludicrous in light of the rules as I understood them.

The so-called “J-Curve Theory” describes crazy behavior by much more than just a fringe. It's the product of historical studies that found revolutions don't happen while things are getting worse, they happen when things start to get better. People get disoriented, sort of catatonic, when everything is falling apart. But when the scoreboard is re-set, the camels are gone, a new set of referees come in and the quarterback finds out it's really 3rd down – but there's still a lot of tough yardage needed for a first down; that's when the players start kicking the refs.

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you," said Carl Jung, the man who invented modern psychoanalysis.

I say, show me a crazy man and I'll show you somebody who's had the rules pulled out from under him.

I did dial into the conference call last week. But as of today: no pony, no bunny rabbit.

Words to Live By

I was about 500 words into my column this week when I stopped to get a cup of coffee. When I came back and glanced over what I'd written I realized that it was dreadful. As I tried to decide whether I should attempt to repair it or just scrap it and start over, I flashed back a few decades to the time I helped my Great Uncle Rudy build a fence. I held the boards, he drove the nails.

After a while he hit a nail wrong and bent it. He straightened it and tried again. It bent again. He straightened it and bent it twice more.


“Why don't you just get a new nail?” I asked.

He stood up, braced one hand against the fence post, stared at me from beneath his magnificent, bushy eyebrows and said, “Anyone can drive a straight nail. It takes a carpenter to drive a crooked nail.”


“I wish I'd said that,” James Whistler once told Oscar Wilde.


“Don't worry, you will,” replied Wilde.


To me, a perfect phrase is a breath stopper. I have to stop and savor it. The best are re-quoted so often they, unfortunately, become cliches.


I am not a carpenter, so instead of trying to straighten out the column I had written, I'm going to start fresh and I can share some of my family's words of wisdom that have not yet become cliches.


Don't feel like you're making progress just because you're moving forward. My grandfather said this after watching my brother trying to mow the lawn. He had taken the blade off the lawnmower to sharpen it and accidentally bolted it back on backwards. The mower was flogging the hell out of the grass, but it wasn't mowing.


You don't follow a furrow that's crooked as a hound's leg. I was about 12 years old and my grandfather had put me on a tractor and told me to disk up a part of a field that he wanted to plant. I tried to keep a wheel right next to the previous furrow, as he'd told me to; but by the time he came back to check on me, my furrows were looking like a longitudinal graph of President Obama's approval ratings.


If they could suck as hard as they can blow, they wouldn't have a problem. That was my father's reaction when I told him I'd attended a meeting of governors from southwestern states that wanted to pipe irrigation water down from Canada. The problem: The cost of pumping it over the Rocky Mountains.


Be cautious, but don't live in fear. This came from my mother-in-law. I don't know the original context, but I love it. I tend to repeat it whenever someone suggests that we Americans need to compromise our values so we can protect ourselves from people who hate us. Perhaps they hate us because we keep compromising our values.


Just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. My wonderful, octogenarian Aunt Daphine, down in rural South Georgia, said she does that when her daughter calls at night and says she's home alone and hearing funny noises. Aunt Daphine isn't speaking metaphorically; she actually grabs Grandad's old pistol, climbs into her golf cart and heads over to her daughter's farmhouse half a country mile away. Daphine has been living alone on the old family farm ever since Uncle Ben died a couple of years ago, but she claims she doesn't worry about her safety. “Everybody knows I'll shoot,” she says. I believe her.


You can sleep when you're dead. When my daughter was still in elementary school, she used that line to get me out of bed on Saturday mornings and to keep me from napping on Sunday afternoons. It's the perfect antidote to my grandfather's observation (shared in a previous column): If you just lie down for a few minutes, the notion that you need to run out and do something will pass.

I'll close with one of my own, the shortest of the lot.


That's my ball! I screamed that at the top of my lungs during a high school football game. It was late in the fourth quarter, we were close to the goal line, I hadn't caught a pass all night and the oversized kid who'd been kicking my butt since the opening whistle had my jersey in one hand and the pass I should have caught in the other. Then came an Incredible Hulk moment. I shouted those words, tore the ball away from the kid and carried it and him into the end zone. Forty-plus years later, saying “that's my ball” still seems to help when I confront a competitive challenge. Shouting it seems to help more.

So as the new year rolls out before us like a blank canvas, I humbly offer these few words of wisdom: As you move through the year, don't feel you are making progress just because you are moving forward; look ahead and make sure the furrow you are following isn't as crooked as a hound's leg. Be cautious, but don't live in fear. If you do become fearful, just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home.
Everyone needs to know that you'll shoot.


Have a great year. It's your ball.