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.