Language fatigue

I must admit it: as far as French goes, I’m all talked out.

Now that you readers who know me have revived from your swoon or cleaned up the bowl of cereal you dropped on the floor, let me elaborate: it would be a cold day in a usually very warm place when I was truly at a loss for words. I’m a word guy, for one, and loquacious to boot. The French would call me bavard, which can be simply be descriptive (“talkative”), or can be pejorative (“diarrhea of the mouth”).

I grew up with 3 talkative brothers and a talkative Mom, so dinner conversations were quite interesting. At once, I would be taking part in a separate conversation with all five others around the table (including my Dad who was an “average talker” and so appeared positively taciturn when compared to the rest of us). My responses, over a 5 second period of time, might go like this:

“No, it was Amerigo Vespucci, not Hernando Cortez…”

“I think Mean Joe Green is way better than Too Tall Jones…”

“I have a band concert tomorrow night, and my white shirt is dirty…”

“Let go of my breadstick or I’ll stab your hand with my fork…”

“Dad, can we tear down that old lawnmower engine on Saturday? I have to do a project for shop class…”

Of course, everyone else at the table had their own topics that they were inserting as well, so it was a bit chaotic, with each one of us trying to keep our plates spinning conversationally speaking. When Beth entered the picture, she was used to very quiet conversations with her sister and parents, usually focusing on one topic of conversation at a time. Her first family meal with us was an eye opener for her—eyes open and staring, I mean, like the “deer in the headlights” look. She was shell-shocked, and it took her years to get used to it.

I say all that to paint a visual picture of my childhood, which centered on conversation. I rarely had fist fights with my brothers, though we did wrestle and pick on each other as most brothers do; but most of our “fights” were actually verbal debates. I didn’t learn anything about logic, debate, elocution, or persuasion from a book or a debate coach: I honed my debate skills in the crucible of family spats. It usually came down to which brother could wear the others down by the sheer weight of words, not necessarily by eloquence or strength of logic.

So when it comes to the English language, I enjoy conversation and can express myself fairly well. That’s why I’m all talked out in French. It is so frustrating to be in the middle of a simple conversation about an object or a place, and suddenly realize I can’t make myself understood because I don’t know the French word for “around” or “underneath” or “upstairs.” Worse yet, it seems like when I look up the word and finally learn it, it seems to kick out another word that I used to know. I think my brain needs a memory upgrade like you can get for your computer.

Yesterday, in the process of buying and taking home a Christmas manger scene, which I’ve blogged about before, I realized that the box we had all the figures in was too heavy to carry 7 blocks back to our hotel. Don’t ask me how we are going to get the figures home; I haven’t gotten that far yet. I walked out to the street and hailed a cab, asking the cabbie if he could take the 2 of us and a large box back to our hotel. He looked into the back seat of his car, and told me that the box wouldn’t fit there. I could not for the life of me figure out how to ask him, in French, how he could possibly know that without actually seeing the box.

I went to the next cabbie, who drove a sort of mini minivan, with plenty of room for Beth and I in the back seat, and the box in the cargo area. I asked him the same thing and he gave me a blank stare. I told him it wasn’t far, and that the box wasn’t that big. He finally told me to get in, and proceeded to go around the block back to the side street that the shop was on. Unfortunately, he turned right instead of left, leaving us on the wrong side of Boulevard St. Germain, a major thoroughfare which would be impossible to cross carrying the heavy box.

After a spirited argument in which I think I said, “you need to go to the other side of the street, the shop is over there,” and he kept saying that “I’ve brought you to the street that you told me to go to,” he finally broke down, backed out of the alley into traffic, crossed all four lanes of Boulevard St. Germain, and pulled up next to the shop. We loaded the box and ourselves into the taxi, and after 3 or 4 exchanges, he understood where our hotel was. When we got to the hotel, I unloaded the box and handed him a 20 Euro note. He said he didn’t have change for a bill that large (about $25), so Beth dug around in her purse for a 10 Euro note, and he gave me the change and roared off. I got the box up to the room and decided that I didn’t want to have any more conversations in French the rest of the day.

Fortunately, I had an excuse for this anyway, since my former clinic administrator, David Schlough, was meeting us for dinner. So I skipped the planned trip to the Cluny museum, holed up in the hotel for a couple of hours, caught up on emails, and when David came to the hotel, we headed out on foot to Atelier Maitre Albert, a Guy Savoy restaurant just a block south of Notre Dame cathedral. We had a lovely dinner of nouvelle French cuisine, and caught each other up on all the doings since we left the States.

He left home the end of August for a month-long tour of Europe. He took a tour of the Danube by boat, and a bicycle tour of Austria, then headed for Italy, where he poked around Florence and Venice. He had planned to spend a few more days in Italy, then go to Switzerland, but rain forecasts in both of those countries caused him to take an overnight train all the way to Paris instead. Some friends that he biked with are American expatriates now living an hour south of Paris, so he has plans to visit them later this week.

After dinner, and a long conversation, we walked back to our hotel, where we gave him a list of good restaurants, shops for gifts and souvenirs, and a “must see” list of museums and monuments that would take him longer to see than he has time in Paris. Oh well, it all comes down to priorities in the end. And for me, talked out as I am in French, I’d still take a good conversation and a good dinner over almost any monument any day.