Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 February 2007 00:49:19
The workday was ending, it was darkening rapidly outdoors. I was closing down the office. Up to the door comes this darling little boy, couldn't have been more than 8 years old. His mother was sitting in the car with his toddler sibling -- an angel in a Harpo halo of wild curls, dunno if it was a brother or sister --
He spoke to me, the bright little boy, rattling on in Portuguese. I probably would have guessed who he had come for -- a particular set of employees come to mind who are from either Portugal or Brazil. No need for sleuthing, though -- the one word among the tidal wave of all the others that I understood was his father's name. So, I called for his father, who soon came through the back door into my lobby to greet him.
Rather than leaving to join Mama in the car out front, Papa whisked him immediately off to the restroom!
The poor little guy. All he wanted was to use the bathroom. To make a pit stop while he waited for his Daddy. He didn't want cookies, he refused the candy basket, he didn't want to sit down and wait for Dad and he didn't want to go back out there with Mom and the baby.
I should have figured it out.
If he had said a few pertinent words in Spanish I might've caught on -- but Portuguese "feels" almost impenetrable to me, neither Spanish nor Italian... If he had clutched the front of his bluejeans and danced up and down a bit, I definitely would have caught on! But he was too dignified, poor little guy, to do the International Pee-Pee Dance.
It's times like that I am again determined to pick up at least a few important words in the major languages I run into at work.
I'm not asking too much of myself. I'm not! I have no intention of trying to pick up everything from everybody. Mandarin Chinese and Swahili are around, but so far the speakers have been very proficient in English as well. The one guy without much spoken English speaks Vietnamese -- but he also speaks French, which I can struggle along with.
But now we're dropping Portuguese into the mix. I'd better add it to the arsenal.