obsolete? I don't think so...

A morning like so many others in July: warm, with a touch of sunshine. I walk the flower fields snipping lilies. Still low on the count: about 240 spent flowers today. Let me correct that: spent lilies. In the course of the morning, I also pinched off some two hundred spent petunias and another hundred or more marguerite daisies from the tubs. There will come a day when I will have had enough. I'm nowhere near that moment yet!

(Such stunning color: like a goblet of a rich Pinot Noir!)

(or do you prefer something with a lemon twist?)

(a check of the roadside bed)

(by the walkway to our back door, which we use 100% of the time as the front door)

(a fragment of the Big Bed with a fragment of a hen)

We eat breakfast on the porch. 

 

 

 Sometimes Ed is sleepy for the morning meal. Sometimes he's attentive. Today, he is feisty. 

My haircut person (whom I saw Monday) told me how happy she was that her son got into (through a lottery) a dual language kindergarten classroom. If he stays with the program, he'll be guaranteed a language fluency very quickly. I mention to Ed that I heard an expert say on NPR this morning that in order to speak a language like a native, without that telltale accent of your place of birth, you really need to learn it by age 12. After that it's just very very hard (perhaps impossible) to shed traces of your learned pattern of pronounceation after that. I've said this before and I repeat it now -- I wish schools here would start teaching languages before kids enter Middle School.

Ed shrugs. Pretty soon, learning another language will become obsolete. Goodle translate is getting to be that good. 

I see we are going to have that discussion today. 

Since Ed has given up on travel (at least my kind of travel, where you actually pay for a hotel room, a shower and a toilet, booked in advance), he has found every reason to believe that spending time in another country is unnecessary to your growth or well being. I've come across this before -- people who claim to get as much from reading books or watching films and who find travel to be a burden, a waste, and a strain. I don't have issues with people not liking travel. I get it: it gets to be expensive, energy consuming, stressful. And yes, I'm sure many people are more informed about the culture of another land by imersing themselves in texts and films than they would be if they were herded like sheep from one iconic art piece to another, shoulder to shoulder with people just like them -- tourists, with no real contact with the communities they visit. Sure. I get that.

But as I tell Ed this morning -- it's not the same. You get something from being surrounded by people who are not like you. And you especially get something if you try speaking the language of those people, I try to analogize it to his world of machines. Listen, we watch Just a Few Acres, where Pete the farmer walks us through his daily routines and spends not a small amount of time explaining how he restores old tractors. The fact that he understands the mechanics of everything in that engine puts him at another level of comprehension than would be the case were he to simply plug in an error code into a reader and get his information from that source. Google translate is not the same as speaking a language.

Of course, he persists. Still, I don't need to know a language to communicate or get exposure to another culture. And in any case, you don't get much exposure by simply popping into a country for a few days, staying in comfortable places and then going home. 

Here's where I get slightly exasperated: I know you are proud of your sleeping in a ditch in South America, hitchhiking across Mexico, hanging out in Cuba for a month. But those trips, glorified in your mind, were a long time ago and not for a minute have you ever been or will you ever be treated as a local while traveling abroad. And especially not with your Google translate. And here's a fact: you can think me to be uninformed in any number of domains, but having lived back and forth between Poland and the US all my life -- a few years here, a few years there, as a Pole, as an American, as a Pole, as an American -- puts me miles ahead of you on the subject of cultural understanding and assimilation and especially the absence of either.

We don't often get into discussions about travel. About languages. About assimilation. About American isolationism. Ed surely is a globalist in that he favors (as I do) immigration that fills many voids in the American employment market place, to say nothing of being the vehicle for innovation and growth. He is (as I am) an American who believes in multiculturalism, seeing it as a good thing rather than some kind of an impediment to prosperity. And yet he stays put, nose buried in reading material, avoiding direct contact with something brazenly foreign. Again -- all good until I hear from him that this is "just as good and perhaps better than going places." Go ahead, stay home, you'll not be harmed by it, but you are then missing a layer of understanding that comes from direct exposure, and especially if accompanied by an attempt to speak the language that is not yours.

Feel free to disagree, but I'm pretty convinced on this point. (Even though this is not why I travel to Europe so often. I do that because I like a break from being home and I like Europe. But not in July. July is flower field time!)

 

 

 

My sweet, sweet Ed! When we first became a thing, a couple, a partnership, he worked hard to convince me that we have common ground. He actually had more than one pair of shorts then and twice (but only twice) he agreed to go t-shirt shopping with me. I picked out 3 cheap shirts at Gap that I still think are my favorites, torn and ragged that they are. Over the years we have both relaxed, giving the other more room to explore preferences that we know are not shared. And yet, we share a ton. We know to go gently when a choice is directly in opposition to the choice of the other. We know to ask (or at least give notice) before we disappear into our own worlds. And we know where we are alone in our thoughts and beliefs. Our morning discussion was nothing more than a conversational game. I know his approach to travel, he knows mine. And never the twain shall meet.

Coincidentally, I came across an article tonight in the Economist focusing on the benefits of bilingualism. It appears that cognitive benefits are greatest for the young and the old (and less obvious for the middle aged). If Ed is at all correct and people will, over time, forgo foreign language acquisition (because of Google translate or the like), then we will all become dumber than we already are. A frightening thought.

 

In the afternoon, I run errands. UPS, RX, USPS. Drop off this, pick up that. I should have biked, but most stops are on busy streets and you get spoiled biking as we do along paths or quiet rural roads. And I do my annual vacuum and cleaning of the car. A year of debris. Car cookies, an odd french fry. A sticky straw once filled with honey. Crumbs, wood chips, dirt. A year of memories I suppose. Time to make new ones!

In the evening, Ed bikes, I watch fireflies outside and read my fifth Tana French book. This is the summer of Irish mysteries! Perfect for losing yourself in stories that are not your own. 

with love...