Tongue-Tied

After dinner the other night, I pulled out a pen and pad and told Lynn I wanted to take some background notes on her fledgling efforts to learn Spanish. “I’m thinking of writing a blog post,” I explained.

“Are you going to mention what a huge baby you’re being about it?” she asked.

Rather than get all defensive, I conceded that this was exactly my intention—albeit while adding a bit of context.

In the evenings for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been catching up on my newspaper and magazine reading while Lynn has been doing Spanish-language exercises on her iPad on a website called Duolingo. She’s sitting on the couch in our sunroom and I’m in a chair at the other end of the coffee table. I’ll hear a woman’s voice say something in Spanish, then Lynn types something in response.

It wasn’t long before this routine started really annoying me. Initially I stewed silently, but then I asked Lynn if she could turn down the volume. I was finding the Spanish-speaking woman’s voice distracting, I told Lynn—even though I couldn’t quite make out the words, let alone translate them.

I wasn’t completely lying. I’m a slow reader, with mediocre retention at the best of times. Hearing Senora Duolingo periodically enunciate was proving to be at least as distracting as it is for me to read while the TV’s on, or while Lynn’s talking on the phone. I’m not the greatest multi-tasker. But distraction wasn’t the primary thing.

You’ve heard of countries that have mutual nonaggression pacts? Well, it’s always seemed to me that Lynn and I have a de facto mutual non-ambition pact. It is this unwritten treaty that she lately has been violating, in my eyes, by flagrantly engaging in intellectual betterment, to the detriment of my slack-jawed contentment with my own unchallenging life of the mind. 

There are many reasons Lynn and I have been a good match for going on 23 years of marriage, ranging from our similar interests and sensibilities to mutual attraction and shared distastes. But a big part of it, too, is that we’re intellectually compatible. We’re certainly not stupid, but neither one of us is a genius by any stretch. We each have our areas of particular interest and expertise. I know a lot more about things like history and geography than Lynn does, for example, while her knowledge of medicine, anatomy, nutrition and veterinary science far exceeds mine. It all kind of balances out.

I’m not saying we lack intellectual curiosity. Various things we read, or hear, or see pique our interest and prompt discussions that can get fairly deep at times. We’re not total dullards. But it’s not as if either of us ever is going to discover the cure for cancer, or even come up with a brilliant way to make a fortune. That’s partly because we’re not super smart, but it’s at least as much because all the lab activity and drawing of business plans that would be required to accomplish those things strikes us as Too Much Damn Work.

What’s that saying about the supposedly world-altering power of boldly asking “Why not” rather than passively stopping at “Why”?  Lynn and I look at people who are really driven—who are constantly busting their asses in single-minded pursuit of a goal—and ask, “Where’s the damn fire?”

It’s not like we’re burdens on society. Separately and together, we’ve been self-sufficient our entire adult lives, earning paychecks and never moving into our parents’ basement or onto the public assistance rolls. But moving up to the career ladder—or even drawing one, for that matter—hasn’t been our agenda. I’ve been in the same job for 15 years now because I like it pretty well, it’s sufficiently remunerative, it’s not unduly taxing and I’m not a big fan of new challenges. Lynn’s job history has been more varied, but she’s motivated by an identical desire to make working as painless as possible, as we wind down the road to the ultimate, glorious nirvana of retirement.

So, where does learning Spanish come into this? Another way in which Lynn and I historically have been two peas in a middling pod is shame of our monolinguality and concurrent refusal to do the work necessary to change it. Both Lynn and I took a lot of French in school, but we’ve retained virtually none of it. We’ve kind of hated ourselves for clinging to the island of English when seemingly everyone else in the world has managed to add our native tongue to their own, with maybe another language or two in thrown in for good measure.

Over the years, we’d periodically talk vaguely of immersing ourselves in French decades hence, when we were retired and didn’t have to append that mental burden to the cognitive demands of our day jobs.

Then, at some point, we started thinking that maybe Spanish was the language we should try to learn. We kept hearing that it’s easier to pick up than is any other foreign language, and “easy” is a word that’s very much in our wheelhouse. Also, even in the cosmopolitan Washington, DC, area, with its embassies and international organizations, one is far likelier to hear Spanish spoken on the street, at malls and in convenience stores than French or any other non-English tongue. I got to thinking about how I’d love to know what the construction guys at the 7-Eleven are saying, even it should turn out to be, “That dorky gringo has no muscle tone whatsoever! How is that possible?” At least then I could respond in Spanish, “Your mother has no muscle tone!” Not that that would make much sense, but I’d feel good being able to issue a retort. At least until the heckler beat me up for dishonoring his family.

In an uncharacteristic burst of effort, Lynn and I actually went so far, maybe 10 years ago, to enroll in an adult education course offered by the county one night a week at a local elementary school. The teacher, however, turned out to be this crazy Cuban women who thought the best way to teach Spanish to novice adults was complete immersion—no English at all. That went precisely as well as might be expected. Which suited us, because we quickly tired of taking notes, and drilling each other at home on nights when we could be watching TV.

That was the last attempt, half-hearted or not, by either of us to learn a foreign language until Lynn’s recent foray took me by surprise. In the meantime, I’d happily returned to the notion that we’d revisit the subject in retirement, or never. Then Gabriela entered Lynn’s life.

She’s a woman in Lynn’s Thursday-night yoga class. I haven’t met her. She’s from Uruguay and teaches Spanish at a private school. Her husband works at the International Monetary Fund. (These are the types of background details that brought out my pen and paper. Not that they’re particularly necessary—I could’ve simply written, “A woman from her yoga class is teaching Lynn Spanish”—but I pride myself on my reportorial skills, if not my foreign-language acumen.)

So, Gabriela somehow broke her ankle several weeks ago and is laid up at home this summer. One afternoon, Lynn brought her one of the variety of awesome soups that she makes. (Which could become the basis of a multimillion-dollar business for Lynn, if wasn’t for all the aforementioned work that would be required.) Gabriela and Lynn got to talking about all sorts of things that day, including Lynn’s interest in learning Spanish. Whereupon Gabriela offered to teach her—no charge, although perhaps with the ongoing expectation of soup. Whereupon, in turn, Lynn—the traitor!—assented.

Even worse, from my slacker point of view,  the missus has been zealously applying herself ever since, with a fervor the two of us more typically apply to handicapping contestants on The Next Food Network Star, or bitching about the broken American political system that we’re doing nothing personally to fix, or dreamily discussing our carefree retirement.

Which brings me back to those language exercises on the iPad. Per my request, Lynn has cut back on the volume, to the point where all I can hear from my chair are the low murmurs of Senora Duolingo and faint bells that sound when Lynn is responding to something. What continues to resonate much more loudly for me, however, is the feeling that my wife is violating our mutual non-ambition pact by aggressively pursuing something that seems incredibly hard to me. I feel kind of betrayed.

 

And yes, I’m being a huge baby about it. I’m trying to be less of one. Also, I’m trying to look at the upside. I mean, if she keeps at it, Lynn one day will be able to tell off the Latino guys at the 7-Eleven if they’re dissing me. Of course, on the other hand, she might find it amusing to use her Spanish to commiserate and pile on. Payback for my language truculence, perhaps.

How the hell would I know which she was doing? I wouldn’t. The thought annoys me. Not enough to take up Spanish, though.