Immersion in a Second Language

I have always envied people who can speak more than one language. In high school, I took Spanish, and all I have to show for it are recurring nightmares about my butchering of Spanish pronunciations in front of the class. In college, I tried to soothe my subconscious by taking four semesters of Biblical Greek, a dead language that requires no conversational proficiency. In hindsight, that was also a bad decision for my subconscious. It is never good for Jesus to be able to directly communicate with your subconscious, without you as the interpreter. 

JESUS: ἀγαπᾶτε τοὺς ἐχθροὺς

ME: [acting as interpreter] Jesus said it’s okay to ridicule your enemies, just a little bit.  

SUBCONSCIOUS: No, he didn’t. I know Biblical Greek. He said, “Love Your Enemies.”

After college, I gave up all studies of foreign languages, in hopes of circumventing my subconscious, only to buy an old farmhouse with a chatty vent pipe. Learning the meaning of the various gurgles and hiccups emanating from the vent pipe or toilet or bathtub is vital for surviving in an old farmhouse. 

For instance, a gurgle bordering on a dry persistent cough, could be indicative that your well has run dry. If this is indeed the case, prepare for a long and drawn out process to reprime the well pump. The steps are as follows: (1) Scratch your head and try to remember the correct process for repriming the pump. (2) Call your wife’s Poppaw to see if he can remember. (3) Meet your wife’s Poppaw at the well pump to see if physical proximity to the pump jogs any enlightening memories. (4) Fiddle with valves and switches to see if anything miraculous happens. (5) Out of sheer befuddlement, yank on the tiny hose connecting the pump to the pressure switch. (6) Wave and enjoy the scenery from atop the geyser spurting from the nozzle to the pressure switch. 

Misdiagnoses like a dry well for a clogged nozzle are common among folks who are not yet proficient at the nuances of conversational gurgles. Personally, I should have used context clues to realize that we were not in a drought, so that gurgle, in that context, must have meant a clogged nozzle, not a dry well. But I can’t be too hard on myself because it takes years of immersion in a second-language to become truly proficient–plus, it was mostly my wife’s Poppaw who got immersed in the geyser. 

That’s not to say that I have escaped immersion. There was the time the drain pipe from the kitchen sink got clogged and then burst during winter. Although I only heard a soft gurgle bubbling up in the backyard, the stench alone was context enough to diagnose the problem. The process for replacing the drain pipe was prolonged by the fact it took many hours wandering the hardware store to find the correct fitting–it is hard to find help in a big box hardware store these days, especially when you smell like the inside of a putrid pipe. 

Perhaps, subconsciously, I wanted to linger–sauntering through a hardware store in muddy jeans and boots while emanating the scent of hard work is possibly a man’s proudest moment, especially for an over-educated man proficient in an antiquated language.