Day 124

We're back from vacation and both working hard to get back in the swing of things. I'm going to post one of my days each week again as I was doing before vacations. Teri will be posting part two of our vacation soon. I've posted a day from my 1st 10 days, 2nd 10 days, a day from the 30s, 40s, etc, all the ten day spans except the 60s when I was in Topeka. Here's a day from the 120s:

Wednesday 10 Dec 2008: Old Dog New Trick

I’ve now been engaged in a one-on-one Spanish class with Sr Eduardo Paz Monteza at Alianza Francesa for one hour a day four days a week since Day 87 on 3 November. Today is my 22nd hour studying Spanish and it has been slow going; I do not have a facility for language acquisition. Today is a normal class day; I arrive at Alianza at 8:00, I rap hard on the front door with a knocker, a custodian lets me in, I walk through the entry into a central patio with doors to empty classrooms all around. I find Sr Eduardo standing alone in the classroom we always use. We greet each other and I sit at a desk about a foot away from a facing desk where Sr Eduardo (he calls me Sr Leroy) usually sits; my desk is about 10 feet away from an erasable board.

Today Sr Eduardo doesn’t sit; he stands and asks me to tell him about my family using Spanish. I struggle at first, and often when I think of a sentence I want to express, the silence echoes in the empty room while I think of the Spanish verb and conjugate it, recall the Spanish for the nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, and then recall the proper word order and the proper word endings, before I speak. We proceed this way for awhile; he continues asking me questions and I answer them. The few times that I don’t know a noun, adjective, or adverb he tells me and the few times I don’t know a verb he gives me the infinitive; often I ask him to write the new word on the board because it helps my memory to read the word—all this is Spanish. Time flies until a tingling sensation almost takes my breath away when all of a sudden I realize that for the first time in my life I’m carrying on a conversation in a language other than my native tongue; tengo sesenta y seis años y soy un perro viejo, pero estoy aprendiendo un nuevo truco!