35 years ago today: THE best before and after (and WAY after) pics

[DFW]

20. Time slips through your fingers like water in the ocean

When my dad returned from his first trip to Russia in 1959, he brought back some post cards. I couldn't read them. Neither could he. I was 7, and vowed that someday, I'd be able to read post cards like that.

I first had French in the 4th grade. I never got to use it, though, until much later. I started Spanish in 7th grade, and found out in no time flat why it was important. When I was offered the chance to move to Spain for 11th grade, I jumped at it, and was blown away by the fact that I was living in a part of Spain where they didn't speak "Spanish" unless forced to. The Fascist government still suppressed Catalan wherever they could, so of course, I learned it.

While in Spain, I came into contact with Germans and Scandinavians, and felt like an idiot for not understanding them while they all understood me. So, when I got to college, I immersed myself with Swedish, started with German the next year, and continued with the Russian I had started in high school. My ancestors had come to America in the mid 1800s, so whatever vestige of knowledge of Russian I might have had a chance at learning from family was long gone. Italian, once I knew Spanish, Catalan and French, was a snap, and Dutch, once I knew Swedish and German was easy, too. When we opened an office in Holland in 1990, I asked our guy there to speak to me slowly in Dutch until I got better at understanding it and could answer back. Russian remained my weakest, as I never got to practice it much until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Even then, the Russians all look at me like I was Rip Van Winkle, since my spoken Russian, while grammatically correct, has no Soviet era slang at all, since I never spent any time there to speak of. My only contact was with literature and the classroom. My spoken Russian sounds to modern Russians like Victorian English sounds to us--understandable, but strange sounding.

I try to keep all my languages as current as I can. Living in Germany, hardly a week goes by without my using all of them at one point or another.

With languages, it "use it or lose it," so I make it a point to "use it" where I can.