Post #72: Insiders & Outsiders

Writing Exercise, May 2023

Hi Friends,

I am writing to you from Spain, where I’m trying to recover from jet lag before we begin hiking tomorrow. We’ve spent the past few days in Barcelona, staying in my dear friend’s apartment. The last time we spent time here, we attended a language school down the street. I studied Spanish years ago when I was completing my doctorate work. As part of my program requirements, I needed to become proficient in two foreign languages or fluent in one. I first tried to learn French, thinking it would be easier to achieve proficiency in two languages rather than fluency in one.

I was wrong about that—I ended up speaking French with a bad Spanish accent. My French teacher told me I was “a menace to the language.” I gave up on French though I do remember how to say a few key French phrases: My name is Suzanne, Where is the train station? and May I have a glass of red wine? These have come in handy.

If I wanted to complete my doctorate, I knew I had to learn Spanish, so I took classes in Mexico and Guatemala, Costa Rica and Spain. I was the oldest person in my Spanish courses, but I was in my early thirties, so it didn’t feel quite the same way it felt this last time, when I had more than 30 years on both my young classmates and my teacher. I tested into the advanced class (unfortunately, my reading and writing are much better than my speaking). The other students had all been in the same class together for months, so when I walked in, they rolled their eyes, looking at me like the outsider I was.

It became clear that I wasn’t just old. I was old fashioned, too, but not in the cool vintage way of classic cars and record players. I was still using my tiny Spanish-English dictionary, a relic from the past that the other students looked upon with disdain as they translated unknown words with their phones. When we talked about social media and I mentioned Facebook, a blonde baby-faced soccer player from some northern European country said, “Facebook is for grandparents who share cat photos.”

I might have told him that I didn’t have a cat. But then I remembered that I had shared