Learning to talk

As most parents will, mine were considerate enough to teach me how to talk. Thanks to their vigorous and dedicated efforts, I was fluent in German by the age of two. There was only one small fly in the ointment: I lived in Novi, Michigan. So, while other young children my age were experiencing their first major "Aha!" victory over the world around them by finding themselves finally possessed of the keys to effectively communicating with it, I found myself with a proverbial car that wouldn't start.

The emotional free-fall gap between between the massive exhilaration of finally being capable of communicating with other people, and immediately slamming up against a sudden, stunning brick wall of realization that GERMAN IS NOT THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA must, in hindsight, have been filled with considerable mental distress for me. The only people who could understand me, and whom I could understand -- by their own insidious design -- were my parents.

My mother tells me that I was so traumatized by this that when an American came to visit, I'd go into a literal paralysis. Wherever I happened to be when the American arrived on the scene, that's where I'd be rooted, utterly motionless, in some cheap parody of a California redwood. My mother tells me she'd have to carry me out of the room like a wooden tree trunk.

Just in case this wasn't enough for me to be FUBAR'd for life, my mother also saw to it that I spent my first day of kindergarten wearing a dirndl (think St. Pauli's girl outfit), which she had painstakingly sewn by hand just for the occasion.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm exaggerating these claims. But the irony here is that I don't remember any of this. My mother told me these things. If anything, the culprit of a story has a tendency to underplay the consequences of his or her actions. My mother was the culprit of these stories. I was too traumatized to remember any of this. What I write here is what she told me. No more and no less.