Quit Working

Dinner.

It’s Lunch where I come from.

Dinner there’s named Supper here.

She didn’t understand.

The meal at noon. They call it Dinner out here, darlin’. Trust me on this one.

           

I remember Bridget Mann, Dr. Bridget Mann, my college French professor, a native of Germany before the time of Hitler, a BBC broadcaster from London during the Battle of Britain.

            

That’s World War II.

       

German speaking English teaching French.

Madame Mann used to confide that students seeking to speak a foreign language well must stop translating – from English thoughts in your mind into French spoken words from your lips in this case.

You must think in French.

Think like the French, without that troubling need to surrender.

The French think different thoughts than Americans – different shadings, different back stories.

It takes some getting used to. Listening deeply, one discerns cultural differences. Divergences in history.

            

My companion nodded, like she understood.

A beautiful, freshly-minted penny.

I pointed to the café we’d just left, an hour and a little west of Fort Worth. “You heard a better example,” I told her, “French versus German, right back inside that restaurant before the chicken-fried hit our table.”

            

“Do tell, monsieur.” She was getting into it.

           

“Remember that cute waitress? When you wanted a cup of coffee?”

            

“Yeah!” Her soft brown eyes lit up in recognition. “The waitress said the coffee pot had quit that morning!”

 No coffee for you.

            

“And if that same coffee pot failed to produce back in your big city Dallas hometown?”

            

“Then I’d tell you the coffee pot stopped working!”

            

C’est vrai?

Sure ‘nuff.

Dr. Mann must be smiling.

Don’t get so hung up on the words themselves, she says across three decades of silence. “Listen to the thought patterns those words betray.”

            Listen.

            Understand.

            Act.