June 22, 2006
Owned
We have a visitor this week, a high school girl from Kentucky visiting Austria with the same group that first brought me here thirty years ago.
I have been looking forward to this for years. It was only a matter of time before my daughter brought one home. I was all for it. I thought it would be neat, and it's neater than I expected, having a bright, interested kid hanging around.
Seeing things through her eyes.
She asks a lot of questions. She listens to what you say, then has an intelligent response. One of those people effort isn't wasted upon. Also she doesn't like Bush either, so whenever someone runs out of things to say, they can always say, "man, that Bush, man," and it kick-starts the conversation.
Your language fossilizes when you move away, you know? I've been away for about 20 years now, and conversations with native speakers have been rare during that time. I can read, or watch movies, but that's about it for means to keep up with the evolution of the language.
For a long time I thought I could fake it. I thought internet communication would help me stay in touch, and it has to an extent, but there are certain expressions I can use in writing that are simply not part of my active vocabulary.
We took our visitor for a walk along the Danube in a nearby town last night and she almost got runned over by a cyclist. She gasped and said, "I almost got owned."
I've read that a million times, owned, and use it with ironic intent in writing, but that was the first time I've actually heard it used. Having an American high school kid around is linguistically refreshing.
Thirty years, man.
Some things, it turns out, don't change in thirty years. She was showing us her high school yearbook this morning. There was a tragic story about a boy who died in a car accident. There was something about a skills club, which turned out to mean job skills. My daughter asked about that. They're not, like, the special people? They're more like the dumb boys that no one likes? she explained.
But, yeah, thirty years, man. A lot does happen in that time, no matter what you do. Where were you thirty years ago? I was getting off a bus in Austria, wondering if I was going to like the host family I would spend a week with, and if they would like me.
Posted by Mig at June 22, 2006 08:23 AM30 years ago?
Lemme think. I know I was finishing the school year in a school I barely tolerated, living in a town I hated. Man did Exile suck. The high point of the year was the yearly pilgrimage, hitchhiking to England. Where I would spend two or three days in London, plundering bookstores and then a week in Oxford, where I'd lie in the grass along the River Thames and read the stuff.
30 years ago. Man, being a teenager sucked. I'm so glad I don't have to go back.
Posted by: TH at June 22, 2006 11:14 AM"Where were you thirty years ago?" My dear Mig - I, of course, wasn't even born then.
@yearbook: Show me one yearbook that doesn't contain a story about a guy who died in a car accident.
Posted by: novala at June 22, 2006 12:20 PMre: yearbook, yeah, that was my point. some things never change.
Posted by: mig at June 22, 2006 01:02 PMThirty years ago, I was four.
I'm told I used to read articles from the Times out loud to my parents back then, skipping over whatever large or foreign words or proper names I couldn't pronounce, giving them a rather incomplete view of the day's events, I imagine.
So I was probably doing that. Or spitting up. One of the two.
I've never heard that phrase before.
I don't really remember much from 30 years ago. I was four, or five. We had a grey cat called Smokey. We didn't have a TV. I have a picture, dated Sept 1976. I can't work out my expression at all.
Posted by: flerdle at June 22, 2006 03:54 PM30 years ago, I was two. Living with my grandparents, my mum recently divorced from her first husband, my dad, whom I met 22 years later, outside a coffee shop, and looked shorter than I thought he would be and a bit more insane.
Posted by: maria at June 22, 2006 05:43 PMTo the day:
I lay flat on my back in a patch of bright green grass with a cloudless bright blue sky above. All around, birds sang. Tonka trucks, parked at the ready to the side, revved their imaginary engines as they prepared for the giant excavation to take place in the sandbox once the foreman gave the word that the imaginary fire brigades had successfully flooded the work area with cold, fresh water.
A black and white border collie with bad hips and a protective soul stood guard and prevented my exodus from the unfenced yard.
Dishes from lunch clinked from within the house. A large sliding glass door stood open and revealed my mother as she finished cleaning up the remnants of my bologna sandwich with mustard meal.
A jet flew overhead far in the distance -- so high and so far that the sound would't reach me for several more perfect minutes.
I was thinking about fireworks.
30 years ago I was refugee :) and,did not have a future
kind thanks
tony
No fair, Novala.
30 years ago I learned to walk backward up the loooong hill from my school in Noe Valley to our apartment halfway up the Peak, and learning the city's many bus routes so I could find my way to school from whichever House of the Free Love or Primal Scream or At Least Cheap Drugs I was left on that week. Also I was learning that [hairy, patchouli-scented] people who like to talk about throwing off the chains of societal norms are usually the ones driving luxury company cars to church on Sunday (then to the hotels to meet their secretaries).
Also I learned about punk rock. That was good.