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The Sick Uncle

When I was first learning Spanish in high school, Mr. Llanos was my teacher. He was an animated, 5'4" Cuban immigrant that bounced on the balls of his feet as he walked. The overall effect of him pacing back and forth across the front of the classroom reminded me of a little of a Jack Russell Terrier attempting to elicit a treat from its master.

Mr. Llanos might have actually been 5'2" but he always combed his sparsely populated hairdo straight up from his balding crown, creating the illusion of an inch or two of additional height. Apparently that extra inch or two made all the difference for his ego. He was one of the most positive, cheerful teachers I have ever had.

My sister, Genette had loved him when she had taken his course four years earlier. I have to admit that he could be entertaining and generally I enjoyed being in his classroom. He cared a lot about each of his students which is an earmark of a good teacher.

That is not to say that everything about the course was perfect. There was at least one thing that he did that annoyed me. He expected me to be as great at acquiring a foreign language as my sister had been. I was there in the house at night when she was taking his course. I witnessed first hand what she had to do to learn Spanish. She memorized vocabulary lists. She even asked me to quiz her, which required that I had to learn how to pronounce the words using Spanish phonetics. In the process, I had learned a number of Spanish words a full 4 years prior to ever officially studying the language. As beneficial as that might seem, I did nothing with the gift of time. In fact when I was in the fifth grade I had enough trouble reading English. I really did not want to learn Spanish at all and found knowing some words a little bothersome at times, especially when the spelling of the words with common roots and origins was similar enough that I would forget which was correct for English.

Regardless, Mr. Llanos used to call on me because my sister was one of his best students ever and he expected me to have the very same genes that produced the excellent student that he had seen in her. He was forever asking me to use a ‘palabra’ in a sentence, ‘en espanol..’
I had exhausted the list of easy but acceptable ones, such as: Yo escribo mi nombre en la papel, Quien Sabes?, No lo se, Tengo muy hambre, or Nosotros somos Dios. The last one I’ll admit he had some issues with.

After a few weeks I had used things I knew from quizzing my sister years before. He called upon me and I had to come up with something fast, something out of my essence and something out of my very limited knowledge of Spanish. This was the one I came up with, and although I could say it fluently, he had issues with it. I believed innocently that I was saying something else about my Uncle being sick, but this is how it came out:

Mi tio es inferno pero el camino is verde.

Now that I know a little more Spanish, I consider what I came up with not only a piece of nonsense but also a work of art. Note that somehow in Spanish it looks a lot more sensible than the English translation.

E

posted by Unknown @ 8:07 PM