Is that safe?
Probably not, but he'll be OK.
He says he goes for weeks without speaking English. When I was growing up, my dad's command of language always seemed comically optimistic. He had no compunction about foisting his fractured Spanish on anyone at all. You can imagine my embarrassment, but the reality was even more excruciating. I took Spanish quite seriously. I took everything more seriously then. I conjugated verbs and considered the subjunctive. My father was trapped in present tense, to the extent that he could utilitize even that. Still, I wonder now if I inherited some language talent from him.
Now father's lingua franca is Russian. Since leaving the US 10 years ago, the place he's worked--Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan--have all been countries hoping to join Europe after decades of Soviet influence. Almost everybody understands Russian, even if they don't want to. Since my dad is obviously not a native speaker, people are willing to lay resentment aside and answer him. Someone complimented his Russian the other day and he told them, "Oh, no, I sound a lot better than I am."
It’s true, his accent is so good that you could imagine he knows something about Russian. Even I can tell that it comes to him easily. Not like Spanish.
Everywhere my dad goes, he seems to get along well. In Baku, it was the same story. After about three minutes he finds himself having a drink and laughing and getting to know people. There is a language barrier, but it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
One time he went on holiday to Egypt and came back saying he hadn’t been kissed so much since he was a little boy in Winamac, Indiana. Presumably, being Egypt, he made all these friends without even drinking.
The next port of call for my father may be Kyrgyzstan. The first challenge, I think, is learning to spell the name of this country. I find it goes easier if you insert the letter "y" in every conceivable location.
The next thing to do when heading to Kyrgyzstan is to see what Lonely Planet has to say. I think my dad will fit in just fine in a place with "a healthy distrust of authority and a fondness for drinking fermented mare's milk."
The distrust of authority part is self-evident: my dad is an itinerant globe-trotting IT consultant who takes no crap from no- one. And he already knows plenty about mares and milk.
A lifetime ago, when we lived on a farm, my dad milked goats by hand; and later, he hooked up our Jersey cow to an old vacuum milker. He engaged in tests of will with at least two mares, and took no crap from them, either. So he’ll fit in great with the Kyrgyzis: he can probably already discuss mares and milk, in Russian--after a fashion.
It’ll be great: the Kyrgyzis can put him in a yurt and he can design a database or two for their government. Sounds like a good sort of exchange.
Our conversation is interrupted then, and my father takes a call on another phone.
In the silence, I hear women's voices in the darkened park speaking words I do not understand. Somewhere in the world, it is night, and somewhere people live an ordinary reality I cannot imagine, expressed as a language I cannot grasp.
Somewhere, in a city on the Caspian Sea, my father will happily talk to anyone in any language he can dredge up. He sounds better than he is, and his secret is that he doesn't let that stop him.
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