Ishi

When I was in college, I took several classes in Native American History and one book in particular still stands out: Ishi. It dealt with the lone survivor of a native tribe. All his people were extinct, he was the only one left. even before I lost my family, I felt great empathy with this man. More so now, as I no longer have any one to speak my native language , Flemish , with other than my aunt in Belgium and that means calling her long distance, which I do every two or three months. I have a brother in Texas, but I last saw him in 1998, at my youngest sister's funeral in Georgia. He no longer has any interest in contact as our family truly was torn apart by tragedy upon tragedy. I see friends of mine, like my Vietnamese friend and her family who own a beauty salon, and they all work together, speak Vietnamese together. We were in Tae Kwon Do as a family, and the owners all worked together, spoke Korean together. I have a Peruvian friend, and she and her mother and the three children all lived and spoke their beautiful Spanish together. Together. I find myself speaking Flemish to myself, remembering Flemish jokes my father told, or recalling conversations with my brother when he was still part of my life and story. There are days when that absence of connectedness to my roots cuts like a cold knife on raw skin, the skin of my heart. My husband and son are warm, loving people and sometimes all it takes is one of their big, bear hugs to make things all right again. I have great empathy for animals, and am a passionate supporter of the American Humane Society, the Doris Day Animal League, Humane Society Legal Defense Fund,and Humane activist. Perhaps because in cases of abuse, animals have no voice, as the ASPCA so poignantly points out. I have turned neighbours in to Animal Services for documented animal cruelty, sometimes successfully so.The ache in my own heart makes their vulnerability more pressing to me. For 25 years now, my husband and I have been taking in unwanted and abandoned  neighbour and shelter dogs. We also always have two or three cats, that somehow always find their way to our home, and peacefully co-exist with the dogs.I speak "cat" and "dog" quite well by now... The inability to speak my language when I want to, the isolation emotionally it can cause, makes me feel like a monk, linguistically, a  monk who took a vow of silence on a not so voluntary basis. That cache of isolation gives me a unique perspective, often difficult to articulate,which can be very frustrating. Perhaps that is part of the reason I like doing my embroideries, and I enjoy writing poetry, two more ways to try to get my perspective across.                                                                                                                              
language is a fascinating thing. It brings people together, and it keeps people apart. I grew up speaking Flemish, and by the time I was twelve, I was learning French, by the time I was thirteen, I was learning ancient Latin and Greek, and German and English. I had the opportunity to put my English to good use when I was sixteen and spent six weeks with an American family in Illinois. When I was in college at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas, I decided to challenge myself and take Spanish. Two years later, I got the chance to practice that very rudimentary knowledge when I spent a month with a Mexican friend's family in Mexico City, a wonderful experience I treasure to this day.With only four years of college Spanish at TCU I was accepted into the graduate Spanish program at the University of Texas in Austin, a feat of which I am proud, as the Spanish and Portuguese Department was at the time ( 1981) ranked fifth in the nation. I graduated with a master's degree from that department in 1987. Having access to Spanish made it wonderful to travel in Costa Rica, the Caribbean and Panama. I was blessed with great friends who would invite me to stay with them, all I had to pay was the plane ticket. It brings you so much closer to a culture, a people if you speak the language. My husband knows a little Flemish but as it was just me he mostly dealt with, there was not enough incentive to pursue it fully.The same reason my son never learned Flemish, in a way it is easier for him that way, although it would have been truly nice for me. Ishi. I have very little accent, that only makes me blend in better, and so the circle of linguistic isolation, invisible, untraceable elegantly loops closed.