Congraduations!
That\’s what people ought to say to each other when they graduate from high school or college. I\’ll be graduating this summer; if anyone was planning on sending me a card, thank you, and thank you even more if it says \”Congraduations!\” on it.
I am assuming, of course, that I pass the classes required of me to graduate. I know I\’m just tempting fate, but I\’m pretty sure it\’s in the bag.
I just have one summer class left, and then I\’m done. The class, which I have to take because of the weird way credits transferred when I came to the U of M from Berkeley, is Spanish 3015 – Conversation and Composition.
In other words, I\’m going to have to sit in a classroom for three hours, three nights a week, from June through August, to prove that I\’m able to converse and compose in the Spanish language.
Spanish. The language I learned to speak before I learned English.
In pre-school – I was about four – I couldn\’t speak English. The few years I had spent on this planet had been spent entirely in the company of my parents, and they didn\’t talk to each other in Ingles.
So, one day, my mom got a call from the pre-school teacher, saying that I was screaming and crying that I kept repeating the word \”Guante\”.
It means glove. You\’d think those trained professionals could have figured that out, since, after all, we were about to go outside, and it was freezing.
There is some bitter irony in all this: after all this time studying how to communicate in English, I have to prove I can do it in Spanish in order to graduate.