Road Apples
Sept. 11, 2006

Hola, amigos! Was ist los?

By Tim Sanders

One of my earlier columns appeared on page 43 of last week’s paper. I scrutinized that column carefully, and when I was done had no idea what I’d read. That is because it was printed in Spanish. Apparently a courageous gentleman named Ervin Stander lost a bet with the editor and agreed to translate portions of the Post into Spanish, starting with my column. Above that column, under the "El Poste" masthead, it said "Las Manzanas del camino Por Lijadoras de Tim Sanders." I tried to translate that using an Internet Spanish-English dictionary, and the best I could come up with was "The Apples of the Highway around the electric Sanding Machine Tim Sanders." I think it was some sort of reference to "Road Apples," but I’m not sure.

I’m not multilingual. In fact, not only am I not multilingual, I’m not bilingual, and just barely lingual. My only language is English, and sometimes even that seems foreign to me. Not that I haven’t given other languages a try.

After my freshman year in college, I spent the summer working as a quality control inspector at a seat belt company in Mt. Clemens, Michigan. One of the things I enjoyed about that job was taking belts off the sewing line, buckling them together, and bolting their anchors to a hydraulic machine which tested their tensile strength. The belts were designed to withstand 9,000 lbs., and testing them was always a highlight of my day, because when those belts finally broke, they made a very satisfying KA-BLAM noise, and frightened people working in adjoining offices.

Another thing I enjoyed was the new experience of working with Mexicans. There were several Mexican folks who worked at the plant, and as a kid from a rural western Michigan town, I found them interesting. They found me interesting too, I guess. I often ate lunch with them, and they were very generous with their food.

"Have a burrito," one of them would offer. I was unfamiliar with homemade Mexican cuisine, but I’d heard rumors about it.

"Is it hot?" I’d ask (I was no fool).

The answer I’d usually get (yes, this happened more than once) was "Hot? NOOOO! See." This was always followed by Jose taking a large bite of whichever fully loaded tortilla he was eating, and smiling the easy kind of smile only possible when your entire alimentary canal, from taste buds to sigmoid colon, is not on fire.

Not wanting to be a sissy, I’d graciously accept one of those innocuous looking burritos and take a bite, and another ... and another. Then my mouth would go numb, my nose would run like a faucet, smoke would roll out of my ears, my eyeballs would fall out of their sockets onto my cheeks, my entire gastrointestinal tract would shout "WATER, WATER, YOU FOOL," and my roasted bowels and I would stagger blindly to the nearest drinking fountain. Sometimes I’d remain there for the better part of an hour. My Mexican friends never seemed to tire of this kind of entertainment, and I never seemed to learn.

Another thing I never seemed to learn was that I was both physically and mentally incapable of learning Spanish. I would spot a pretty Mexican girl working on the assembly line, and ask one of my Mexican acquaintances if he could teach me a nice compliment I could offer her in Spanish, so as to impress her with my suave sophistication. My Mexican buddies were always happy to oblige. Sadly, the words and phrases I was given never produced the desired results. Often, in fact, the response was much too animated to suit me, and followed by a rapid-fire stream of Spanish expletives and very unpleasant hand gestures. At best, those newly memorized Spanish phrases produced way too much laughter. In one pathetic effort, I strode up to a lovely girl named Rosa, looked deeply into her sparkling brown eyes, and intoned: "He perdido la maleta." It sounded very smooth and romantic to me, but as I learned later only meant that I had lost my suitcase. Sadly, Mexican girls were not impressed by college nerds who wandered around seat belt factories looking for their suitcases.

But everything is a learning experience, and if you pay attention, making a fool of yourself can be instructional. When I returned to college, I realized that I needed to learn a foreign language, because ... well, because my advisor said it was a requirement. I also sensed that in the coming decades there would be millions of immigrants crossing our borders, bringing with them fascinating words and phrases from their homeland, working side-by-side with us, opening restaurants, contributing to our musical culture, making movies, operating cable TV channels, and enriching the fabric of America with bilingual assembly instructions for everything from bookshelves to computer hardware. I could see the future, and I wanted to be part of it. I was not going to go through life wallowing in ignorance, speaking only one language. No, I would go through life wallowing in ignorance, speaking two languages. I took a language that I knew would come in handy. I wallowed in German.

Yes, that’s right, GERMAN! There may have been some rationale for taking German at the time, but I don’t remember what it was. Much of the ‘60s are a blur to me now. Actually, they were a blur back then, too. What I do know is that after sweating through two miserable semesters of German, here is the sum total of what I learned:

Q: Was ist das? (What is that?)

A: Ich haben gasangriff. Ist der McGoldklumpen Hahnchenstuckchen. (Chicken McNuggets always give me gas.)


Oh yeah, and "ziegenkase" means "goat cheese," and "apfelstrudel" means "apple strudel." Try using any of that in a Mexican restaurant.

I am still linguistically impaired. So, if you are fluent in Spanish, and anything in that column last week sounded goofy, blame Senor Ervin Stander. In fact, go knock on his door late some night and tell him that you’ve lost your suitcase. It’ll serve him right.