Lost and found

Day 4 of the project 
Lima, Peru

One of my unspoken fears was that I had lost my Spanish. The lack of formal study and any semblance of verbal practice over the last few years left me with a scary number of blanks and "yo no se"s when walking through San Francisco's Mission district. Chile and Peru are full of English speakers, but South America and Spain are the only places where I can hope to converse in the local language. And hopefully reinvigorate my Americanized brain.

Researchers have compared the brain to a network of roads. The ones that get the heaviest use are like freeways and information flows quickly. The least used are back roads must be navigated slowly and with care. The metaphor makes sense, though I was terrified that my Spanish was going to be like an Arkansas dirt road: pot-hole-riddled and embarrassingly red.

But it is amazing the brain's capacity to quickly convert a dirt road into at least a single-lane paved back road. Words that I haven't used in years have been dug out, dusted off and applied across the past four days. But what I am noticing is that it is much more difficult to cement new terms into my mind. I can't tell if that is exhaustion from a kind of mental exertion I haven't had in a decade or if it is a phenomenon of aging.

I discussed this topic...sort of...with un abogado Columbiano (Columbian lawyer) at dinner. My Spanish was slightly better than his English, and between the two of us, we managed to eek out a somewhat intelligent conversation. We agreed it is much harder to learn as grown ups (30 and 28, respectively) and that we both wished we had done more to maintain our language education. I hope this is not a permanent condition. I'd like to move beyond third-grade-level Spanish proficiency sometime in my life.

Nevertheless, it was fun to talk with someone who has a completely different perspective; el abogado hinted at being pretty politically far left and it would have been great to ask a lot of questions. But I don't think our respective commands of the other's language would have gotten us very far...probably just confused.

So here is to hoping. Hoping my vocabulary continues to be remembered and added to and that my conjugations become smoother. Hoping that I can eventually ask those questions and have an adult-level dinner conversation that allows me to see through a different lens and give someone else my view.