Yesterday at about 5:30 PM I took the #5 bus to meet my friend R. She usually works at home, but is still taking various diagnostic tests before her surgery and has bouts of tension when she can't work, so she called me to accompany her on a theraputic shopping expedition. I sat down on the bus next to a friendly-looking woman who began talking to me in Hebrew, and it took me a minute or two to realize she was my favorite former Ulpan teacher, Ruti!
Ruti has retired now, her son who was about 10 years old when I took private lessons in her home is now a computer programmer. She looks only a little different, shorter hair, but still the same open face and manner of the former kibbutznik I suspect she is. After my initial self-consciousness about speaking to her in Hebrew, I relaxed a bit and felt confident enough to pay attention to my accent. What can this mean?
It was such fun to see Ruti after all these years, and realize that yes, I have achieved some fluency and comprehension in the language that bedevilled me for so long, that I ended up buying myself a new outfit! Rena claims that it cheered her up as much to see me buy something new as it did for her to buy for herself. I am usually not interested in shopping, and only went along as a mitzvah. Photo to follow.
5 comments:
Whheeeeeee you rock! So we are totally going to start having a 10 minute hebrew talk at the scrumptious soup salon I take it ...? (hope hope) BTW since you are going awol for like awhile up north with children and animals and nature and stuff --ya want to start All Creatures Great and Small on dvd --I have the whole long series... :)
Do you have an RSS feed? I can't seem to find it on your site....
Yael - I'll do better than that: I'll invite Ruti to the soup salon! I'd love to borrow All Creatures...
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Happy New Year to you and yours Savta! Ienjoyed this post so much as it reminded me of my own short-lived attempt to learn to at least read and write Hebrew. I took a course called (excuse the murder) called something like B'Yad Ha Lashon. (By the ear?) It was a group lesson given through a Jewish center in FL. I don't remember much other than I translated a passage as "The goat is eating the Torah," before my teacher threw up her hands and in the towel. Now I just quietly hum or move my lips during Yom
Tov services.
Anyway, L'Shanana Tova Savta!
Lucy: you are so funny! I know that "yad" means "hand" and "lashon" means "tongue" or "language." So where did the goat come from? Happy New Year to you and yours, in any goat!
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