25  What I want to be when I grow up

I was in about third grade, and my mother was talking about me to some adults. “Ricky likes jokes. I think he’s going to be a comedian when he grows up.”

“No, I’m not,” I said, apparently offended that I might be categorized in such lowly terms. “I like history.”

I’m not sure if I understood what it takes to be an historian, or even if such a thing existed, but it was a clue that I saw myself as a thinker, one who makes a living from his brain rather than his muscle.

The earliest record of what I would be was a note my mother put into one of those fill-in-the-blank scrapbook albums for babies. Alongside the yearly height and weight, and favorite foods, there was the question: “When I grow up I want to be…” and a helpful multiple choice set of answers. Instead of “fireman”, my mother circled the choice for “astronaut”. Of course, in those moon race days of the 1960s, such a dream would have been common for every kid, and I suppose I was probably similar, to the degree I bothered to think about it. But like most kids, I needed several more years before I could think about it for myself.

My multiple bouts of hospitalization, and experience of seeing Dr. Gungor’s position first hand, made me interested in becoming a doctor. That seemed like a good fit, and it matched my eagerness to learn about science, but it never became a passion. I just felt that, yeah, I could do it; it was good money and prestige, so why not.

25.1 Missionaries and Languages

Sometime in elementary school, maybe after fourth grade, after a world cultures reading when I learned about Saudi Arabia, I learned while in the midst of a fervent prayer session, that God wanted me to become a missionary. Saudi Arabia seemed like an especially challenging place, and that’s where I wanted to be. I didn’t know anything about what it would take to be a Christian missionary in a Muslim nation, but who was I to question God’s call? It just seemed obvious that this was why I was put on the earth, and for many years that was what I understood would be my life’s work.

Perhaps it was too obvious, too inevitable for me, so I didn’t pay much attention to the mechanics of what it really meant to be a missionary. Of course I needed to learn more about God, through prayer and Bible reading, but I was doing that anyway. The social studies classes at school, where we learned about other cultures, kept me interested in the idea of foreign lands, but I don’t remember taking it to a deeper level.

But around the same time, my schoolteacher showed us a documentary about linguistics that absolutely fascinated me. Although if somehow I were ever able to find that film and watch it again, I’m sure I would be disappointed – it has built up quite a monumental reputation in my recollections—but it instilled in me the idea of how interesting the mind is. Like the short story I read in third grade that exposed me to computers for the first time, I suddenly saw how language was another way to become smarter. I realized that I really wanted to learn another language.

Real missionaries visited our church from time to time, and when they did they usually stayed at our house for a few days. I remember missionaries who talked to us, over dinner, about places like Thailand, South America, the Philippines, South Africa. It gave me a sense that foreign countries were real places, with real people who were just like me only from a different culture. What was it like to speak another language, to think from a different culture, I wondered.

Like many Americans, another exposure to the rest of the world came from the friends and relatives who had served in the military. One such family, the sister of a regular church-goer and good friend, had just returned from living in Okinawa Japan, and had even brought a missionary back who presented at our church. The missionary visited us with his family, and I met for the first time somebody who had lived in Japan and – what really impressed me – had learned to speak some Japanese. I no longer remember the words they tried to teach me – I’m sure it was simple greetings or perhaps numbers – but the very sound of the words impressed me. How does language work, I wondered? How can you possibly express the same ideas, using completely different sounds and symbols?

I had other hints about how fascinating it would be to know another language. It was in the evening, at a church Bible study held at the home of one of our church members, and as was the custom each person was asked to read a verse from the Bible, one at a time, around the room. There was an older woman there, from the Chippewa Indian reservation, who apologized that, although she had brought her Bible, it was written in her native language so she would be giving an on-the-fly translation that might be slightly different wording. My father, delighted by this, asked her instead to read in her native language, and she did. At this point, the hosts of the Bible Study, who were immigrants from Germany, admitted that they too normally read the Bible in their own language. It struck me as absolutely amazing that, not only were there different words that meant the same thing, but that you could have a key idea from the Bible represented in a code that was perfectly intelligible only to those who understood the language.

All of this made me eager to learn a second language. Our school taught basic Spanish starting in middle school, and I tried as best as I could with the couple hours per week minimal exposure. But obviously I was not going to get very far and I lost interest. Spanish wasn’t my idea of a “great” language. Meanwhile, I noticed in my father’s collection of books a five-language dictionary: translations to/from English, Spanish, French, German, and Yiddish. It was great fun to look up words in one language and see how they sounded in another. Of course, since most of the words were indo-european, it wasn’t hard to notice the similarities, and this gave me more confidence in my ability to master these languages.

In Jimbo’s house, I found another interesting set of books, a course on memory from Dr. Bruno Furst. My father had the same book, a home correspondence course with tips for how to develop a perfect memory. I devoured the series of lessons, driven by the desire to reach one of the later ones “Learn a foreign language on the plane ride to the country”. When, at last, after surviving chapters about memorizing long phone numbers and people’s faces, I arrived at the one about languages, I learned again how similar the European languages were, and once again developed additional self-confidence that I too could someday be bilingual.

But why Spanish? I thought. Here my mother intervened in my life in one of the critical ways that made me what I am today. We needed to choose which classes to take among a set of electives that included two that I really wanted to try, home economics, and industrial arts, plus Spanish. I decided that because I already knew the basics of Spanish, I could skip it. But my mother wouldn’t let me. I was angry and disappointed at the time, but she insisted that I needed it for college. Ultimately I was able to take the other electives anyway, but her insistence that I take Spanish the whole way kept me focused on learning the language – any language – in a way that I couldn’t have had the self-discipline to do on my own.

Still, Spanish was never enough of a “cool” language for me to want to seriously devote myself to it. My teenage arrogance let me think I already knew the basics well enough – after all, hadn’t I studied the 5-language dictionary, didn’t I already know much of the simple vocabulary, wasn’t I learning the basics of the grammar?

Travel to Mexico, fortunately, forced me to confront my linguistic limitations. True fluency, I realized, would take more than a Dr. Furst course. But the American-born missionaries I met convinced me that it was achievable. Maybe I would try a different language, but I definitely wanted to know what fluency felt like.