Vnuchka Memoirs, Part 4

Trilingual Detour

After the “glory” of Russian choir my freshman year, Mr. Guidry left for Baylor University and our Russian program was dead. I wanted to keep studying language, so I had to choose. La Porte was the first bedroom community for NASA, so we had a pretty solid college prep curriculum. Our high school offered Spanish, German, French, and Latin. I wasn’t really interested in Spanish (not exotic enough), German seemed hard, French pronunciation seemed crazy, so I considered Latin. I thought it could be valuable in future studies in other languages and in literature, so I chose it. It actually suited my academic style, since Miss McNamara followed a grammar-translation approach. I don’t remember much about the class, except I had to memorize a longish classical Latin passage. At the end of the year, I decided that was enough Latin. My sophomore year was blur - I don’t remember any of my other classes. Near the end of the year, my father took his own life. I will explain that to the best of my ability in another thread. There was one more note about Latin. Miss McNamara took it personally that I didn’t sign up for Latin II. She pulled me aside and asked me why. I don’t think I gave a very good answer, but I was kind of a mess.

This ended the study of languages for a little over 2 years. When I graduated from high school, I was hoping to pick up Russian again, but none of the colleges I could go to offered it. I went to San Jacinto Community College, then Sam Houston State University, then back to San Jacinto College, then Golden West Community College, and finally to Eastern New Mexico University. I signed up for French every semester during that time. I didn’t finish my first semester at San Jacinto, but managed squeak out a C in the spring semester. At Sam Houston State, I got distracted by literature and history and theater. I barely attended French class, still took the final, then received my first F in college. Next semester, back at San Jacinto, I was back in French. The French teacher was really nice and loved theater. She actually became part of our theater group and even got a little too intimate with our best leading man. As a result, she was worried that if any of us (many of our theater participants were taking her class) got a bad grade, we might let it slip that she was in an inappropriate relationship, so we all passed. I think I would have gotten a C anyway, and to my knowledge, no one actually threatened her. We were better than that. Anyway, the best thing about that semester was a performance by the language classes (again!), and I sang Dominique, a song popularized by the Singing Nun. The teacher wanted me to sing Eau Claire de le Lune, but I couldn’t quite get the melody right, so we settled for Dominque. I wore a puffy sleeved shirt and pastel plaid pants and pranced back and forth on the stage. It was well received, so both the teacher and I were pleased.

I began the next semester at San Jacinto College but left abruptly. My old high school girlfriend had graduated from high school and had begun her studies there. I tried to accept it, but seeing her nearly every day, sometimes even playing ping pong with her in the Student Union, was just too much for me emotionally. I dropped out of school, packed up my Ford Falcon, and drove west to California, showing up on my Uncle Clyde’s front porch, seeking refuge. He and Aunt Margaret never hesitated. I stayed with them for a year and began classes at Golden West Community College in Huntington Beach, California. I took and finished my third full semester, eking out a “mercy” C from a very sympathetic French teacher. For our final, we had to make an oral presentation. I chose to demonstrate the rules of playing chess. I studied and practiced for hours, but when the time came, I freaked out. I got the names of the chess pieces mixed up, forgot key verbs for the moves, broke out in profuse sweat, and spoke in a quavering voice. It was a train wreck. I’m sure she passed me out of pity.

My final semester of French came after I joined the US Air Force, went to San Antonio for basic training, then Denver, Colorado for electronics technical training, and finally to Clovis, New Mexico begin my “career” as an avionics technician for F-111 aircraft. I was miserable at the job and had a terrible boss. He knew I was smart, but thought I was just being lazy for not learning what I need to in order to be a good technician. We clashed so badly that I was reassigned to a night shift administrative position. This turned out to be a very positive turning point. I went to work at 10 pm every night, assembled all the maintenance reports for our training aircraft, the F-111’s, and our brand new very cool A-10 ground support aircraft. I put all the information together into a very condensed summary of our overall maintenance status for the 7 am Commander’s briefing the next morning. I was allowed to leave as soon as I finished the report. Since it only took 2 or 3 hours to complete, I began taking classes at Eastern New Mexico University full time.

My fourth semester of French (required to qualify for a Bachelor of Arts degree) was a bit of a tragedy. I had scraped through 3 semesters by the skin of my teeth, so I had no idea how I was supposed to pass this final hurdle. Fate took a hand. I hung on till about a third of the way through the semester. Suddenly, our teacher stopped showing up for class. It turns out his wife and children had been killed in a horrific highway crash with a semi tractor-trailer rig. Class was suspended for two weeks, but when we resumed, the teacher just showed up and told us to study our books. We never received another lesson. The university decided the only fair thing to do is give us the grade we were carrying when the accident happened. So I got my 4th semester C by default, and would graduate with a BA in Literature with a double major in Speech Communication a year later.

After I graduated, I still had a full summer before I finished my air force enlistment. One of my best friends was Gracie, a very nice, very pretty, very smart Latina. She was majoring in Physical Education, with a minor in Speech Communication. We shared lots of classes together and played handball and tennis whenever we got the chance. I beat her in handball, but she killed me in tennis. Anyway, for a surprise, I took a summer Spanish class. I studied pretty hard and thought I was getting pretty good, A popular Latino expression back then was “Viva la Raza,” so I learned it worked it into a conversation. She said something about working on voting rights for Hispanics and I said, “Viva la ratsa!” thinking the “z” was pronounced “ts”. Gracie started laughing so hard, she was crying. She nearly fell off of her chair. When she finally caught her breath, she told me, “You just said ‘long live the rats’.” And that was the end of my trilingual detour from Russian.