Tudo Bem

Yesterday I put A. and B. on the plane. They will be away for a month. I came home and got into the Brazilian Portuguese software. That is a beautiful language. I studied it all four years of college, from beginning Portuguese all the way to advanced Portuguese literature. I confess I do not remember any of the literature studies.

The teacher was a young grad student, very enthusiastic, but very, very nervous, and what I chiefly remember about him is that his shirts were always damp with perspiration. Also, he had very thick, wavy brown hair, and his head seemed a little large for his body. I was young and stupid, you know, these are the kinds of things that captured my limited attention.

You might think that after four years of Portuguese study with the same group of students, I might have made some friends, but no. Remember what an oddity I was. The only other student who sort of became a friend was a woman in her 30s who was the mother of a 3-year-old. Once we went to the beach together, and I was a little shocked that she was still breast-feeding. Again, evidence of my youth and stupidity.

There was, however, one male student of Portuguese who took an interest in me during freshman year. That may surprise you, given how deeply I was steeped in my awkward phase. And yet, there is no accounting for taste. This student lived in married student housing, so I assume he was married. We sometimes bumped into each other on our way to or from campus, as I lived in a dorm off-campus that was just across the street from the married student housing complex. Like our teacher, this student was short. He was older, though, maybe in his early 30s, and had thinning pale orange hair and very white skin with freckles. He wore little round glasses and was given to wearing khaki shorts. Whenever we talked, he stared at my chest. It made me so uncomfortable that eventually, I pretended he did not exist. I sat as far away from him as possible, and when we met on the path, I made believe I did not recognize him. This went on from mid-freshman year until I graduated.

I am happy to say that the Portuguese seems familiar and comfortable, though. Which is not to say that I am at all fluent, or even that I remember enough words to find my way in a country where people mostly speak Portuguese (one hopes that country will be Brazil), or even enough words to order a decent meal in a restaurant, it is only to say that my pronunciation of Portuguese is so much better than my mangling of French, and that I remember basic grammatical principles.