In which I bring you up to speed even as I barely can remember all that’s happened.
Beloveds, it’s been a minute. Or a year. I don’t even know.
My previous post was <checks notes> in January of this year. It’s just turned June. Where did the time go?
I’m still spending a large amount of energy, time, and spare money on Creole lessons. I am way beyond my beginner levels and am approaching a nice-to-have feeling of not being absolutely terrible. Except for my lack of confidence which causes me to stumble, I’m able to have conversations with my Haitian friends on ordinary topics. (Some of them really try to push me to the next level and I can almost keep up, but holy moly, every time I think “How much harder could it get, really?” I have yet another encounter with someone or something that shows “Oh baby, you don’t even know the half of it yet.”
In my current Creole class (I have several), we are working through general concepts of grammar, sentence construction, and pronunciation. My teacher has therefore decided that rather than just keep us at a place of accomplishment, it is time to throw us into the racetrack and see if we can keep up with the other cars.
A few weeks ago she started us listening to a Haitian radio soap opera (I think that’s what it is) on a YouTube channel called Lekòl Nou (Our School) in a series called Feyton Chapo Ba. There are perhaps a dozen characters, almost none of which I can recognize yet by their voices. (Maybe Rose-Darline and Mario… and oh yeah, Mèt Ba because that guy is absolutely impossible to understand.) We’re tasked with just listening to the show in very tiny amounts, over and over, and we are asked to listen at full speed, and then at slightly slower speeds (60% and 70%) to see if we can hear the flow of the language and hear the way that words flow from one ending syllable into the next beginning syllable. We’re not listening for understanding—just to hear the musicality of the language. I can’t help but listen and unconsciously try to understand, of course, so for a few of the mini-episodes I can catch the drift. But the larger picture of “What are they people doing, and what do they have in common?” still isn’t clear. I cannot emphasize enough just how difficult this is for me, to have to listen so carefully and intently to hear the syllabification and construction and rhythm.
I went back to listen to some other videos by speakers I’m used to listening to even if they can be a bit rapid, and here’s what’s funny now: those guys sound clear as a bell. Wilky Toussaint? He’s just enthusiastic, but such a good speaker. Decouvrir Grand’Anse? A bit of a French flavor, but so slow and careful. Abedjlunivers? Like a friendly guide exploring the world with you. It’s almost funny to see how much listening to street slang conversations pushes me to better comprehension of “gently spoken” Creole.
My original goal still stands: I want to be able to hear and speak Creole like a native, and I’m working diligently towards that goal. But the goal is not quite as crisp as it was at first—what does it mean, to speak like a native?—yet it seems more possible that I will achieve some level of comfortable fluency so that when I am talking with my Haitian friends they do not have to shift their speed and vocabulary down so I can keep up.
Back in March of this year I wrote an essay for the magazine Our Human Family. Clay Rivers, the publisher, has become a great friend, and while I am no longer an editor for the magazine because of time commitments, I still contribute now and then.
The essay (Renewing in Hope) was about staying the course of advancing justice and liberty in the face of both indifference and opposition. True, it’s tough at times and we want to give up. But we stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were, and every generation faces the same indifference and opposition—and every generation finds a way to pull that moral arc of justice closer to touch the earth. We continue not because “at last we’ve succeeded”—because as long as people are human, there will be selfishness and self-interest that override the necessity of loving one another—we continue the work because each generation needs to have justice and to see it promoted and established.
Now, when I write, I write for myself, mostly: Am I clear? Did I enjoy what I did? Do I enjoy what I write? Am I proud of what I did? If I can answer “Yes” to those questions, then it is enough.
Still, it’s pleasing when someone else likes it, and Clay liked it enough to publish it. Which was cool, right?
But then it got picked up by two non-profits that focus on equality and justice, and promoted by them in their webpages/newsletters.
I was very, very pleased. No lie! It was nice to have some other people find the essay, read it, and enjoy it enough to share it.
Last year I started having a weird sensation in my left thigh, a kind of weird prickliness or itchiness in a patch about the size of a plum. Just superficial, not in the muscle, but somewhere under the skin. Not my right thigh—just the left.
It wasn’t debilitating, so I thought nothing of it. A body that’s been around for almost seven decades now is going to have some issues.
The feeling would come and go, but gradually it started lasting longer and becoming broader. Then a genuine pain would start, not blinding, but an ache. Still thought nothing of it because perhaps I just needed to walk more.
Well, about two months ago it leaped into criticality with giant shocks of pain that were so bad I yelped involuntarily when it hit. It was especially bad when I performed certain actions such as turning my body with my left leg planted firmly, like you do when you’re picking up garden debris and you turn to your left to get some that you missed on the first grab.
Went to the doctor thinking it was just some old-age-related thing, but it’s not. It’s meralgia parasthetica, and it’s pain caused by pressure on the lateral femoral cutaneous nerve which runs from the spine through the groin and down the front of the thigh & is used to transmit sensation from the muscle to the brain. So pain, heat, injury, pressure, and the like. When the nerve is compressed, it’s irritated or damaged, and the response is “pain” or other forms of irritating sensation in the thigh.
The treatment is fairly simple: Lose weight (which I’m doing) and reduce/remove the pressure (by wearing looser clothing, for example). So over the last eight weeks I’ve begun a strict diet supervised by my doctor, and I’m also now going to a gym five days a week for a personal trainer/kinesthesiologist to help me in stretching and moving along with my exercises.
In just three weeks I’ve seen remarkable changes in my ability to stretch and changes in my strength. We’re not free-weight lifting yet, but I’m already able to lie flat, raise both legs together to point to the ceiling, and then sway them side to side to touch the mat with both feet together, bringing them to the upright position each time, and then closing by letting my feet descend together to the mat as slowly as I can. I spend 60-90 minutes each day in these stretching exercises plus some more intense exercises (pushups, burpees, leg lifts while hanging from the bar), and somewhere after the second week of this, I broke through to this place where exercise makes me feel good.
I can’t explain it, but I am feeling a perpetual “buzz” all day of pleasure and contentment, and I look forward to exercise every day. In the six decades of my life, in the running I did every day in college or the gym work I did for ten years, I never had this feeling. Physical exercise was always hard and always unpleasant. I did it because I had to. But now—well, I’m getting up at 5 a.m. so I can get to the gym by 6 a.m. so I can work out for 90 minutes and be at work by 8 a.m., five days a week.
It’s quite a change for me!