...so I'm hanging about two metres from the ground on a 5.8 that we're trying only because all the 5.6's and 5.7's are taken and some curly-headed scarecrow of a boy who had just asked if we were taking the red or the yellow climb in a suspiciously familiar accent turns to his even smaller friend and begins jabbering at him and I realize that I'm understanding all of their words.
Hey, they're speaking polish.
Hey, maybe I ought to be focusing on how in hell I'm going to wedge my toe into that little hole.
I made it two thirds of the way up on sheer positive reinforcement and when the recessed holds got too tiny for my rented clown shoes I slid happily back down right in time for another barrage of polish as they're asking each other if they should ask us if we're finished with the red 8.
I tell them yes, and they look unsurprised as I tell them that I understand a little bit of what they're saying.
Of course, I'd been staring at their mouths while they spoke, a bit of an obvious indication that I'm processing something of their conversation.
They broke into such swift grins though, not just that we were leaving them the red climb but also in sheer supportiveness of my sad attempts at speaking a language that my parents obliged us to abandon upon arriving in this country nearing on twenty years ago.
"But you understand everything!" the littler one would jabber in polish.
"Well, just the really common bits."
"But you really are understanding everything!"
And for the next hour or so while our diminished climbing group wandered about discussing this or that move that this or that spidermonkeyman was flawlessly executing, waiting for our arms to stop visibly throbbing so that we could try one last one, we'd cross paths with our polish compatriots and they would grin wide polish smiles and the little one would insist again that I'm understanding him and I'd answer in broken half-polish half-english with only one slip for a french word and by the time we were leaving I remembered how to say goodbye and how happy I was to have met them
and I understood perfectly when they said
"same here".
It felt so good to be speaking in another language. However awkwardly, however slowly. As though hidden corridors of my brain were being dusted and opening their doors and letting the already impeded ventilation breathe just a little clearer across my hemispheres.
Today my arms hurt less because I didn't want to waste too much of our threesome's time but there is a perpetual stiffness that allows me to sit here and rub my bicep and marvel at how if I squish hard enough I can actually feel a muscle beginning to grow so deep beneath layers of round.
Yesterday at some point Josh commented that my arm strength is just fine and that maybe I ought to stop trying to power up climbs now. I made it up the first handful of the green 5.8 with one grunt-and-pull. It's not good technique by a long shot, but some small part of me marvelled that for the first time in my life I made the same mistake as everyone else.
Today in my head I can still hear the rapid rise and fall of yesterday's vocalizations, but they are already falling out of key when I try to repeat them --
I really have to find a cassette player to play the lesson over whilst wrestling with the coffee perk in the morning.
My morning routine gets stranger with each passing week. Wander downstairs, kiss the bird, grind the coffee, rinse out the pot, pull out some fruit for breakfast, stick my fingers in the plants to see which ones need watering, dose out the plant food if it's been a while, talk to bird whilst dispensing rain on his own personal rainforest and tell him about how wonderfully the coriander is sprouting and how the basil has finally overcome its shyness, how the spider plants are threatening to eat my hair the very same way he does each time I bend over the vine cuttings that I stole from random places in Montreal and enumerate the tiny little brighter green shoots that poke wee spikes out between the farthest leaves and then unfurl.
And now, hit play on the tape just as the coffee begins percolating, and deafen the poor cockatoo and wilt the plants while I try to play soprano and learn how to remember with my ears rather than my eyes.
When I was little I read in one of my thousand paragraphs (I lived in the paragraph, then, I had nowhere else to stretch) that photographic memories were learned just so and consequently ten years later, laughed my way through the simpler portions of higher education.
I still remember that the page explaining that the difference in graphing velocity versus acceleration at different points on a slope is a tangential relationship, is the top left hand corner of page 122-123 in the dark blue physics book. The graph was right-justified and had a red line superimposed on a yellow curve. In green pen I had drawn in the indiviual limit points for various tangents out of boredom while the teacher tried to re-explain first year calculus to a braindead second year crowd.
Now I just have to learn to do that with my ears. I can see the shape of the melody in my mind, but I want to hear it.