When I moved out of my parent’s house, the one thing I really started missing — aside from my cat, the gorgeous, the inimitable — was the daily access to the mother tongue. I’d grown up speaking it all the time. Half my day was divided between learning all the proper ways to tell a classmate to go fuck themselves, and arguing about spurious chess moves with my grandfather. The access was always there. Even some of my friends were of the same cultural background, but we never spoke the language to each other. It would break the “law” (see footnote)1.
With my grandparents finally succumbing to their wounds (thanks Nazis) and cancers (probably still Nazis), I had only my parents, my aunts, uncle, my brother and my cousins to reminisce about the old country. This sounds fine but even they started to veer off into the territory of language-garbling. There’s nothing really wrong with that. You can replace whatever words you like, and after about 18 years in the country who could really blame any of them for doing it. Shit, I did it, but I’m the youngest, my grasp of these words grows more foreign everyday. I struggle to read, I struggle to write and I struggle to speak. I have to recite to myself, in my head, an order for half a pound of my favorite salami, before I walk sheepishly walk up to the counter at a Sheepshead Bay Supermarket that doubles as sex dungeon (probably).
So, lately, I’ve been trying a little harder to keep up. I try to use the language wherever possible and appropriate, and with whomever appropriate too. I’ll text in it when I can, read the news in it when I can and force myself to visit and buy groceries from that Sex Dungeon … uh, store, when I need copious amounts of black bread and organic sour cream. I even have this podcast going right now where I try to listen to informative news about various topics that include politics, economics and harping over the Cold War (not really). About midway through the podcast a segment about the these new medical marijuana vending machines is ending and the host takes a request from a previous caller to play a song during the short break before the next segment. The listener asks that the host play Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” a strange sort-of anthem, not really about New York, at least not for our immigrant community, but more an anthem for the cultural signifier that is Sinatra, even though he used to call us “Ruskies” and “Pinko Commies.” At least I think that’s what he called us. And then the song began to play and some sort of electrical shock went up my spine and into my brain and I couldn’t hold back the laughter. No one else cared in my near vicinity, thankfully, but it was important. Why? Because I spent the next couple of minutes looking at Sinatra videos instead of finding out exactly where I could find these weed vending machines. I suspect they’re being conveniently placed next to a Domino’s.
1. ”The Law” — ABA (Always Be Assimilating)
