RIVER CITY JOURNAL: BUENAS DIAS, MONSIEUR: SORRY, THAT'S ABOUT ALL I REMEMBER

Those visiting Ukrainians didn't seem to have any trouble understanding each other. Why does it sound like Greek to me?

For about an hour at this week's meeting of the Cape Girardeau Rotary Club, it was like being at the United Nations. A group of visiting Ukrainians -- three tables' worth -- were visiting. As the meeting progressed, translators at each of the tables provided an instant blow-by-blow account. The translators must have been doing a pretty good job, because the Ukrainians laughed at some of the jokes.

It was pretty disconcerting to the rest of us, however, to hear everything in stereo, only it was like listening to an orchestra and a rock band at the same time. This is a musical combination that rarely works.

Just imagine if you were really at the United Nations and heard a hundred or so languages all around you. No wonder there's so much confusion in the world today.

I'm always fascinated when I hear other folks speaking a language other than English. In the first place, I am transfixed that others can communicate without English. I tried to learn Spanish in high school and French in college. I can tell you that if I ever got stranded in France or Mexico, I'd be up a creek or rio or rive or something.

Yet there are all those Mexicans and Frenchmen babbling away, laughing and scowling and gesturing. They seem to understand each other just fine.

My high school Spanish teacher once told our class that we would know when we had learned the language. Mrs. Jones said we would be dreaming one night, and when we woke up we would realize we had been dreaming in Spanish.

I've got news for Mrs. Jones. In my dreams, I can fly a hundred feet off the ground. I can swim underwater for hours at a time. Heck, in my dreams I can even replace the spark plugs on my car.

Speak Spanish? Yo no tengo whatever it is that makes my brain think in anything other than English.

When I was growing up, Kelo Valley in the Ozark hills west of here was no cultural melting pot, if you know what I mean. Sure, my stepfather was from Austria and could speak Italian, but he only spoke English, which seemed perfectly logical at the time, since that's what everyone else was speaking.

And we had a family or two that had migrated all the way from Greenwood Valley, which was just over the hill. Once we had a family move in from St. Louis, but they didn't last long. Boy, did they talk funny.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is The Summer the Mexican Man Stayed in Our House.

This would have been sometime about 1953, which is when electricity arrived on Kelo Valley. This meant we could have a real radio and an electric toaster. It also meant we could have a deep well dug, one with an electric pump several hundred feet down in the ground where there was an ample supply of cold, lime-sweet water. With a deep well, we would no longer need to rely on the hand-dug cistern that collected rainwater from the roof of the house.

My stepfather contracted with a well driller from somewhere over by Van Buren. The well driller came, set up the drilling apparatus and then left. Staying behind to operate the machinery was a Mexican laborer who spoke a little English. Manuel was fully prepared to fix his own meals and sleep outside for the week or two it would take to drill the well. But my mother, like most folks in the Ozarks, wouldn't hear of this. So Manuel moved into our living room, where there was a day bed. He ate meals with us -- remember, this was in the days when you ate three big cooked meals a day -- and turned our kitchen into a League of Nations. I heard amazing stories about Mexico and pesos and tortillas and burros.

As it turns out, Manuel wanted to learn English, because he dreamed of becoming an American citizen. In those days, you had to be able to speak English to be a citizen. Really.

My mother taught eight grades in one-room schools, and she decided to take Manuel on as a special project.

Most vividly, I remember my mother and Manuel sitting side by side on the concrete foundation of the old cistern with a second-grade workbook my mother had in her teaching supplies. There were freshly dug beets on the cistern foundation, drying out before they would be cooked or canned or stored in the root cellar. And there were some good-sized tomatoes waiting to be taken into the kitchen.

My mother was trying to teach Manuel the concept of "choose." The workbook wanted the student to "choose" the right answer for each multiple-choice question.

"What is this meaning?" Manuel kept asking. "What is choose?"

After several stabs at explaining to no avail, my mother picked up a beet and a tomato, one in each hand, and asked Manuel which one he wanted to eat. Manuel went for the tomato.

"See," she said, "you choose the tomato."

A light bulb went on in Manuel's head. Honest to goodness you could see it happen. A big smile spread across his face. "I choose!" he shouted. "I choose!" he said to me.

That night at supper, Manuel couldn't get over his excitement. We had fried chicken. "I choose this piece of chicken," he said, reaching for the green beans. "I choose these beans," he said, cocking his head the way any learned man would, under the circumstances. "I choose gravy for my potatoes," he said.

Any time I ever ran into a brick wall after that in my schooling, I would think of Manuel sitting on the cistern foundation, ecstatic over learning the meaning of "choose." Goodness knows where Manuel is today. Maybe he went into oil drilling in Texas and owns a major-league sports team somewhere. Maybe he died in poverty in some Mexican village -- but not before he told the story over and over of learning about "choose" on a farm in the Missouri Ozarks.

Manuel will never know what an inspiration he was to an 8-year-old farm boy who had plenty of choices left to make and never gave up. My mother wouldn't give up on Manuel. And Manuel wouldn't give up on himself.

I just wish he had taught me to speak a little Spanish.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.