Every day on my way to school during high school I would pass this small little factory in the woods. I could always see it was busy from the cars and trucks outside, but I could never see anyone actually working there. The entire place remained shrouded in mystery to me, its only identification being the "parking for miscoe springs visitors only sign". My job search last summer brought me close to working there but I instead found employment with a landscaper. This summer my choices in employment were much more restricted and I reapplied.
Walking into that factory for the first time was like walking into another world. A world that smelled of musty cardboard and hot rubber from the forklifts, with the humidity of a rainforest and the languages of the Iberian peninsula. I put on my hair net and commenced to work for 12 hours with extremely minimal verbal communication. My first day of work I was lucky enough to have a co-worker who knew enough english to talk with me and tell me how much he hate the job, but the next day I found he had down what I would seem strongly desire to do... quit.
Meanwhile I spent the next three days inside of an almost micro-culture within the small New England town of Mendon. My co-workers laughed about jokes spoken in other languages and shouted warnings that could only be heeded by those who shared their tounge. Meanwhile I spent endless hours with nothing to do but think. For the most part I thought about how obnoxious my bosses were, how inefficent some of the processes we did were and how incredibly similar a lot of my co-workers looked like B-list actors. Xerxes from 300, Egon from Ghostbusters, Joe Pesci and Mark Walberg were among those who I worked with. With my limited communication, I amused myself by imagining these actors and characters interacting with each other. But in some ways I was able to fully immerse myself in their culture. Lunchtime, or almorzar, has always been a favorite activity of mine. I embraced the lunch period fully with my co-workers by enjoying a good lunch outside and then napping on the concrete wall with the Brazillians while the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans engaged in heavy discussions. At times I could almost understand what the discussions were about, but mostly I would try to just listen to the tones.
The guys at lunchIt has been now almost two weeks since I quit that job. I went out to dinner with my Grandmother for my birthday on Monday. The next two stories I have to tell are her's and not mine. Since she is my last Grandparent I am trying very hard not to take any experience with her for granted. The stories she would tell me were always interesting but the ones she told me on Monday especially stood out.
I had heard about how in the past that living rooms actually served as funeral parlors. People lived in a much closer proximity to both birth and death. But I never had thought about how my Grandma had actually been a part of that generation, although it seems she was just at the tail end of it. When she was 4 years old she remembered going to the funeral for her Uncle Fred. She had grown up in a large French family. Everyone spoke French, including her mother and grandmother who she lived with, but she was never taught French and felt a strange distance from the rest of her family. This distance was felt to an even greater extent when her entire family began to argue in French all around her. Amongst the commotion she felt bad that everyone had come to this big event for her Uncle Fred, only for him to be left all alone in the other room. She walked up to the the propped up body in the other room and began to talk with it, believing Uncle Fred to still be alive. "Uncle Fred, why is everyone fighting in the other room while they are leaving you alone here?" she asked him. The lack of response did not surprise her due to the fact that few understood the English she spoke anyways. But she continued to talk with him. Then her mother, my great grandmother, walks up to her and asks her who she was talking to. "I was just talking to Uncle Fred" was her response to her mother's bewildered look.
The next story she told me was closely related to the last. My great grandmother stuggled to learn English in school and stuggled overall in school. Because of this she vowed that she would teach English to her child before French. So she did. My grandmother's first language was English. She never learned French though, despite her mother and grandmother's attempt to teach her after she had learned English. When they would try to teach her French, she would stick her fingers in her ears, shake her head and yell "no no no no", agressively pushing away the language she did not want to associate with. Whenever her mother had a secret to hide from her, she spoke in French. Whenever there was something going wrong, she would speak in French. French was the secret and dirty language. It was the trash language to my grandmother and she vowed to never learn it. So she didn't.
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