You probably know that I’ve been struggling to learn Spanish over the last three years, spending two hours per day with Duolingo, listening to Spanish podcasts, attending online classes, having daily Zoom tutoring sessions and watching Spanish telenovelas every night. And yet … I consider myself an intermediate student with only a moderate fluency. Sure, I know thousands of vocabulary words, but putting them together with the right gender and conjugation is a different thing altogether and still presents a challenge for me.

My purpose in learning another language, specifically Spanish, was to be able to communicate with my grandson, whose mother is a Mexican national. However, another reason for working so hard at this is that somewhere I read taking up a new language at retirement is a good way to ward off dementia and keeps the brain active.

The past three-and-a-half days I’ve been in California, visiting my family. My cousin Amy and her husband were visiting from Minnesota, so another of my cousins, Mary Au, who is a professional pianist, put together a mini-family reunion of ten of us, including my sister Margo and her husband, Ken, my brother Jim, visiting from Portland, and my brother Rick and his wife, Sandra, and their son-in-law, Matt.

I was able to visit my son’s family, including my four-year-old grandson, Andrés. He didn’t start speaking until after the age of three, and even was assigned a speech tutor by Los Angeles County. I heard, though, that late speech is typical for children growing up in a bilingual household. His first language was Spanish, and even when you asked him a question in English, he always answered in Spanish. That changed only a couple of months ago, when his English and Spanish speech grew exponentially. I would say that he is extremely and equally fluent in both Spanish and English. When he talks to his mother or to his mother’s sister, he speaks Spanish, but when he speaks to his dad (my son) or to me, he speaks English. I tried speaking a little Spanish to him, but he always brought the conversation with me back to English.

It’s simply not fair that he has picked up all these language skills in about a year and here it’s taken me three years. I simply don’t have the facility or fluency that this four-year-old has!

I also had a nice visit with former Hawaii resident and dear friend, Joan Ishibashi, who drove down from Oxnard with her mother, Mary. We were able to have lunch together and remembered that in 2019, I saw Joan on four separate occasions, once in London and another time when we drove to Cornwall to the seaside town of Port Isaac where the TV show Doc Martin is filmed. We also saw each other that year in California and then in Cleveland, Ohio, where Joan arranged to have me play several organ concerts and we heard Apollo’s Fire and the Cleveland Orchestra.

Now I’m home in Hawaii for about two-and-a-half weeks until I go to Seattle for the 65th anniversary of the Compline Service and the 2021 Symposium for the Peter R. Hallock Institute. I’ll only be gone to Seattle for the weekend, then home for three days, then it’s off to California again and then to El Paso, TX where I’ll visit another of my BFFs, organist Jieun Kim Newland. Of course, I’ll have a couple of day trips to Kauai in there too.

The return of the jet-set life!