Goat Boy, Captured!

I’m listening to a new album of Ottoman court classics.  Closing my eyes, I can see Istanbul, a city that I love.

Meanwhile, outside, the neighbour kid is breaking in his new skateboard.  He’s practising tricks that will allow him to hold his own at the skate park not far away.  The skateboard’s sound, as it grinds down the granite curb, is oddly appropriate accompaniment, notwithstanding the distraction of worry that the boy might break his neck on the pavement below my office window.

Playing on the streets of urban Cambridge can sometimes be a dangerous proposition, even during the quite hours of the working day.  But now, it’s 4:23 p.m.  When his father arrives home, the sun has nearly set.  Drivers are already racing down the street in hopes of finding one of all too few parking spaces for the night.  Drivers, at this and in the hours to come, will be single-minded.  Their desperation will make them more dangerous the darker it gets.

Conversations between father and son usually begin in the father’s native Spanish.  They often communicate instructions.  Presumably, they’re in Spanish as much to save the child face among the friends who usually accompany him on the street, as for the bonds strengthened by a family language.  As a child, I’d often wished that my father would have spoken to me in his parents’ German, to save me the indignity of being seen to bow to his will.  But, on this street, the kid is aware perhaps that Spanish separates him from his English mates.  So, the father’s Spanish is usually interrupted with the son’s pleading, Ah, Dad. Speak English!

This evening, I’m not paying much attention to the conversation.  Living so close to one another, one learns to tune out the conservations of others and to blindly stare past open windows blazing light like a beacon to sailors on the sea.  Besides, my Spanish is rather poor.  By time it registers that it’s an argument I’m hearing in fact, it has gone well beyond Ah, Dad.  The father who has in the past been, by measures, friendly, fatherly, and stern is now audibly angry.  It’s a single word, one that I rarely hear in public, that pins the specimen to the board. . . . cabrón . . . It’s spoken as the verbal equivalent of the slamming of a door, or, the breaking of a dish.  Surely, it’s not meant to be understood by anyone other than the son.  This is the language of family.  Nonetheless, I can’t help overhearing it, or, attempting to understand what it conveys.

Language is, for me, like a mechanical flip-clock with its split-flap display.  It has teeth.  They go Tick. Tick. before the moment of comprehension.Tock.  To understand this word, I have to be refreshed, by words more immediately familiar to me.  Along the way, I will have collected up all of the similar sounding words that I know, whatever the language.  It’s as if I need to see the stepping stones across a stream before I will make the crossing.  It’s caballero to which the dial first spins.  Sir. Mister. Cowboy. in translation.  Caballero is a word that I’ve frequently heard used in the heat of debate.  It seems particularly New World Spanish.  Often, it accuses another of being cavalier if not arrogant.  Cabestrillo next takes its place.  I once heard this word used in an argument between a Colombian and a Venezuelan.  Go hang yourself with an arm-sling! one quipped to the other.  The comment was, certainly, a cavil.  The use of an arm-sling would be rather ill-suited to a hanging.  But, as argumental rhetoric, it was effective, as considerable offence was taken.  Other words from my mental dictionary step forward in mechanical succession.  Cabra = Goat.  And, Cabro = Boy, quickly tick up.  Destinations to which my train of thought has already departed.  I sense that I’m honing in on a precise understanding despite the fact that Goat boy . . . Niño de Cabra lights upon a cultural reference.  Cayetano Muriel, El Niño de Cabra as he was known, was a Spanish flamenco master-singer.  In a sense, this is the model of the kid’s skateboarding practice: to master the sport’s art form.  This is interesting!, I think.  Earlier in the day, the Indian news-ladies, gave me new words.  Gujarati, not Spanish.  Doebo, one said, this, it means “Boy” or “Goat”. Doe-Bo, I repeated.  But, the other interjected, Doe-Bee, it means “Stupid”.  Her timing was perfect.  She must have seen me flashing through yesterday’s lesson: Kew-Tro = Male Dog and Kew-Tree = Female Dog.  I mustn’t accidently call their teenage sister “stupid”.  Internationally, it seems, goat boys can be synonymous with “stupidity”.  When cabrón finally goesTock!, it’s the slur of Caribbean Spanish.  So vile is it that, when used among Domicans and Puerto Ricans, it can’t be put into English print.  I’ve dredged up words from arguments overheard while working or traveling in the Spanish Caribbean, and come to this.  A word that dare not speak its name.  Certainly, in Continental Spanish — the language of this father and son — its use must be less vulgar.

On the street, following its use, the argument goes silent.  No longer is the skateboard grinding down the granite; it — itself — is curbed.  There’s no slamming of the door; its closing is muted.  Here inside my office, the music of the Ottoman court plays on.  I close my eyes; and, as I do, I see the notes transformed to numbers that hang themselves on the grid of a musical scale.  Passerines.  Magpies.  Birds with a beautiful song.  I remind myself that their Spanish name, spoken while spitting, is maricón.

International Departures: Rock, Paper, Scissors.

This is a story about transportation.  I have none.  Well, actually I have a bike and my own two feet.  But, I have no motorized transport to speak of.  I suppose I could ride the bus, though Cambridge is so walkable that I’d feel ridiculously shameful.  I have occasionally taken the train to distant places: Birmingham, Ely, London, and York, so far.  But, a train is on the order of airplane.  It is not something I ride - not yet anyway - with any regularity.  And, as long as I may remain a tourist in London, the subway is more amusement ride than means of getting here or there.

I have to say that the Tube, London’s underground transport, scares the hell out of me.  But that’s another story, here only in brief.  I should clarify that it is not the tubular stations and roundish trains that scare me.  It is the narrow platforms.  Most of them leave me dizzy.  I’m one of those people that Tube station announcers refer to as having gotten “sick on the tracks”.  That’s a euphemism.  What they mean to say, though English civility prevents them, is “suddenly severed” into, oh, let's see: head, two arms, torso, and two legs.  What’s that: six parts.  Some people might count that as better than drawn and quartered.  But, I hug the station walls, hunched over like a lower-case f and looking to the world like a man who has been homeless for too long.

I have begun studying the Highway Code and other driving instruction manuals helpfully issued by the British government.  The road guide is 250 pages long.  The road sign guide is 100 pages long.  That’s much longer than the short little pamphlets drivers get in the U.S.A.  In one hundred and eighty-five days,  when I can legally take my driving tests, both theoretical and practical - I imagine that I will have a reasonable chance of passing.

One hundred and eighty-five days is the amount of time that the British give foreigners - those of us, anyway, who learned to drive on the wrong side of the road - to forget our bad habits and to learn new ones.  

David isn’t having anything of it.  He is afraid, I suppose, that an old dog can’t be taught new tricks.  When asked recently to lead next summer’s geology study-trip to Spain, his remark was, “Well, at least I can drive there.  I’ll be on the right side of the road.”  Don’t ask me which the right side of the road is.  I’ve never learned to tell my right from my left.  So, I guess David figures that I’m kind of a blank-slate, here.  Ready and able to learn.  That will make me the designated driver in the United Kingdom.  And, that’s saying quite a lot for David who’s never trusted my bat-out-of-hell style of driving.

A Brummie - that’s someone from Birmingham, England - a cab driver once told me that Britons drive on whatever side of the road they drive on because that’s the side of the road they used for jousting.  The comment conjured up visions of cars equipped with harpoons.  It is something I could have used back in Florida with all of its old, slow driver.  But, I haven’t seen it here yet.  I imagine that I will when I really get out on the road.  A country that maintains driving on the jousting side would almost certainly have maintained a jousting tradition of some sort, right?

The jousting comment is easily rationalized.  Most people are and would have been right-handed.  So, they would have carried the jousting pole firmly in their right hand.  Let’s just imagine that a horse, unlike a car, steers itself pretty much with little or no attention.  All one’s left hand would have to do is


hold onto the reins.  If my pole is in my right hand, that must mean that I’m driving on the left side of the road.  On second thought, the logic is kind of counter-intuitive.  It’s far easier to simply maintain that the steering wheel is always near the middle of the road.  Unless, you happen to be in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where all bets are off.  Driving an American car on the left side of the road, as is their custom, is probably necessary to keep the tourists off the roads.  Anyway, here in the United Kingdom, it doesn’t help that Britons park on either side of the road in any direction they please.  It confounds one’s sense of the proper flow of traffic.  And, not a lick more helpful, Britons seem to prefer, when able, to drive in the middle of the road.  That sense of owning the road is probably what gave rise to jousting.

So, why do you think the French drive on the right?  They too had a jousting tradition.  I am certain that the reason had little to do with contemporary Continental advice to Drive right!   I have an idea, thinking ahead to the day I can drive again.  Maybe it was practical experience shifting.  While a lazy leftie can hold the reins of a horse, that left hand has to take charge to shift gears.  Just thinking about it makes the fingers of my left hand slightly dizzy.  - I won’t say “spastic”.  The term is politically incorrect here in the U.K.   The disability of palsy with which the term is associated here, however, more aptly describes the motion sickness of my left hand than does the American sense of “spastic” associated with the self-deprecating awareness of the off-spring of the nouveau riche.  I’m going to have to get a car with automatic transmission to pass my practical test.  Driving a standard transmission here might just trigger one of my, so called, classic migraines.

David’s uncertain ability to drive on the wrong side of the road isn’t the only thing that unnerves him.  ”I’ll be able to read the signs”, he also said of driving in Spain.  I was puzzled by the remark.  ”But, they’re in English here.” I observed.  ”Exactly!” came his reply.  In Spain, you know that you have to translate.  You’re always translating.  In our experience driving in the Mexican highlands, when the sign translated as “The road dissolves ahead of you”, you knew that the road was literally going to dissolve.  And, experience soon taught that it would usually dissolve on a hair-pin turn, falling away into a mountain-side ravine that the locals tried to fill with a bus-load of tourists on their way to Palenque or Oaxaca or San Cristóbal de las Casas.

In the United Kingdom, all of the signs are in English.  If a road sign indicated that the road ahead would dissolve, you'd probably stop in panicked disbelief.  A more likely encounter with a sign indicating a soft verge might leave an American, familiar with converging traffic, wondering if skating across lanes were not only possible but encouraged.  You don’t know what needs to be translated, really.  A “carriageway” is eventually sensible enough as to be understood.  But for the newly arrived American, it might just as readily elicit a sense of driving through Pennsylvania Dutch country.  You go slow, keeping an eye out for horse-and-buggy.

The U.S.A. is the country where the French yogurt company, Danone, decided to go about its business without its e.  Americans would be more likely to think Dan-One than Danon.  We’re a simple people.  Some of us would end up in the supermarket asking for Dan One thinking he might be the store-manager.  ”I need to speak to Dan One.  The commercial said he’d know where to find the new yogurt that will restore my health.”  What then do you think we make of a road sign reading “adverse camber”.  What the hell is a camber?  The more educated of us might recall that Camber was the legendary king after whom Cambria, or ancient Wales, was named.  We might take “adverse camber” as a reminder that we’re not in Wales.  Mindful of dry British humour, such a reminder might make perfectly quirky sense.  Wales, being something like the U.K.’s Oz.  I am not actually certain how an American road sign might label an “adverse camber”.  ”Turns into the gravitation forces of the bend” probably wouldn’t be understood.  My guess is that an American would find the sign “Speed


Kills” on the approach to an adverse camber.  Or, maybe more poetically “Death Awaits” in certain parts of Appalachia.  I’m pretty sure that the simple sign “Bend” suffices.  But, I’m also certain that “Bend” means nothing to us.  ”Yep.  That was a bend!” I’d tell myself taking a curve in the road at 75 mph in a 45 mph zone.  Adverse gravitational effects have always acted upon cars travelling roads made for horses and buggies. 

This is to say nothing of signs indicating multi-lane round-abouts.  They might as well read “three ring circus in hell”.  But, most bear no English other than the names of nearby places.

Neither signage nor the Highway Code is helping me much as a pedestrian.  Road crossings, in the United Kingdom, sometimes present considerable risk.  It doesn’t matter if I’m in a Zebra, a Pelican or a Puffin, or even a Toucan crossing.  What I feel that I sometimes need is a massive Trojan horse.  A prophylaxis.  A personal crossing guard, if not the national guard.  I am not a cat.  I have one life.  I have no aspirations to live it out as a hood ornament.  Not even the slightest curiosity, though I am intrigued by what it might feel like to be a lolly on the windscreen of a lorry, in need of scraping off.  I should Americanize that: I am intrigued by what it might feel like to be taffy on the windshield of a truck, in need of scraping off.

The rule is simple: traffic stops the second I plant one foot inside the crossing.  And, until I do that I’m fair-game to be taken as target practice.  ”Bag the buck, blokes.  C’mon, can’t ya see that target on me vest?”  I prefer to live by a simpler rule: Rock-Paper-Scissors.  Only, rock never crushes scissors.  He might paint them a different colour, however.  If you’re ahead of me you can see why I’m so intrigued with lollies on windscreens.  Bikes take out pedestrians.  Cars take bikes.  Buses take cars, or, lorries take small caravans (um, trucks take out small vans and SUVs).  And, trains on level crossings take buses and lorries.  The rule is based on one simple principle: the more metal you’re pushing, the more clear your right-of-way.  I should put that in terms Americans can easily understand: might makes right.  

Honestly, I am amazed, actually, that Cambridge is rated as one of the United Kingdom’s safest cities vis-à-vis traffic accidents.  Mindfully, as a pedestrian, one has to realize that one is at the lower end of the food chain.  No one crosses the road without looking both ways.  This caution lends a keen sense of irony to driving scenes in the British sit-com Keeping Up Appearances.  That oft-repeated line, “Mind the pedestrian, Richard”, spoken by character of Hyacinth Bucket to her husband is awfully hilarious.  Drivers do yield to a pedestrian crossing an intersection, but the pedestrian yields to the bike and car more generally, except at a signalled crossing.

For a cyclist, the fun begins in the bike lane, presuming there is a bike lane.  Bike lanes are easily followed where they exist.  They’re painted blood red, probably with real blood.  There aren’t many bike lanes.  So, if they are painted with real blood, that is probably good.  There certainly seems to be enough cause for blood to be spilled.  Just before the year-end holidays, the local newspaper ran as series of He-said/She-said articles.  He, by the way, was the driver of a sport-car.  She was a cyclist.  It just happened that way.  In reality, the sexes are equally represented among both car drivers and cyclists.   The commentary of each on the other, however, was a vicious as any arising out of the 1970’s sex wars.  The enmity of the opposing camps aside, real circumstances: road quality and the number of people on the road regardless form of transportation, render selfishness a third and distant wheel.

I’ve seen bikes travelling 15 mph passed by cars going 30 to 40 mph with just inches between them.  One delivery driver came to my door not so long ago, muttering.  Mine was his last stop in Cambridge.  He couldn’t wait to get out.  ”Too many cars, on too narrow streets, headed right for you!  Whilst too many cycles seem as though they’ve got a right to the motorway!” he said with a certain exasperation that print can’t capture.  The rub is that these streets weren’t designed for the traffic that they carry today.

Something has to go first.  Rock-Paper-Scissors is as sensible as any rule of the road.

At another time, I might have been logging an experience from the road, in Ankara, Turkey.  There I once hired a taxi to take me from the city centre to the airport.  With all direct routes in grid-lock, the driver turned onto a one-way street.  We were headed in the direction we needed to go, but we were travelling against the traffic.  The experience was very much as David feels now.  It had movie-qualities.  Rush Hour 2.  Goods were flying and pedestrians, running for cover as the driver made a lane of the broad sidewalk.  Reading the fear telegraphed from my eyes into the rear-view mirror, the driver explained in broken English, “You pay me.  They no pay.”  I could only mutter: “Dış hatlar gidiş, lutfen.  Dış hatlar gidiş.”  International departures, please.

Recreation through Translation

Recently, I wore a pair of new shoes to a meeting with a client.  What a mistake.  I had to take a taxi home, unable to make the 15 minute walk that normally seems so easy.

The taxi driver had an accent - that is, not any of the American or British accents one hears here in almost any course of affairs.  So I asked her where she was from.

"Slovakia", she said.  The word was followed by a bit of nervous laughter.  Perhaps, because Eastern European immigrants are taking a bit of heat here: seen as taking jobs in hard times.  Perhaps, because, as she'd later tell me, most Britons wouldn't know where Slovakia is if you hit them with the Iron Curtain.  I sympathized; when I studied in Kentucky, one mid-1980s survey found that only nine percent of its citizens could find it on a map.  I lived in Ohio, so I didn't count.  But, I never got lost on my way to University.

I followed tentatively with "Bratislava is its capital?"

With the pain in my Achilles Tendon, my brain had been slow to visualize a map of the country.  The map was also dim and flickering something like a computer monitor suffering power failure.  But, that and its implications are another story.  The name, Bratislava, was difficult to read from the mental map.  And, distractingly, it conjured up an image of a plump, white Brat roasting on an outside grill.  It was lunch-time, I thought, and excused the image on a savory bun as hunger.

At my recognition, she was overjoyed, turning her head from the ruthless Cambridge traffic, offering a broad-smiling, "Yes!"  She turned back just in time to see the woman riding down congested Mill Road in the middle of the street as though she either owned the lanes or had a death wish.  Taxis, cars and loris were dodging the woman like a piece of gum you don't want on the sole of your shoe.

By the end of the ride, our short conversation had travelled miles, sometimes as if meandering down country lanes, sometimes with the intent of Dr. Viktor Frankenstein searching out buried body parts and stitching them together.

I'd walked because parking a bike in Cambridge is a hundred times worse than parking a crutch on the walls of the Cathedral at Lourdes or St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal.

When finally home, I Goggled "How to break in new shoes".  One of the more highly ranked sites was a Spanish blog.  "I can deal with Spanish," I thought.  "I've held tri-lingual conversations with colleagues in the Caribbean where no one speaks anyone else's language.  This should be easy."

The English language sites gave lots of now useless or seemingly absurd advice.  "Wear new shoes with thick socks," for example.  This advice was useless; I'd already thought to do just that when putting the shoes on in the morning.  "Soaking [the shoes] over night and wearing them the next day until dry," was an absurdity.  Certainly, I could agree with the logic that wet leather would be likely to dry formed to the contours of my feet.  Wet leather, though, tends to shrink when dry.  I had the O.J. Simpson trial ringing in my ears: "If it does not fit, you must acquit"  . . . as well as an old form of torture-to-death practiced in the late 18th century by certain Western American native populations.  In any case, this was a strategy best not attempted during the wintry cold snap that Cambridge was now experiencing.

The Spanish blog had none of that.  Instead, it seemed fixed on the legalities of the practice.  It was flush with all of those common journalistic questions: Who would want to [break into a pair of new shoes]?  How would you get in?  Maybe unlacing would do the trick.  Might the wearer be asleep?  Or, per-chance, fixated on a newspaper while, say, riding a train?  Surely, no one would want to break into a pair of vacant shoes, would they?  And, once in, what would you steal from a pair of new shoes?  Laces?  Perhaps, one might silence their tongues as well, to keep them from naming you as the thief. 

I assure you that nothing was lost in my translations.  I used BabelFish to ensure that I hadn't gone crazy.  (I'm winking and nodding, knowingly.)

With books on this and that for dummies, I'm wondering if I might launch a new career here with a line of books: "Idioms for Idiots".  I'm sure that the description frequently includes myself.  I should be well qualified to author at least one.  There's no end of British idioms that have already gotten me wrong.  But, more on that later.