Week 3, Theme 3

Prompt: With Joyce’s Portrait or Alvarez’s “My English” as models, write a theme about an early experience of sound. You might choose an experience in which you were perhaps unsure what the sound meant or what made it, and had to interpret the sense of it on the basis of sound alone. You might choose a song, or the sound of a particular word, or someone’s speech. The sound you choose need not be linguistic---it can be anything that you heard and paid attention to---but you will want to suggest nonetheless what it was saying to you, the sense you made of it, in short, and how that sense was conveyed through sound. Decide what point of view you wish to take---that of your younger self, your self today, or some combination. Use your heightened sense of sound in this theme to bring other senses, also, to the foreground. As you reflect on sound, think about the sound of your own writing.

Grandma and I waited in our place in line at the bank. My eyes, in line with the middle of her skirt, stretched up toward her face as she continued to look forward. A tug from above on my fingers let me know it was time to see the bank lady. As Grandma sorted through papers on the wooden desk, the lady looked at me and asked if I wanted a lollipop. Oh, did I. “Hein!” The woman gave me a bemused stare and then laughed to my grandmother, “That’s so cute! Your grandson speaks German!” Grandma did not have the same smile on her face. As we walked out of the bank a while later, she looked down at me and said “Patrick, ‘hein’ is not a word, ok?” “Hein,” I replied. Frustrated, she strapped me into my car seat and drove me home.

And so it was that hein and I entered into a torrid affair. Whether at birthday parties or bakeries or at the pediatrician, hein would ring out loudly and proudly from my little mouth. The relationship was confusing to my family, especially my mother, who came to think that she had at some point errantly pronounced a word in my presence only to spark this dreadful tryst. She even considered delaying enrolling me in Pre-K because of hein, among other reasons (food issues, attention problems, rejection of clothing standards…). But, alas. Happy affairs are, well, happy, only when they’re secret. My sister Meghan, who had found my linguistic-rebel-without-a-cause air amusing, had a hand in ending it. As she played with me on the slide, she beckoned me toward her at the bottom. “Want to slide down, Patrick?” From my mouth, mid-slide came, “Hein!” Meghan started. “Patrick, does ‘hein’ mean ‘yes?’”

“Hein!”