My Husband The Mexican

On hot, blinding days, when the heat gets to be a little too much, I take my dog Zoe across the street to swim in the river. She has now decided that she is an old dog, sporting a gray muzzle and a meandering walk that means I am going nowhere in a hurry. She’s a sweet dog, with the personality of a chicken. She has been chased by tiny kittens, she has tried to crawl under my bed at the sound of construction trucks, and she has sat on my foot shaking in total fear at the site of the 4th of July pet parade. (She is specifically afraid of the llamas.) But nonetheless, she’s a big dog. One hundred and three pounds with a deadly tail. A tad smaller than a pony.

Zoe and I were at the park today, she was eagerly fetching her ball from the river. Coming around the corner I noticed a Latino woman with two little kids. They did not see Zoe at first, but soon the mother was screaming my favorite of all Spanish terms, “Cuidado! Cuidado!” The two little kids hid behind their mother. Immediately, I yelled, “!Mi perra no es agresiva ella es muy amable!” (My dog is not aggressive, she is nice.)

It was a Kodak moment and one that I will not soon forget: two little kids and the mother looking at me, the gringo in complete and total shock. I was speaking Spanish. It was more shocking than the size of my dog.

Luckily, they were from Honduras which means their Spanish is very easy for me to understand. (Unlike the Puerto Ricans or Cubans who might as well be speaking Swahili!) The mother and the little girl spoke almost no English. But the little boy, with bright blue eyes and no front teeth, switched back and forth between Spanish and English. “My mother does not speak English. I speak for her,” he told me proudly, as if he were the man of the house at the age of 6.

Maria, the mother, was incredibly intrigued by why I would want to learn Spanish. “Is you husband a Mexican?” she asked me in Spanish, which really made me laugh. As I spoke, I would watch her face and see when she smiled at my errors and my thick American accent. Like me, she seemed to find great humor at listening to someone brutalize her language. And she was even more excited when I told her I had just been to her town in Honduras. “?Que hotel? ?Que playa?” She wanted to know all the details of my trip, to think of her town for just a moment.

She told me about her oldest daughter who was only ten years old, but was back in Honduras. How she missed her dearly and always hated to leave her home while she came to the United States to earn money. She told me about how her husband worked in construction, with his brother. And how she wanted her kids to learn English so they could have jobs that paid better. And then she returned to the puzzling question.

?Porque usted habla espanol? (why do you speak Spanish.) “?Es su esposo Mexicano?” (Is your husband Mexican?)

I laughed again at her repeating the question. I realized that in looking at me she had concluded my family was not Latin, but I had to be married to a Hispanic and it had to be a Mexican because I spoke so slowly. (It takes me forever to figure out the verb tenses. My mind constantly searches through my mental “501 Verbs in Spanish” book!)

As she and her two little children left, and I waved “adios”, I just stood there grinning. Nobody will ever think that I am actually from Latin America because I am too old to learn a native accent. BUT, to have someone think I am married to a Mexican! Well, now, that’s quite an achievement. Especially given that my husband is from Minnesota and can only count to five in Spanish.

By Linda English