Whatever I said, I must have said correctly?

So before Mass at my regular parish last night, I had a chat with a parishoner.

The chat was almost entirely in Spanish.

But wait, Tim! you cry. You don't speak much Spanish, do you?

Well, no. I took two semesters of Spanish in college, and that was it. Even at most Spanish Masses, I generally speak English, because most folk are bilingual. And I don't have a significant number of friends who speak Spanish.

Still, somehow, I managed to describe my jobs (all of them), my family, my music, and more over the course of 15 minutes. And I did most of it in Spanish, because the parishoner spoke little English. (I did warn her: "No hablo mucho espanol." I don't know whether that sentence is correct, either.)

I stopped by church again this morning, because I needed to drop in and prep for some housekeeping I'll be doing on Good Friday. (I'm taking the day off from the day job, and there's about a ream of paper's worth of music that needs to be put back into their individual English and Spanish books.) I saw the Sunday Spanish cantor (who is bilingual) and said hello, telling her about the chat the prior night.

"You know what it is -- it's like a file cabinet," she said, referring to the dos semestres of Spanish I'd taken earlier. "You can retrieve it, even if you didn't think you could.

"And a little goodwill goes a long way. They know you're trying, and they appreciate it."

And of course, she said, there's always God. After all, she said, you might not quite know exactly what you're saying. (And I sure didn't.) But perhaps with just a little help, it gets that much easier to communicate.