A moment of confusion

Today I combined my walk with a shopping trip.  I walked a while, climbed down some stairs, and arrived at Staples and Stop & Shop.

The bags weren’t too heavy, and I hauled them back up, via a different route. The steep part was up a street with an “S” shaped curve, and mid-curve I was passing three people. Two of them, a man and a kid, passed by, but the third, also a man, approached me, stopped in my way, and started to speak. And I froze.  The guy was white or Hispanic, an adult. I didn’t understand a word. FWIW, the guy and kid who passed me looked Black. Whatever the guy said, it wasn’t English. I replayed the words in my head. It wasn’t Spanish.

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But he was in my way, talking, and smiling. And I was staring, jaw slack, looking stupid, trying to listen.

It was only 20 seconds, but it seemed an eternity. Former student, current math teacher, with new facial hair. Dominican (as were the other two). Had a scholarship once upon a time. In Russia. He was babbling at me in fluent Russian, happy to practice. I recovered, made some polite conversation. Turns out we live only a few blocks apart.

While he used his Russian for daily life for a year or two, mine was for books and the occasional carefully-formulated tourist sentence. But that’s not what threw me. It was the complete lack of context.