FRESH YARN presents: Why Not(e)?... by Lauren Marks

FRESH YARN presents:

Why Not(e)?
By Lauren Marks

You know me, I'm the person in your car who, when a song comes on the radio, sings loudly and excitedly, but sludges though 80% of the words. It's annoying, I know. But I am not a native speaker and I've been learning this language by melody -- the broad strokes come first, the nuances take time.

You don't notice my shortcomings when we have casual conversations. I easily manage interactions over a counter, or at the grocery store. If you bring up theatre or politics or relationships, I will be able to follow you, and might even be able to add to the conversation. But if you bring up a subject that I know nothing about, my stutter will become more noticeable. My grasping for language will become increasingly louder and more gauche. I get confused, but instead of going mute, I belly-flop in words. And if you are wielding hardly-used terms or multi-syllabic expressions, I will parrot them back at you, awkwardly and persistently, until I roll the new words around my tongue like a just-prepared piece of sushi.

Do you mind if I ask you something? Why do you say, "a needle in the haystack?" Who would put something so tiny and insignificant inside of a high pile of dried grass? And then who would look for something so minute, so easily replaced, if they had? I recently bought a book about the origins of English idioms because the more I know the stories of the sayings, the more I can make the phrasing stick. It's not that American English is the exception to the world's rules -- in every language I have learned, there are a number of colloquialisms that don't make perfect, literal sense. I find mon petit chou an odd term of endearment, because my experiences with cabbage have left me much less endeared than gassy.

I am writing a book in English, even while I am teaching the language to myself, idioms and all. Every page is a lesson, transcribing a melody that becomes more and more hum-mable. It's an ambitious project, but I learn by doing, so why not? I will readily admit that when I write, I often interchange words that sound similar but have drastically different meanings. I write "call" instead of "car," "sore" instead of "soul." I find the mistakes when I edit, and the first-draft faux-paux are often funny and sometimes enlightening in context -- like writing "Why note?" on the top of an essay I had intended to call "Why not?"

I graduated from speech therapy four months ago, but my therapist still meets me for coffee periodically to check in. Recently, at a sidewalk café, she sat across from me and wanted to know about my progress. I told her about the book I'm writing, and asked her if she had thought that I would come this far, this quickly. It was an honest inquiry, but I am pretty sure that you would call this "fishing." My speech therapist doesn't mind. "No," she said, as she stirred a second raw sugar packet into her cappuccino, her broad smile assuringly toothy. "You were motivated Lauren and that counts, but a lot of people who have had your type of brain damage never recover." I childishly beamed with her praise and enjoyed when she added that I had made a "really remarkable recovery." I loved her alliteration.

It was August of last year, two months after my 27th birthday, when I went on tour with a show from New York to the International Fringe Festival in Scotland. On a night off, some close friends and I went into a dingy dive bar in Edinburgh, and decided to try to win the prize money for the best karaoke performance of the night. When we were called to the stage, my friend and I began to sing the song that she had selected as our "sure-fire" submission to the competition, a duet of Total Eclipse of the Heart.

I don't remember stopping the song, I don't remember the fall.

When I awoke 30-odd hours later, the doctors explained that a previously undetected aneurysm had ruptured in my brain. That rupture had caused the collapse that took me from the stage to the bar floor, a break of blood that preceded to drown me inside of my skull, and had warranted emergency brain surgery. I do find it a little unseemly or a little uncanny, or both, to have had the most critical event of my life arrive while I was singing a ridiculous power ballad, in a song whose title itself sounds like a rallying cry for a body's catastrophe. But regardless of oddity of the situation, the result of the rupture was this: I largely lost English. It was my first language, the language of my parents and my friends. A born Los Angeleno, my conversant Spanish went missing, my German became nicht gut, and my already bad French was entirely washed away.

The aneurysm affected the Broca's area, a language center of the brain, so it drastically altered my abilities to speak, read, and write. Returning to an old Spanish textbook, I was recently reminded that there are two different Spanish words for an "earthquake." One is a temblor, the everyday kind that can be acknowledged before returning to one's café con leche, and the other is a terremoto, the kind of rumble that lifts tectonic plates like dinner settings, rearranging mountains and countries. The aneurysm was a terromoto, impossible to ignore, maybe a 7.6 on my imagined Richter Scale. It was a big one, but not The Big One, the quake occasionally joked about by Californians, usually in hushed, uneasy tones. That is not to say that I expect Bigger One will come for me (once in a lifetime is enough, thank you), but I can't think of the aneurysm in that impossibly large way, especially now, while it is finally becoming manageable.

It was my neurologist who first advised me to sing along with the radio, her prescription for a neuroplastic routine. It was good enough advice and somewhat appropriate, because thirteen months ago, I was a performer, a writer, and a PhD student in Theatre Studies. It was also thirteen months ago when I became brain patient with a vocabulary of about 30 workable words.

I soak up the music of language, anything I could borrow from. I mimic the song I hear and mimic you singing that song. Why not? If I once had a small way with words, words are now having their large way with me. And in spite of that, I see that my English is getting better, better than good.

These days, I experience only rare outbursts of lack, which would be more unnerving if they weren't so miraculously insignificant. I can't order a dish in Spanish at my favorite Mexican restaurant, El Super Burrito. I can't keep the words of "The Pledge of Allegiance" straight, though I recited it every school-day from ages 6 to 13. Even the missteps are sometimes enjoyable, because it's only been a year, and I can read again. I can speak, if I occasionally stutter. I can write, even if I write about how incredibly difficult it is to write. I read every word I write down, say it aloud in cadence and time, listening to hear if the song works or not.

I do wonder though about this process -- this repeating, this recording, this recovery --adding a world of words to my so recently barren store. There is a picture that disturbs me: a reoccurring image I have of a mynah bird, fixed on a perch, singing its bittersweet tune. I've been told that the more perfect the bird's training, the more perfectly she will be able to sound like the people around her. But if the bird will sound more and more like you, then she will also sound less and less like herself