French in the Shower
- Reba
- Jan 30, 2016
- 2 min read
Je suis
Tu es
Il est
Sometimes I feel guilty that six semesters of agonizing over the various forms of the word être have gone seemingly to waste. I’m living in Kansas, and the closest I will come to France any time soon is proofreading a student’s paper on the anatomy of the snail.
January is a month of new beginnings. Yes, I will go to the gym more. Of course I will keep my closet perfectly organized. No, I will not let another plant die a long and lonely death on my patio.
But here we so often are, on January 30th, moaning over the fact that once again New Year’s resolutions lacked a little in resolve.
In a life where trying to keep a simple potted plant alive seems too much to hope for, how can I even attempt to chase the dream of reviewing French? The limited vocabulary I am left with spells out the words, c’est impossible.
Then I remembered how I learned French in college those many moons ago. Showers.
Surely I’m not alone. I would copy pages of irregular French verbs and their conjugations and insert those copies in Ziploc bags. My homework became waterproof. The morning before a big French test I would wake up to the feeling of steamy waters and the sight of conjugating the verb finir in the subjunctive mood. The result was a clean scalp and a few more verb conjugations stuffed into the grey matter a couple inches below.
College graduates, let’s be happy that our days no longer begin this way by compulsion. A morning shower may be the only bridge between “I never want to see the light of day again” and showing up for another work day. Let no man take that away from you.
Yet I admit. Showers, as pampering as they are, can be boring. I’ve read the shampoo bottles, wondered what exactly Polyethylene Glycol is and whether or not it will give me brain cancer, and have counted the small white tiles a dozen times. So, I decided to stick a bag on the side of those tiles that showcase words I dream of remembering.
If you do this as well, you won’t be fluent by the time you condition, but you’ll be doing French, or memorizing that translated poem by Plutarch that softened your soul the first time you heard it read in a college lit survey. Perhaps you will finally understand that geometry puzzle that tortured your brain in 10th grade.
My best days are made of little victories. I like the idea of my shower being one of them.
Some days I don’t even look at the verb conjugations clinging to the steamy sides of my shower. But when I do, a little part of my mind goes back to that drizzly day in Paris, ready for an adventure that just might happen.
Comments