365 Cheeses

“A country that produces 365 cheeses cannot lose the war!”

So said General DeGaulle.  Also:

“How can you govern a country where there are 258 varieties of cheese?”

These two quotations came to my mind a couple of months ago while on the road interpreting for a group of over thirty French visitors to the Midwest.  The exact number of cheese varieties in France, as well as in the quotation, was as jumbled in my memory as it was in DeGaulle’s, so I had to look it up.  I tried to find an exact figure of how many different types of cheese are produced in France, and those numbers were all in conflict with each other.  I think the reason for the ambiguity is that the French don’t want to discount the small producer out in the Aveyron with a hundred head of cattle on a hill and a really great homemade cheese sold in the local farmer’s market.

The huge variety of cheeses is the perfect expression of how French cling to their individuality, to their unique personal expression.  How horrible of me to make sweeping generalities about a culture!  This is the place where prejudice is born!  And yet, the more time a person spends straddling two cultures, the more those cultural definitions become enforced through observation.  I know for a solid fact that some jokes will make an American laugh, and will not even provoke a smile from a French listener.  Conversely, something a Frenchman finds screamingly funny can totally escape the American sense of humor.  Certain actions and reactions can be expected, dependent upon culture.

My group of French visitors to the U.S. approached me on the tour bus with a request.  Would I please speak to the driver in order to reserve her services and her vehicle for the evening? 

It would be simple enough to just go interpret the question to the bus driver, but my antennae went up, sensing a pending complication.  Interpretation always has the interpreter thinking ahead.

“Before I ask the driver, can you find out three things for me?  How many passengers will there be?  What is your destination?  And at what time do you want to leave?”

The groups’ transportation delegates left me, with a promise to come back in a few minutes with the answers.

I sat in the back of the bus and watched the conversation unfold in the aisle, starting with a simple question and escalating to a full blown debate, punctuated with both laughter and moments of forcefulness.

An hour later, their spokesperson came to me with the following itinerary:  “Six of us would like to go to the art museum.  Five want to go to the jazz club.  Three from the museum group want to join the others at the jazz club, and two from the jazz club don’t want to leave the hotel until later, but then the art museum would already be closed.”

I borrowed the piece of paper on which the person had scribbled the math and made my way down the aisle of the bus to the driver’s position, knowing full well what her response would be:  “Taxis.”

How did I foresee that there would not be an easy consensus?  Would an all-American group have come up with one destination and one departure time?  Perhaps not, but I dare to make the generalization that Americans are more “team players” than the French.

I often hear from French visitors that they are astounded by the number of American flags, flying from every building, from schools to gas stations.  You don’t see as many tricolor French flags in France.  In some way, the French don’t need a symbol to know they are French.  Their culture is so thick with traditions, with “dos and don’ts” that are subtle indicators in a person’s mannerisms and speech that immediately communicate to each other that “I am French.”  I can’t describe it, but when I go to the airport to meet a group of clients, I can spot a group of Frenchmen at a hundred yards in the crowd.  For that matter, it’s just as easy to pick out American tourists at Roissy.  Nobody is carrying a flag.  The American one is a confusing patchwork of stars and stripes, and serves as a symbol to unite the cultural mix that is an American.  The French flag takes the same three colors, bleu blanc rouge , but displays them in an understated couturier-acceptable array of equally measured vertical bands.  I think to the French mind, other than on July 14^th on the Champs Elysées, those colors merely indicate the location of a government office and the French have a love-hate relationship with government.  They rely heavily upon it and are always extremely unhappy with it.

Working in the French language and culture is personally exhilarating for me, like joining an exclusive club with an elaborate secret handshake.  The French with whom I work are usually very warm hearted towards me, with my mixed American background but my obvious efforts to be one of them.  I think professional linguists have somewhat of a split personality, with a foot in two cultures.  We get to be someone else, role playing and toggling between idioms and the manners that go with them.

Today is the Feast of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators.  He was a Roman who traveled to Gaul and spent some time in the Middle Eastern desert with hermits.  He made the cultural transitions required to translate the Bible into Latin, an amazing piece of work. 

I wonder if he was easily recognizable as a foreigner when he was hanging out in Syria?  Or was he successfully able to blend in with the locals?

The real test would have been when he went to arrange for his “bus ride” back to Rome….

Putting words in their mouths

Language separates humans from animals, and yet there are so many experts out there that claim to “read” animal language.  I suppose that puts animal trainers and handlers in a certain class with translators and interpreters.  We decipher a “foreign” communication, and give a voice to those who cannot be understood.

I volunteered for many years in an equestrian center, drawn by the natural beauty of horses, and perhaps riding a horse was the fulfillment of a dream passed down from my Polish grandfather. His portrait in my home shows him brandishing a sabre as he sits astride a horse that I would guess to be an Arabian, with its small stature, dished face and dancing feet.  Someone once told me that it is particularly tiring to sit an Arabian horse, because they never stand still.  My grandfather’s horse looks as if it wants to fly off the wall.

Early on in my exposure to horses, I found it interesting that human handlers routinely “spoke” (in first person) for the horses in their care.  “Where’s my hay?”  “I don’t really want to go for a ride today.”   I suppose all humans put words in the mouths of their beloved four-legged companions.  My dog communicates fairly clearly to me:  licking his nose while standing next to the fridge where his bag of kibble sits means “hey, I’m hungry.”  Standing by the front door means “I need to go out.”  Putting his toy at my feet means “can we play fetch now?”

Horses, on the other hand, are infinitely more discreet than a dog, and almost entirely non vocal.  They don’t bark or wag their tail to let you know they are happy to see you.  Their communication is so subtle:  the direction their ears are pointing, the position of their head, the amount of white showing around their eyes.  Unlike the happy hind end message of a dog, a swish of the tail on a horse (if not to chase a fly) might be a warning signal that a hoof is going to come off the ground in your general direction pretty soon, especially if his ears are flattened against his head.

As an interpreter, I would listen in quiet amusement while humans in the barn would “interpret” for horses.  Horses do communicate, but their very nature makes the communication complex.  They are both powerful flight animals and submissive servants  and we humans have had to figure out which side of their nature is operational at any given moment, without too much of a sign from the horse.  Human history would have never progressed to where it has if there had not been generous equines to assist us.  What if all we had to work with were goats or kangaroos?  Horses, with all their muscle and size and speed, stand for us and let us climb aboard, allow us to attach all manner of leather and metal to their bodies and in their mouths.  I am always deeply touched by the generosity of this animal towards humans.  It is their very generosity that makes them inscrutable.  Saints are not complainers.

As an interpreter, I am limited to my experience and exposure to situations in my foreign language.  I have actually toured a nuclear power plant with French speakers.  While this allowed me to learn some specific technical vocabulary, that one encounter does not make me an expert in nuclear power.  Likewise, spending years and years with horses might give me some vocabulary, but would I actually “speak horse”?

There are horse “whisperers” and trainers who, through extensive exposure, interpret what the horse is thinking and feeling.  Unlike language interpreters, however, who are trained to remain neutral, and who are interpreting within their own species and maybe even under a common modern cultural “umbrella” of understanding, the horse whisperer or trainer is making a bigger leap of faith.  Seriously, no one really knows what a horse is thinking. 

I have watched the conflicts that have arisen between horse handlers, each interpreting equine messages differently and subsequently providing different responses and reactions.  There are those who will beat the horse and intimidate it (the caveman approach), shout, whisper, massage, clicker train and reward. 

The trainer I respected the most was the very first one I encountered in a barn.  He didn't speak so much to the horse as LISTEN.  And, as any interpreter knows, effective LISTENING is crucial.  Horse communication is full of tacit messages, and can go misinterpreted for a very long time until the horse has a “freak out” moment, or lies down in pain on the ground.   

There are as many different styles of training and managing horses as there are barns across the countryside, and horse handlers are often immovable in defense of their preferred method.  They fervently cling to their method like a religion.

That is why I so appreciated my first instructor, Matt Trynoski.  His reflective approach to any horse problem would begin with:  “Hmm, that all depends….”  tempered with years of experience and a lot of listening.

Through my contact with horses, I have found them to be wonderful teachers.  They have much to teach human beings on the subjects of fear and confidence, dominance and submission, persuasion and force, strength and gentleness, generosity and collaboration.

If we only know how to listen…

Obsolescence

I’m just old enough to know a thing or two about obsolescence. 
 

 

My first computer had a DOS prompt and I’ve owned every version of Windows since 2.0.  My first job using a computer required that I learn to use WordPerfect, which has since disappeared  in favor of MS Word.  Fortunately for my career, I was able to move from a technical environment into a legal one, and attorneys held on to WordPerfect longer than other professions.
 

 

From my thirties on, changes in technology have zipped along, with kids leading the race, eager for each new gadget, and frugal adults reluctantly following, learning early on that any equipment bought was obsolete as soon as it came out of the sturdy cardboard box in which it was sold.

 
 

Perhaps a person’s age and experience paint our world’s planned obsolescence in a bad light.  I spoke up at a recent board meeting, where the discussion of replacing the company fleet of cars was on the table, to tell clients that the hybrids they were contemplating are equipped with a special battery that has an estimated service life of seven years and a replacement cost, after seven years, that would then exceed the resale price of the car.
 

 

I’ve often wondered what happened to the bits and pieces of my old cars, beloved machines that carried me where I wanted to go.  A lot of metal, plastic and rubber went into their construction.  Where is it all now?  And I am only one single car owner on this huge, automated planet.  Sometimes I imagine the earth beneath my feet suddenly bursting open with old car bumpers, milk gallons, and 8-track players oozing to the surface from long hidden garbage dumps.
 

 

I started writing this while seated in the double-deck car of my commuter train, having left my Buick in the train station parking lot.  Soon I will be getting on a plane to cross the Atlantic into France.  Hundreds of other aircraft will be in the sky simultaneously, and the international space station will float over all of us.  How many times in our lives do we entrust our physical bodies to the inside of a big metal machine, with the objective of moving quickly from Point A to Point B?  I’m sure few people know how many times they have ridden in a car or a bus, and I count myself fortunate to have lost track of how many flights I’ve taken over mountains and oceans.
 

 

The trains and cars and aircraft have all gone through lightning evolutions in a short period of time, but here is the constant in all of this Modern Metal Modification Madness:  People are not obsolete.  The machines get faster and more efficient (well, let’s take the Concorde out of this discussion), but their goal is to move human beings.  I can easily transmit my image and my words and thoughts over wireless connections to far reaches of the globe.  And yet people still need to meet up with other people, have face-to-face contact.  The basis of the whole internet and communications revolution is to carry human words and voices faster and further.
 

 

As a translator and interpreter, I am acutely aware of the individual, personal nature of a human being’s speech and use of his language.  Human rendering of language is as unique as a fingerprint, with accents and styles, ethnicity and education all shaping our speech and our words.  But just as we entrust our human bodies to a variety of machines so that our presence is not limited to the space in which we live, our words and our speech are more and more entrusted to mechanical devices that will carry them great distances.
 

 

We should never forget the human being behind the text message, the document or the Email.  Because behind the flood of electronic communications is thought:  the intangible products of the human brain.  And no two brains are alike.
 

 

I recently attended a professional meeting of translators, where a distinguished professor of translation lamented the rapid decline of the individual translator’s income.  While translation as an “industry” is outpacing many others in growth, individual translators are suffering from plummeting rates.  As in many fields, the mechanization that was developed to “make life easier” has made life harder for those humans whose functions it replaces.  Linguists seem to be going the way of travel agents.  Although we are the ones who know all the best places and how to get there, the general public prefers to take its chances with booking over the Internet.
 

 

Translation software was developed to enhance the translator’s memory by instantly coughing up a phrase that was translated previously.  As a tool for the translator, what a boon!  But these lovely tools have fallen into the wrong hands:  translation agencies and the clients themselves.  Now the client can say to the purveyor of translation services:  “I’m only going to pay you for NEW text, since my machine has already translated fifty percent of my document.”
 

If the subject of the translation is an owner’s manual for a machine that is in its FIFTH VERSION, it’s easy to see how automated translation would be fast and efficient.
 

But how much of human language is so repetitive, so uniform, so black and white and lacking in nuance, that a machine can render its translation?  Machines are made that way, but not human beings.
 

I just translated a brochure for a client who wanted the product literature to be an elegant reflection of the high-end, unique objects whose commercial value resides in their place of origin and the human craftsmanship that went into them.  The brochure was classy, peppered with descriptive language and the occasional play on words that only someone French-speaking would grasp.  I had some great “Ah Ha” moments coming up with parallel expressions in English.
 

A machine could not do this. 
 

On my way to Union Station in Chicago this week, I passed in front of a record store that was selling good old vinyl records.  The store was full of customers at 10:00 o’clock in the morning.  I asked someone about the value of going backward technologically and purchasing vinyl.
 

“It just SOUNDS better.”
 

I guess until human ears and brains become obsolete, with all their capacity for detecting nuance, there is still hope for humans who translate and interpret the shades and tones and notes of human language.

The State of my Soul

Interpreting is an adrenaline sport.  The physical demands of the job cannot be ignored.  Most employers at least recognize the need for a glass of water within reach, but I doubt that they have any idea of the importance of preparation materials, time of day, comfortable positioning with visibility of the speaker, or the need for working in manageable amounts of time.  Some of these conditions can be controlled by the interpreter, but for the most part, we are at the mercy of the environment into which we are thrown. .  For the interpreter, our success is a transfer of meaning from one brain to another, a nebulous and intensely personal outcome.

 

I had a mentor who put me into my first simultaneous assignment.  Many years ago, at a formal dinner in his home, I was seated next to a prominent figure in the French community, who was singing the praises of our host.

 

“I knew William was a brilliant interpreter from the very first sentence I heard him translate in the booth.  It was:  je n’ai pas d’états d’âme… “

 

I froze.  Even though I grasped the meaning, I couldn’t, at that precise moment, come up with a solid English equivalent of that phrase, translated word for word as “state of the soul”.  As soon as I returned home, I ran to my Robert Collins dictionary.

 

État d’âme:  mood, frame of mind, to have scruples, to have qualms, to have doubts.

 

How wonderfully French!  The definition of the undefinable, the expression of turmoil in the soul. 

 

A week ago, I struggled through a tough assignment, and went home feeling totally defeated.  Among other difficulties I encountered while interpreting was the acronym “GPA”, which does not mean “grade point average” in French.  This morning, my best friend, a Frenchwoman who has lived her whole life near Paris, told me that she had never heard of GPA, which stands for  “grossesse pour autrui” or “surrogate motherhood”. 

 

Acronyms are one of those obstacles that can derail an interpreter’s performance.  They are linguistic shorthand, a sub-language, in a way, some being universally recognized and needing no translation:  CD-ROM, JPEG, even the word RADAR is an acronym.  Some require some scrambling of their letters:  NATO becomes OTAN, AIDS becomes SIDA in French.  BRIC can stand “as is”, but I’ve had Americans throw BYOB and GAAP into their speeches, both requiring expanded definition.  A programmer once informed me before his speech that IBM stands for “I Blame Microsoft”.

 

During an interpreting assignment, in the heat of battle, sometimes one saving moment of inspiration gives that essential injection of confidence into the bloodstream that makes everything work.  I have vivid memories of the precise words I was able to translate for a colleague interpreter who had the microphone and looked to me for help:  simple things like “checking account” for “compte courant” or “nacre” for “mother of pearl”.  Under less stressful conditions, my partners would have come up with those translations easily.  Being able to instantly fill a gap is like hitting the tennis ball to the complete opposite side of the court where the opponent isn’t.  Lucky shot.

 

On the second evening of my recent difficult assignment, I needed some inspiration.  On stage behind a microphone, in front of a good sized audience and cameras, I was hoping to redeem myself from the previous night’s performance. 

 

And then, suddenly, I heard my speaker use the phrase “états d’âme”! 

 

It was almost as if my mentor was sitting on my shoulder, whispering the translation into my ear.  I knew then that everything was going to be all right.  The expression itself is not so unusual, but like Proust’s madeleine, a whole realm of memories was attached to it, and I was now reliving my mentor’s moment of glory.

 

The word “inspiration” comes from the ecclesiastical “spiritus”, meaning both breath and spirit.

 

Thank you, my guardian angels, for your whispered inspiration when I’m interpreting.  Thank you for easing my doubts, my mood, my frame of mind, the qualms in my soul.

 

 

 

Our Half of the Sky

I thought I knew something about the oppression of women around the world. 

Working as a French-English interpreter, I heard testimony in court about a gang rape in the Congo.  I interpreted the asylum interview for a young West African woman who pleaded to remain in the U.S. to avoid female genital mutilation and a subsequent arranged polygamous marriage to a stranger, twenty years her senior.  I was privileged to interpret Dr. Terarai Trent’s speech to hundreds of Girl Scouts from around the world on how she overcame poverty and exclusion from education in Zimbabwe. 

This week, I read “Half the Sky” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn*.  The book came out four years ago, but with the instant “click and download” options I have now, there are publications I’m immediately accessing that would have been consigned to a list of “must reads” that end up taking a place in line behind other immediate priorities.

Even my firsthand exposure as an interpreter to individual cases of abuse did not prepare me for the book’s overwhelming statistics on the worldwide oppression of women.  “Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination.”

We mostly think of discrimination here in the U.S. as unequal pay or unwanted sexual advances.  The country is in shock over the story of three women chained up in a basement in Cleveland for ten years.  As horrible as that story is, it is only a local sample of the daily victimization of women on a worldwide scale: forced prostitution, honor killings, denial of education, the absence of maternity care, lack of protection from HIV and STD’s, rape and beatings as a way of life for the dominance of women by men.

Reading about all these horrors would be unendurable without the book’s central message that when the  quality of life for women improves, it raises the whole country up.  The education of girls seems to be the most powerful solution to elevating communities and eradicating poverty.  The empowerment of women increases productivity, reduces infant mortality, and contributes to improved health and nutrition of the entire community.  I heard a report on my car radio this week, about a study of men and women whose brains were scanned while listening to a baby cry.  As if we needed scientific confirmation that women, and not men, are natural nurturers of human life.

This book touched a harmonic chord within my female soul when I read that it is more effective to give small sums of money to individual women than to throw huge sums at governments.  I may not be able to identify with an African women kept in a mud hut, forbidden to come out without her husband’s permission, but I grin in recognition when I read that if you give that same woman a mere $10 per month, she manages to squirrel enough away to sell a few more crops, buy a couple of goats, and then send her children to school.  Give it to the Male Head of Household, on the other hand, and it gets spent on banana beer and prostitutes.   Women take small resources and nurture them into big results. 

My daughter grew up listening to my personal evaluation of our lot in life as women: “Society is set up to give back to men an advantage over women that they biologically lack.”  We women can reproduce and nurture life.  Half the Sky tells of the violent, repressive social structures put in place to give men control over those reproductive and nurturing capacities we have.  Girls in America who don’t think much about giving away their virginity would face stoning, forced prostitution and death in other places on the Earth.

It makes you wonder if, by extension, questions of global warming and the stewardship of the planet shouldn’t be predominantly handled by women.  Mother Earth has been raped long enough.

We know that gender equality and improving the life of young girls is one of the most effective forces for change on the planet.  It’s Mother’s Day soon.  I’m all for recognizing Mothers, and empowering our girls, our future Mothers.

On Father’s Day, a banana beer should keep them happy.

 

*Half the Sky (Knopf, 2009)

Crime at the intersection of cultures

This post is republished here with the permission of Anne Copeland, Executive Director of the Interchange Institute.  I had the pleasure of taking Dr. Copeland's cross-cultural training course in Boston.

 

 

Consider this:

You are riding in a car driven by a close friend. He hits a pedestrian. You know he was going at least 35 miles per hour in an area of the city where the maximum allowed speed is 20 miles per hour. There are no witnesses. His lawyer says that if you testify under oath that he was only driving 20 miles per hour, it may save him from serious consequences. What right does your friend have to expect you to protect him? And what do you think you would do in view of the obligations of a sworn witness and obligation to your friend?

This dilemma was posed to people in 50+ countries around the world by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner* and the results have become part of the canon of intercultural understanding.

My mind jumped to this study this week when I read about the three college friends of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, arrested for allegedly trying to destroy evidence of Tsarnaev’s involvement in the blasts. Let me be clear – I am no apologist for the crime. It happened just two miles from my home and I’m as shaken and dismayed as anyone; the drone of helicopters overhead has only recently stopped its continual reminder of the tragedy.

But can we use our intercultural knowledge to understand these college boys’ actions?  Here’s what Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner found: Across the globe, people responded to the driver/pedestrian dilemma very differently. In countries they labeled “universalist” (because they make decisions based on universal standards), people said that the friend had no right to expect protection and/or that the friend might have some right to expect it but even so, they wouldn’t lie under oath to protect him. In countries they labeled “particularist” (because they make decisions based on obligations to particular people they know), people were more likely to say they would testify to the lower figure to protect their friend.

The US, Canada, Australia and virtually all of northern Europe all scored strongly in the universalist direction – 87% or more of the participants from these countries (93% in the US) said they would not lie in court to help their friend. But in other parts of the world, more than 50% of the participants said they would testify to the lower figure. Why? Out of their obligation to a close friend and/or to protect the friend from what they feared would be unfair treatment by the police.

And there’s more: For universalists, the worse the pedestrian injury, the more likely they were to say they would tell the truth in court. But for particularists, the worse the injury, the more likely they were to protect their friend. Everyone’s moral reasoning was deeply shaped by their notion of competing loyalties to relationships vs. abstract principles.

I witnessed this myself one time during a training, when a co-trainer from a particularist culture (who, by the way, was the participants’ minister) virtually led his trainees (from his own culture) to conclude that protecting the close friend by lying in court was the right thing to do. Universalists say, “I wouldn’t trust a particularist – he’ll always help his friend first.” Particularists say, “I wouldn’t trust a universalist – he wouldn’t even help his friend.”

It’s this turn-the-world-upside-down perspective-taking that is the crux of the intercultural training we do.

Back to Boston: Two kids from Kazakhstan and one from the US figure out that their close friend was involved in the bombings and they set out to help him by throwing away incriminating evidence. Under police questioning, the Kazakhs tell the truth (perhaps because they misunderstand how egregious their conduct will be considered in universalist America) but the American compounds his crime by lying to the police about this involvement (perhaps understanding quite accurately how he will be judged).

In our discussion of how to explain the behavior these young men, I hope we can use our cultural understanding as a lens for focusing on some of the roots of this otherwise inexplicable act.

Anne

* Trompenaars, F. & Hampden-Turner, C. (1998) Riding the Waves of Culture. McGraw-Hill.

 

Anne P. Copeland, PhD

Executive Director, The Interchange Institute

www.interchangeinstitute.org

Crossing Cultures with Competence  Training of Trainers, Levels One and Two

More than words

I had dinner last evening with a ninety-two year old gentleman for whom I had done some translation work.  Because we are both volunteers for our local Forest Preserve District, I don’t charge him for my translation work which is related to our volunteer service.  He, in turn, shows his appreciation by treating me to dinner in his favorite restaurant. 

At ninety-two, his only problem is a bit of a hearing loss, electronically corrected, but problematic enough for him to request a corner booth rather than a table in the midst of the dinner traffic.  Dr. DuBose and I exchanged documents over a glass of Malbec, both of us refusing a refill because we each had to get behind the wheels of our cars to drive home later.  This morning, I saw the time stamp on his Email, thanking me, and realized that he had stayed up much later than I had after a sumptuous dinner that had made me overwhelmingly sleepy.

My own father, who is ten years younger than my dinner companion, has long since given up driving his enormous tank of a Buick and never made the leap to cyberspace, Email and the Internet.  He knows how to reset his answering machine and leaves me to pay his bills on-line for him.

Aside from studying the Secret of Youth that my dinner partner embodies, and listening to his acquired wisdom on the subject of the translated documents, I had an additional “cultural” surprise last evening.  The observance of cultural trends is vital to translation and interpreting.  Beyond my daily personal contacts in France, I make a practice of watching the French news on the Internet.  When I started interpreting, there was no “mad cow” disease, “bird flu” or “airbags” in automobiles, and watching the French news keeps me abreast of evolving vocabulary.  Without the Journal de 20 heures, I might not have encountered éthylotest, béguinage, or gaz de schiste.

Dr. DuBose’ blue eyes twinkled across the table when he took a small, battered box out of his coat pocket, and removed the rubber band that held on the cover.  “I wanted to show you this.”  He handed me a medal, his Purple Heart.  While serving in the infantry in France, he had been critically wounded by a German bullet.

I have always considered myself lucky and mysteriously supervised by a Guardian Angel, but this man clearly has had some miraculous chances in life.

The next thing I knew, the party at the booth next to ours had politely interrupted our conversation.  “Did I hear you say ‘Purple Heart’?”  The setting for the conversation was perfect, since Veteran’s Day is just around the corner and the restaurant had lined the walls with a collection of vintage Armed Services posters.

The young father who had spoken to us from the next booth handed his little girl out from behind their table to see the medal, which they all admired, to the complete delight of Dr. DuBose.  Wait staff moved in to eavesdrop on the conversation, and my dinner companion was repeatedly thanked by complete strangers for his service to our country.

After the young family left, our server came up to our table, glowing and clutching the black folder containing our bill.  “Before he left, the gentleman who sat next to you paid your dinner bill.”

Dr. DuBose and I looked at each other in amazement.  His was more an expression of pride, that his youthful brush with death on a battlefield could still be so appreciated this many years later.

In my case, my surprise took me back to an evening only a couple of weeks ago. 

I had been sitting at the table in my sister’s house and listening to my cousin Larry talk about his return from Viet Nam where he had served in the Marine Corps.  He and his fellow Marines, when they stepped off their plane coming back home onto U.S. soil, were met by complete strangers who threw animal excrement at their sparkling uniforms.

I am not (yet) as old as Dr. DuBose, to be able to witness as many sweeping cultural changes as he obviously has.  This change in public opinion of the military has a particularly strong impact on me since my son has just recently entered the Navy.  Coming of age in the Viet Nam era, I had always secretly plotted to move any as-yet-unborn sons to French-speaking Canada to avoid the draft.  I never thought I’d have a son who would voluntarily enlist.  As a mother who has watched her country in and out of a few wars, my heart swims in a dizzying cocktail of fear, pride, confusion and hope.

My thoughts went back to my visit with my father that same afternoon.  I had asked him if he had voted to re-elect President Obama.  Four years earlier, he admitted voting for McCain.  His reasoning at the time was weirdly prescient, if not tinged with racism.  My Dad didn’t have any personal objections to voting for a black President, but he explained that Obama didn’t have what basically amounted to a snowball’s chance in hell to get anything done, precisely because he was black. 

It was for that very same reason that he voted for Obama this time, saying he wasn’t going to vote for a loser.

Culture shifts in just such ways, changing perceptions over time.  The determination of who is a winner and who is a loser sometimes needs to mature, like a good glass of wine, over time.