You will understand(?)

I love driving. It’s probably the most enduringly American thing about me. Though I’m not from out West like my friend Andi–who will comfortably drive 9 hours one way on a given Friday only to do the return trip again on Sunday–I really don’t mind spending three or four hours in the car driving around my home in northern New England. 

Living in Maine one of my favorite things to do was to drive up and down the coast, especially in the off season, stopping in at antique stores and junk barns followed by a meal of grilled cheese with tomato and a side of thick fries at a town diner. 

When we had some money my favorite thing to spend it on was a couple of nights at the Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, a magnificent old hotel with spectacular views of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains and easy access to the scenic drive of the Kancamgus Highway, which climbs and descends through thousands of acres of unspoilt wilderness.

And other than perhaps March, known locally as mud season, there isn’t a time of year I don’t enjoy driving in New England. Summer is verdant, autumn respondent, and winter bright and sparse, until of course around 4 PM when it’s dark and sparse. Best of all, Maine’s law prohibiting billboards allows even the most major thoroughfares feel secondary to the state’s wildernesses.

And so I was spoiled to spend my adult life driving through maximal beauty and minimal traffic. 

Of course last year my family and I moved to Cholula, Mexico. We were too jet-lagged to pay much attention to the staggering levels of traffic as our taxi extricated us from Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City and carried us southeast to our new home in the state of Puebla. 

We had no car those first few weeks, and I remember observing closely our taxi and Uber drivers, trying to decipher the driving culture they were navigating for the day when I’d be behind the wheel. I started to figure out when signs were directives and when they were subjective. I noticed the four different levels of police vehicles and which were more likely to stop you for running a light. I observed when drivers gave way and when they forced a merge, how pedestrians made their calculations to assert themselves through the traffic, and how the local wildlife–namely bands of rogue street dogs–did the same. 

The greater metropolitan area of Puebla, I later learned, is about the same size and population as Los Angeles, which is fitting since Puebla’s full name is Puebla de Los Angeles. With its similarly large and complicated highways, expanse of low residential areas, and collection of shiny modern towers–not to mention the abundance of palm trees and billboards–I found myself in as about a different driving place as is possible from rural Maine. In Maine, with plenty of good roads with so little traffic, it’s easy to figure getting any place takes just over a minute per mile. Puebla, on the other, follow’s Cher Horowitz’s Dad’s rule of thumb: “everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes” he truth bombs over the phone. Same here, even if your destination it’s just a few kilometers away as the crow flies.

Along with adapting to the higher density of traffic, my major transition to driving here has been orienting myself to a completely different city planning structure than I’ve been used to. Though I know many cities in the US are built on sensible, 19th-century grid systems, New England cities in my life have retained the urban sensibility of their Early Modern English settlers, which is to say chaos now too enshrined by time and status to be reincarnated into something sensible. 

And of course, outside the cities, New England roads are often built along old trading paths established by the first peoples, who in turn followed the paths established by animals in search of salt licks. Therefore the navigation system in New England often follows markers such as old cemeteries, stone walls, major trees, farms, and gas stations. I could easily tell you how to cut across from Route One to my grandmother’s house in Freedom solely based on these categories of markers.

Mexico, of course, has its own layering of colonial and first peoples in its cities, and Cholula and Puebla are potent examples of these. Puebla was founded in 1531 by the Spanish and the archaeological evidence suggests that, in contrast to Mexico City, it was built afresh, rather than on top of a preexisting indigenous settlement. There’s a legend that a bishop dreamt of being called by angels to build a city on the spot it lies today–hence the appellation “de los angeles.” However, the legend may just be a cover-up for the fact that the city stands at the convenient midway point of trade routes between Mexico City and Veracruz. 

Regardless, Puebla was designed, and built, in adherence to the highest principles of Spanish urban architecture and is accordingly considered the purest built example of the form in the world. Nearly 500 years since its conception, the city remains highly structured with a sophisticated and logical block system that predates back the formation of a single Main Street in my home state by about 200 years.

Puebla still considers itself a pretty world-class city, and with some rights. It has outstanding universities, museums, food, artisanal specialties like Talavera pottery, and architecture.  And the poblanos know it, or so I’m told. They’re known nationally for being somewhat haughty, liking the finer things in life, and attempting to display a level of Spanish cultural purity.

Cholula, on the other hand, just a few kilometers to the west of Puebla is considered to be the longest-inhabited city in all of the Americas with a settlement estimated to have begun a few centuries before the start of the common era. And though it too now has a grid system, it feels very different than Puebla. Whereas Puebla flaunts the purity of its Spanish heritage, the faces of Cholula insist upon their ancient and immovable presence. Cholula remains home to a high percentage of indigenous Mexicans.  The Cholulatecans in fact remained one of the very few independent city-states at the height of the Aztec empire, a status that more or less continued even as the Spanish established Puebla so nearby. Our housekeeper Silvia, for example, speaks Nahuatl as her first language; she only learned Spanish at age 18.

And the independence of the Cholutatecans is still visible in the town itself. First of all, instead of a Spanish colonial square at its center, there is a large mound, thought upon arrival by the Spanish to be a neatly shaped hill, but in reality, a pyramid greater in volume than the Great Pyramid of Giza, though overgrown by vegetation to this day. There is now a Catholic church on top, but even that doesn’t redefine the underlying structure very much, for the structure of that overgrown pyramid is less in conversation with the church on top of it than the volcanos around it.  Cholula is built at the exact midpoint of the vast central highland valley, defined to the northeast by La Malinche and to the southwest by Popocatepetl. A few weeks ago at the autumnal equinox, the residents of Cholula experience the sun setting precisely into the crater of Popo, evidence of a sacred astrological significance to the city’s placement. 

However, different Puebla and Cholula are in their histories and urban DNA, the Spanish block system they share has proved to be a surprisingly difficult spacial language for me to learn. You see New England, with all of its graveyards and stone walls and trees, should by all rights be more complicated to navigate than the sensibility of marking all streets with a number and cardinal direction in relation to a central square, as the Spanish do. And yet, having grown up learning to navigate by built and natural markers rather than logic, I’ve struggled driving around here! To me, everywhere I go, in any direction, is merely a series of four-way intersections after another. 

Actually, no, that’s true for everyone driving here. Every Mexican knows the system of north/south by east/west streets that make up the four-way intersections (and their respective one-way systems that are more or less consistent) and can easily picture therefore where they are in relation to the central square and to where they want to go. I, on the other hand, arrived here trying desperately to find my bearings based on markers. 

Unfortunately, every intersection in Cholula shares the same few potential markers: a church, an Oxxo convenience store, a hardware store, a taco stand, and a chicken rotisserie. Though I couldn’t find conclusive stats for all of these, to give you a sense of how very pervasive these are you should know there are almost 21k Oxxos in Mexico, 93 million catholic churches,* and 100% of Mexican citizens live within 400 metres of a taco stand. All of which is to say, rather than spending the past year figuring out how to use the street numbering system I’ve instead memorized the unique combination of churches, oxxos, taco stands, hardware stores, and chicken rotisseries at any given intersection within quite a few dozen square kilometres. Does it make sense? No. Have I figured out a better way? Also no.  *[NB: forgive me, there are 93 million catholics, not that many churches. But FWIW my small town of Cholula has had up to 365 churches in it at one point. Apologies]

This is the moment when I want to reveal that this essay is actually not about driving, or urban planning, or tacos, though I definitely should add a culinary beat to this podcast sometime. Rather all of this has been a rather roundabout, or New England, way of getting to what I’ve been thinking about this week, which is language. 

You see, while I’ve spent the last year figuring out how to get around–to grocery stores and dentist appointments and museums and, unfortunately, Walmarts–my kids have become fluent in Spanish. This is not a brag, it’s a fact. Ok hey it’s a little brag. But I’m so proud of them. 

Vivi got there first. She was 7 when we arrived here and is now 8.5. She was actually the most apprehensive about learning Spanish because she was old enough to understand the concept of a new language, but not able to read and study Spanish workbooks the way her sister was. But she’s social and expressive by nature. I remember when she first asked to have a friend over last year, and reassured me that she’d be able to explain to them whatever I needed to say. Sure enough she was soon having play dates at other people’s houses, and then sleepovers, til finally sometime last spring or summer I heard her sleep talking in Spanish. We would go to the dentist, or to get her hair cut, and she could communicate everything she wanted to, while I was left to just pay the bill and make the follow up appointments.

I’ve also heard Julian speak Spanish in his sleep, but that was only this past week. I thought for sure since he was only 4 when we arrived that he’d be the first out the door linguistically, but early on he figured out his teachers speak English, so he managed to coast for quite a while. Last winter his teachers remarked at their surprise he wasn’t more advanced, and they recommended I send him off on more playdates. Sure enough he found his playdate soul mate, a boy in his class named Joshua. Joshua’s mom Magaly is someone I really enjoy, and who can speak English with me, so we four have happily hung out. Eventually Julian and Joshua started spending all their free time together, and many weekends they would sleepover, and that’s how Julian has gotten to be so good at Spanish.

And then there’s Aurelia. When I first proposed moving to Mexico and I mentioned needing to learn Spanish she said, I kid you not, “Oh good. I already know everything in English so it makes sense that I learn another language.” Sure enough pre-departure she enjoyed her workbooks and DuoLingo, but upon arrival her introverted nature took over. She seemed to pay attention enough in the initial months to be able to keep up in school, but her language eventually plateaued. Around the same time she began reading massive YA fantasy novels, though I did once here her summarize her favorite epic in Spanish to a classmate. 

But I think Aurelia and I are a lot alike. I should add before I move on, her teacher revealed to me recently that Aurelia actually understands much more Spanish than she lets on. But still she and I are far less at ease in Spanish than Vivi and Julian who move between their two languages with facility and clarity. 

Aurelia and I, on the other hand are I think still running everything we want to say in Spanish through the filter of English. Other than a few phrases, expressions, and salutations, there are few sentences I speak or write in Spanish that I’ve not thought first in English in my head. I try not to give myself too hard of a time about it. At least I’m able to process many of my basic thoughts and needs into Spanish. Really it could be worse than being slow, stilted, and possibly/probably/definitely grammatically imperfect. I could be one of those people who goes to a new country and doesn’t ever try to learn the language, or insists on speaking in their own language just louder. (Britons on holiday in Europe I’m looking at you.) 

In the first weeks and months we were here I felt proud of the progress I’d made, certainly in understanding and eventually in expression. Oh wow you’ve only been here 5 weeks and you never learned Spanish before this–well you’re doing pretty good, was the feedback I’d received from many Mexicans I met. Upon arrival, my kids were in awe of my handful of phrases and educated guesses at what waiters and taxi drivers were saying. “You’re the best in the family!” they’d say. But I knew it was only a matter of time. 

And now we’ve been here 15 months. Indeed I have two children who are more or less fluent, one who is quietly advanced, and me. Me. Still picking my way through the past tense and conjugating clumsily in my head. I constantly struggle to differentiate between the words for 50, 60, and 70, and will often just hand over a $100 peso bill to avoid the awkwardness, unless Vivi is at hand to tell me the number in English while rolling her eyes at my ignorance. 

I’ve been trying lately to advance my language skills in two ways. The first, and most obvious, way is that I have dedicated myself to reading my Spanish book regularly. I have the excellent book Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish and a little notebook in which I jot down what I learn as I learn it. That’s definitely helped, and I credit Madrigal with all my newfound knowledge of the past tense (though God help me when I encounter the past perfect and the subjunctive). 

The other way I’ve been engaging the language learning process is, of course, because I’m a writer, by thinking how I think about language. 

Some of my earliest memories of language learning, I’ve realized, were at the exact same ages as my kids when they came to Mexico. Except unlike them, I didn’t ever have an immersive language experience. I lived in Connecticut. And I had the Disney movie Pocahontas. 

It had been many decades since I’d watched Pocahontas when a few years ago my kids asked to watch it. I was initially apprehensive, having been so disappointed upon rewatching other classics of my youth in the 90s. So I did what any good Millenial parent would: I googled around, and was surprised to find a piece in The Atlantic called “Revisiting Pocahontas at 20.” In the 2015 piece, author Sophie Gilbert writes:

“The movie might have fudged some facts to allow for a compelling romantic story, but it had a progressive attitude when it came to interpreting history, depicting the English settlers as plunderers searching for non-existent gold who were intent upon murdering the “savages” they encountered in the process. The film also seemed to embrace an environmentalist message, with Pocahontas showing Smith the absurdity of relentlessly taking things from the Earth instead of seeing its potential. It was a radical story about female agency and empathy disguised as a rather sappy romance…”

I should add, Gilbert doesn’t get, and didn’t ask for, the definitive word on the movie (I appreciated reading Chis Bodenner’s response on the complexity of any assessment). But after reading her piece I decided to go ahead and watch the movie with the kids, in hopes also of talking about it afterward.

All of this is a rather long way of saying that upon rewatching the film I was surprised to observe much of the nuance that Gilbert pointed out regarding the environment, depiction of the English greed, and female agency. For example, did you remember that she rejected John Smith’s request to go with him to England at the end of the movie? I hadn’t! I was totally wowed to see a woman in a Disney movie chose her family and culture over love (take that The Little Mermaid!). 

Yet I was completely shocked at the lack of nuance the film displayed when it came to language. 

The quick and the dirty of it is that that film acknowledges that Pocahontas doesn’t understand John Smith when they first meet, but with a swirl of pastel and the chorus from an anthropomorphic willow tree singing “listen with your heart, you will understand” just like that Pocahontas both understands and speaks English.
No wonder to this day I’m such a half-assed language learner. With swirling pastel leaves and a waifish lyric as my template, I cannot tell you how dissatisfying it was in 6th grade when I first took French and encountered vocab lists and conjugation tables. Later I had a slightly more positive experience as a sexy European boyfriend encouraged me with kisses to pick up words in his language, but the relationship was short and without the kissing, it didn’t seem worth pursuing. 

To this day when I’m asked what superhero power I want I respond that I’d like a papercut from a radioactive dictionary to give me the ability to speak, read, and understand every language in the world. 

But like Vivienne, I’m social and expressive by nature. Unlike her, I don’t have the soft and flexible brain of an eight-year-old and 6 hours of immersion per day. Instead, my work is thoroughly immersed in the English language–my writing consultancy business is called of course Written English Collaboration. And why go from a language of which you operate with complete ease and mastery–so much so that week after week you can write 5,000-word essays in just a few hours–to the quieted, discomfort of a limited vocabulary and labyrinthine grammatical structure?

And that’s one of the things I’ve learned this year. Not being able to speak, to express myself fully and with nuance, has been hard. Many days as I am out and about I feel small, knowing I am limited in my communication to the present, future, and only just recently simple past tense of the five verbs I feel truly comfortable using. As a result, I can’t ask complex questions. I can’t convey any conditionality. I can’t joke or be self-deprecating. And I can’t build relationships with casual interactions beyond the establishing facts of where I’m from, why I’m here, and how hard it is to learn Spanish (but would you believe me when I say that my kids speak Spanish in their sleep!) 

Again I can get around. Nouns are no problem. I’ve mastered the grocery store and menus. I can read road signs, business signs, out of order signs. I worship at the altar of cognates and I can muddle through just fine in most situations speaking with my taxi driver or housekeeper or store assistant. But again, I can’t verbalize all that I observe, or wonder, or need to explain when I’m pulled over by the police (though fortunately in that one case I think my lack of Spanish has gotten me out of paying any bribes because they see I’m hopeless at understanding when I’m being shaken down).

But then, here’s the other thing. While I can’t say all that I want to say, and I don’t understand all the words I hear, I’ve learned that communication does not come down wholly to vocabulary and grammar, thankfully for me. Language is also highly emotional. 

I know when I coach folx in their writing I try to attune myself to them emotionally as a means of understanding them, building trust, and sensing when to push and when to pull back. Writing is such an intimate process, and requires the creation of a responsive emotional state to support it. And I’ve long known how to do that professionally and in life. 

But it turns out, unlike naviation or verbalization, emotional attunation is transferrable. Sure words and morays are lost in translation, as the saying goes, but connecting eyes, observing microexpressions, being responsive to a smile or a word catching in the throat–well it’s remarkable how true  Pocahontas’s grandmotherwillowtreeladyspirit’s message is: “Listen with your heart, you will understand.”

My life isn’t a Disney movie. Listening and understanding aren’t sufficient to somehow magically being able to speak a foreign language. It didn’t help me the other day at the autobody shop. That definitely relied wholly on simple verbs and a lot of pointing.

But it turns out that listening and understanding are critical to living amid a foreign language and to connecting with people. And perhaps it’s a good thing for someone as hyperverbal as I am–I swear sometimes the fast-paced dialogue of The West Wing and Gilmore Girls is my love language–to experience an extended period of time not being able to speak. Because of my not being able to speak I’m strengthening my capacity for nonverbal understanding. 

As I said, when I started thinking about how I think about language, I hit on the thought that language is not limited to words–I don’t think it’s just an easy out for me. I’m still reading and transcribing my Madrigals Magic Key to Spanish. That book is big and takes up about 30% of the space in my purse. But by carrying it with me it continually asserts itself, nonverbally communicating its importance and necessity until I have internalized its contents enough that I don’t need to carry it around. 

There is another piece of this. I know I’ve made you go through driving and language, and now another thing. But I think these are all interconnected. So hear me out.

The last piece I’ve been thinking about is the difference between being an immigrant and an expat. 

I’m in a Facebook group called “Expats in Mexico.” I’d say about 5% of the group’s content is really helpful, but the other 95% is pretty damn scattershot. But I saw someone the other day pose the question I’d put firmly in the top 5%. They wrote: “What’s the difference between an immigrant and an expat?” 

It was one of those questions I thought was so good that I decided not to read any of the comments, which would invariably piss me off, but instead to sit with the question. “What’s the difference between an immigrant and an expat?”

I was tempted at first to say that there’s no difference at all–both are people transgressing borders and maybe there’s an opportunity to humble one group and elevate the other by viewing them as equals. 

But of course in reality that’s not the case. 

The answer, I’m pretty sure, can come down to one word: volition. An expat has the privilege that allows a desire to live elsewhere to be possible. An immigrant, on the other hand, generally doesn’t have the privilege to return. One gets a flexible date round trip ticket and the other gets a one-way. One gets to learn the language on their own time at their own pace, the other needs to get up to speed super quick or risk drowning. One gets to be seen as contributing to their host economy, even validating the desirability of their host culture, and reveling in their foreignness with a community of other foreign nationals, whereas the other had better not be a drain on the economy, might be seen as bringing the neighborhood down, and definitely should neither mix too much with the dominant culture nor enjoy too much of their own ethnic subculture. 

One of the many reasons we moved to Mexico was that, as lovely as Maine is, it’s largely culturally and ethnically homogenous. I worried about raising kids worthy of the challenges of the 21st century in the whitest state in the nation. I tried when we lived there to find other ways to incorporate the world in my kids’ lives–for example for almost four years we hosted a family from Burundi in our home, and my kids see those three teenagers as their siblings. I wanted my kids to see, even if they couldn’t quite understand it wholly at their young ages, the challenge of joining a new culture and the vital importance of supporting people as they make that transition. 

When I thought about us moving to Mexico, I hoped it would, among other things, build their empathy for the experience of all those in the world who relocate, who must leave their landscape, their mother language, their traditions, and reference points. 

But of course, that’s not wholly been the experience, because being an American outside the US does not require totally leaving behind English, or traditions, or cultural reference, because of course these have all been so broadly exported. You can get Walmart and Netflix and shitty Domino’s pizza all over Mexico, and not just the border towns as I’d have assumed. Amid the richness of the Mexican tradition of Dia de los Muertos, you can buy cheesy polyester witch costumes and plush jack-o-lantern throw pillows. Despite not having Thanksgiving here, my local bougie supermarket hawks decorative signs that say “thankful” and “give thanks” (though they stop short of anything pilgrim related). At Christmas, the radio playlists are the same, entirely familiar melange of Mariah Carey, Paul McCartney, and the Rat Pack. 

Of course, there are many, many aspects of our life here that are distinctly Mexican. For example I can find Coca-Cola and Jarritos anywhere, but I have to trawl the bottom-most shelves for any hope of a dusty Dr. Pepper. 

However, US culture is rarely too far away, especially if you have the money to upgrade your hot morning atole to a flat white.

And so in an attempt to separate my kids from US culture in order to build the empathetic and interculturally competent children I want to step out into a century certain to bring the highest levels of global human migration, I’ve discovered just how much the people in other countries are still being put in the position of adapting to American culture, language, and practices. Someone doesn’t need to move to the US to see the primacy of English language skills in business. You don’t need to be thousands of miles from the nearest atole stand to have made the switch to Starbucks. You don’t need to be facing a fleet of conquistadors or English merchants or a gift of blankets impregnated with smallpox to see your land being taken over, or your languages and traditions dying off.

I want to go back a minute to the language thing. 

I think Spanish is a truly terrific language. Though it has some irregularities, as all languages do, for the most part, it is incredibly consistent. Whenever I buckle down and get through a new conjugation or the rules of direct and indirect objects I’m inevitably completely impressed by the thoroughly sensible rules, spelling, and pronunciation. 

In our first year here I taught English to middle schoolers and I couldn’t help but feel for them as I tried to guide them through the spelling, pronunciation, and meaning of words like through, though, thought, thorough, tough, and touch. And how the hell do you explain to 12-year-olds that the past tense of most English verbs is indicated by an -ed at the end (like cooked and walked and brushed), except that sometimes the past tense is indicated by a change in the vowel as in write and wrote, run and ran, swim and swam, sweep and swept, think and thought. 

Within a short time of living here I came to the conclusion that the Spanish, whether in their grammar or their cities, really came up with some pretty sensible systems that should be much easier to learn and use. 

And yet, as a native English speaker, and a New Englander, I remain thoroughly acclimated to the irregularities and preposterously contradictory conventions I was born into, speaking and writing with the linguistic equivalent of windy roads that can only be navigated by familiarity with antiquated markers like old cemeteries, stone walls, and the peculiarity of tree gnarls (the fact that I know how to spell “gnarls” proves my point).  

I should be able to learn the Spanish conjugations and city grid system and be grateful that my old brain is not forced to parse out theirs, there’s, and they’res for the first time.

And yet as the world changes, so do languages. As people move, so do languages. As groups gain and lose power, so do their languages. 

Part of the reason I’m writing this essay is to extend some grace to myself for not having mastered Spanish yet. Hell, I’ve barely intermediated Spanish yet. But we can’t all have the soft brains and social malleability of my 8-year-old. What matters is that I’m trying, and when I can’t take in all of the words I work extra hard to take in the emotional context. 

Meanwhile, I’m grateful to the many people I’ve met here who have extended patience and guidance to me and my kids since arriving in Cholula. I’m grateful to have friends who speak with me in English while helping me with my Spanish. 

If I could complain of one thing, however, it’s that too often people apologize to me for their English. I recognize this thinking from my years working with students who grew up speaking other languages. Too often those students felt hesitant at calling English their own, let alone making friends with it. 

That being said, it was a bilingual, Ghanaian-American student who shifted my thinking about this. About eight years ago I met Esther. Esther had grown up in New York, redefined the spoken word scene at the New England college where we met, studied abroad in India, went on to receive a prestigious fellowship to teach English in South Africa. She now is a poet and I highly recommend her first book of poetry called “Light Soup.” 

Anyway, Esther did what poets do with such ease: she found a new combination of words to tell a truth. I remember in the essay I was helping her with she recounted teaching English at a girls school in India when a student broke down in apologies for her “bad English.” Esther comforted the girl not to be mad at her “jealous tongue” that doesn’t want to relinquish it’s mother language in order to speak English. 

That image of the student in India and Esther’s words to her always stayed with me. 

To this day when people apologize to me for their English, I remind them that it is I who have moved here, and it is my responsibility and privilege to learn their language and that the English they give me is a gift I receive with only appreciation and never criticism. 

Because language is about confidence and exchange, and because otherwise it too easily becomes about inadequacy and social divisions. And what’s the point of that? We have enough of that already in the world without shaming anyone trying to connect with the world beyond their own. 

Building confidence in narrative, and in English, is the fundamental mission I founded WREN CO to accomplish. Though it seems incongruent at times when I tell people I’m an English-language writer and writing coach living in Mexico trying to learn Spanish, I believe it’s been a necessary experience to extend my own empathy in order to know firsthand what it feels like to meet a language anew and try to make friends with it.

When I was 17 and we were living in Connecticut, our town was surrounded on three sides by New York State. This made driving on a Connecticut learner’s permit logistically ridiculous, for I could barely drive us anywhere before hitting the NY border. I was always a fairly confident driver, and I remember my mother being weary of the density of traffic in the metropolitan area, so she would often take the risk of letting me drive even over the border into NY, confident I could manage the driving until the point when we got anywhere near Manhattan and we would switch. 

Til that one time when we forgot to switch. I don’t recall if it was an engrossing NPR story or some good old-fashioned Gilmore Girls-style banter but I remember the moment of realization when we noticed I was driving down FDR Drive. Traffic flowed thick and fast like hot molasses and I just had to go with it, down the eastern course of the island til entering the grid system of the interior. There was no time for hesitation, I just had to drive. My mother in the passenger seat next to me navigated, calming me down better than Murray or Cher when Dion found herself on the freeway. I forget where we were going but eventually, we arrived. And I learned that even though I was practically from the Connecticut idyl of Star’s Hollow, I could drive illegally down FDR Drive if I needed to. I’m glad my mother let me drive over the border, and didn’t freak out when we found ourselves in Manhattan, because she taught me (there’s another tough English past tense) I can adapt, I can get up to speed, literally. I felt so American, driving through the streets of New York, and have never stopped loving the thrill of finding myself too far in to stop, even if I’m hopelessly in over my head.