What happened? French happened. Try as I might, I could not make French behave. My ability to manipulate the English language gave me no leverage with La Francaise. The language labs left me sweaty, the homework left me despondent, and the classroom interaction left me feeling like the deaf mute in the choir. It would not figure out!

The teacher, watching my struggles, took a special interest in me, and offered to spend extra time helping me overcome this difficulty. I had never needed special tutoring, and felt uncomfortable taking him up on his offer.

A delicate balance was disrupted. My IQ plummeted in my other classes, too. This experience was sending me into an intellectual stone age. I was becoming a Neanderthal!

My stomach began giving me fits. Gurgling and aching, particularly when I would don my imaginary beret to begin my homework. Usually a confident intuitive, I began painstakingly transcribing each phrase ten and twenty times, sub-vocalizing each as I scribbled. My handwriting went to hell along with the rest of my faculties.

My doctor prescribed a healthy dose of failure. “Drop the class,” he advised. Reassured by my parents that there was, indeed, life after French, I dropped the class. I was assigned to shop class instead. Shop class was overseen by an unimaginative bull of a bullet-headed man who taught me one enduring life lesson. When my intuitive design for a shelf baffled him, he advised me to, “Just copy something from the back of the book.” I had gone in less than one semester from near the head of the class to crouching in the back of a wood shop, looking for something to copy out of the back of the book.

I was twenty five before I figured out a way to get into university without mastering a foreign language, and I did well there. Very well. How curious that I still tend to cope with the impossibles in my life by carefully transcribing, then sub-vocalizing them.