Count It Again
“Count it again, but slower this time,” the customer’s voice rang loudly, her words steeped in a thick Eastern European accent.
The bank teller looked shocked as if she’d been slapped in the face. She knows how to count. Was this woman questioning her abilities? The teller stiffened. In a sarcastic, staccato rhythm, she counted again. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred….”
The elderly customer sharply nodded and smiled, satisfied that the bill count was right.
But the premise was wrong.
She wasn’t questioning the count at all.
As I heard this interaction unfold, I thought my grandmother (Oma) was standing next to me in that bank lobby for only a second. With every word the customer uttered in her broken English, my heart felt a longing pang for someone I’d lost nearly a decade ago.
Oma was a German immigrant who’d sailed across the Atlantic to the United States—a two-week journey at the time. Her husband had immigrated a year before to establish a job and a home. Oma had never wanted to leave her native land, especially not with two young children in tow and with little grasp of the English language. But she’d left a devastated economy following WWII at the hands of a maniacal dictator.
As a child, I would often help Oma translate American slang and poorly enunciated words into friendlier International English.
The bank customer was Romanian, I discovered.
She wasn’t asking for a recount.
She was seeking to understand the spoken language.
“Twinny” is much harder to understand than “twenty.”
And she asked for clarity using her own broken and limited English.
I thought about the bank teller and her defensive response. It wasn’t unkind, but she didn’t grasp the big picture.
Aren’t we all, in our own way, still struggling to understand the language of others in our own broken way? And isn’t it beautiful when someone can hear us and translate what we mean when we can’t find the words?
