Comment allez-vous?

ça va, ça va. If I hadn’t mentioned it already, I am finally following through on my lifelong desire to learn French. There was some problem with scheduling or something in ninth grade, and despite my absolute certainty that all the cute girls were taking French, I was stuck in German. It’s a fine language, they’re wonderful people, and I think the Jews are pretty much over all that, right? Well, I’ll grant that it’s a simple language, fairly easy and nearly rigid in its adherence to rules (hmmm… the culture doesn’t fall far from the linguistic tree?). But it isn’t French, which when spoken sounds like birds. Love it, wish I could speak it, wish I could understand it. And usually, along about December when cabin fever is setting in, I think about taking a class, but it always requires that I have taken the fall semester section, which I have never done. So, a few weeks ago, I suddenly realized that schools were registering and I had to procure French lessons. I was closed out of Hudson Valley Community College — apparently some kind of hotbed of francophonie — and the closer colleges didn’t have anything I wanted or was willing to spend money on. But strangely enough, Schenectady County Community College — which in my younger, crueller days, I will admit, I scorned with derision, and saddled with such monikers as “Second Chance Community College,” “College High,” and “Van Curler Tech” — good old SCCC came through for me. This school was started when the Hotel Van Curler, once Schenectady’s premiere hotel (though, truly, not that grand compared to other upstate city hotels), closed, and the college was hurriedly slapped into the old hotel building shortly thereafter. It wasn’t much different some 10 years later, when a close friend took classes there while waiting for his true academic calling. I hadn’t before encountered a college with lockers (though in fairness, I hadn’t encountered all that many colleges) (and as a commuting student years later, I hated that there were no lockers to be had at SU).

Mon dieu! Is this going anywhere?! Wrap it up!

So, I’m taking French class at SCCC. There, was that so hard to get out? The campus is kinda growed up, there’s a broad mix of students, there’s hardly any of the old hotel building left (but what there is is still kinda thrown together), and it’s not the worst place in the world to spend a few hours once a week conjugating verbs and mangling “heureux”. So, eventually I’ll be able to cross this one off my list of lifelong dreams. I’m not sure I’m ever going to get around to the cello (though if French had fallen through completely I was going to go with guitar lessons — I used to pick and strum miserably, but a lesson couldn’t hurt). And I think I’m going to have to reconcile my rock-climbing dream with the fact that I get terrified when I’m more than 6 feet off the ground. But we’ll see….