Sepharad

Last January, I started studying Spanish. I took two 7-day, total immersion classes at the University of Miami, and made great strides. Then I stopped the week my mother's health took a turn for the worse. Tonight, for the first time in six weeks, I mustered the energy and the focus to return to Spanish. I had a one hour lesson this evening.

Learning a new language is like being issued a passport to a new identity. When I learned to speak Italian, I became Amy Selvino. I rolled my rrrrrrr's and I gesticulated wildly, and I channeled the inner Monica Bellucci.

When I learned to speak French, I felt like Deneuve and I started wearing my hair in a chignon. I listened to Edith Piaf. I cried when France won the World Cup and the band struck up the Marseillaise.

And now it's Spanish.

There's a family link here that I should explain. My father's parents fled Russia in the early days of the century, approximately 1911. They were Ashkenazi Jews -- typical Eastern Europeans arriving by the boatloads at Ellis Island and probably smelling of pot roast. Or worse.

My mother's family, on the other hand, hailed from Spain -- part of the Jewish community ushered out of the Sepharad in 1492. A big year for Columbus; a bad year for Spain's Jews. My mother's aunt was a world-famous flamenco dancer by the name of Estrellita (real name Stella Paul), whose photo hangs in an arts museum in San Francisco and who had a very public affair with the writer Jack London.

(Incidentally, this is small potatoes compared to my mother's grandfather, blackface comedian and Ziegfeld Follie Frank Tinney, who pulled down $1,500 per week back in 1912 and was kicked out of the Follies when he bit the nipple off of some chorus girl he was shtupping.)

So, back to Spanish. As I explained to my very patient and kind teacher, the lovely Julio from Argentina, I have managed to forget nearly all of the verb conjugations. Except, interestingly enough, the present tense. Talk about a sure-fire way to remain in the moment. If the only tense you know is the present, then the only thing you can talk about is what is happening right now.

At the end of our hour, I was remembering more and the words were coming more fluidly. It will happen. I will speak Spanish. I long for the day when I can sing along with a Marc Anthony CD and converse -- at least in my fantasies -- with Javier Bardem in his mother tongue.

But there's a serious point to all of this. Not just that I managed to stay in the moment for an entire hour, bound by my limited grammar and vocabulary. No, beyond all that, there was a tremendous feeling of connection. Finding those dots that connect and form a line -- literally, a life line. From a people, from a country and a culture, to my mother, to me and to our story.

There's something incredibly magical -- and comforting and reassuring and wondrous -- in knowing that I am part of a story. A dot on a line, yes, but a dot on a line that is continuous. Like there is a plan and I'm part of it. I'm meant to be here.

The story continues. And note that it is in the present tense.