The Door is Ajar

I have heard that English is very hard to learn for people whose native tongue is another language. We got this nice young kid named Enrique who is an exchange student from Argentina. He wants to be an international lawyer and is here to brush up on his English. I reckon it's because of this that he spends so much time at the library where I am a volunteer. Yesterday Enrique came in with a puzzled look on his face. He watches a lot of old movies because those 1930 and 1940 movies used a relatively simple dialog to tell their story. In one of the movies he saw this week one of the characters stated, "When I got there the front door was ajar." When he asked me about this in my mind I could see him picturing the front door as a clear glass jar. After talking to him a minute I realized he thought it was a metaphor for prudence. It seems that Maylene Barnplow, the lady whose family he is staying with, had given him a Mason Jar with a slit punched into the lid for the purpose of slipping in the coins from his pocket at the end of the day. Maylene is well known around here for her frugality. I don't know a lot of Spanish but I did learn a little tricky thing way back when. I told him, "Eso si que es." He smiled, I think because I didn't say it exactly right. Then he laughed and told me he just thought I was simply spelling S O C K S. All languages are hard to get.

Tales of Harper, short stories and poems about the fictional town of Harper, Mississippi is available on Amazon Kindle