Language of the Heart

When I stood with my three boarding cards in hand today - Detroit, Paris, Cape Town - the coincidence of the countries represented made me think of a time with my daughter and her friends over a year ago.

I had taken them to lunch after a band competition to La Madeleine’s - a French restaurant chain in Austin where you order at the counter before getting a table. The girls were in middle school and I knew some of them were taking French as a second language so I thought it might be fun to practice ordering from the menu en francais. They were hesitant, but promised they would do it if I went first. I rehearsed my high school French in my head and stepped up to the counter to order. The server responded in French and the girls were impressed. Heck, even I was impressed. It felt so good to use a language I hadn’t spoken since living in Europe.

I slipped back in to English as I helped the other girls find what they wanted on the menu, and when I finally came to pay, the same fluent server that had endured our schoolgirl French said, “Dankie dame, lekker dag!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. This young twenty-something had just spoken another one of my heart languages in the time it took to order lunch.

Still taken aback, we conversed in Afrikaans while my payment was processing and the girls looked on in complete surprise. Like me, he had grown up in South Africa and was thus able to detect my accent when I spoke English. As most South Africans are bilingual, he knew I’d be fluent in Afrikaans, too. Unlike me, he had spent time in France working on a vineyard before moving to the U.S., so while we shared the same three languages, his French was remarkably better than mine.

Why tell the story? Because there’s nothing quite like speaking a person’s heart language to make them feel seen and known. A deep longing can be met in a few simple phrases - like mine was that day over the counter with a stranger. So, as I prepare to board my flight, it leaves me to say goodbye, au revoir, totsiens.