I bought a prehistoric Russian mummy and put running shoes on it, then laid it down, for the time being, against the south wall of the living room in the house where I grew up. Sat down on the sofa facing it and suddenly realized that I couldn't remember why I had bought the mummy, or why I had put the running shoes on it. My stepbrother walked in, looked at it, frowned, and muttered, "It's disgusting, the things that people own."

About nine years ago in Ann Arbor there was a young Turkish guy in one of my classes. He was about the worst one in there. He had a great attitude. Every time he spoke to me, I had no idea what he was saying. The words were English, but they were completely jumbled. He certainly didn't seem insane or stupid, but his sentences were like a Cubist version of English. Two years ago in Linguistics class, I learned that Turkish has a general Subject-Object-Verb word order, different from English, which is basically Subject-Verb-Object (as in the sentence "Carl smokes cigarettes," which, in Turkish, would be something like "Carl cigarettes smokes"). In the last couple of months I've been taking a Turkish class at the school where I teach, from one of my colleagues who's a German teacher from Turkey. As I was reading my textbook, I remembered my former student's word salad sentences. The order that information appears in a Turkish sentence is really, really different from the order it appears in an English sentence. Let me demonstrate this. If you want to say: "We're going to Germany with my friends," you say "Arkadaslarimla Almanya'ya gidiyoruz," that is, "Friend-s-my-with Germany-to go-we." That is basically the same kind of English sentence I was hearing from my student. It's comparatively easy to learn vocabulary in a foreign language; it's much harder to rearrange the invisible patterns in which you express your information. I experience this difficulty when speaking German. Specifically, the verbs appear early in my sentences, as they would if I were speaking English, and often I don't have the foresight or the strength to push them to the end.

Sanded a small floor with a big sander, warped pine boards from 100 years ago, the servant's room.