Calypso(25)

I’ve outlawed “meds,” “bestie,” “bucket list,” “dysfunctional,” “expat,” “cab-sav,” and the verb “do” when used in a restaurant, as in “I’ll do the snails on cinnamon toast.”

“Ugh,” Ronnie agrees. “Do!—that’s the worst.”

“My new thing,” I told her, “is to look at the menu and say, ‘I’d like to purchase the veal chop.’”

A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. “My bad,” for example, and “I’ve got your back” and “You go, girlfriend.” They’re the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.



The weak link of my American English for Business Travelers program is the “business” part. It used to be that I could eavesdrop on a conversation and learn that the two men at the next table were doctors, or that one was a massage therapist and the other sold life insurance for cats. Now, though, I have no idea what anyone does, especially if the people I’m listening in on are under forty. I hear the words “integration” and “platform” a lot, but not in any recognizable context.

Theirs are the offices, I imagine, where Kayson rides his scooter down the concrete hallway, passing a warren of workspaces that resemble cages. And no one’s shirt is tucked in. That’s one phrase that won’t be in my English book: “Nice suit.” Twenty years from now they probably won’t be making them anymore. Dressing up will mean wearing the sweatpants without paint on them to your father’s funeral.



My American English for Business Travelers will teach you to recognize the most often repeated words and phrases but hopefully leave room for wonder. I’m constantly surprised and delighted by some of the things I hear while traveling across the United States. I’m thinking of a fellow bus passenger who turned to me as our driver barely missed a pedestrian, saying, “See, he don’t love life.” Of a Memphis panhandler who called as I passed, “Hey, man, why don’t you buy me a Co-Cola?” Of the newsstand cashier who did not suggest I buy a bottle of water but, rather, looked at the price of my Sunday Times and said, “That’s five dollars, baby. You OK widdat?” Or of the pilot who somberly said as he turned off the seat belt sign at the end of a flight, “All rise.”

Now that’s what I’m talking about.





Calypso



The deal with America is that it’s always something. I go twice a year and arrive each time on the heels of a major news story: SARS, anthrax, H1N1. Bedbugs! In the fall of 2014 the story was Ebola, not the thousands who had died of it in Africa but the single person who had it in Dallas. Because there are TVs everywhere one goes—restaurants; hotel lobbies; airports, even, I discovered; doctors’ waiting rooms—and because they’re all tuned to one cable-news network or other, the coverage was inescapable. Every angle was explored, then subsequently beaten to death. When the patient, whose name was Thomas Duncan, died, you’d think he’d taken half the country down with him. A teacher in Maine was sent home because she’d flown to Dallas, not to the hospital where the man had been cared for but just to the city. Schools closed. Hysterical parents were interviewed. “Ebola is here,” we were told by the media, “and it’s coming to get you.”

I started seeing people wearing face masks in the airport and decided that I hated them. What bugged me, I realized, was their flagrant regard for their own lives. It seemed not just overcautious but downright conceited. I mean, why should they live?

“Stay safe,” a Starbucks employee said to me one morning. I was in a hurry to get to my gate, so didn’t stop to ask, “Safe from what?”

I was in the United States for a lecture tour: forty-five cities in forty-seven days. “My God!” people say when they look at my schedule. But it isn’t like real work. The travel can occasionally be taxing, but anyone can turn pages and read out loud. What takes time are the postshow book signings—my fault because I talk too much. “What kind of a name is Draven?” I asked one evening, squinting at the Post-it Note attached to the title page.

“I don’t know exactly,” the woman on the other side of the table said. “He’s a friend of my brother.”

I looked at the name again. “Draven. It sounds like…the past-past tense of ‘drove.’”

In most of the cities on my tour I didn’t know anyone, but here and there I caught up with people. In Winston-Salem it was my sister Lisa. A week later in Omaha I saw my old friend Janet and her twenty-five-year-old son, Jimmy, who is tall and thin and was sporting a long rust-colored beard. Back when we met in the late 1980s, Janet was highlighting the grain in rectangular sheets of plywood. That was her artwork. Now she just leaves the rectangles as they are and has founded something called the Wood Interpretation Society. “Jimmy,” she said, standing in the living room that doubles as her studio, “fetch me my stick.”

Her son handed her a length of bamboo, and she used it to point to her most recent piece. “All right, can you see the snowman?”

I saw nothing, so she gestured to two knots. “His eyes. You can’t see his eyes?”