How do you say ´avocado´in Spanish?

Today is the last day of Spanish class. It´s been a challenging four weeks, let me tell ya. My head is so crammed full of jumbled information I can hardly remember my own name. But I really have learned a whole lot in this short amount of time. We covered several hundred nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the first 3 weeks alone. And I did pretty well remembering them, even conjugating the verbs correctly for their respective pronouns most of the time.

During the past week I´ve been whipping Spanish out like Bat Masterson with a 6-shooter whenever a situation arises that suits my newly minted vocabulary. I was even feeling a bit cocky. That is, I was feeling pretty cocky until yesterday...

For our final exam, Socorro, the instructor, went around the room asking us to answer some pretty difficult questions to test our mastery of the course. What! When did we cover future and past tense? Was I in the bathroom for those 4 minutes? I prayed she would not notice me slumped down in my chair in the back row. Every time she passed me over, I felt like Moses´jews who escaped the plague of death under the lamb´s blood. Whew! OK to breathe again. But my luck did eventually run out. Bummer. She saw me. I held my breath and silently begged for an easy one. Please, please, please God, please let her ask me something I know. Unfortunately, God´s line was busy and I got voicemail. ¨Tracy, explain to the class, in Espanol por favor, what is a grandparent?¨ CRAP! I would have a hard time doing that in English. How can I explain my grandfather's third wife Hazel who used to scrub me and my sisters with a sandpaper washcloth until we were pink and squeeling for mercy like little piglets. Not an easy task. After several moments suspended in time while I scoured my brain for the appropriate words, the answer came out something like ¨A grandparent is the breast and the potato of your father.¨ Ha, ha. Very funny. Socorro had a marvelous time acting out this latest blunder like it was the final episode of Seinfeld. She looked like she desperately needed a fresh Depends when she and the rest of my classmates (thanks a lot guys) finally stopped laughing. Later, still smarting from the humiliation experienced in class, I told Marina, our housemother, about my friend's baby that was both happy and very, very ugly. Ha ha. I meant ¨very very healthy.¨ And then, just in case I thought I could get by without Chatty Cathy Rena, my apple-polishing friend, I asked a shopkeeper for some drunken paintbrushes instead of a more expensive brand. She looked at me like I was retarded. I fell back on the old standby whenever someone doesn't understand me in a foreign tongue - I said it again, only louder. After she assesed the situation, she turned and asked Rena to please explain what the idiot needed. How everyone can tell that Rena knows more Spanish than I do just by looking at her is a mystery to me.

So, in the end, Spanish beat me 3-0. Oh well. I´ll have another go at it next year. On the bright side, I can say avocado in Spanish with no problem. Avocado! Ha. Take that, Mexico! You have plenty of words that I can whip out with one hand tied behind my back. I like tacos and enchiladas and guacamole and I can live on them for the next 3 weeks if I must. And as for the rest of this impossible language, at least I can still grunt, point, and smile to get my point across. Bueno. Y adios mis amigos.