Bad Poetry: Good Mood Anchor

California was handed my brother and me,

Eccentricities to explain,

While further south, to Mexico,

Went the parents of John and Jane. 

Returning to old Virginia,

We knew we'd come home again;

But, from laziness, the language we studied

At school was the language of Spain.

The Mississippi River, we said,

We never would cross again,

But Spanish was good for sharing

A secret with John or Jane.

Then we went away to college

And considered it all again:

In the cities, many people speak

Some form of the language of Spain.

And Joe, being a few years older

And known for his great brain,

Went to work for a famous man

Who took him directly to Spain.

And when I grew up I married well,

And so did young cousin Jane,

But harder fates the boys befell,

Even Joe, growing rich in Spain.

In all of our Spanish the English accent

Forever will remain;

When we speak it with Cubans or Mexicans

They laugh, and we laugh again.

Muy divertidas estamos,

Entendemos sin desden,

Como vacas locas holandeses

Mangling the language of Spain.

Widowed before age forty,

Returning home again,

I laughed to hear my cousin Joe

Mangling the language of Spain,

And the laughter was balm to a heart soon old

And surcease to a dying man's pain,

And many a day it comforted Joe

When I tortured the language of Spain.

And on Joe's grave this summer

Grass grows thick and green in the rain;

I remember how he said the best years of all

His life were his years in Spain.

I often read Spanish for pleasure

In holding the ground I did gain.

I sometimes speak Spanish with visitors

If English overburdens their brain.

If I had found one use for Spanish

In life, and never used it again,

It would have been well worth the learning

To remind Joe of his time in Spain.

Note to Local Readers: All names have been changed. That's all I have to say on that subject.

But I often remember the whines of left-wingnuts in my generation, at school: "Art, music, literature, foreign languages, algebra, physics--what use will we ever have for all those antiquated bourgeois affectations they teach in high school? Why can't we just go directly into trade school?" 

I am all in favor of trade school courses, apprenticeships, and anything else that gives students a chance to learn grown-up money to pay for their own higher education. If the question is what to learn first, by all means study Bricklaying or Auto Mechanics before you study Languages and Literature. 

But always remember that the so-called "liberal arts" were the arts of free men and women for a reason. They make life better. They form good mood anchors in the brain. You too might happen to know someone who is dying slowly, painfully, and prematurely. Music is what's usually recommended as a better mood booster for that person than any pill, but you never know whether, for the individual you know, it might be algebra or botany or a foreign language. My objection to Spanish, if I had one, would be that it is (or should be) so easy and familiar that it hardly counts as a foreign language. Saying you studied Spanish at school, if you didn't make it a major and make translating Spanish poetry a career, is like saying "I am a slacker." Nevertheless, the best free mood booster anyone could give the relative remembered here was to speak Spanish with him. You never know. When life hands you opportunities to learn something, life is probably preparing to hand you a need to know it. Use all opportunities to learn anything useful that come your way.