My brother called tonight (happens a couple of times a year anyway) to say that my father is having minor surgery tomorrow. My bro knew my mother wouldn't call until after it was all over. She wouldn't want me to worry.
So I called my dad. He sounded calm, kinda meek actually, rather unlike his usual feisty self. That means (I think) that he was worried about the cause of his pain and now that he knows what the problem is and that it's relatively minor, he is very much relieved.
I hope it goes well. Communicating with my family is like speaking a foreign language that is constantly changing but you have no dictionary for the changes. You have to infer meaning from inflection, gesture, lacunae.
Also everyone is terminally polite, so that has to be decoded too. "Hmm, this tastes interesting" means "why are you feeding me this garbage, but I'm too nice to call you on it." "To each his own" means "your choice makes no sense whatsoever but I don't want to be the one to have to enlighten you." And so forth.
I like to think that this heritage is one of the reasons I'm pretty good at learning foreign languages. I know that less than 10% of the meaning comes from the actual words.
Posted by otto0114 at November 29, 2004 10:46 PM