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epitome of incomprehensibility
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The Moldova Incident sounds more like fiction than fact when pulled up from memory dust (what_language_am_I_speaking)? It's at least partly true, but I might have fudged up details. (Fudge will stick to memory dust.)
I'm twelve, probably. A man visits our school one day: he's a teacher or principal from a school in the capital city of Moldova, perhaps the only school there that uses the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum. When he was in Montreal, he found out its suburbs held another school doing the same workbooks, so he decided to visit.
Mrs. Scott is flattered, but she doesn't quite know where Moldova is. She calls it Moldavia, which to my twelve-year-old mind reveals her ignorance (it's rather the opposite: Moldavia was its old name). My brother is in the room with me, and I can't quite remember why. In fiction, I'd have to invent a convenient excuse for his presence.
I think this was after the different classes were called together to be part of the video he was sending to his students. But it seems strange to me that Mrs. Scott, the principal and high school teacher, would just agree to such a thing without some sort of reassurance that Mr. Moldovan Principal wasn't some fraudster or pedophile. Now that I think of it, he probably called her ahead of time and that's why the meeting was arranged. My fanciful child-mind was the one thinking he dropped in unannounced.
Anyway, my brother Y. is listening intently. See, for the past year or so he's been borrowing a series of children's geography books from the library, each focusing on one nation. He's particularly drawn to the more obscure ones: Laos, Moldova, the central -stan countries. I'm on the periphery of this hobby, but I've taken a look into these books, entranced by how neatly they divide elements of life: culture, language, religion, physical geography, notable landmarks, and food. I like the food pictures.
At a pause in the conversation, he - usually so shy back then - speaks to the Moldovan teacher. The man looks surprised that this small red-haired Canadian knows that the capital city is Chișinău and can correctly list the languages spoken in the nation, with a rough idea of what's spoken where.
He only stops to correct my brother slightly on the language front: many people there know more than one. He speaks Romanian, Russian, and English, for instance.
Hearing that gives me an idea. Shyly, I ask if I can sing a Russian song for the video. It's something I learned in choir. And I do, with my classmate Adam doing a goofy dance behind me. His intention is to mock, but I don't care. I'm in the spotlight, an appreciated part of the S. Family Moldovan Appreciation Team.
I can still sing the tune and a rough approximation of the first words:
Dye vitsi krasa vitsi, du shen ki podru zhenki. Ra zi graityes dye vitsi, razgu laityes miliyi.
Of course I'm messing up the word boundaries and pronunciation. Memory dust will do that. I remember remembering the song was by Tchaikovsky, but even that isn't certain. (Mom illegally copied a lot of my choir music, so I could sift through her files somewhere or the hollow piano bench, should I feel so incluined.)
Anyway, that was The Man from Moldova, Accelerated Christian Education edition.
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