I’ve always had the greatest respect for people who are bilingual. If you are fluent in more than two languages, you’ve achieved God-like status in my eyes. Kids who can speak more than one language just make me feel dim and inadequate by comparison. My parents are bilingual, and they tried to instill the same talent in me from an early age. Much to their chagrin and disappointment, I turned out to be a linguistic loser.

I suppose my father wasn’t too interested in having me learn Hungarian, or perhaps he just realized that I was too much of a moron to handle such a difficult language. My mother, on the other hand, would not allow her son’s apparent stupidity to dissuade her from forcing him to learn–of all things–Ukrainian. After all, her Ukrainian friends down the street had two perfectly wonderful sons, both of whom could readily converse in that language at a moment’s notice. Even my sister could rattle off a few well-spoken sentences at the appropriate times, which really annoyed me.

So off I went to Ukrainian school. In my memory, it was held in a small elementary school in a neighboring town all day on Saturday, with only five minutes set aside for food, drink, recreation, and bathroom breaks. That’s what it felt like anyway. In truth, the classes were probably held at night for two or three hours with a half hour set aside for recess. But it felt like entire days of my life were being stolen from me week after week.

I knew things wouldn’t end well as soon as I was introduced to the Cyrillic alphabet. What the hell is this? I can remember thinking. I was soon asked to read such banal sentences as The tall reeds grow in the muddy river in horribly butchered Ukrainian. The aforementioned golden child of the people down the street excelled in all facets of the class while I sat there staring at the clock and wondering how the red second hand could move so impossibly slowly around the clock’s face. How did you say, Get me the hell out of here, I wondered.

I do have some happy memories, though. Recess was a wonderful thing. I remember throwing a tennis ball against the wall of the gymnasium in some game that we invented that involved a tennis ball and a wall. Hey…back in the day, we had to be inventive with the things we had. There’s a lot of truth to the rumor that us older folk could make do with a stick and a hoop, and I’m pretty sure we were the generation that found an old coffee can and invented that front-yard classic, Kick the Can.

Pretty soon, my parents realized they were wasting all that money for me to throw a ball against a wall, and were smart enough to know that I could probably do the same thing for free at home. (Perhaps it was the F on the report card that tipped them off as well.) Whatever the case was, I was withdrawn from the school, and I’m happy to report that it was one of the greatest days of my childhood. Victory for being a complete failure! At last, all my dreams were coming true.

Ah, but those of you who know me are well aware that God hates me. Fast forward to 1993. My Ukrainian-born grandmother was dying in the hospital. My mother had urged me to visit, but I had been avoiding it. My grandmother and I were close, and I wasn’t wearing my big boy pants quite yet. Who wanted to see somebody you love in such an awful state?

I eventually visited. She was asleep in the bed. I spent a few minutes trying to wake her up. After all, if I had made the effort of going to visit, I was going to be damn sure she knew I was there. Eventually, she came around. In a daze, she began speaking to me in Ukrainian. Of course! What were the chances, really? Well, like I said … when God hates you, the chances of things like that happening are pretty good.

We went back and forth for about ten minutes, my grandmother speaking Ukrainian, and I all the while trying to tell her that I didn’t understand a word of what she was trying to say. There was no way I could allow this to be our last time together. I had to make her realize I was there, to see me and acknowledge my presence.

And then, finally, it happened. In one brief moment of lucidity, after I had just said, “But Grandma, I don’t understand what you’re saying!”, she rolled her head and looked at me. She took a deep breath and spoke the last words she would ever say to me in this life … and I’ll never forget them.

“What good are you,” she said, “if you don’t know the language?” She closed her eyes and went back to sleep, and I never saw her again.

And now you understand the title of this story.