McGraw©Hill/Focus/An Unpredictable Japanese Lady p. 464////R7N27 ***** One of Mother's many consuming desires was to learn to speak

the English language. Mother's younger sister, Kikue, had the

opportunity to attend high school and in a short time, Kikue was

able to speak fluently. Mother had been married too soon and

missed out on this chance, but she was determined to master the

language with whatever facilities she had. If her four children

could learn to speak it, there was no reason why she couldn't.

Still, we felt something was amiss whenever we were welcomed home

by Mother with a beaming smile, "Well, did you guys have a good

time?" Mother was really too busy and we were too impatient to sit

down and teach her in a systematic way. It was mostly a trial

and error method...a great trial to us while she made the errors.

She drove us frantic by asking us the meaning of odd phrases to

which she was invariably attracted. She liked the lilt of a

phrase in a song which she had heard over the radio, "nothing but

a nothing." She repeated it over and over to master the

difficult "th" sound. We told her it meant nothing at all and

that no one ever talked that way, really, so there was no sense

in memorizing it. Father had no practical need to learn a polite version of

the English language because his contacts were with Skidrow men

and it was better for him to speak to his rambunctious guests on

equal earthy terms.