(first posted 9/25/2017)     When I was an eight year old kid and during my professor father’s year-long sabbatical from the university, our family took a trip overseas.  Our ultimate destination was a nine-month stay in Dad’s native Liberia, but on the way to and from western Africa, we visited five cities in Europe, including Paris – which was our very first stop.  Upon our arrival to and subsequent departure from Charles De Gaulle Airport, one of my first, distinct memories was of all five of us piling into a ’70s-era Peugeot 504 taxi after the driver (the sixth person in that car) loaded our luggage into the trunk.  Our destination was a place whose name my older brother translated to us as the “King Hotel” (which might actually have been something like the “Hôtel Du Roi”).

My face was soon flush with what felt like a million pin-pricks of embarrassment as my mother (a Midwestern farmer’s daughter of German and Irish descent, who looks a little like Petula Clark) proceeded to ask the driver, “You take American dolla?” in a most inauthentic-sounding, American Ebonics accent that I had never heard come out of her mouth before that day.  I thought to myself, Who is this woman, and why is she speaking English that way to a Frenchman who might have had issues understanding her even in her normal dialect?  At that moment, my mom’s voice sounded, to me, about as French as… a Pontiac Parisienne from the mid-1980s.

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