Isn’t it funny how you simply don’t notice certain, well, let’s be nice and call them “personality quirks” about yourself, even when they’re blatantly obvious to everyone around you? It’s kinda like havin’ a big ol’ third eye, right there in the middle of your face!

When I was in high school, my Dad (who was an engineer for Dow Chemical at the time) managed to wrangle (a West Texas expression that means to chase after something hard to catch, sling a rope around it, and wrassle it to the ground so it can’t get away) a 6-month field assignment in Europe. Better still, we (meaning the whole family) got to go, too!

What a gas! To have the opportunity to live in The Hague for six months, see a lot of central Europe, and to have absolutely no fiscal responsibilities while doing it – well, it was just the cat’s meow, lemme tell ya!

Anyway, since my sister and I were still in, you know, school - our loving, well-meaning parents enrolled us in the American School of the Hague (cue the weeping and gnashing of teeth). Needless to say, this came as a huge disappointment to us, since we had envisioned our European trip as one extra-long, fun-filled summer vacation. (Alas, such was not the case. But we got over it. Eventually.)

Now, although the courses we were taking at our current school didn’t ALL match up, we did manage to continue our studies without too much disruption. One of the things I wondered about was whether or not we could continue our Spanish courses (of which I’ve sadly forgotten far more than I remember). As luck would have it, they DID have a Spanish class in progress, so we joined them. (Actually, this was a bit weird – since my sister was two years ahead of me, we would normally never share a class. But I digress.)

Ah, how I remember that Spanish class – it was actually a lot of fun. I’ll never forget how the other students used to kid around with our teacher (alas, after all these years I can’t remember her name – I’m afraid those particular little gray cells have taken early retirement).

One of the boys asked her one day, “‘Hey, Teach’ (that’s what they called her), what’s the proper way to say this expression in Spanish? Is it ‘besa me cula’, or ‘besa me culo’?” Well, after the laughter finally died down (this phrase translates roughly as “kiss my, er, um, nether regions”. Kids!), she smirked and replied, “The proper expression is ‘besa me culo’!”

Like I said; a barrel of laughs.

But practically the very first thing we noticed was that the teacher had an absolutely atrocious New Jersey accent. (Um, no offense to New Jersyites; I mean very pronounced, not horrible.) This was particularly noticeable in her (mis)pronunciations of certain distinctive sounds, such as the rolling “r” so prevalent in many languages (other than English, that is). In fact, she didn’t roll them at all! I mean, this was like, wrong!

At first, my sister and I were so surprised we couldn’t help but snicker and giggle. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stop giggling until (wouldn’t you know it), the teacher heard us. She finally put us on the spot one day when she suddenly stopped right in the middle of conjugating her verbs (Eek! Right there in front of everybody!) and asked just what the heck was so funny?

Well, still being young and foolish, we just had to let her know the letter “r” was supposed to be “rolled” when pronounced, don’cha know. I mean after all, being from Texas, we had been around Spanish speaking folks quite a bit, so if anybody should know, then we should know, you know? In fact, one of our Aunts spoke nothing but!

(At this point I will humbly ask you to please forgive our impertinence. As you know, people afflicted with youth - er, particularly junior high school through college-age youth - invariably consider themselves experts on virtually everything *sigh*. I’ve always held that youth is wasted on the young.)

Needless to say, our attempts to, um, straighten her out didn’t go over too well. But (and that’s a really BIG ‘but’) eventually we did manage to get into the spirit of the thing, and began to integrate into our classes pretty well.

In fact, before too long, the situation got kinda turned around on us. To our surprise, our fellow students started asking us to “talk” for them, just so they could hear our Texas accents!

Huh? Accent? What accent?

Makes you think, doesn’t it? In technical terms, it’s called a blind spot.

If you’ve ever driven an automobile, you know what the blind spot is, right? It’s that area behind you that your rear-view mirrors won’t reveal. The thing is, to see what’s really there, you have to actually make the effort to turn your head. If you’ve ever come close to hitting someone because you tried to change lanes without checking your blind spot, then you know how critical it can be to know what’s there.

Alas, most of us have blind spots of some sort or another. (Don’t think it’s true? Really? If you dare, find a true friend. Ask them.) The problem, you see, is it’s been there all along; you’ve just gotten so used to it that you don’t even notice it anymore. You’re too close to it.

It’s a manifestation of the “can’t see the forest for the trees” syndrome. Ah, but when you meet new people, well sometimes – yeah, sometimes those quirks can be as obvious – and as unwanted – as a third eye. (Uh, do they make glasses for that?)

Luckily (and *ahem* I say this with absolute and complete humility), I’ve outgrown all of my silly little quirks. Oh, and I don’t have an accent, either - y’all!