The interpreter

When children start acquiring language, a whole new world opens up to parents, too.

Each morning, as we drive to the sitter’s house, my little kumquat bombards me with questions and commands that I can only humbly (and barely) translate. When the occasional passenger looks on they act amazed as I juggle CDs, popping them into the player as an answer to the mono-syllabic requests that have come from the backseat.

“Moo.” She wants the CD with the picture of the moon on it. (This is, of course, mildly different than the sound a cow makes, which would be Mooooooo); “Bey, Bey, Bey?” Oh, she wants the “Bed, Bed, Bed” song — not the version on the yellow CD but the one on the blue disc; “Kikki?” Finally, an easy one — the Long-haired Hippy Kitty song.

What I’ve ended up with on this long road of listening trial and error is a personal dictionary that few outsiders would be able to interpret without the help of a Rossetta stone.

The question is invariably, “How did you know that’s what she wanted?”

Simple. I just happened to be there when the light went on.

But of course, it’s not that simple. Not for any of us.

We sometimes forget that every time we speak to another human being we are trying to decipher some weird set of hieroglyphs that are colored by everything from place of origin to era of upbringing, and any number of little ticks and foibles that just crop up out of the blue.

During every family vacation, I inevitably confuse my mother-in-law by speaking in movie — a foreign language to all those people who live in the world of intelligencia instead of its shadow world, insomnia.

As she and her children converse in French with a Parisian house guest, I and my similarly afflicted brother-in-law breakout into “Nemo” while setting up the dominos.

HIM: “What’d he open with?”

ME: “Gator Gliben drill.”

HIM: “He’s been favoring that one lately.”

Looking across the table at my mom-in-law’s doe-eyes staring back at me, I immediately feel guilty.

“Do you understand what they’re saying?” she searchingly asks her French friend.

Of course, the ackwardness of speaking about sensitive subjects can make perfectly good words go silent.

Our babysitter has her own lexicon for all items personal: She uses no clinical nor colloquial terms for intimate body parts or their corresponding items of clothing, just throat-clearing noun substitutes — “a-hems” — and spellings.

Of course, the topic is unavoidable as my itty-bit jams her hand down my shirt as she chomps down on her bottle.

“You really should think about getting a better B-R-A.”

A-hem.