MY FISH PONDS

Making lemonade out of lemons. That's what I was doing this week.

On Wednesday, I suffered a minor injury playing pickleball. At least it was minor according to the doctor who examined my X-rays.

"Just a slight strain to the tendons below your left knee," he said. "Ice it every few hours, take some Advil and you should be back to normal in about ten days."

Since I'm not in training for the Canadian Olympic pickleball team, this injury is no more than a minor inconvenience however I do find it ironic that I'm now using my mother's chair lift to go up and down the stairs. And here I wanted to sell it on Kijiji.

The up side of this injury, the lemonade part, is that I now have a lot more time to work on my French which is coming back to me in bits and pieces as I struggle to reawaken the second language that I knew so well as a kid.

As I studied some French vocabulary and a dialogue today, I made a strange discovery about how my brain seems to work.

My English brain is all about categories. For example, if you mention tennis players, my mind immediately jumps to names like Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe. My tennis player box opens, these names jumping out from the past. Then others, more current names, like Nadal and Federer emerge. It's the same thing if you ask me to recall the names of Canadian Prime Ministers. I'll come up with Pierre Trudeau and Lester Pearson with ease well ahead of PM names like Harper, Chretien, Borden and King.

To put it another way, my brain seems to separate information into small ponds of data. When asked to retrieve names or dates, it drops fishing lines into the appropriate body of water. Some lines go deep to catch fish near the bottom. A few more lines troll near the surface to snag top feeders while the preponderance of my lines dangle at a level near the middle of the pond where I do my best fishing. That's why names like Trudeau and Pearson seem easily retrievable. Harper and Chretien take a little more effort while names like Borden and King are harder to come up with.

However, my French brain has not developed this way. In fact, based on my two first French classes, I realize that my brain francais never did create categories or ponds pour mes memoires. Thus when I try to recall a word or a phrase in French, my fishing lines are sent out over a sea of random fish, my hooks often snagging a tuna or a perch when I was hoping to land a mackerel or a walleye.

Maybe that helps to expIain why I can recall obscure words in French for things like comma and squirrel yet forget the French equivalent for words like above and below. Or how I seem to know about French tenses like the imparfait and the passe compose yet can't conjugate some simple verbs in the present tense like prendre and tenir. My French brain appears to be a sea of flotsam and jetsam waiting to be organized.

As well as helping me build well defined ponds, I just wish my teacher could add a few new fishing lines to my collection. The more lines, the easier the fish catching.

But then again, he's a teacher....not a magician.

Au revoir mes amis!