My "new" life
Retirement is a bit under siege at the moment as little jobs continue to come in and I am hard pressed to say no to old clients. I finished up two small jobs today.
But---I have ample time to pursue other interests and one of them is a course entitled "Serious Nonsense" which is given in the Pa. Dutch dialect and taught by a professor at one of the local universities. The dialect was my "native tongue" to a degree----my Mother (a school teacher) refused to allow it to be spoken in the house where only English was to be spoken. In the barns and the fields English was verboten.
As a kid, the predominate language was Pa. Dutch. If you heard English being spoken you looked around to find the
ausländer! When I began school (and my Mother was my teacher), the kids who could not speak PA Dutch were outcasts on the playground. School was taught in English. My brother who is 4 years older than me started school (circa 1945) in the dialect.
The transition from primarily PA Dutch to English was swift---it seemed in one generation that transition was complete. As that happened fewer and fewer opportunities to speak the dialect occurred. Today, I have to find an old order Mennonite or an Amish to talk to in PA Dutch---and I am pretty rusty plus I find modern German sneaking into my speaking. My comprehension of the spoken word is better than my speaking.
So---I'm going back to school 
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis
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