Not quite the cultural exchange I was looking for.

I was typing a blog post at my neighbor’s house when I stopped mid-sentence, startled and not quite sure what I had just heard.

My neighbor had been working at her sewing machine when something had gotten stuck and the machine had jammed. She called over Modeste, the teenage boy who lives with her, but isn’t her son, to help her.

Modeste fiddled around the machine for a while, unable to find the location where the problem had originated. He stepped back and crossed his arms, and then, very plainly and calmly repeated what he had heard me say the night before when I couldn’t get the hose to fit on my new gas tank. The word that he had heard me say when I ripped the valve off my bike tire. The word that he heard me say when I showed up at my house after working with my director at my school all morning only to find kids already waiting for me.

Then, he went back to checking the machine.