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 So here, on his day off, Dud was walking around the yard wearing
ear buds and talking to himself. Anita opened the window and
listened.
“Low,” Dud said.
“Hi,” said his wife.
Dud grinned. “No Honey, I said low, because low is French for
water.”
“We’re going to France?!!!”
“Well, no. It’s an experiment I’m doing for the book. I think maybe
what the book needs is a touch of sophistication, you see. So I’m
trying to find out what language the duchess might speak.”
The Book, seven years in the crafting … so far … is a
transcontinental miasma of mayhem, murder and passion that Dud calls
“Murder in the Soggy Bottoms,” but everyone else calls “The Duchess
and the Truck Driver.” There was this American truck driver, you
see, who was sent on special assignment to the village below the
duchess’s castle … oh, you know.
“Anyway, Hon, I got this language sampler CD in the mail. It has
samples of a bunch of those European languages. I’m trying to find
one for the duchess that sounds classy. I’ve ruled out German so
far. It sounds angry. And some of the Slavic languages don’t make
sense. But French has possibilities, as well as Italian. They have
duchesses in Italy and France, don’t they?”
“Pretty sure they do, dear,” Anita said.
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“See … what I have to do is find a language
that I can write easily, then I can kinda sneak in some
sophistication for the duchess, like having her order a glass of low
instead of saying water, that kinda thing.”
Anita gave that some thought. “You know, Sweetheart,” she said, “A
lot of those Europeans speak three or four languages. Maybe you
could really make her sophisticated that way.”
“Anita Campbell,” he said, shaking his head, “you’re giving me a
brain burn, you know that?”
[Text from file received from
Slim Randles]
Brought to you by The Home Country Hour podcast. Check it out at
www.slimrandles.com.
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