I have always had a fascination with foreign languages. That’s one of the reasons that I took Spanish in high school. By the way, Spanish with a Wewoka accent is basically another language to itself.
But I took Spanish in high school. I bet you are wondering how that went. Well, I learned to ask where the bathroom was. Even at that young age, knowing such stuff was pretty important. I learned to say “hello.” I learned to tell people what my name was. And I learned to ask someone what his or her name was. That doesn’t necessarily mean I could say their name, at least how they said it.
The only language other than English that I ever had much success with when I was growing up was Pig Latin. I suspect many of you are very much aware of Pig Latin. You may, indeed, be fluent in it. Ifa ouya owkna, ouya owkna. As I was typing that sentence in Pig Latin, I discovered Microsoft Word is way out of date. In fact, Word thought every word in that short sentence was misspelled.
I also suspect that a bunch of you have no knowledge of Pig Latin. For those of you who are curious about this Pig Latin, I don’t think Google Translator can help you out. As a result, I will choose to write the remainder of this in English.
I have told you all this as background. What I wanted to tell you happened a long time ago in a land not so far away… It happened at Starbucks.
Now Starbucks had been around for a while especially in our larger cities. But this story is about a Starbucks that was located in the hinterlands of Lawton. It was the very first Starbucks that I had ever been to.
I had taken Gayla “to town” to buy some important stuff. Important stuff always has “points” associated with it. I was suffering a bit in the points department. OK… maybe I was in the negative on points.
We had wheeled around town going into different places. I thought I was almost at the break-even point on points. So, I asked my darling bride if there was anything else she would like to do before we made our way back to Marlow.
She said she would like to go to Starbucks. She started giving me directions to get there and told me as we got closer, we could just go through the drive though. I pulled up to the outdoor menu and Gayla started rattling off a bunch of words that I was most unfamiliar with. I stared at her for a moment wondering what language she was speaking. She hit me in the arm and told me to order her drink just the way she said it. I did my best. There were words like cappuccino and latte and grande and a shot of this and two shots of that. Ignorant me… I thought you got coffee at Starbucks. Little did I know that the reason people go to Starbucks is they don’t like coffee at all. So, they just put a bunch of other stuff in the cup to mask the coffee taste.
I was still staring at Gayla. She hit me again – same arm, same place. And she said, “just order what I told you.”
I tried. I really did try to say what she said the way she said it. I failed. The reason I know I failed is the young man who took my order had the audacity to correct me and tell me how I should have ordered Gayla’s coffee. After he finished his enunciation, I told him I thought that was right. He informed me that I should pull forward.
When I got to the window, there he stood with a coffee cup in his hand. He had the audacity to tell me that would be $5.42. I looked at Gayal again. She said, “Just give him the money.” That was a difficult thing to do. I was used to paying fifty cents for a cup of coffee at the convenience store in Marlow. The only thing you could put in that coffee was three different colors of sweetener. You could have bought 2.5 gallons of coffee there for $5.42.
But I have digressed. Gayla got her Starbucks for my $5.42. She asked me if wanted a drink. I declared that I did not. A grown man can only take so much especially when it comes to the coffee he drinks.
Here’s a couple of lessons. One, we are all either a Starbucks Coffee kind of person or a convenience store coffee kind of person. (I think Jesus was more of a convenience store kind of coffee drinker.) Make room for this in your life. Two, when you are trying to get some points with your wife, remember that some points just cost more than others. But you should never point that out. Third, if your wife is making a habit of slugging you on the arm, take it like a man and pour some Starbucks coffee on it.
