I fell in love with foreign language to the sound of hammers and saw blades.

Melanie was eight and I was seven. There were workers repairing the house across the street in Rowayton, hammering away in the summer heat. “Koool-Aiiid!!” we yelled from our little card table. “Fiiive centtts!”

Melanie had talked me into the business: “The sugar and Kool-Aid are already in the house. We give Mom a dime for the cups, and the rest of the money we keep.”

A dime for the cups to Mom? I’d thought afterward. The cups cost more than a dime…so that’s not fair.

But I went along with it. We kept getting the workers as our only customers.

“Kooollll-Aiiiddd!” we kept yelling their way, wanting more sales. More nickels.

“Ees good, very good,” the older man commented, chugging another cup of the cherry Kool-Aid, wiping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. “What ees zees drink?”

“It’s…Kool-Aid,” Melanie said. You could see it in her face that she found it odd the man was asking. Didn’t everybody on Earth have a pitcher of it in their refrigerator?

“Ahh, c’est magnifique,” another worker said with a smile.

By the end of the week, they’d talked with Mom. Our Kool-Aid was something none of them had had in their home countries, which were Hungary, Spain, and France. Mom and Dad told us one evening that they’d made arrangements for Mr. Laszlo and his company to start work on our own house. The men would be turning the dusty attic of our split-level cottage into a huge master bedroom.

How funny, we kids said, that there was a country called Hungary. Was it next to Thirsty? North of Tired?

And…why have these men moved here from their countries? Was it because of no Kool-Aid and stuff?

Mr. Laszlo, the other man from Hungary, the man from Spain and Paul, the Frenchman, spent weeks and weeks in the upper split level of our house. Mom bought us French workbooks in New York; she’d had French in school. Paul said sentences to us in French, and we showed him our workbook pages. Mr. Laszlo chided Paul every now and again, but the arrangement was brilliant: Paul took frequent breaks from the carpentry, and Melanie and I were chit-chatting in French by late August. One year later, we were put in a K-12 school that emphasized daily lessons with French native speakers.

All that from one little Kool-Aid stand, a bunch of nickels in our pockets—two of which went to Mom for cups—and fate.

*****

I wish I’d gotten one of those same nickels each time I heard someone overseas faulting Americans for not having a command of a foreign language.

Mr. Laszlo and his crew had to work together, even though none of them had a native language in common. There was a reason to learn—a real reason. There weren’t any services for him or his crew in Hungarian. Or French. Or Spanish. Not back then.

In today’s America, it’s an interesting difference to see that so many companies, government organizations, hospitals and school districts are making allowances for non-English-speaking community members. I see wall signs in Somali. Application forms in Spanish. Driver’s Ed booklets in Russian. Immunization forms in Mandarin. School districts are paying interpreters to be there at parent conferences. The significant presence of all these other language groups almost makes the French in our U.S. passports seem like a relic of a bygone era.

Rosetta Stone is the new Jane Fonda workout tape. Seems everyone is harboring a copy in their living room. This next time I go abroad, I might not get as many imaginary nickels.

Sure, the majority of my countrypeople will still not attempt to become bilingual. As a native speaker of English who studied several languages with a certain earnestness, I’ll probably always hear comments overseas about how no American bothers to learn French. German. Chinese. Dutch. Portuguese. Japanese. But when hundreds and hundreds of languages exist, what are we native speakers of English supposed to learn?

And if we take on one or two languages with great gusto, like many in the world do, will there be a guarantee that those languages will be exactly what we need? Because seriously, what other language will be the “passport to world communication” that English is for everyone else? English seems to have become that “one ticket in” for so many.

I was a language buff, a person who’d lived on three continents, when I realized this troubling aspect of being a native speaker of English. I never thought I’d be learning Danish, in Denmark. But there I was, in love, newly settled with my partner in Denmark, and the acquisition of det danske sprog was my task. All the years of French, Latin and German I’d had in school helped a little, but only a little. A person can get very, very confused by taking on the study of a third or fourth foreign language. An effect known as “word salad” can occur: The brain’s signals go haywire with all the cross-referencing, the recognition of words that are similar to something in a different language, the choo-choo train of syntactical placement of the parts of speech all derailing in a mangled mess. And the Danish salesperson stood there, searching my eyes, wanting to understand the wrecked sentence that just came out, but it was hopeless. So, wanting to be helpful and wanting me not to feel awkward, she said in English, “Would you like me to bring you that sweater in a different size?”

“Sure, that’d be great,” I offered, defeated. Lady, I didn’t plan on ever being here for more than a Copenhagen holiday. I didn’t major in this. And now the joke’s on me.

Fast forward 17 years. My monolingual family of three is now on the cusp of beginning an international odyssey that will offer, if we are lucky, several languages. Instead of paying $20,000 or more to attend private schools in the area that offer significant language immersion, we hope to spend far less than that and get to live in the places where those languages are spoken natively. I also intend for us to practice other languages not spoken there, because someday we might change countries/continents, and we’d like a bit of ‘foreshadowing,’ a head start.

We have friends here in the U.S. who speak English as well as Farsi, Arabic, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Danish. We’ve been at an ethnically diverse public school in the Pacific Northwest with students from over 30 countries. However, the context has always been the U.S. as norm, as dominant culture. What the boys have always seen here is “them having to come to us.” The international, non-native-speaking kids have had to be the ones adjusting their slang on the playground. Those kids, not mine, have had to get used to Halloween, Santa Claus, and Valentine’s Day, and a curriculum talking about Abe, George and Barack rather than the heroes and political leaders from their part of the world. My children have witnessed this, and only this: The foreign kids are the ones who have to make the effort to come to us.

That’s not what I want for my family, the perception—over many years—that everyone else has to “come to us.” It might be the historical, economic, and political reality of things, but it doesn’t match my thinking patterns that we will remain the passive recipients…the monolinguals…while others all around us are getting bilingual education, cross-cultural immersion opportunities, and all that brain training that goes with it. Why should we not also be the ones to experience in a significant way what it feels like, sounds like, looks like, to have to be the ones to “go to them?”

Go to them we will, then.

I imagine that we will delight in the world we discover, in the common ground of humanity that we find, yet we will also struggle with cultural misunderstandings, and miss our home.

And all of those things will be good for us.

And maybe, on a hot afternoon somewhere new, we will meet some people like those two little girls with the Kool-Aid stand.