ENOUGH SAID!

I was thinking about my Dad this morning as I walked home from the post office.  He's been on my mind so much as I relive memories of all the years he was here with us.

I was walking home looking at the trees, watching the birds, the sky, feeling the air around me, and I realized that it was my Father who taught me to appreciate the beauty and wonder of nature.

He always had his eyes to the sky, he loved birds and he loved to watch planes - and so do I.

But on this day, my eyes were focused on a bunch of noisy Blue Jay's who were taking advantage of the mild spring-like weather we are having, and going on and on in their chatter - and for some really strange reason it made me think of my Dad speaking "Pig Latin"!

Oh - he was a master at it!  He could carry on a conversation using Pig Latin, and never switch over to real English.  It drove me crazy , but it also made me laugh... and over years and years of listening to it... well he might as well have spoken English, because I could understand it so well that he wasn't fooling me anymore.

I asked him once why and when he learned to speak like that.

He said that he learned to speak it as a child.  It was a game that children played back in the days of his youth.  He learned from other kids, and he and his siblings used it to speak in a secret code so that his younger siblings  couldn't understand what the older ones were saying.

Pig Latin - actually has nothing to do with Latin at all.

It is simply the language you get by moving the first letter of a word to the end of the word and then adding a "ay" on the end.

Such as... pig is "igpay" in pig Latin.

When someone speaks an entire conversation using this form of language, it quickly becomes pretty confusing to listen to, because of all the "ay" sounds.

Thinking about it now, I realize that in order to covert common English to this language you have got to have a very quick and sharp mind to pull it off.

I can honestly say until this every moment, I never actually considered what a keen mind my Dad possessed.  I knew he was good at solving things, fixing things, making things, but switching, verbs, consonants, vowels and nouns around on the fly - requires a level of smarts that quite frankly I don't even have - and I have had much more education than he had.

So I leave you with this...

To my readers -

Avehay away Appyhay Appyhay Ayday!

and to Dad -

Ankhay ouyay orfay ivinggay emay osay uchmay.  Iway Ovelay Ouyay andway Issmay Ouyay!