Home Depot. I needed to buy some glass. It's a maze in there. Helpful young man asks me if I need to check out. "No, but I do need some glarse" (short a, like how they say "car" in Boston")
"Glasss? What's that for?"
"Glarse. You know, like in windows" (even in America they have windows in their houses)
"What part of the window? Do you use it for gluing or something?"
... It's about this point I realized we were not communicating ... It must be the accent ...
"Glarse, you know, it's the see through stuff you put in the window. But don't worry, it's my accent, not you."
"Ohhh, glasss! Where you from man?"
And after one mid-week encounter on a run I just had been feeling so sanguine about my mid-Pacific accent understandable if not native to both the Antipodes and the Americas. I spied someone ahead with a t-shirt that looked familiar. It was the 2005 Philadelphia marathon shirt with the course map on the back. Not a lot of Minnesotans who ran that, so I pulled alongside and said hello, and how I'd run that marathon too. We reminisced about a beautiful day beside the Schuylkill. "Where's that accent from?" said the friend of the other Philadelphia finisher. "New Zealand, but I've been here a few years," I replied. "Yeah, " he said, "it sounds like it."
Posted by robe0419 at April 8, 2006 7:06 PM