Tongue tied

A few hundred meters into my run to catch the train today, I could feel glass splinters scraping the back of my tongue and taste metal. Why am I in such a hurry to get to a voice lesson, especially since this rush of dry air down my windpipe may be doing more harm than good? And so I slow down, call to say that I’ll be late, empty my water bottle in a guzzle and put my instrument back in its box.
Those few minutes of elevated pulse and rapid recycling of blood were evidently enough to alert me to another story of my life: struggling with an awkward tongue, a deaf ear. My misunderstanding, or yours?
I struggled later this afternoon during my voice lesson to lift the back of my tongue toward the roof of my mouth and sink its tip just behind my lower incisors – in so doing stir up the warm overtones of my still too cool ”i”. A-ve Ma-ri-i-I-a. The lips/the teeth/the tip of the tongue, over and over again until my body learns what only repetition and a good night’s sleep can teach.
It was that way every time I moved to a new country. Like when I first came to this country too, my entire body seemed to be sandwiched between the folds of a sign that read: “I am deaf and dumb” in big invisible capital letters with the smaller text below: “(Don’t bother to ask questions.)”, like an advertisement for a new Burger King, or the ones used by the first protestors against McDonalds invasion of Café Corso near the entrance to the Main library by Observatorielunden. Good thing I had that sign back then when held responsible for the war in Vietnam.
I had to listen hard to hear, to distinguish, much less be able to pronounce the difference between the words brunn, brun, and bron: well, brown, bridge. I still remember how I struggled in front of the mirror to get my tongue to roll from a “b” over an “r” and into these new vowel sounds. Broom was the key to the 'bron' where I could ride, sweeping the floors of the department store every morning between 5 and 9 a.m. I had two textbooks: Per Lagerkvist’s Gäst hos Verklighet (Guest of Reality, 1925) and Tove Jansson’s Pappan och havet (Moominpappa at Sea, 1965) to help out. I sang their familiar melodies over and over again – my mantras – until I could taste their words, pronounce and repeat them in new constellations.
The trouble is, when it came time for me to say something, something of my own - something that is also yours - I was perfectly tongue tied. So busy pushing the broom and pulling a little red wagon that just got heavier and heavier, I lost it, like the lace handkerchief. Had I looked back earlier, I might have seen that I was pulling dead weight, but by then it was too late.