Speech Impediment

I have a speech impediment. I never knew it. It came as quite a shock to me when I discovered it at the ripe old age of 39, a shock to learn that I may not be so normal, so average Josephine, after all. And now my little me cowers and cringes in the recesses of my mind, waiting for the inevitable pin drop silence that we all expect when we make a vocal blunder. She whispers as I speak, "They all hear it. They are all looking at you. They are pointing their perfectly manicured fingers at you, and are laughing their crystalline laughs at your expense." Of course we all know that when we feel insecure even the most hideous of beings with teeth missing, foul breath of rotting eggs, hair greasy and unkempt, and fungus under the nails is perfect compared to our single horrible self. My particular speech impediment is not the tripping, stopping, starting, skipping impediment of the stutterer. It is not the childish, effeminate, softness of the lisper. It is not rhotacism, also called Elmer Fudd syndrome, where "rascally rabbit" becomes "wascally wabbit". Sometimes I do stammer. This is an actual speech impediment in which the speaker may have difficulty in beginning words or sentences and may be unable to express sounds, but this not the impediment that vexes me. My problem showed up when I left my country and had to learn a different language and I had to be able to roll my Rs. Lo, I cannot. When I speak Italian, instead of the beautiful trilling of the R coming from me, I hear instead the thick tongued thump as my mouth struggles to imitate the sound. It is sad. It used to be embarassing. Now, I ignore my little me and get on with it. The Italians don't really seem to mind at all.

My former father in law is Cuban and those Cubans roll their Rs too. He taught me this Cuban tongue twister to help me practice.

R con R cigarro,
R con R barril,
rápido corren los carros
cargados de azúcar al ferrocarril.

I tried it. And I decided I much prefer to listen to him say it. It sounds much better that way.

Pathetic

It is simply pathetic that I have reduced my writing to only the "fun facts" printed in our one time weekly events pamphlet at work. It seems at the times I am available to write all the great things I had wanted to say while I was standing in the shower, the ideas are gone. They have left me as if they were washed away with my final cream rinse application. I should write something down to help me remember the thought. How can I do this while I am soggy & dripping, while there is shampoo in my eyes, and soap up my nose? I need to find a way to remember just a tidbit of the thought because a tidbit would bring it springing back to me like the blade of grass that is pushed over by the dull mower blade springs back up defiantly once the mower has passed...

Elephants

Most elephants weigh less than the tongue of a blue whale.