I don’t close cupboard doors, vacuum my car floors, sit in a kayak with oars, or speak the language of the Azores.

I did, however, enjoy listening to Brazilian colleague Pedro speak Portuguese.

Just as I love watching and listening to murder mysteries in Spanish, Italian, Finnish, French, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Romanian, Icelandic, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Hebrew, and Navajo with English subtitles. Never, under any circumstance, dubbed in English.

My favorite early-teen pop song, which I first heard in 1963 on my tiny orange transistor radio, was “Sukiyaki” by the Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto.

So too, I’ve seen the complete listings of Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese and Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish films.

Sadly, I know, at 76, I’ll die monolingual in a multilingual country and world.

And I hope you won’t.

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