Column: Writing in Spanish

Near the end of my eighth grade year I was able to sign up for freshman year classes that included my first foreign language credit.

Like a lot of eighth graders, I was a genius in my own mind and thought the best fit would be to take German. I still have no idea what I was thinking. Unless I planned on living in Germany this made absolutely no sense. If I remember correctly, most of my friends were going to take German and that is why I signed up. I would take German throughout high school and a semester and a half in college. I sounded really good with my accent and could read Deutsch wonderfully out loud, but was far from proficient at anything else.

The second semester of my freshman year of college I started to really struggle at German II. I had bombed the first test and was warned by the professor that I could be in really big trouble if I messed up on the second one. I spent hours and hours studying and felt somewhat comfortable, but that would end with question one. I literally stood up, crumpled my paper and tossed it, told the professor I can’t do this anymore and walked out of the class I would be dropping.

Looking back, I’m an idiot for not taking Spanish because I feel it could have been very useful. Although I have never taken a Spanish class, I have somehow managed to have stories published in a Spanish language newspaper as strange as that may sound.

I’ve lived all over the place, but once spent a few years in central Washington where there is a large population of people who speak fluent Spanish. There are several newspapers and magazines published in Spanish. These were certainly not something I would read because I only know how to count to five and the word cerveza, but there certainly was a market.

I was working as the managing editor of two publications and was busy covering six or seven communities. Just trying to keep up with that many high school football teams was a job on its own, but it was a fun experiencing trying to mix the news every week.

The company I worked for also owned a weekly Spanish language newspaper and although I worked in the same office as the guy who put it together, I never honestly even picked one up even to check out pictures or design.

One day out of curiosity I passed by a newspaper stand and saw one and decided to pick it up. This would be a shock to my system when I looked at the front page and saw that I had two bylined stories on the front page.

I had no idea what was going on. While my name is common, there are not many newspaper writers who will use their middle initial of “H” on a byline, so I was really confused.

I thought for a second that maybe I was a sleep walking at night and during this time had taken night classes in Spanish and had another career. This was disappointing in a way because rather than donning a cape and having an alter ego who fights crime, I was writing stories in Spanish about Farmer’s Markets.

I was however interested to go in the next day to work to see how in the world that I or somebody with the same exact name happened to be writing these articles.

The managing editor laughed when I asked him and his explanation was simple. He had a couple of people who worked as stringers quit, so he was just translating my articles from English to Spanish and running them.

I told him this seemed like a lot of work, but he didn’t seem to mind, and at least he had stuff to fill his paper.

I guess now all I need is to get an article in a German language publication.