Seven Stages of Seduction

I. While in grade school, I am sent to a private tutor, which my parents could hardly afford, where I encouter verbs that don't conjugate and nouns that have no cases--English sounds like baby talk.

II. I watch "Rio Bravo" eight time with my sister (who pines for Ricky Nelson) and I can follow John Wayne's words to the villain: "Slowly. And if I say "Stop", stop, or I will stop you).

III. I learn by heart the lyrics to the Beatles's "Hard Days Night"--the most memorable achievement of my high school education.

IV. At a train terminal in Vienna, I approach a woman selling snacks and say: "Coca-Cola, please" and she actually hands me a bottle of brown liquid.

V. I try to read my first book--The Cuban Missle Crisis"--with two handsome brothers on the cover and a distant memory of people in Warsaw lining up to buy flour and sugar fearing another war.

VI. I finish my first novel--"The Godfather"--a present from my American girlfriend to cheer me up when I am sick with hepatitis; I learn useful phrases like "go to the mattresses" and "to make one's bones".

VII. I encounter English poetry--a phrase in "Nostromo": "the common decencies of the civilized society" and I am stopped short and forced to reread it aloud several times, each time awed by this cascade of c's and s's. I try to tell people around me about my discovery and they look at me with pity. They don't know I am not crazy, merely seduced.