My city-meine Stadt-mi ciudad-ma ville

The playgroup: A boy walks over to Small Boy and takes his ball. His mother comes over, scolds him seriously in Japanese, gives Small Boy the ball back, and says sorry to me in English.

The busride: Two women across the aisle from me are chattering animatedly in Spanish. A little girl asks her mother "Was rede sie?" (what are they speaking?) in Dialekt. The mother answers her in French.

Our backyard: Our apartment building has a little play area in the back. There is a sandbox; there are rocks, oh, yes, there are rocks; and there is some strange orange sculpture thing whose purpose we have yet to identify but the kids seem to have found many uses for it including jumping up and down on it, jumping off of it, and throwing rocks onto it and listening to them rattle. Yesterday I brought Small Boy down to play. Sophie, Alison, and Fabienne, three girls in our building from three different families, were down there playing being lightly watched by Sophie's father G. G and I say hello, how are you in German, but not much else. I always speak to Small Boy in English, even when there are others around, like Grossmutti, who can't understand it. It may be rude, or just anti-social, but as I've said before, I am Small Boy's link to the English speaking world and English it shall be. So I'm now and then saying things to Small Boy in English, then Alison, who's about five, speaks to me in Dialekt. Alison is the daughter of Swiss-American guy, so I find this an interesting choice and probably driven by the presence of her Swiss speaking friends. I find the Dialekt of small children particularly difficult to understand, but I try a little conversation, responding in High German. After a bit Alison's mom (whose name, appallingly for Switzerland, I cannot remember) comes out with Maya, who's about 20 months old. She speaks French with Maya, G. switches over to French to have a coversation with her, and then she chats with me in English.

These are the times when I feel so lucky to be raising Small Boy here. Not just here in Switzerland, but here in the city, in this busy little neighborhood near the university where Mama is just one of many Ausländerinnen. He will learn English and Dialekt at home, German and French in the schools. He'll hear Japanese, Russian. He won't hear them enough to learn them, but he'll hear them, he'll be used to this strange fluid polyglot world. I like to think it will make him open to and curious about the world, that he'll take it in stride to meet people for whom English - or Dialket - is not a first language. I know it doesn't have to work that way - you can find plenty of tri-lingual Swiss who are not exactly the most open people in the world, after all - but I like to think it anyway. I know it will give him advantages - to move between languages and cultures - that I never had. But what I want him to get out of it is not being able to put "I'm trilingual" on his CV. (Well, yes, okay, if it gives him a leg up in a competative world more power to him.) What I hope is that it will allow him to meet the world with a curious heart.

I have but three wishes for the Small Boy. That he always be his true self bravely in the world. That he goes out into the world with an open and generous heart. And that he knows love.

We've got that last one covered. Die andere zwei, wir schaffen daran.