Some Things Just Don’t Translate

This is the t-shirt my 90-year-old Cuban grandfather was wearing when I took the kids over to visit on Saturday afternoon.

Nobody had noticed what it said until my 9-year-old niece wondered out loud why Abuelo’s shirt read S-E-X in big red letters.

My sister and I were stumped.

“Says what now?”

I walked up behind him in the backyard, camera phone at the ready, while he plucked weeds from his mostly weedy lawn.

“Where’d you get the shirt?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?”

“Do you know what it says?”

“Something about sports.”

“Uhm. No.”

“What does it say?”

I translated for him. More than once.

He was a little mortified. He went inside and shredded the shirt with a pair of shears to ensure, I suppose, that he never made the mistake of putting it on again even by accident. He tied the fabric strips together in to one long string he was going to use to tie bundles of yard debris together.

He’s been in this country longer than I’ve been alive and the most English he can manage are the number words he uses to write out his personal checks. In Miami, he doesn’t really need more than that.

Unless he’s wearing a questionable message on his apparel and suddenly needs to decipher t-shirt phraseology.

This shirt looked like a hard worn hand-me-down. The bottom had been cut off along with the collar.

What gets me is that almost every holiday and birthday, I buy shirts and shorts for this dear man, which I’ve never once seen him wear. Instead he’s apparently stealing sex shirts from other people’s clothes lines.

Or someone’s dropping them in to his laundry basket as a gag.

Either way, it’s not the easiest thing to explain to children on a Saturday afternoon.

Or old people for that matter.