Spanglish/Grunting

I just spent 20 minutes being reduced to gestures and grunting. This is thoroughly embarrassing.

Walking home from the bank, I passed a Latino couple whose car was stalled in the street. I discovered that my Spanish has deteriorated so badly that we had to communicate primarily through hand motions. That meant the guy and I were pushing on the car for a full minute before I walked up to the driver's side window and discovered she'd had it in park the entire time. Attempt to gesture on how to shift into neutral. She gives up, gets me into the front seat. I get it in neutral, but they don't have the force to move the car now. I put it back in park, hand-explain again, and we get the car in the parking lot. Unfortunately, it's not where they want it. Of course, I've offered my help, and my Spanish sucks, so I can neither just take off nor quibble. We spent twenty minutes putting the car into something approximating the place they wanted it.

As a 22-23 year old, I wrote a chapbook in both Spanish and English. Not only that, but the Spanish was nuanced, genuinely poetic. Now I'm miming steering wheels and ending up in the wrong space.