Grace.

I don’t know whose idea it was, but it sent several Russian immigrants running. My father came home last Friday evening from work, and he seemed glum, distracted even, as he watched his customary evening news on CNN. Mom leaned over to me and said, “His office is having him read a few lines for a skit.”

A skit? Oh, right. He does work for a big insurance company; corporate America at its best. His office will have five teams of about 10 people putting on a creative commercial in front of about 100 people at their biannual meeting. I don’t know if any prizes are involved, but I do know that a great deal of preparation is being made by my father and his neighbor, both Russian men, programmers in their late fifties, both with tremendous Russian accents. There are two other Russian programmers in his group of 10, and I’m willing to bet that they all had similar, pained expressions on their faces as they sat down to eat dinner that night.

Cultural discoveries have been made before my very eyes over the last week. “No,” I said to dad, “It’s not Mr. Hovel, it’s Mr. Howell. Pronounce the owell like the word owl, not like the word shovel.” Dad tried it a few times and finally got it. Sort of. “Dad,” I told him, “It’s Gilligan’s Island, not Gilligan Island. It’s a possessive apostrophe s.” Then, he sat on the floor in front of the new big screen TV watching an old episode of the show, singing along with the theme song, practicing it several times before he got the hang of it. Mom told him, “Just don’t sing loud and you’ll be fine.” Dad laughed at the show as Maryanne tried to seduce a native who resisted her by mumbling in an “ethnic” language: “You’re not the type of girl I can bring home to mother.”

Yesterday, as on most evenings, I carpooled home with my dad’s lifelong Russian friends turned neighbors turned coworkers. I listened as the woman corrected her husband’s pronunciation. “No, it’s not strugety it’s strutegy.” This went on for a few minutes, and I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. I threw myself into the fray and said, “it’s just like the beginning of the word stratosphere. Make that ‘a’ nasal sounding, and don’t mix up the ‘g’ and ‘t’. They had me say the word stratosphere five times, followed by the word strategy as it was intended to sound, with the g and t in the right places.

Four out of ten of the troubadouric thespians are Russian, I thought. Did the American who wrote the skit know that my dad has trouble with the word whirl? Did he even realize that my dad would be preparing for his five lines with the kind of fervor that he had when he was studying to be a physicist, the kind of diligence he tried to instill in me when it came to my own algebra and history classes?

My dad’s friend sat in the backseat and said to his daughter on his cell phone, “Listen to me and tell me if you can understand me…” and he recited his few lines, enunciating each syllable, massaging the sides of his tongue against his teeth as he emphasized the American, flat r, chiseling away the rrrolling exotic Russian r to the topography of Wyoming.

As we neared the end of our 50 minute car ride, dad surprised me by reciting his lines perfectly by memory. Each word rounded out like an apple pie’s edges, each intonation of a phrase ebbed and flowed like an American flag, and I could see the smile on his face when he finished and saw me staring at him. Almost a week later, he had finally conquered his demon, and I was reminded again of how each victory over the English language is really a victory for my entire family. These battles are being fought and won, but the word immigrant will never be fully conquered.