Taking the Class Outside . . . To Taxco, Mexico

Taxco is known for its crafts, churches and stunning views. (Nadine Markova)

I didn't need to know a word of Spanish to understand what the guard was trying to tell us. The chains wrapped around the gate to the Spanish language school spoke the international language of "closed."

Now all that I, my wife and daughter could do was stare through that wrought-iron barrier to the darkened hacienda and its manicured grounds, wondering what, exactly, we were going to do for the week that we had rented a house here in Taxco, 100 miles south of Mexico City.

How could this be? I'd made explicit arrangements weeks before coming to this cobblestoned mountainside town. First by phone, and later by e-mail, I had spelled it out: classes for my nearly fluent wife, and daily one-on-one sessions for our 9-year-old daughter, who had made good progress in our Montgomery County Spanish immersion school.

No problem, the director told me. Just show up at 9 o'clock on Monday.

No problem, except that the Monday we were talking about was the first day of Holy Week, the on-ramp to Easter Sunday that is anything but business as usual in Mexico -- a detail the director had somehow missed.

The snafu was but a minor blow to my own embarrassingly modest ambitions. Having long ago surrendered to my neurally calcified, monolingual fate, I was looking forward to a lazy week of reading on the panoramic patio of the home we'd rented in advance, just a few minutes' uphill walk from Taxco's bustling Zocalo, or central plaza.

But Spanish school had been the whole point for our daughter, Katherine. And classes had been a vacation prerequisite for my exceedingly disciplined wife, Natalie, for whom hours a day spent drilling on verb forms is a way of unwinding from her usual routine of writing science books and pumping iron.

With classes unexpectedly canceled, I knew it would not be long before demands arose to find another city with a working school, or even to surrender and go back home. Considering the nonrefundable house rental and the airline's ruthless change fees, dollar signs began to spin, cartoonlike, behind my eyelids.

Yet a silver lining would soon dissipate our blackening mood -- an appropriate metaphor, given Taxco's reputation as Mexico's premier sterling jewelry center. No, we did not climb out of our funk with a shopping spree. Rather, we got to know, thanks to our sudden aimlessness, Oscar and Sylvia -- the husband-and-wife handyman and housekeeper of our rented home, who otherwise might have puttered about almost unnoticed during our visit.

By the end of our week, we had climbed high into the mountains with them and their two sons to a hidden waterfall; accompanied them to an ancient Aztec ruin; whiled away hours together, talking about politics, religion, and our children's hopes and dreams; even attended the wedding of two friends of theirs, who had decided to get married after 15 years of living together.

Almost all of this was done in Spanish, the only language Sylvia could speak, providing a more practical -- and far more convivial -- linguistic workout than any university could have offered. And between Oscar's passable English and assistance from Katherine, who took some pride in her ability to translate for her dad, I never felt left out. In fact, by the time it was over, I had picked up enough simple vocabulary to leave me wondering whether this old dog might still have it in him to learn, at least in rudimentary fashion, a second language after all.

Call it a resurrected Easter vacation.