Beautiful Language

I know, this is the second post of the day. But I can't let my blog become disorganized and address two different dates in the same post, and I've been lazy and not updating as quickly as I should. So shut up and keep reading, because this one is going to be short and sweet.

Sunday night, Spenard store. Closing with a filler employee as my regular coworker called out sick with some sort of illness that may or may not have been a severe case of spring fever on a beautiful Sunday evening. The store was slow, and since I was technically the regular employee with seniority, I got to be the awesome person and run the show. I got a key to the store (technically borrowed, but now they know I can be trusted with one and I will get my own), was entrusted with the balance of the change bank (which came out even as it was supposed to. Hooray for advanced math skills! Thanks, college education!), and the general operation of the store. It was a fun evening, all in all, with a lot of new faces that had just flown in from all sorts of places and shared stories with me. I wore my Amsterdam shirt and was able to talk about the beauty of my favorite city and tell some of my amusing stories.

Then, I glanced over at two guys in the wine department. Both were tall, good-looking, slender men, selecting a chardonnay. Nothing out of the ordinary, until I realized they were communicating in American Sign Language. I took ASL for two semesters in college, and while I've lost a lot of the vocabulary due to lack of practice, I picked up the general feel of the conversation.

When they arrived at my counter, I rang them up and ran his debit card. As I waited for the receipt to print out, the man paying for the wine turned to his friend and signed rapidly - first he shook his right hand as though he had burned it, then pointed to me, then waved his fingers in a circle around his face and opened his hand like a starburst. The second man nodded his right hand up and down vigorously and repeated the sign on his own face, three times with three starbursts. Translation: "WOW. She is beautiful." "Yes. Very very beautiful."

I tried not to grin or blush as I handed him his receipt. He signed "thank you" by placing his fingers under his chin with the back of his hand facing me and drawing them across his chin in my direction.

I signed back.

I drew my fingers across my chin in a mirror image of his last sign, then pointed at him, raised my pinky finger against my chest, pointed my index finger at my head, pointed at him, waved my fingers in a circle around my face with my own starburst, and then held up two fingers.

"Thank you. I think you're beautiful, too."

Zing.