We tell stories of our lives unselfconsciously, and pass along the interesting stories we’ve heard from others. We seldom pause to imagine how other people will devour them, reconstitute and recombine them to build their own meanings and solve their own problems.

I was at a friend’s birthday party one winter evening. The wine was on the table with tortilla de patata, chorizo, and potato chips in a colourful glass bowl. A black leather sofa worn by years of renters indiscriminate use bordered a low-ceilinged living room. Small, compact women filled the space, standing close, enjoying themselves and enjoying each other, warbling away at twice the speed of my plodding English. One stood half-in-half-out of the window to a lightwell, smoking a cigarette. The pace of the conversation, en Español, made the room largely incomprehensible to me. I hovered, listening to the stylish, energetic, dark-haired women, while stuffing myself with snacks and pretending. I opened my eyes wide as though through the whites I might eke out a bit more understanding.

A gentle woman reduced the velocity for me, we began a halting conversation. I explained how I love languages, how I wished my kids could grow up bilingual, though John and I are both native English speakers. How I worried that speaking to them in my own broken Spanish would do more harm than good.

She had a story to tell! She told me about her friend in Madrid, who decided, when his daughter was born, to speak to her in English from the very beginning. He wasn’t a native English speaker, but he decided to do this anyways. She’s now five or six, and he still speaks to her only in English.

This was a little snippet of a larger conversation, ephemeral and lightweight. It was told to me by somebody I didn’t know, about a man I’ll never meet. I don’t know how their story ends, whether this girl grew up bilingual, or what the effort meant for her dad. The story might have been fiction, or wild exaggeration – but that didn’t matter. It was an idea that was useful to me, so I grasped it tightly and used it as inspiration to confidently proceed with my own language project. I thought, well, if somebody else has done this thing, surely I could too, right?

Now, when friends ask me why I’m scolding Max in Spanish, I tell them about this man from Madrid – I pass the story and the idea along beyond myself. I wonder where it will end up?