Je suis une ananas

I remember way back in grade 4 or 5, when we first started learning French, we watched this silly little french kid's show.

I had already known one word in French since grade 2. "Chat." My brother taught me it by sound, so I always thought it was spelled "Shat" and would wonder why my teachers would mark it wrong. I'd use it whenever I could, only knowing that it meant cat and sounded so much cooler since no one else knew it. The same thing happened with multiplication and fractions- my brother would teach me the basics when he would learn them, and then I'd be so great at them for the first few lessons when we finally got to try them, and then later on... Well, I dropped French in grade 10 (the earliest I could) and I had to go down to college level math in grade 10, too. Funny how things turn out, huh?

Well, the first whole sentence my class got to learn came from this silly show that starred a pineapple. I bet you can guess what the phrase was, especially if you remember watching it as well.

"Je suis un/une ananas!"

Oh what fun we had. We ran around for weeks calling ourselves a pineapple, our friends a pineapple, everyone a pineapple. Even before we learned to conjugate, we'd call other people pineapples by saying "You suis un/une ananas!" or "You are an ananas!" Phrases that would make many a French teacher cringe at the butchering of their beloved language.

But us? We kids? We found it awesome.

And it carried with us. We were all different, and everyone had been the brunt of a cruel joke, and everyone had been on the whacker end of it, through the years (very few people moved out, and very few people moved in, so until middle school (which was a huge shocker for all of us) we were all friends and enemies and knew each other's parents and sometimes grandparents). But no matter how long since that first lesson, if you said "Je suis un/une ananas!" or any of its conjugations, those from our grade way back then would smile, and we'd know.

We could remember the shouts of glee from years past in that one moment.

And sometimes, someone would respond, "Non, tu as un/une ananas!"

And it was on.