I am of the opinion that everyone needs their own personal German. We acquired ours with equal measures of curiosity and audacity on the beach in Alligator Point, Fla., circa 2010.

Our family rented a house shaped like a tiki hut on the Forgotten Coast for a couple weeks that summer. Hardly anyone goes there. It is beach boondocks. You essentially have the beach to yourself.

My children--Grace, 10, Harper 8, and Adelaide, 4--were running wild like the hoodlums they are, playing in the waves just outside our door. Some blond boys of comparable ages to theirs came out of the adjacent house and started playing too, and we overheard them speaking German. My kids recognized the sound because we had been to Germany the year before. Grace the wunderkind remembered some words and spoke to them in their native language. This was met with great enthusiasm. I think at first they thought they had encountered some fellow Germans. The fact we were Ozark hillbillies soon became clear, however, when my kids' Deutch vocabulary was exhausted.

Fortunately, the German kids were all learning English as part of their school curriculum. The rest of the week they ate American meals with us, and our kids went over to their fancier house to play video games we didn't have. We got acquainted with their parents, spending long evenings watching the sunset and mornings fishing.

The boys' mother, Nina, and I became fast friends in the way women often do, watching our children play and swapping stories of their births and early years. It turned out we........

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