At a themed dinner party we brought dishes based on our individual heritage which is why our gastronomical surprise included Sephardic meatballs, sauerkraut, chopped liver and Rhum Babka.   It’s such an American thing, to dredge up treasures from the Old World.

And that is why it’s perplexing when Republican presidential candidates who want to lead this country and represent it in the world, act like they couldn’t possibly have any ties or interest in anything beyond the good old USA.  One candidate chided another for speaking a second language. The other guy knows French he sneered, as if it were something to be ashamed of. Who could you possibly offend by speaking two languages?

That same candidate decries the entire Spanish language even though it happens to be the second largest language spoken in the United States. He calls it the language of the ghetto. The first immigrants on American soil spoke Spanish.  Spanish is the second most widely taught language in the United States…followed by French.

And then there’s the Europe-haters.  We finally got past that Freedom Fries nonsense and now there’s a whole new round of Europe-bashing. When they run out of ways to attack President Obama they accuse him of “taking his political inspiration from Europe.  Voters must choose between “a European-style welfare state” or “a free land,” says one contender.

Given that the U.S. was founded by people from Europe and the population swollen by Italians, Irish, Germans, Russians, Poles – you name it – this anti-European English-only rhetoric would seem to be turning on our own roots.

The Republican candidates hold to a blind belief that everything America does is best, that we have no need to look beyond our shores for any guidance or inspiration. We don’t need their language. We don’t need their ideas. We don’t need their health care plans and we’ll deal with carbon emissions our way.

We’re Francophobes, Hispanophobes, monolingual, mono-thinking and proud.

The issue comes close to home now because Santa Rosa (Ca.) is getting a French-American school. When I first read about it I thought it a bon-bon of an idea. I love going to France. I like that my granddaughter’s pre-ballet dance teacher counts out the tempo… un, deux trois.  I don’t think anyone  thinks her un-American for saying “bonjour” to a bunch of five-year-olds in pink tights.

And yet regarding the French American school there was criticism. French is charming, but Spanish is essential, seeing as how our population includes so many children whose first language is Spanish. What we really need in the North Bay are more schools with a Spanish-English curriculum.

I want my little white grandkids of mixed European ancestry whose mother tongue is American English and live in California and Texas to study Spanish. Know it. Use it. Put it on their resume. Learning to speak a second language will make them worldly. But learning Spanish will help them be local.

Might even help were they to run for president.  Que fastidio!  (Means good grief in Spanish. I had to look it up.)

The used book store in my town closed last week because the landlord raised the rent. At the last day half-price sale I picked up a Charles Dickens’ which seemed fitting in the soon-to-be orphaned space.

Books were off the shelves. Shelves off the walls. Unsold books were piled on makeshift plywood carts, no longer aligned in elegant alphabetical order. The staff offered cider and tried to be upbeat but I kind of felt like a fringe relative picking through the remains of the empty family home.

Too dramatic? Maybe. But how else can you react when a book store disappears?  The used book store was a fixture on Main Street.  A destination bookstore for fans from out of the area, a rainy day stop for locals and a fitting shelter for your own old books when it was their time to move on.

The staff said the old book business will be folded into another store in a nearby town but they hope to one day return.  Yeah, we know what happens when a good old friend packs up.

Meanwhile, just around the corner the town library closed. For remodeling, said the sign. The librarians promise it will be more jumping than ever when it re-opens. The same library reduced its schedule last year. Regulars get nervous when a library cuts hours, thins staff and puts up a closed sign, if only for three months.

I’m not going to blame any of this on my friends who’ve gone over to the dark side. Kindles, Nooks and e-readers are clearly here to stay and I’ve tried to stop grousing about them, saving my curled lip for landlords who raise the rent in a recession.

Over Christmas I was in a bookstore line when the man behind me held up State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and asked if I knew the book. I said I was waiting for the paperback. He was buying it for his wife, he said, adding that she had breast cancer and loved women authors. Who else would I recommend? I said our book club is wild for Alice Munro. He excused himself and disappeared into the M section.

Ann Patchett has opened up her own independent book store in Nashville. She said she has no interest in living in a city without a bookstore. And who would?Although the used book emporium is gone from our town the independent bookstore with new books thankfully hangs in there.

Last winter in Truckee my daughter and granddaughter and I trudged through a mountain blizzard to a small book store, warm and smelling of hot chocolate. I found an Edith Wharton, my daughter a Bill Bryson and my granddaughter a picture book. Is there a comparable Kindle moment?

If everyone was to eventually give up hard copy books and go electronic our towns would lose their literary center. And what would become of the books themselves?

We have six bookcases in our small two bedroom house. When they fill up and we need to purge we take our books to the hospice thrift store. Or give them to the library for their book sale. Or take them to the late great used book store downtown.

Knowing your books will find a good new home makes it easier to give them up. It would be a sin to throw a book in the trash or put it into a recycling bin. To do so would surely call forth the ghosts of the greats. Emily Dickinson might haunt you, as well she should, and I imagine she can be pretty snappish.

When I was in high school there was a girl in my English class who “got in trouble” and was sent away to visit her aunt in some far off state.  We were scandalized.  Did she have an abortion? Who took the baby? How could she let this happen, we whispered, as if we never put our own pure and righteous selves at risk for a hasty trip out of town.

But that was in the days when we were more hypocritical than compassionate, and I’m not just talking about gossipy teenage girls.  That’s why it’s hard to believe that all these decades  later we could be regressing and in the future be telling stories about how it used to be when there were safe places girls and women could go for help in making very tough choices.

Like this one.

Elizabeth was single, in her 30s, working as a writer and a teacher with a city apartment.  As she says, “I had a very nice life.” She was conscientious about birth control and when she discovered she was pregnant she was horrified. She said she liked the man a lot. He was attractive and intelligent.  But she doubted he would want to marry her. Besides, she didn’t consider herself ready to have a baby.

She went to the Planned Parenthood clinic in her town intending to get an abortion. And there she met a counselor who changed her mind. “She was very warm and very kind. She had children. She’d had an abortion herself. She asked me questions like, where was I in my life? How did I feel about this pregnancy? How would I manage as a single parent.”

Elizabeth left Planned Parenthood that day conflicted about her original decision.  “I needed to go home and think about it. This time I felt differently,” she said.

She said this time because Elizabeth had two previous abortions. Her diaphragm had failed her those times, too.One abortion was done at a Planned Parenthood clinic when there had been no question that it was “neither the right time nor the right man.”

The other was at a hospital in Eastern Europe where Elizabeth was teaching and it was a terrifying experience. “I remember screaming and being held down. There was no anesthetic.” The hospital conditions were so grim the staff washed the surgical instruments in the same hot water used to boil the noodles for lunch.

Now with another abortion pending Elizabeth went back for a second  meeting with the Planned Parenthood counselor. Plus she started seeing a psychoanalyst. Neither of them told her to have a baby or not have a baby.

What they did, Elizabeth said, was “help me see someone I didn’t know I was. That I could have and love a child.”

That baby is now her bright wonderful grown-up son and Elizabeth is a grateful defender of Planned Parenthood.

“I owe that woman. I wouldn’t have gone ahead if some indifferent person had been there.  She  listened to me. She saw me as a worthwhile young woman at a fork in the road. She helped me decide I didn’t want to miss this chance and that what I needed in the end was to have a child.”