Die or go drifting and languages change

I need to learn some ASL.

I was on the Green Line to Kenmore this afternoon when a small child sitting next to me tried to talk to me. She looked a little older than my niece, so maybe five or six; she was sitting with an adult who looked like a parent to me, but since I have at different times been mistaken for the parent of my niece, my godchild, and my first cousin once removed, I try not to assume. They were signing to one another. I was reading and keeping an eye on the stops. But I looked over at one point and made eye contact with the kid and she started signing to me.

I have no idea what she was saying. More to the point, I couldn't say anything back. My knowledge of American Sign Language is confined to the alphabet and "I love you," of which the first seemed tedious and the second inappropriate. I don't even know how to say, as I do in a variety of spoken languages, "I'm sorry, I don't really speak this language." I have been shown various signs over the years and they are difficult for me to learn in the same way that dance is difficult for me to learn, but I felt really bad not being able to respond to a small child on a train who was probably asking me what I was reading. Or even if she was telling me a story about her day, or that we were on a train, or that she likes blue, that is the kind of reaching out that I always feel should be rewarded. I smiled apologetically and turned my hands out in an abbreviated I-got-nothing shrug and waved so that at least I was making a friendly gesture and she smiled and signed something else I couldn't understand and the adult with her looked over and nodded to me and I went back to my book. I felt that I had not been helpful.

(I know ASL is not the only sign language. I just assume it is the likeliest to be in use around here. Obviously if it was another sign language or some kind of home sign I would have been hosed even if I knew rudimentary ASL.)

Suggestions appreciated.

These days have got so much explaining to do

David Pendleton, archivist and programmer at the Harvard Film Archive, has died. I didn't know him well. He was responsible for the annual all-night marathons and for a number of retrospectives and series I enjoyed. I asked him once if he would ever consider doing a retrospective of Powell and Pressburger and he said he'd think about it. He was fun to talk with. He was not a reasonable age to die.

I keep coming back to H.D.'s "R.A.F." (1941):

for I am stricken
as never before,

by the thought
of ineptitude, sloth, evil

that prosper,
while such as he fall.

Every time I hear that some kind of artist, writer, musician, activist has died, someone who made the world better. Enough.