The café was a new one for me, so small it seemed I could hold it in the palm of my hand. It was called, fittingly enough, Café Sparrow. As I sat with my morning coffee and notebook, I was accompanied by the conversation between a man and a woman at a table an arm’s length away. Had I been at my usual café, I would have been overhearing a conversation in Greek. But I was one avenue and seven streets away from my usual spot and in Astoria, that distance takes you over a border into another country.

I suspected they were speaking Serbian. I’ve often thought that if cats developed the ability to speak like a human, the language they would choose would be Serbian. The rolled R’s and the shzu shzu consonants would prove so easy to navigate. As for the breakfasting couple, I loved the sound of their language. I would have asked them what it was. But I was afraid they would think I was from ICE.

Long ago in civics class, we were assigned to write a term paper on one of the federal agencies. (Nearly every part of that sentence is hopelessly quaint.) I chose, as it was then known, the Immigration and Naturalization Service – INS. One of the stated objectives of INS, created by FDR in 1933, was to “supervise the immigration process.” In 2003, as part of the Homeland Security Act, ICE was created – Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of the stated objectives of ICE is to operate the “removal process.” For “naturalization,” (to become a citizen is to become “natural”), you must go to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But you don’t hear much about USCIS, and perhaps I should not have mentioned it.

Some people fond hearing a language that is not English “uncomfortable.” I have in my time been made uncomfortable by language. When I was at CBS, my first job out of film school, my boss used to leer at me with his palm against my neck, “Oh, if I were ten years younger.” This made me uncomfortable. When my father, responding to my complaint about this behavior, replied, “Can’t you put up with it?” I was uncomfortable. When the HR assistant at ABC, shaking her head at my resume which included my degree, two years under siege at CBS, and a novel under contract from a prestigious publisher, told me “Only secretarial positions are available,” I was uncomfortable. (And skeptical.)

But that was language directed at me specifically, and I am using “language” here in the definition “choice of words” not “a system of communication used by a particular country or community.” Although I was made uncomfortable by the latter definition when I worked at an Italian law firm (having switched industries, feeling no love or money from television) and two people conversing in English in front of me, gave me the side-eye and switched to Italian. That behavior was deliberately exclusionary, as opposed to the Serbian couple at Café Sparrow, who were merely conversing.

I wanted to ask merely, “Hey, what language is that? It’s beautiful.” I remember asking a man in a wine store “Are you speaking Portuguese? Such a beautiful language.” I guess I’m not made uncomfortable by the sound of other languages. I guess I have no conclusion to offer that isn’t naïve or too hopeful or too bleak. I guess I am fond of the sound of purrs and shzu shzus.