WHO SPEAKS ARAMAIC THESE DAYS?

As I was growing older (don't forget, boys don't ever "grow up") I often wondered if Aramaic, the mother tongue of Jesus, was a language that people still talked.  Really.  I used to think of that a lot as I was going through school.  I even went to school and took three years of beginning Hebrew as a part of Bible study called exegesis.  Hebrew is a very strange language that I don't really want to "diss" on this page, but hey, there are a lot of things that you can find yourself saying about a language that has no vowels.  But, I digress.  I also have to say that Aramaic has no vowels and no verb "to be", just like Hebrew.  So I suppose that I could "diss" them both, but I won't.  Besides, I speak a language that has vowels but no verb "to be".  I makes it hard for God to say "I am" in that language.  I feel like saying, "Keeps you humble" but maybe God wouldn't like my saying that to Him.  So, anyway, back to Aramaic.  I found out that there are a lot of people  in the world who speak Aramaic.  There are many of them in San Diego.  Many of them are friends to me and Belle.  I happened to have to go to one of the stores in our neighborhood that is run by Aramaic speakers.  I walked in and one of them was in back, setting stuff on shelves and trying to get directions from the boss in front.  The loud talk (they never speak softly, these Aramaics) was going back and forth across the top of my head and all of a sudden the guy in the back says, without breaking cadence, and in very thickly accented English (a language that has vowels and the famous verb "to be") "Wah dah hell I gonna do?"  My head immediately exploded in a lava flow of humor as I pictured Peter looking at Jesus and asking him the same thing with a similar imprecation in the sentence.  Can't you see it now that I have told you?  I would take odds that Jesus would have laughed at it.  Why did the man say that in English?  Maybe they don't have a word for "Hell" in the Jesus language?  Maybe it's like the nuns at Immaculate Conception used to say, "You can't swear in French because it is such a beautiful language."  Really?  I can swear in French.  Ya wanna hear me?  But evidently you can't swear in Aramaic.  At least not in San Diego.
You see, you can find Jesus everywhere.  He still walks the earth.  Not so much in Bethsaida and Caparnaum any more, I guess, but he is sure hanging around San Diego.  It's kinda neat.  The other truth about it is that these people are all Catholic.  They are peace loving, friendly types.  They take care of one another nicely and they don't get to see the inside of the jail very much.  One of the guys who works in the liquor store that I used to frequent is a deacon.  So you can see that there are a lot of interesting things in Southern California.  One of them is that it is in San Diego that I discovered that Aramaic is a living language about 45 or 50 years ago.  Yesterday I found out that when a Chaldean who speaks Aramaic wants to use edgy language, he speaks that vulgar, pagan tongue, English.