I took Ulysses to the playground at nearby Warner Park on Madison's Northside today. I pushed him in the kiddie bucket swing while all around us moms and dads with various shades of brown skin spoke in Spanish to their little ones as they played.

A little blond boy of about 8 or 9 rode up on his bicycle and stood behind us.

"Beba voli ljuljati!" I cried in Serbian to Ulysses as he thrilled to the movement -- Baby likes to swing. "Lepo ljulamo!" -- We're swinging nicely! And such like.

After a minute or two, the blond boy said to me, "Hello."

I turned to him. "Hi!" I said, and continued pushing Ulysses's swing.

"I'm glad to find somebody else who's English," the boy said. "Hardly anybody is nowadays."

"I'm not English," I said.

"I mean, somebody who ... who speaks English," said the boy, now sounding flustered. "It seems like more and more people don't speak English these days. It's harder to find people who ..." he trailed off.

"That's America," I said, cheerfully. "That's what it's all about."

But he had gotten on his bike and ridden away as fast as his rosy legs could take him long before I was finished speaking.

I didn't get a chance to tell him that my parents weren't native English speakers. That my grandparents didn't speak English. To ask him whether he had great-grandparents, or perhaps even grandparents, who weren't native speakers of English.

I didn't get a chance to tell him that nothing was new, nothing had changed. That Madison, Wisconsin was largely settled by speakers of German, Danish, Norwegian, Italian. That speakers of French predated the speakers of English in Wisconsin. And that speakers of the Ho-Chunk language and other tongues long predated them. There was no "these days" phenomenon going on.

Or to ask him why he approached me, out of all the parents and kids on the playground that afternoon. I wasn't speaking English to my child, either.