That first magical summer in France, 40 years ago?

Forty years.

Forty years ago today, I boarded an Air France flight at Orly to return from France to the U.S.  It had been a magical summer. My first time ever in France. A life-changer.

That June I had graduated from high school and had gone on a three-week whirlwind tour of Romania with my school glee club.  In anticipation of the flight's stopover in Paris, earlier that spring I had begged my parents to see if they knew anyone in France with whom I might spend some or all of the summer.

Hooray!  As it turned out, there was a family.  Friends of friends had lived in Paris working for Time-Life; eight years before, in 1965 when they were leaving Paris, they had brought along a lovely young Parisian, Marie-Noelle, to Connecticut as an au pair so that their children could keep up their French.

Fast forward to 1973: Marie-Noelle was now in her late 20s, in Paris, married with a baby of her own.  Her extended family (grandmother, parents, and sisters and their families) spent the summer on Ile de Ré.  They would be delighted to have me as an au pair for the summer.

Back then, a fille au pair was not hired help, not a euphemism for a nanny.    Au pair meant on a par.  (In fact, I was never paid a cent.  In retrospect, I should have paid them.)  From the beginning I was treated as a younger sister or cousin, completely part of the family, who earned my keep by lending a hand with the children and household duties, mostly with the assistance of Mamita, the grandmother.

For eight weeks I was immersed, submerged in French family vacation life.  Upon my arrival, they asked if I would rather speak in English or French.  "En francais!" I blurted rather vehemently.  Oh-so-politely, not another word of English was spoken to me all summer.  (Except most evenings when Marie-Noelle's husband Jacques would re-re-fill my wineglass at dinner, joking, "Just a leeeetle drop, Pollee?")

It was a summer of transformation.  Twelve years of classroom French, filled with Moliere and Sartre and verb conjugations, rapidly transformed into must-use everyday French.  Who the heck knew what a biberon was?  Une couche?  I thought une couche was a layer. Baby bottle and diaper.  Got it. But in short order the learning curve became so fast I didn't have time to translate:  I just had to figure it out.

Example:  I knew the word for floor was le plancher.  But when someone said "Tu peux mettre cela par terre," I had to do some quick mental leaps to figure out that it meant "Put that down (on the ground)."  Finally the mental leaps were arriving at such locomotive speed that I put away my mental French-English dictionary and just went with it.  And French food and cooking lingo deserve their own chapter...

I had to keep up daily with spoken French on all levels:  toddler and pre-school age; vivacious sophisticated Parisian 20-somethings with their large entourage, with full-on colloquialisms, at dinner or dancing at island nightclubs or sailing; kind and worldly grandparents whose English far surpassed my faltering French; and the clear-speaking but cryptic Loma, the ancient, tiny, widowed great-grandmother swaddled in black. To me, it seemed Loma parsed out wisdom in 19th-century French haiku.

But it was far more than just a language-learning experience.  For 8 weeks, every minute, every hour was an awakening.  This life is what I was meant to know, I thought.  This is where I belong. French beach picnics -- feasts, not just sandwiches! -- boat outings, everyday summer dinners, daily shopping, meal preparation, everything about French lifestyle was both eye-opening and instantly right. The pace of life and the focus. I found my true sense of self.

I was eighteen.

Reality check:  1973:  no cell phones, no internet, no TV on the summer island; and a long-distance call was prohibitively expensive, ergo was for emergencies only.  Thus my only communication with American family and friends for eight weeks was via postcard or aerogramme.  Bless my mother, who saved all my letters home.  By mid-summer my English syntax was down the drain, and the vocab was slipping:  "We go every day to the plage with the children,"  I wrote.  I wasn't putting on airs, I was losing myself in French and France.

And that is how I really learned French. I lost my American self in the French world.

I think I never fully returned.

Oh, I physically returned to America on that Air France flight 40 years ago.  I had flown from La Rochelle airport to Le Bourget (I think).  I know I took a connecting bus to Orly.   Gilles, my handsome summer-unrequited-crush who had spent many July and August weekends as a guest with the family, was waiting for my bus as it pulled in to the bus lane at Orly (he worked for Air France, as had his uncle, Antoine de St. Exupery). Belmondo-esque, he stood at the entrance, one leg perched on the barrier, leaning and smoking a Gauloise. My heart fluttered.

I attempted to haul my embarrassing, oversized, orange, too-American Tourister suitcase from the luggage compartment of the coach.

"Laches," he asserted gently, grabbing the handle.

Lâche raced through my brain, seeking quick processing.  Lâche, poltron, couard, peureux went the brain scan in a nanosecond from senior-year Advanced French language class when we had to memorize synonyms.  Why was he calling me a coward? My heart pounded.

"Laches," chided Gilles, tugging more firmly.  I finally released the handle to him (which was what he was in fact saying: "Let go"), banking on the body language, still unsure why I was a coward. Did he think I was grasping so tightly because I was embarrassed at the weight of my suitcase?

He bought me an Orangina, got me checked in with his svelte, perfectly perfumed young French colleagues at the desk, and finagled as much VIP treatment as a junior Air France worker could finagle.  After some final chit-chat, address exchanges and "Oh yes, we'll keep in touch" banalities, he accompanied me to the gate.  A total gentleman, truly and genuinely so.

It didn't register -- actually at that point, I couldn't really fathom what it meant -- that I was leaving France and returning to the States.  A seven-hour flight was not enough time to adjust, linguistically, emotionally, or culturally.

I had become a different person.  I was still Polly, but who was she?

Three days later I was sitting in a freshman "French class" in college in Connecticut: nothing French about it, at all, really.

Lost.




related posts:

Mamita

Unlocking

the French R

A la plage

When You Wish Upon a Star

On this day four years ago, I was having a hard time making sense of what I would do next in my life.  I had successfully finished the important project I'd been managing, so my job was sadly ending. The sale of our family house of 15 years was looming. My kids were away at school, and I didn't know where I was going to live next or what I was going to do when I got there.  A relationship had imploded.  All I could see metaphorically were a lot of doors closing, slamming, or gently clicking shut.

Quite honestly, 2005 had been a personal annis horibilis to beat the band. (And, trust me, some of the others had been doozies.)

December 14, 2005.  I rattled around in the quirky lovable shingled Victorian cottage by the sea, a place where I'd been living for months while I readied my own house for  sale.  I had planned to buy this charming vintage cottage;  it was a house that I had instantly fallen in love with, to the point of envisioning it filled with grandchildren in a few decades, a home to come home to.  However, I'd recently gotten word that the deal to purchase the house wouldn't work.  I was crushed.  Drained.  A zombie.

That evening I sank into the sofa, surrounded by darkness, staring into the orange flames of the wood-fire in the immense stone fireplace, contemplating nothing and everything.

Outside, the ink-blue night was still, dark, and clear.  Eventually I climbed the creaking stairs and crawled under my down comforter, ready to be lulled to sleep by the distant sound of waves washing over Singing Beach.

I awoke a few hours later with a brilliant full moon shining through the window to the right.  It was gazing straight at me, the beams falling on my pillow, poking me awake.  I sat bolt upright and rubbed my eyes and took a good look up at the moon.  A perfect orb, incandescent white, glowing high in the blue-black sky. I was spellbound.

Out of the corner of my left eye, through the window that looked out over the ocean, I caught a slight motion.  A small speck of light had just fallen down over the Atlantic.  Did I just see a satellite fall to the sea? A plane crash? I jumped out of bed and ran to the window.  In that dark glassy sky, I saw another chip of light, sizzling like a spent firecracker down toward the horizon.

Shooting stars!

I was awestruck.  A full moon beckoning in the south window, a meteor shower in the east window.  Surely this had to be a sign!  Well, okay, at least an inspiration.  I watched the extravaganza for about a half hour, rapt. As that long unhappy year was drawing to a close, I finally was looking outward, beyond my own house, to elements bigger, brighter, higher.

I finally settled back to sleep with a smile, refreshed and peaceful.

And in the morning when I got up to fix my coffee, for once I didn't ruminate about my gloomy present or past. They seemed not to exist.  I simply knew what my next step was, and that was to go to Paris.

Three months later, there I was, living in Paris.  Invariably, people would ask, "What brought you to Paris?"

I couldn't exactly say, "It was a full moon and a falling star," now, could I?

Most often I would quip, "I think it was a 747, ha-ha."

But in some ways it was the moon and the stars, and a lifelong desire. 

Sometimes looking out the window is all it takes.

photo credit: Examiner.com

There's Always Room for One More Book

I've received a number of books for review, which the authors or publishers think might tie in with the themes of Polly-Vous Français. Since I have quite a backlog of reviews to write, I'm just going to scribble a few heartfelt thumbnail sketches and encourage everyone to READ MORE BOOKS.

You can always watch the movie version or sitcom or miniseries later; just read the book now. These books. Other books. Read books!

Okay, end of Mommy-Vous Français lecture.

For starters, two books about France in general.

The first one is totally delicious. So delicious it makes me drool with envy. Gastronomie! is the result of a couple's pilgrimage across France visiting food museums and food heritage sites in all regions of the Hexagon. Tom Hughes and Meredith Sayles Hughes traipsed across the French countryside, from the Hotel-Restaurant Tatin in Lamotte Beuvron, birthplace of the tarte tatin, to the Maison de la Chicoree in Orchies, to the Musee du Tire-Bouchon in Menerbes. They recount their travels (and those meals!) in easy-to-follow itineraries that will get you itching to pack your suitcase and forswearing that diet.


Next is a book that you might pass over, assuming it's just another photograph coffee-table book of Paris. Au contraire. Historic Photos of Paris is not a mere compendium of excellent antique photos, dating from the earliest days of photography in Paris. Author Rebecca Schall has written a compelling social history of Paris and France using the photos as a springboard. These are not merely captions, but rich text, clearly written, that gives a better understanding of the whys and hows of Paris today through the lens of history. I learned a lot. It's the kind of coffee table book that I will actually read and re-read.

The next books fall under the veni, vidi, vici category.

Petite Anglaise needs no introduction to francophile blog readers the world over. The subtitle is "In Paris. In Love. In Trouble." But first and foremost this book is a blook (a term I just learned; I think I got it right.) And a blook worth reading not because it primarily features Catherine in Paris or love or trouble so much as her "blogging in Paris, in love with blogging, and in trouble with blogging." Many tomes have already been written about life journeys in Paris; and to me the great merit of Catherine's book -- what kept me eagerly turning the pages -- is that it lets you into the mind of a blogger. The life of a blogger. Paris is the mere backdrop. When does a blogger reveal the details she chooses, and why? And how does she handle interactions with readers? It's gripping. So whether you are a blogger or a reader of blogs, this blook is for you.

I haven't yet read Laurel Zuckerman's Sorbonne Confidential, but from the reviews I've read and some excerpts, it's a witty and trenchant view of an American's experience inside the most famous French educational institution. The French translation was published by Fayard, and this month her original English version will be launched. To hear more and to meet Laurel herself, you can attend a reading at WH Smith on October 14 at 7:30 pm.

Adam Shepard's book has nothing to do with Paris but everything to do with starting all over and making a new life for yourself. Scratch Beginnings recounts Adam's journey as a recent college grad who decided to see if he could start from scratch in a new town, with just a duffel bag and $25 and no connections, and have a functioning car, a place to live , and $2500 savings by then end of a year. No small feat. Harper Collins will have the book on the shelves October 14 as well. Bless that boy, he told me, "I've been featured on The Today Show, CNN, Fox News, NPR, Christian Science Monitor, The New York Post…blah, blah, blah." Nothing blah about that!

So I think there is still room for another Paris veni-vidi-vici book, one with a twist at the end. Yet to be written or published. A divorced woman starts a new life in Paris, plans to stay "until I've seen all there is to see," i.e. forever. She has innovative, creative ideas for making a permanent life here, starts a kind of funny blog, writes half a manuscript with a French woman, gets filmed in a documentary, writes some articles, edits a book, discovers the daily joys and frustrations and indelible infatuation with the most beautiful city on the planet, and re-discovers herself in the process. Gradually the economy erodes her ability to make the Paris present continue into the Paris future, and she realizes her time in the City of Light has come to an end. She has still conquered, though, because she'll always have Paris in her heart, her soul, and her bones, when she says au revoir and moves back to the States in November. The book's title, of course, will be Polly-Vous Français.

I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.

Full Moon in Paris

As I turned out the lights at bedtime last night, I realized there was a full moon. The beams shone directly onto the tiles of my kitchen floor. My amateur photography skills don't do it justice. It looked as if it were from my favorite childhood book, Goodnight Moon.

Goodnight stars, and goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

It also reminded me of the daytime version, last fall.

Haven

Summer Porch © 2006 Jim Minot

Sometimes in Paris the days seem so complex and complicated. Racing around my apartment, prioritizing a mental tangle of computers and committees, finances and French, schedules and Skype.

Then, sometimes, a gentle reminder crosses my path that suspends daily enervation and springs me from my urban worries. An email link arrives. I click. I take one look at this painting, and a yearning rises from deep within. A lump forms in my throat. In an instant technology evaporates, the bustle of the city recedes, and I am no longer in Paris.

I am an ocean away, on an island in Maine. I am splayed on the warm steps next to this rocking chair, soaking up the August sun. Just back from another long walk on the stone beach, I sit on the porch, lazily sorting through my trouvailles: elegant driftwood, turquoise and green sea-glass and perfect, whole sea urchin shells.

The wind sifts through the pines and ruffles the tall grass in the field. An occasional osprey cries, a lobster boat chugs by in the distance, seagulls circling hungrily. Other than that, there is no noise. No electricity to make the slightest hum.

Time stretches endlessly at this antique wood-shingled farmhouse, on a remote point of land on the island. Each minute holds hours of wonder.

My only care right now is to choose the most exquisite of the shells for the sculpture I am designing. The kids are off exploring in the woods or fields somewhere along the ancient dirt road; there are no cars or other concerns. At most we'll tend to mosquito bites or sunburned shoulders, or scratches from brambles, when they return.

They'll eventually scramble back to the house with proud discoveries and new secrets, and we'll prepare for the evening ritual. But before it's time to light the gas lamps and candles inside, we'll sit on this porch and marvel at the view as the sky turns a pale transparent lavender, a soft hue that I'm convinced exists only here.

How can I distill the air and take it with me when it comes time to leave this place? A soothing fragrance of deep pine and salt blended with the subtlest distant hint of ripening raspberries. I'll simply absorb all I can to carry it within me when I go.

Until then, I am sitting on this porch, on an island in Maine, and I don't want to be any other place in the world.

Watercolors by Jim Minot, www.jimminot.com

The Language of Dying

A thought-provoking post by une nouvelle vie de boheme yesterday about the perils of translation in Camus brought back memories. Aching personal memories of describing death in two languages.

My oldest brother, J, was my idol. I hero-worshiped him. Tall, angularly handsome, he was brilliant, artistic, and funny -- full of mischief -- well, everything you could want in an older brother. He took me for rides in his red Triumph Spitfire when I was a pre-teen. He surprised me one Christmas when he said he couldn't come home for the holidays, then he sprang through the front door on Christmas Eve singing "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!" That kind of a big brother.

When J was in his thirties he developed a serious medical condition that put him through a torturous hospital time, keeping him alive on machines until there weren't enough machines to function for his body. When I visited him in the ICU with all the charts and beeps and wires and tubes, he couldn't speak. But he repeatedly traced the letters D-I-E in the palm of my hand. He wanted to go, to exit the nightmare. "No, no, you'll get better," I reassured him. But I wasn't reassured myself.

Weeks later, one evening I was at home having dinner with friends. The phone rang. It was my sister. "J died," she told me, along with the details which I didn't really hear as my thoughts blurred. I let out a soft sigh of relief -- he was out of his terrible misery. "Died," a verb, to me indicating that he moved on, as he had wanted. He was freed from the mechanical torture of articificial life. I was numbed, but I didn't even cry. Instead, I felt an unusual serenity knowing that all those tubes, that terrified look on his face, would no longer be there.

The next morning I got up and, trance-like, went to work, at a French organization in Boston. I had to inform my boss that my brother died and I'd be leaving town to go to the funeral. "Mon frère est mort," I announced, using the passé composé of mourir.

Suddenly grief exploded from me like a bomb. I had just said, for the first time, the permanent words "My brother is dead."

Mamita

From my first "Polly-vous francais" moment as a child to current French friends, I've been blessed to know patient people who teach me a great deal about practical French, languages, systems and cultural codes. One mentor who had an enduring influence on me is Mamita.

I met Mamita the summer before college when I first set foot in France. Spending July and August with an extended Parisian family who were friends of friends of friends, officially I was an "au pair" in the old-fashioned sense. It was not a paid job at all; rather, I was part of an adopted host family for the summer.

The family consisted of a widowed great-grandmother, Loma, less than five feet tall and clad head to toe in black; the grandparents, Mamita and Dady, a welcoming, erudite couple retired from UNESCO and international affairs. Their three daughters, Martine, Chu, and Domino, were svelte and gorgeous twenty-something sisters, the elder two accompanied by dashing husbands and towheaded toddlers. My role was to be the "extra" youngest sister, helping out where needed, an integral part of the family in the French hierarchical sense. I arrived on July 14, an auspicious date, a turning point in my life.

Their summer house was a rustic but exquisitely renovated stone compound --a former sheep farm on Ile de Ré, off the Atlantic Coast. This was Ile de Ré before the bridge, before movie stars and le Tout Paris. Ile de Ré where summer days were spent picnicking in the shade of the pines on the beach at Trousse Chemise. Evenings dancing at boites de nuit with the young couples after the children were tucked in bed and the grandparents read by the fireplace. I spent six weeks in the heart of this family, not speaking a word of English.

Usually I spent mornings back at the house with Mamita, a bright, energetic woman in her 60s, helping her with les petites while the young mothers escaped for a game of tennis or errands. Mamita showed me how to select perfectly ripe plums and mirabelles from the fruit trees in the garden. I learned how to make jam. I observed Mamita as she trained her three cherubic granddaughters in all the proper ways of being good little French girls, bien elevées. Mamita knew how to speak perfect Oxford English, but since I was there to absorb French language and culture, she genteelly refrained from uttering a word of English all summer.

While the little ones were napping and she and I had a break, we would retreat to the shade of the garden and play French scrabble -- and oh, how gracious she was. We took Scrabble to the beach, too, and Mamita kept the tiles in an old purple velvet Seagram's drawstring bag -- such an elegant touch and yet so frugal. She never actually let me win a game, but she gave ample hints, her eyes sparkling with delight if I made a good play.

Mamita specialized in the art of hints. Since that summer I was an American teenager and it was the 1970s, I was naturally inclined to run around barefoot. Long hair and a flowing India print dress were my uniform. Island weather was hot and sunny, and the transition from house to courtyard to yard seemed seamless to me. One August day, Mamita asked me with a wise, warm smile, "Polly, tu n'as pas froid aux pieds?" ("Aren't your feet cold?") "Non," I replied merrily. "Ca va!" The next day was another scorcher. Again barefoot, I lolled around the house and terrasse. Mamita, once again, "Dis, Polly, tu n'as pas froid aux pieds?" Again I blithely replied that no, I was accustomed to the.... oh. Ohh.

Cultural light bulb popped. Mamita, in her elegant, kind manner, was letting me know that it would be better if I wore shoes. Without another word, I slipped on a pair of espadrilles and wore them daily for the rest of the summer.

My French summer was filled with subtle epiphanies like that -- not just that French people from "nice" families disapproved of grown young women going barefoot, but also that she would never have affronted me by complaining or directly instructing me to don shoes. Lessons in nuance that can't be taught, but can be gleaned if you just pay careful attention. Mamita taught me by inference, to listen, observe, to be a jeune fille bien elevée. Following Mamita's gentle lead, I learned more about being French than any textbook or etiquette class could have dreamt of drilling into me. The memories stayed with me, and have been recalled fondly with her when I've had the chance to visit Mamita over the years. She continued to be so gracious and hospitable to visitors, though frail and having difficulty finding her breath to speak.

Yesterday evening in her beloved stone house on Ile de Ré, Mamita died, just before bedtime. She would have been 95 this November.

Merci, Mamita.

Art and Reality

It is raining again. A neighbor somewhere in my apartment building is playing the piano, a piece that I often hear him -- or her? -- practicing. Somehow I picture a lovelorn man poetically swaying over the keyboard, eyes closed, deep in remembrance and emotion. The music is lyrical and evocative. Ravel? Debussy? No, more recent, I think. I don't know my composers well enough to recognize it. Maybe it is his own composition, because usually he plays just the haunting refrain, which then fades as he strums softly on the keys trying to rework his effort. Then silence, drifting.

The lilting notes still echo through the courtyard, and I have the impression of having heard this very tune long ago, a score at the end of a black and white film, a French romance, with a failed love story. In it, the couple mournfully leaving each other, one descending stone steps under the pressing raindrops, the other gazing out the car or train window, pining, regretting what will never be. The camera fades. The credits roll.

So much of Paris often feels like the backdrop to a movie set: the architecture, the crowds, the sounds, the narrow streets. Scores of individuals in every quartier who could be from Central Casting.

The confusion of art and reality is never stronger than Paris on a cold and rainy afternoon.

Fourth of July Memories

Growing up, I always loved the Fourth of July because it meant a time for family gatherings. I don't recollect specific events, but I know that it has left me with an abiding love for sparklers. Waving them around to spell letters in the cooled evening air, feeling content from a perfect meal of slightly blackened hot dogs drizzled with French's mustard from a pump jar. Chilled canned peaches on iceberg lettuce with a dollop of mayonnaise. Homemade ice cream more deliciously earned because you had to participate in cranking the ice cream maker, its wooden bucket crammed with ice and rock salt. Later, when the sparklers ran out, there were always glowing fireflies -- lightning bugs -- to catch in a jar with a few leaves and an aluminum-foil top punched with holes. Eventually pity forced us to release them, and they escaped into the velvet of a Tennessee summer's night sky. I wonder, sometimes, which of my hazy memories are of the Fourth itself, or simply other happy summer moments. I don't think it really matters.

In my teenage years, July 4th meant rising early to watch New England village "Horribles Parades" where hastily costumed children on beribboned bicycles and not-yet-grown-up adults straggled through the town center. Uniformed Cub Scout troops marched in vague formation, and local swells waved from the back of a borrowed convertible, Veteran's caps perched jauntily on their balding pates. Sometimes a homegrown Uncle Sam or a small marching band, or a few funny floats, the joke understood only if you lived in town. Being local felt comforting.

Later July Fourths witnessed my own toddlers and their little cousins as they swung plastic bats at wiffle balls on the broad lawn of the family place on the Massachusetts coast. By afternoon the "littlees," as they were called, invariably got splinters in toes or on knees as they scrambled on the wide weathered porch of the house, their chins stained purple from dripping popsicles. All generations of the womenfolk shelled fresh peas in the kitchen and every year discussed anew the best way to poach and serve so much salmon to feed the extended family. A faded, moth-eaten 10 foot by 12 foot American flag flapped gently against the grey shingles of the lumbering old Victorian, a perfect backdrop for what looked like the American Ideal. The years and years of the Annual Photo, with smiling faces of babies, aunts, in-laws, step-uncles, siblings, and grown cousins and their current roommates or best friends or loves or spouses, posed in the same place in the branches of the sprawling catalpa tree. Thinking about these July Fourths, I prefer to choose the happy appearance of those successive photographs as the memories to retain. Because by nighttime, when the menfolk scuffled to detonate contraband fireworks on the beach, with frantic dogs barking, mosquitoes swarming, and exhausted children cringeing or squealing, the darkened evenings of the Fourth had inevitably lost the joy that the day's anticipation and sunshine had brought.

That classic Fourth-of-July house now belongs to some other family, to create their own American Dreams. And I live in Paris now, to create mine.

Ici est Tombé

Paris immeuble walls are plastered with a multitude of plaques commemorating where this illustrious author lived or that famous painter spent his final days. Living history. Fabulous.

Then there are these plaques, sober souvenirs dedicated to the mostly anonymous or unknown Resistance fighters who died for their patrie during the Liberation of Paris in August 1944. Each plaque has a little ring at the bottom. This is to hold a bouquet of flowers placed there on various State holidays in tribute to these heroes of modern France. They are honored and remembered, with flowers and a ceremony, many times in the year.

This plaque, near the Ecole Militaire, is for a man who was 40 years old when he died for his country.