tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39810342313095864932024-02-18T21:56:06.989-08:00FollowmalenaThe Bonbon VivantUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-75506846401676115702014-07-01T06:31:00.002-07:002014-07-01T06:31:23.653-07:00I'm nearing the age of reasonThe other day, Max decided that he was going to spend the twenty euros that he had saved for several months on a remote control Fiat car that he'd seen for sale at Monoprix, which is basically a mini-Target. He'd wanted to buy this car a week before, but we were about to leave for a trip to Nice and I told him to save his money in case he saw something there that he wanted more. This led to an argument, with him insisting that nothing could be as wonderful as this junky, overpriced remote control car, and me maintaining that he shouldn't let his money "burn a hole in his pocket," a new expression for him, which he didn't appreciate much. We were also about to go to a swimming pool, and I wasn't in love with the idea of carting this car in its considerable packaging on the metro to the pool and back. I thought he would forget about it. But no. His memory is frighteningly good. The moment we returned from our trip, where did he want to go? Monoprix. For that car.<div>
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There was another reason why I wasn't dying to help make this little dream come true. The clerks at the Monoprix in our neighborhood are super surly. They all seem to hail from lands that are not France, but the fact that neither they nor I speak French as our native tongue does not endear me to them. I get no A for effort. Perhaps because they are always also making an effort, so big deal: who cares. We're foreign, but that's where our commonality ends, and we must all follow the rules of shopping in France. The rules at French stores are different. You must say hello (or good evening) when you enter. But you don't ask someone how they are or (god forbid) volunteer how you are. There's no banter exchanged, no chitchat about the weather, the crowds, the sales, etc... When we went to London recently, I was shocked by clerks calling us "Love," and wanting to talk like old friends as they rang up our purchases. There is also no attempt to speed things along at French stores. When clerks are dealing with the customer at the front of the line, they are oblivious to the crowd behind them. If you are in a hurry, maybe you shouldn't have gone shopping. </div>
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All of this was on my mind as I brought Max to buy his car, because his savings--30 euros--was entirely in change, in an enormous and grungy ziplock bag. Much of it was his saved allowance of 6 euros per month (his age) but some he'd earned by helping carry the groceries home and up five flights. The guys at Monoprix who deliver groceries get a tip of 1 euro per bag, and I'd offered him the same rate, although I must say he complains a lot more and carries much lighter bags, and often gives up halfway home, and yet I still almost always give in and pay him, because I'm a sucker and I use him to get rid of change and lighten my wallet. As a result, much of his life savings was in the form of 10 and 20 centime coins. I considered exchanging the change for bills before we went to buy his car, but then I realized that I would be stuck with the bag of 30 euros in change, and that's about $45. You can't exchange change at the airport, nor would I want to. I needed to get rid of this money, which meant letting Max spend it.</div>
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I felt trepidation as we neared the Monoprix cash register, but I also felt ready for the challenge. I am by nature a conflict adverse wasp. I was bred to play nice. But since living here, I've gotten more and more used to the culture of debate and argument that flares up around me on a daily basis. I've come to appreciate it, and even to participate in it. At a pool recently, a cashier chided me for not bringing my identity papers to prove that I should get the residents' discount of one euro off. Rather than apologize, I informed her that as my identity paper was a passport, I was sure she could understand why I wouldn't want to risk losing it or having it stolen in a public locker. She gruffly conceded that I had a point, and I felt victorious. Arguing in French makes this bracing and fun. When Max was having issues at his school recently, not wanting to eat veal and pork in creamy sauces for lunch, the teachers telling him regularly that he couldn't eat a healthy vegetarian diet, some friends advised him to reply, "I am nearing the age of reason," before giving any argument on behalf of his budding vegetarianism. Apparently, age 7 is considered "the age of reason" here in France. It's a Catholic thing--the age when children are allowed to participate in the sacrements. I feel that I too am nearing the age of reason--a kind of finishing line that moves along with me, so that I'll never quite get there. "J'approche l'age du raison..." This runs through my head a lot, before I make any kind of argument.</div>
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In any case, knowing how long it was going to take the clerk to count our coins, I hovered near the back of Monoprix until it seemed like no one was going to come after us in line. Then I began by having the clerk ring up my groceries, for which I was paying like a normal person with a credit card. She did so in a typically surly fashion. I happened to be buying 3 packages of socks for Matt. After she rang them up, when I asked for a bag, she told me, "The bags are for clothes, not socks." The socks cost about $25 total, so it didn't seem wholly unreasonable to me that I'd want a bag for them, but I didn't fight this battle, as I was preparing myself for war. </div>
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After I finished bagging my groceries, I put Max's car on the register. Just as she rang it in, I noticed a woman with one vial of nail polish in line behind me. Not wanting her to have to wait 10 minutes, I asked the clerk if she could go first.</div>
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"I already rang you up," she announced gruffly. "I can't cancel the transaction. You will have to pay."</div>
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"Okay," I said. "But I'm afraid this is going to take a while..." And with that, I placed Max's ziplock bag of change on the counter. My heart was hammering, my mouth dry. (Yes, these are genre novel tropes, and yet they were truly happening). </div>
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"What is this?" she asked, with no trace of humor.</div>
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"It's his money," I said, gesturing to Max, whom she seemed to take in for the first time, looking down at him over the edge of her register.</div>
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"How did he get it?" she demanded.</div>
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"He earned it," I said. "Little by little, which is why it's in change."</div>
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"Doing what?" she asked.</div>
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"Chores," I said. "Like carrying bags of groceries..."</div>
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And suddenly, to my utter shock, her entire demeanor transformed. Usually being a kid here doesn't seem to earn you any extra points. But maybe things are different in whatever African country this woman originally came from. She was definitely moved by the fact that he was buying this thing for himself, with his own money, and more than happy to be part of the experience. </div>
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"You earned this?" she asked him. I translated. He nodded. "Good for you," she said. "Let's count it together."</div>
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And as she spent more than 10 minutes helping him to count his change into tiny little stacks and then double-checking her math--totally oblivious to the pouting irritation of the nail polish woman behind me--I realized that sometimes the Alice in Wonderland nature of customer service here is a good thing. Cash isn't king. She could not have cared less if the next client was inconvenienced or took her business elsewhere. It's not as if she was on commission. We had her undivided attention for as long as we needed it, and I didn't even have to fight. </div>
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And she even gave Max a bag to hold his car.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-86875658455124657222014-06-29T08:21:00.001-07:002014-06-29T08:21:12.837-07:00The Paris Top Ten Countdown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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#10: The Windows Of Our Apartment<br />
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It is a lazy Sunday in Paris. It's been rainy all weekend, chilly and muggy at the same time. The air feels heavy, almost tropical in spite of the fact that it's not remotely warm out, especially not for late June. Normally I hate the rain, but for some reason I'm not minding this rain. This morning, I braved a break in the storm and took the landlord's wheeling shopping cart out to the corner markets, where I ran into the upstairs neighbors, also wielding their wheeling shopping cart, who invited Max over to play this afternoon. That is where he is now, having "le play date" with two French children named Iris and Merlin, which is why I find myself with the time for a quick entry here, after having been too busy for a while.<br />
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It's hard to believe that we have only 2 weeks left in France. Matt and I are playing a sad little game to try and make ourselves feel better about the dwindling supply of days. Starting at about 2 months, we'd tell each other (rightfully) that for most people, 2 months in Paris would be an incredible amount of time, and that we should try to keep this in mind rather than feeling sorry that our stay was already coming to an end. The same was true at 1 month. Even 2 weeks is a good sized vacation--by workaholic American standards, in any case. But very soon we're going to have to stop deceiving ourselves, and then we're going to have to get on a plane--and lord help us, that plane will be in the American Airlines fleet, so it'll probably be another 2 weeks between when we board at Charles deGaulle and actually land. Maybe we'll land in Mexico and then come up by bus.<br />
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In the meanwhile, Matt and I keep making lists of our favorite things here: things we want to make sure to do one more time before we leave; things we don't want to forget. Since writing helps me to remember, I thought I'd use this space for 10 of my Paris favorites, and today's entry is dedicated to the windows of our apartment.<br />
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To understand why I love the windows of this apartment as much as I do, you need to know a little bit about the windows of our San Francisco apartment. 1) They're on the ground floor. Technically you mount about 8 stairs to get to the landing and front door, so we only see the tops of people's heads as they walk by on the sidewalk. Still, a very thin pane of glass separates us from the street and its (often less than savory) denizens. We have to keep the blinds drawn at all times, or else we're putting on a peep show. 2) There are probably 7 or 8 of windows total in the apartment, and all but 1 have been painted shut. The one in our bedroom opens, but there's something wrong with the weight pulley system, so it has to be propped open with a book or else it falls and slams shut. And if you do prop it open, you could literally reach out and touch people as they walk by (see issue #1). It's impossible to get a good breeze in the apartment, although the glass panes are cheap and don't seem to keep out one particle of street noise, so they might as well be wide open. Most often we hear the thumping bass of the sound systems of the cars passing by, "aural graffiti," as Matt puts it. Basically, these are the worst windows in the world.<br />
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By contrast, the windows of our apartment here are the best windows in the world. Our apartment is on the 5th floor and overlooks a courtyard. Having to mount five curving flights of stairs isn't ideal when you're out of shape from too much wine and cheese, and have bought too many groceries. However, the quiet of a fifth floor courtyard apartment can't be beat. There are huge, door-sized double windows in every single room (save the bathroom) that open to the inside. Sleeping with them open is almost like sleeping in the open air. They let in so much air and light that you can stay indoors all day without feeling any cabin fever. They also frame the sky perfectly. I discovered this one day, when I was doing a yoga video in the living room and, at the end, I lay down with my head against the wall, under the open window, and the view of the sky was like nothing I've ever seen before. That is because Paris has the best clouds I have ever seen. They are enormous, and they create a perfect wild panorama over the antique gray skyline, and I don't even know how to describe them because in the end they're just clouds, but they're also not. I've tried to take pictures of them, lying on my back in the living room, hoping that I could frame the pictures just so and have a souvenir of this view from the best windows in the world, but the pictures never come out. Matt has taken some better ones with his real camera. But still, nothing compares to the real thing. There are flower boxes in two of the windows. One of them holds the herbs that Max has learned to pick and choose to season the soups that we make. The other has flowers, including some he planted with seeds he got at an Easter event at our favorite library.<br />
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Today, the sky keeps shifting between slate gray and pale blue. When it's blue, it seems impossible that it could rain again. When it rains, the flash flood sounds like gunfire when it hits the cobblestones of the courtyard, and it seems inconceivable that the sun could come back out. Right now, because I'm alone in the apartment, I've got all the windows open. Occasionally I can hear the sound of kids laughing upstairs, and I know one of them is Max. The wind is blowing hard, and it's a little chilly, but I don't want to miss out on one minute of it. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-21734887707731735392014-05-06T03:01:00.002-07:002014-05-06T03:34:09.122-07:00The Lunch WarsFood is a battleground. Every parent knows this. Kids all seem recognize that food--what they will and won't eat, the speed at which they will or won't eat it, their willingness to sit in their chairs, etc...--is one small area in their limited little lives in which they can exert control. And drive their parents crazy.<br />
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Before coming to France, I'd heard about the whole movement to get your kids to eat everything: "the French way." In all areas in which we Americans would like to see improvement, we tend to look to the French as our counter-example. Without a bit of our puritanism, they seem to do so much better than us in so many ways. They don't get fat, although they eat copious amounts of foie gras and triple cream fromage on bread! They age beautifully, never fighting it but somehow becoming more fetching with every new wrinkle! Their children sit obediently through three-hour lunches, polishing off every last escargot, never having a <i>separate meal!-</i>gasp-of something more "kid-friendly."<br />
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All of this sounded good to me. I wasn't so naive as to believe that all of these "French X don't..." books had the whole truth. But I was hopeful, especially where it came to Max's diet. Our kids never fail to surprise us in the ways that they stubbornly insist on being themselves, in spite of our genes and best efforts to train them. As a lover of pretty much all ethnic foods, spicy food, stinky food (cheese at least) and everything pungent and flavorful, I expected a kid who would take after me. Even when I was little, I'd eat hot sauce until tears streamed down my face, partly to be macho but also because I genuinely liked it, already getting high off the endorphins. Matt is not quite as much a fan of heat, but he's also got a wide palate, and our fridge is stocked with more "weird stuff" than normal. But since birth practically, Max has preferred a much more limited range. He's not quite as bad as the kid I knew who went through a phase of only eating white cheese sticks, but he likes his food simple, plain, and (preferably) raw. Given his choice, he'd live on desserts, raw vegetables, yogurt, and noodles with butter and parmesan. It's really boring, but he's also really stubborn, and I don't like fighting over food. It just doesn't seem like a battle worth waging, especially since he will happily consume heaping portions of vegetables. So before coming here, I'd largely given up.<br />
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But then he started at a school with a "composed" lunch served every day, and given no alternative, I found myself getting on board with the whole "French kids eat everything" plan. I remembered my mother saying that you have to try something 7 times before you can decide if you like it. Seems kind of quasi-scientific, but then again why not? I was happy not to have to spend the time to pack a lunch, and I liked the idea of him having this cross-cultural experience every day. I'd read (in the aforementioned get your kids to eat book) about the cloth tablecloths laid on French school children's cafeteria tables, the courses, the way that they were expected to keep their elbows off the table and their hands in sight at all times. Matt and I joked that if Max got nothing besides better table manners after this year in France, it would be well worth it.<br />
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From the start, let's just say that he didn't come home raving about his lunches. "They're very French," said one other mother, a woman from Mexico who (as Max reported to me) packs her son a lunch of rice and beans and tortillas and other items every day, because he refuses to eat the meat and fish in heavy cream sauce that the school seems to serve daily. "It was lamb again!" Max says indignantly, almost every time I ask him what was for lunch. Or else "horse hooves," although I find this very hard to believe. Or "Baby cows!" When Matt pointed out that this was called, "veal," it didn't seem to make him any more predisposed towards it.<br />
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Another big parenting term these days is "natural consequences." This is supposed to be the best form of discipline (or coercion). You let the kid hang himself, and then wait for him to find a way out of the noose. Joking aside, I do like the thought of "natural consequences," at least in principle, and hoped it might work here. Sure, he didn't like the school lunches. But since he didn't have an alternative, he'd eat them and his palate would grow more diverse and sophisticated. I thought: <i>if he doesn't eat his lunch one day, he'll realize how hungry he was all afternoon, and the next day he'll eat it. </i>When this didn't seem to happen--when we picked him up and he was nearly psychopathic, and we asked what he'd had for lunch, and he snapped, "A LOT! I ate SO MANY RADISHES!"--we started to get concerned. "We have got to pack that kid some other food," Matt finally said last week, after our normally agreeable child fell apart on Friday afternoon, and then admitted that he'd eaten a "huge" lunch of beets. "Pascal gets to bring his own food. Why can't Max?"<br />
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Why indeed? Although I'd been on board with the French lunch program, Max has been in school here since January, and if he hasn't learned to love lamb and cream sauce by now, the odds are he's not going to. He's outplayed us at the natural consequences game. The natural consequence of having to put up with his vicious low blood sugar every afternoon is that we are worn down and sick of this particular battle. He won. So over the weekend, I bought a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of peanut butter and some jam. I'm willing to make him lunches, but easy ones. As far as I've seen, they don't even sell elaborate lunch boxes here.<br />
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Day 1, yesterday, all seemed fine. I explained to Anne, his Irish teacher, that I'd packed him some food because he doesn't like the school lunch (and has, in fact, decided that he is a vegetarian now) and she said that this was okay by her. At the end of the day, Max seemed much happier, and he'd polished off both sandwiches. But he also told me that Elodie, his French teacher, wasn't pleased, and that she was going to talk to me about how he couldn't bring his own lunch to school.<br />
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"Don't worry," I said to him. "It'll be fine. I'll explain to her."<br />
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But this morning, Elodie greeted me with a distinctly frosty demeanor. She didn't broach the topic, so I did, assuming it would be fine.<br />
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"In fact it is not fine," she said in French. "It is against the rules for children to bring their own food."<br />
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"But why?" I asked. I have been here long enough that, I have to admit, I'm becoming much less conflict-adverse. I'm actually kind of starting to enjoy a good verbal sparring match. I feel like I've learned a few tips from the folks here.<br />
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"It is important for all of the children to sit together and eat the same meal," she said. "They learn to eat at the table that way."<br />
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"In principle I agree," I said. "But he is impossible at the end of the day, and when we ask, he says he ate only vegetables. We can't stand his moods. He doesn't want to eat meat, and after trying to fight it for months, we are accepting that this is his choice, because what else can we do?"<br />
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"It is very difficult for a child to be vegetarian," she said. "He is too young."<br />
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"There are regions of India where everyone is vegetarian from birth," I said. (Good one! I thought) "I was vegetarian for many years. I know how to make vegetable-based proteins, and he eats a vitamin-rich diet."<br />
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"Yes," she said. "Beans are a good source of protein. But not sandwiches."<br />
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"Excuse me?" I said. We seemed to be getting to the source of her scowl.<br />
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"These sandwiches. It's very American, I know. If he has them, the other children will all want them, and it's not a proper lunch. What is in them?"<br />
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"Peanut butter. A good source of protein."<br />
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She didn't respond to this. "The school lunch has many courses. There is an entree (appetizer) and a main dish, vegetables, dessert and cheese. He doesn't have to eat the meat."<br />
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"Fine," I said. "I will pack some extra food, so he can eat it if he's still hungry or at the end of the day, and he can eat the other courses."<br />
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"No sandwiches," she said, to which I agreed.<br />
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Sometimes you have to concede the battle in order to win the war.<br />
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Max makes his feelings about roasted sheep head quite clear.</div>
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Another appealing display at our corner butcher's. (Note how the chickens seem to be clutching their own beheaded selves in horror).</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-59884073199642859582014-04-23T04:12:00.002-07:002014-04-23T04:12:29.538-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Some people draw the short stick when it comes to family. I've been ridiculously lucky three times: first at birth; most recently, when I married Matt and acquired his excellent crew of loving lunatics; but in the middle, at age sixteen, when I was placed at as an exchange student in the Delaunay family for a year, in a town called Brie-Comte-Robert.<br />
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Brie-Comte-Robert is in "la grande banlieue" or the outer, outer suburbs of Paris, beyond the reach of the RER, the commuter rail. When I mention it, most French people haven't heard of it. The last train rolled in at midnight, with no bus service home at that hour. This meant that when I was in high school here, if I wanted to go into Paris for the night in the middle of the week, as I often did, there was no returning home until the following morning. My host parents were fine with this. My host-mother, Claude, would pick me up at the train station and take me straight to school. Her only rule was that I sit through my classes and not complain about feeling tired or hungover, although both were inevitably true. You make your choices, you live with the effects, and you accept your responsibilities. That was her motto. Not a bad message to absorb as a teenager.<br />
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Because I was sixteen and American, I was more than a little clueless about a lot of things. I understood that their property was different from the others in town, and that it was beautiful, a crumbly old house behind a tall gated wall. But I didn't realize that it was the largest tract of land in Brie. The land had belonged to Claude's parents. Her mother (la Meme) still lived within the walled enclosure, in an old house of her own. Apparently one day, a few years after I returned to the States, Claude realized that the mayor had plans to turn their land into a protected zone, meaning they wouldn't be able to develop or sell it for its worth, because no one was going to want to buy a big piece of land with no option to build on it. Before that could happen, the family acted preemptively, built an apartment complex, and moved to an even smaller town called Montreal, in the south of France, where they bought a bigger, older and crumblier house (pictured above).<br />
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This week, Max had yet another school vacation, and so we got on a plane to Toulouse, the closest city to Montreal, to visit the Delaunays in their new (to me) home. I hadn't seen them in 20 years, and I was excited but nervous. So much time had passed. My life has gone through so many revolutions. I didn't know if I'd feel comfortable with them anymore, let alone with my kid in tow, who's neither perfectly behaved (particularly in the table manner department) nor conversant in French, contrary to the popular belief that, "kids are sponges! He'll be fluent in two months!" (Yeah right). But apprehension aside, I really wanted to see them. I retain extremely vivid memories of my year in France, and especially the time I spent with them. I remember weeping uncontrollably when the day came that I had to leave, feeling completely ripped apart at the thought that my time with them was over, just like that, when I had truly come to feel like a part of their family. <br />
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Our plane from Paris to Toulouse was delayed by 2 hours, so we didn't land until almost midnight. As I waited to be picked up by Richard, my old host-brother, I wondered if I'd even recognize him. Richard was 15 the last time I saw him. My memory was of a sweet and geeky teen, who was most often to be found lying on the "poof" (beanbag) watching dubbed American action movies. Our bedrooms came one after the other, at the end of the hall. As the year progressed and we became better friends, we'd steal Claude's long, skinny "Vogue" cigarettes and smoke them out of our bedroom windows late at night, talking softly and blowing our smoke in the direction of the chicken coop.<br />
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Thanks to the delay, we happened to land at around the same time as Agnes, my old host-sister, who was 7 when I lived in their family. Agnes now lives and works in Serbia, having spent her own year as an exchange student in Russia, which started her on the Slavic track. My memory was of a pesky kid, also sweet, bright and very aware, a great mimic. "Ma petite Malena," she'd call me, which was the same thing her parents called me, almost always followed by some admonishment--which she copied as well as their chiding tone. She loooooved to correct my French, which I found very irritating coming from a child, but hilarious in retrospect. Agnes hadn't originally been intending to come home for Easter, but when she found out that Max and I were coming, as well as her older brother Charles from Guyana (he was away in the US the year I lived with the family) she decided she had to make the trip, and I was so glad that she did.<br />
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In spite of my fears, I recognized both Richard and Agnes immediately, and immediately felt a sense of deep happiness to be with them again, that persisted and grew throughout the weekend. When I lived with them, the Delaunays always made me feel like a real part of their family, and even though two decades have gone by (and I have been a terrible correspondent) that feeling came back, and grew stronger as I watched them take Max in too, and make him feel welcome despite the language barrier (and those less than perfect table manners, which did get noted).<br />
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Many (all?) of my memories of living with the Delaunays revolve around copious consumptions of very good food and wine. I don't know if they shaped the gourmande that I am today, or if I just got lucky to be placed with a family of bon-vivants. The first week that I lived with them, we spent a whole day bottling the table wine that they'd consume over the course of the year. Each adult got an allotment of 1/2 bottle per day. The wine arrived in caskets, and we used tubing to fill an army of empty bottles. The trick was to fill each bottle below the point where the cork would go, but (inevitably) I'd fill it to the brim and then have to drink that inch of excess. This was one of the first things my host-mother Claude reminded me of. "Comme tu etais soule!" How drunk you were! This became a refrain to the stories they told about my year with them. Another one, told with a bit less affection, involved the hot summer night that my Finnish friend and I bought wine from the gas station and took it to the edge what we believed to be a lake but was actually some kind of sewer, where drunken skinny dipping ensued. Reminding me of this one, Claude shook her head in disgust. I couldn't tell if she was more horrified by the fact that we'd gone swimming in the sewer or consumed gross wine FROM THE GAS STATION! L'horreur! "Didn't we teach you anything?" she demanded. "We had very good wine you could have taken!"<br />
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I was glad for once that Max's French comprehension is minimal. Although the family did their best to try and corrupt him to their decadent French ways... While this photo was staged, he did get his own (little) glass of champagne at each meal.<br />
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Only one member of the Delaunay family was missing. I remember Claude's mother, la Meme (who died five years ago) as an adventuresome white-haired woman who'd traveled the world, and declared San Francisco "the only livable part of America." She was always in an apron and blood-speckled rubber boots. There were chickens on the old property in Brie, one of which met its demise at Meme's unswerving hand every Sunday morning. It was from her that I learned that if you decapitate a chicken improperly, its feathers will remain stuck and be hard to pluck. Every Sunday, the Delaunay family spent more time preparing and eating a meal than the typical American family does on Thanksgiving. The entire day was given over to the creation and consumption of a true feast. The head chef was always Daniel, my host-father, who had run away from home at age 14 to be an apprentice chef in some of the best restaurants of Paris.<br />
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They don't have chickens at Montreal, but Daniel procured this special capon for Easter--a castrated rooster, which apparently makes them get way bigger--and you can see him here doing the beheading of the beast. Max was fascinated and horrified. Since arriving in France, the land where butchers sell all beasts complete with heads on, he has decided to be a vegetarian, abstaining (his loss) from both the capon with chestnut gravy, and Claude's homemade foie gras. Before serving the foie gras, she launched into a long tirade about how crazy Americans are to object to the practice of fattening geese, since "this is exactly what they do before their long voyage south! They live off their own liver! We just happen to harvest and eat it!"<br />
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He had no problem with the homemade french fries or the apple galette, which we made with Daniel. He was a bit protective of his incredible pate brisee, but allowed Max to do the honors of slicing and peeling the apples, and sprinkling the whole thing with pats of butter, cinnamon and brown sugar.<br />
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Agnes had recently been to Turkey and she brought back this box of Turkish Delight, which was great since Max and I had just finished reading The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, where the bewitched Turkish Delight gets Edmund to betray his family. Max helped to set the table, and cut these flowers from the garden to use as decorations.<br />
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Also present was a woman named Liloil, an old friend of the Delaunay family, who is a painter and an astrologer. "It's crazy how accurate her predictions of the future are," my host-mother said to me. "She sees everything about everyone except herself." <br />
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Liloil did tarot readings for all of us, myself included. She also drew a sketch of "Charlie," the knight who haunts the 500-year-old house in which the Delaunays now live. Apparently he appeared when they started doing renovations on the place, to make sure that they didn't alter the place in a way that didn't sit well with him. "For instance, he would not have let you paint that wall green," Liloil said. She is the only person who has seen Charlie, but everyone in the family has stories about him moving their things around, ripping the covers off their feet or generally toying with them. Max swears that he saw him too, but wearing white pajamas rather than the black robe and medallion that Liloil sketched.<br />
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At the end of our stay, I felt nearly as sad to be leaving as I had that first time, twenty years ago. Daniel keeps asking us to return once more before we leave France--preferably with Matt--and even though it's far, I am tempted. I definitely don't want 20 more years to go by, although we all agreed on one thing, which is that people never really change.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-26209452997353393022014-04-08T04:57:00.001-07:002014-04-08T09:16:20.912-07:00Sarcastique<br />
On Mardi Gras, all the other kids in Max's class came in costume. We hadn't realized that it was a kind of Halloween-lite here, and Max was upset to be left out. He rolled his eyes at my suggestion that he could say he was dressed as a ninja, since he happened to be wearing a black shirt and pants.<br />
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"Look at me. I'm a witch," said his teacher Anne, a silver-haired Irish woman in her late fifties, wearing a black dress and tights. "And I'm not in costume, either."<br />
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"You're the most sarcastic teacher I know," Max said.<br />
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"I'm not sarcastic," Anne replied. "I have a dry, British sense of humor. Can you repeat that please? <i>You have a dry, British sense of humor.</i><i>" </i><br />
<i><br /></i>"Sarcastic!" Max repeated, rolling his eyes again--a new "skill" that he is practicing dutifully. It takes like a minute for his eyes to make the entire 180 degree sweep. My own eye sockets ache, just watching. And he's getting more sarcastic by the hour.<br />
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Until recently, Max didn't even know what sarcasm meant. I'm not sure where he first heard the term, but he now tries to drop it into every conversation. At the house of some French friends of Ward and Vivienne's who had invited us over for a lovely afternoon snack of the most amazing crepes and creme caramel I've ever tasted, he announced that he hadn't learned much French at school.<br />
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"Like, I don't even know how to say 'sarcastic' in French," he complained.<br />
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"Sarcastique," they told him. "It's the same."<br />
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This pleased him. He asked how to say homework. They told him. "J'aime les devoirs," he said. I like homework. They looked confused, not understanding that this was his attempt to demonstrate the principle of sarcasm in French. Or maybe it's just that sarcasm doesn't work in French.<br />
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Max's teacher Anne is right that her sense of humor is very British--which is probably why I find her so funny, because I generally prefer British humor. She has also been living in Paris for 40 years, married to a Frenchman. "He says I've become more French than the French," she told me. But whereas she may dress like a Parisian and observe the rules of politesse, her sense of humor remains intact.<br />
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"Sarcastique" may be the word for sarcasm in French, but it has never seemed to me to be a big part of French culture, where there is still respect for mimes and clowns. Matt wisely forbade me from signing Max up for the atelier on "le clowning" over his last school holiday, reminding me that where we come from, this is the stuff of horror, not humor. When I was a high school exchange student here, I remember feeling like my own sarcastic sense of humor didn't come across in French.<br />
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Max's bilingual montessori school here draws a hodgepodge of kids whose families have settled temporarily in Paris. Most of his classmates in his tiny class speak two languages at home, often not the same two they speak at school. These families are almost all going to go elsewhere eventually, and so they're reluctant to put their kids into the notoriously rigid French public school system. Or else they're committed to montessori education, something about which we knew little before arriving here. It's very childcentric and--if this school is representative--very earnest. <br />
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This week, after dropping Max off at school, Matt was stopped by a mother (American) who wanted to talk about something "upsetting" to her daughter, and asked if he could wait 10 minutes. With a sinking feeling he agreed, wondering what Max had done wrong this time. Well, nothing as it turned out--or nothing more than what we were already well aware of: whistling incessantly. He mastered this other new "skill" a few weeks ago, and has a particular fondness for whistling the Harry Potter theme song, a minor key ditty that repeats over and over. As with everything else, he does it at maximum volume. He has also mastered selective deafness when told to knock it off. Now apparently his teachers are as sick of listening to it as we are, and in class the other day, Anne said, "If you don't stop whistling, I'll have to put a piece of tape on your mouth."<br />
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This is what had so upset this woman's daughter that she brought it up with her mother, who then shared the story with Matt and also with the other parents in the tiny class, all of whom were adamant that we should contact the administration ASAP. "I would have been on the phone in five minutes," one told me. "I would have considered pulling my child from the school," said another.<br />
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Both Matt and I thought: <i>really? </i>It's not like she actually taped his mouth, and to be honest, I wouldn't have cared if she had. As a kid at the French lycee in San Francisco, I often had a piece of scotch tape covering my mouth. It was an effective solution when kids chatted with their friends in class, as I was often wont to do. I remember it being kind of irritating but not traumatic. Besides, I remain convinced that we all--well, writers at least--benefit from these small humiliations. Without them, would anyone have anything to write about later on?<br />
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"When your teacher threatened to tape your mouth if you wouldn't stop whistling, how did you feel?" we asked Max privately, trying to figure out if we should be as upset as the other parents.<br />
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He shrugged. "Okay," he said.<br />
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"Were you scared?" we asked.<br />
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"No," he said.<br />
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"Did you feel upset at all?"<br />
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"No," he said. "I have very moist lips. I could use the power of my tongue to break through the tape. Besides, she's not really going to do it. She was just being sarcastic." He grinned.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-7570375206389002152014-03-20T02:44:00.000-07:002014-03-20T02:50:22.835-07:00La PolitesseMonday afternoon, Max and I were in line to buy two baguettes from the bakery near his school that we like when I realized that the folks in front of us were American.<br />
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They were immediately recognizable by the guy's baseball cap and battered athletic shoes (ie: worn for comfort not style), the woman's loud nasal voice and, most crucially, the fact that they were talking in American to the woman behind the counter. No chance of anyone mistaking these two for anything other than my countryfolk. They did not modify their speech in any way (ie: slowing it down, attempting to throw in a French word here or there as a token gesture at communicating in the language of the place where they happened to be visitors, ie: France). They were also taking an extremely long time to place their order, deliberating over pastries (in American, naturally, to each other, all but ignoring the cashier and the line that gathered behind them, then adding a few diet cokes (coca light, they should've said) at the last minute. Their total came to over 20 euros. The dude pulled out a credit card. In French, he was told that they only take cash. He looked at the woman blankly.<br />
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"<i>Monnaie</i>," she said. The couple shook their heads, apparently unable to understand the homonym. The cashier exhaled noisily. I hate to make cultural generalizations (ok, that's not true) but the French have the most expressive exhales of any nationality. Outside the human species, only horses use their nostrils with such gusto and flare. No need to speak a word of their language to understand that this woman was beyond annoyed.<br />
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At this point, the couple became flustered. If they'd done any research, they would have known that lots of small businesses here are still cash-only. Maybe they'd spent it all at the Eiffel Tower. They began counting out their change. It took a long time, probably because their hands were shaking as they suffered the cashier's withering stare. Together, they had less than 8 euros.<br />
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Now I could have been nice. I had the difference in my wallet, and then some. I could have loaned it to them, accompanied them to an ATM machine. But that would've been a massive hassle, I had formed a powerful dislike of them, and--more importantly--seized the opportunity to be a better kind of American, brown-noser than I am. I didn't go so far as to shake my head in apparent disbelief along with everyone else, as they slowly deliberated over which items the woman should put back. But once our turn came in line, I made a point of treating the cashier with great politesse, following the rules of the civil shop exchange in my best possible French, aware that my accent, though pretty good for an American, still betrayed me as such. I was glad. She'd see that <i>I </i>was a different kind of tourist, or rather <i>not </i>a tourist at all. <br />
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"<i>Bonjour madame. Nous voudrons...</i>"<br />
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If this couple had done any reading whatsoever on the etiquette of the land they were visiting, they should've known that it's considered rude here not to greet a shopkeeper with a polite hello, good morning or good evening, before placing an order. It's not that hard to pronounce these words, and effort is always appreciated. Max, after three months, has become fluent in <i>politesse</i>, and I must say it's taking him far. He always greets the people who sell him his beloved pain au chocolat before he requests one, and then he says, "<i>Merci beaucoup. Bonne journee." </i>I can't always get him to say please and thank you in English, but the difference is that he knows few other words in French, so he likes showing off where he can. He also likes the clear smile of approval that his <i>politesse </i>inevitably earns him. He's a bit of a brown-noser too, I guess. (Oh, and sometimes he gets an extra little treat shoved in his bag, a custardy tart at <i>Du Pain et Des Idees</i>, or a <i>chouquette, </i>these delicious eggy puffs, like profiteroles minus the cream, sprinkled with nubs of sugar).<br />
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Not long after we first got to France, I had coffee with an American woman who has been living here for years, and who wrote a guide book on moving to France. She mentioned that some of the things that had initially drawn her to Paris were growing wearisome, among them "the famous<i> politesse." </i>She pronounced this sarcastically. We didn't have long to talk and I didn't really get a chance to ask what she meant, but I remember thinking that I hadn't heard of this as a French quality before, that more often French people get stereotyped as rude--at least by Americans who return from visits with stories of "terrible customer service," no doubt having been about as charming as that couple in front of me at the patisserie, who all but courted rudeness in return.<br />
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After having been here for a few months, it's starting to become clearer to me that there's a thin line between <i>politesse </i>and rudeness--or rather it's easy to violate the rules of <i>politesse </i>and slip into rudeness--and to be treated in kind.<br />
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It was a glorious spring afternoon on Monday. After buying our baguettes, Max and I met up with Matt at the library where he'd been working all day, and the three of us decided to walk home. On the way, we took an unfamiliar path and stumbled upon a new bakery advertising in its window that they'd won the gold prize for the best baguette in Paris in 2013.<br />
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"The current baguette laureate!" Matt said.<br />
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Even though I already had 2 (okay, 1.25 by that point) baguettes in my bag, we decided that we couldn't possibly pass up the chance to try the reigning champion, so I popped in to buy a third baguette of the day, pleased as always by how inexpensive it was. 120 euros! Just a dollar fifty! I love the fact that baguettes have a standardized price, that the baguette laureate costs the same as a crappy baguette at Carrefour, that everyone should have the same access to bread, regardless of means. Max wanted to tear into it right away, but we overruled him (it's not actually polite to walk around eating, although people do violate this rule, earning scowls) and decided to bring it home to do a blind taste test between baguettes.<br />
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On our walk home, we passed Notre Dame and took the road next to it that cuts across a bridge between flower vendors, which was tres picturesque. We were almost at the end of the bridge when I overheard an increasingly heated exchange, in French, between a man and two flower vendors. Apparently he'd just asked them for directions somewhere.<br />
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"You're welcome!" she yelled.<br />
<br />
"Excuse me?" he called back over his shoulder, having walked away.<br />
<br />
"You're welcome for the directions!"<br />
<br />
"I said thank you! I said it twice!"<br />
<br />
"Well, there are two of us standing here, and neither of us heard you!"<br />
<br />
"Thank you!" He was yelling too now. "Thank you so much, <i>madame.</i>"<br />
<br />
"It's only polite to thank someone when they give you directions!"<br />
<br />
I translated this for Matt, and we both found it quite funny. I don't think that French people "are rude," as Americans sometimes say. But often strengths and weaknesses are linked. It's frequently the case in writing, I've noticed, that a good thing can become too much of a good thing pretty fast. And maybe this is the case with <i>politesse</i>, too. Or maybe it's just that the French love a good excuse to tell someone off. Again, far be it from me to make a cultural generalization, but it's something I've noticed both when I lived here as a teenager and again on this stay.<br />
<br />
Max and I were at a farmer's market last Wednesday, right when the vendors were closing up shop, and I happened to set my backpack on a bare wooden table to try and consolidate the things we'd bought before we headed to the Metro. A woman came at that moment to pack up the table, and man was I inconveniencing her with my backpack! "<i>Mais c'est pas vrai!" </i>It can't be possible! She yelled as I scrambled to shove my things in it. "Some of us have work to do! This isn't your table to use like that!" I was the ugly American that time, although her voluble irritation was so close to the surface, I almost had the feeling that I was doing her a favor, giving her someone to lash out on and scratch that itch.<br />
<br />
I'm still trying to figure out the rules. Some rules, like greeting shopkeepers and saying goodbye before leaving the store, are clear and easy to follow. Yesterday, a man on the Metro seized the chance, as the doors opened, to drop a wrapper down in the gap onto the tracks. And another man seized the chance to tell him off. OK-don't litter. Others are murkier. Is it rude to ride your bike on the sidewalk, when the streets are crowded with traffic? I've been testing it out, and no one has told me off yet. According to a French friend, traffic laws here are "suggestions." Maybe that applies to bikes too.<br />
<br />
Last week, I was shopping at the cluttered and grimy Franprix, carrying a ridiculously overburdened basket of food, when I happened to knock into a poorly placed display of chocolate easter eggs, one of which fell to the ground. Thinking myself unobserved (frankly, not thinking much at all) I sort of toed it back in the general vicinity of the pile. A moment later, a cashier literally came running from the registers at the front of the store (was she watching me in a mirror?), and told me off for not having picked it up.<br />
<br />
"It's not done!" she yelled. "If you drop something, you put it back where it was!"<br />
<br />
Fair enough, but I felt my blood begin to boil in spite of myself. "I think you can see that my hands are full," I replied in French.<br />
<br />
"So you set your basket down," she said.<br />
<br />
"Well excuse me," I said. "But if your store were less cluttered, that would be easier to do!"<br />
<br />
Even though I have no doubt that she could tell by my accent exactly who--and what--I was, I didn't feel particularly American right then. We are (I think) pretty conflict adverse, gritting our teeth and smiling falsely even when we're seriously annoyed. And I have to say, it felt good to lash back at her.<br />
<br />
We haven't been here long enough for me to tire of <i>politesse</i>, and I enjoy the street drama of the little fights that break out and then dissipate just as fast. It's great people watching. I also haven't tired of the baguettes. After our blind taste test, we reached the unanimous consensus that the baguette laureate was indeed and clearly superior to our former favorite baguette. So apparently these distinctions do mean something, and we're French enough to be able to tell the difference.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-1378394440799902252014-03-14T09:23:00.000-07:002014-03-14T09:23:02.138-07:00Baguettiquette<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif2KiZycrK0eP2mOT8-pTpsac-MtmK2Q4CB52UglbunvlXSSUSrOfcL17W7661WbUKaMZ490qVorlSknIQLInWDMUsMtnsObvofZc8UfiaVN8x2aGyo4t-gXN5O_0kIBeVobn-OfwCCGE/s1600/baguette_2523140b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif2KiZycrK0eP2mOT8-pTpsac-MtmK2Q4CB52UglbunvlXSSUSrOfcL17W7661WbUKaMZ490qVorlSknIQLInWDMUsMtnsObvofZc8UfiaVN8x2aGyo4t-gXN5O_0kIBeVobn-OfwCCGE/s1600/baguette_2523140b.jpg" height="198" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
I just rented a Velib to go and grab a baguette.<br />
<br />
Now that spring is here and the sun is out, I'm seizing every chance I get to bike around Paris. The bike I selected this afternoon had about 30% brake functionality. That's a good Velib, too good to risk returning at a kiosk that might then malfunction and not register that you returned your bike, as happened to me earlier this week. I'm terrified by the prospect of having to call the Velib office (I shudder even to imagine the place) and explain to someone in my halting and accented French that I did, I truly did, return the bike as per the rules. I could already hear the sigh of disbelief. I also couldn't risk returning the bike and trying to find another one when I had just half an hour before Max got home from school to bike 1.7 kilometers and back. I had promised get him a "religieuse" or double chocolate eclair, for an end of the week treat today. There are closer bakeries to our apartment. There's at least one bakery per block, sometimes two. But I wanted to visit this particular bakery, in the 9th arrondissement, because I'd learned that it won the "best baguette in Paris" contest in 2007. Having already frequented the bakeries that won the "best baguette in Paris" contests in 2003 and in 2011, I'm eager to keep going, to find out which deserves the grand prix d'or for the city.<br />
<br />
I found the bakery in question, bought Max his eclair, a small lemon tart (because those need sampling too) and one baguette, stashed it all in the Velib's handy front basket, and biked home, making good time due to those faulty brakes, feeling damn Parisian as I watched my bread bounce around. It's a Parisian cliche matched only by the beret. But I'm not wearing "hobo headgear," as Max calls it.<br />
<br />
Before we came to France, I went through a few dark months where the hassles of dealing with uprooting our life and plunking it down over here seemed so overwhelming that I questioned whether the move was even worth it. Everything was hard, and everything was hard twice. We had to find a subletter for our apartment back home, and find a sublet to rent over here, figure out how to pull Max out of school for a year without losing his spot, and find a school that would accept him for that long over here, convince my work that I could do my job okay from here, and convince the French government that I wasn't going to be working at all, so that we could get our long term stay visas.<br />
<br />
My early encounters with French bureaucracy at the embassy in San Francisco were daunting, accurately foreshadowing the joys of dealing with a massive and often ineffective government. You should've seen how the woman at the embassy coquettishly laughed when we handed her our visa applications over which we'd labored for weeks, turning us away because we hadn't copied and properly collated every document into three piles and had instead created one pile for the whole family. Given that it was a family application, the mistake seemed understandable to me, but she didn't have the time to make piles! She was extremely busy! And how crazy we were not to realize that we clearly needed a third copy of our notarized promise not to seek employment in France, and our Parisian apartment's rental contract, for six-year-old Max! (Where did she think he'd be living? In a pied a terre of his own?)<br />
<br />
I'd be lying if I said that I kept my cool either during or after that appointment, ranting about how I highly doubted we'd ever get this visa, and even if we did, were we sure we wanted to live in the country that had produced this beastly woman who seemed to derive great pleasure from showing us the error of our ways rather than helping us? Sick of listening to me complain, Matt finally said in exasperation, "To make all of this hassle feel worth it, you'd better figure out something about France that you're looking forward to, something you're really excited to discover there, even if it's only the bread."<br />
<br />
I remember this comment because it took me by surprise. The bread? That was supposed to be the big pay off? Now Matt is not a "foodie," and bread was pretty low on his list of things he was looking forward to discovering in France. As long as the food is decent, he seems perfectly content eating more or less the same thing every day--the dietary version of his white shirt/dark jeans or black pants uniform--leaving him more time to focus on other, presumably more important things. Plus, bread had earned a bad name in our house. For about a year, we'd been trying to eat as little of it (and other starches) as possible, on the "Dukkan diet," which originated over here of all places. Well, no wonder. The results were hard to ignore. Bread does indeed make you fat, even if it's simply because it tastes so good that you can't stop eating it, whereas few people reach for yet another chicken breast.<br />
<br />
Matt wasn't the only person who cited bread as a major plus of living in Paris. My friend Maria, who'd lived here for many years with her family, happened to be visiting San Francisco right when we were dealing with the visa nightmare, and she too mentioned that the bread here was better than anyplace else. "Or so they say," she added (herself a carb avoider).<br />
<br />
I considered abstaining from carbs here in France. Or at least limiting them. But life is short, and our time here is shorter. Also, life in Paris is expensive, and the baguette is one notable exception to that rule (along with wine, government subsidized to keep the vintners going).<br />
<br />
It turns out that baguettes are required to follow certain rules in order to earn the name. A law from 1933 decrees that a "baguette tradition," the beautifully irregular ones with pointy ends, can contain just 4 ingredients: flour, leavening, water and salt. They rarely cost more than 1.40 (or about $2) and usually they're just 1.20. The best way to get rid of pocket change that I know of. Max likes a pain au chocolat after school (who doesn't?) and there's a decent bakery (though no awards have come its way) halfway between the library where I work in the day and his school. On the way to pick him up, I'll often grab a baguette (or two) along with his pain au chocolat. Inevitably, we end up tearing into it long before we make it home. Sometimes finishing it.<br />
<br />
Different people look for different things in a baguette. You can request one that's "bien cuite" (well done) or "pas trop cuite" (on the pale side). We like the one from that bakery near his school because the crust is fairly pale without being underdone, a light caramel color, and the insides are springy and moist, almost like the chewiness of a bagel but less dense. (There are bagel stores in Paris now too, but the bagels taste wrong, apparently because the French are highly reluctant to boil bread). All of this talk about something so seemingly uniform, reminds me of living in Japan, where people endlessly discussed and debated which prefecture had the best rice. I mean rice, baguettes, we're talking about the plainest, whitest foods imaginable. But Matt should understand. He of the self-imposed uniform, who derives much pleasure from noticing the distinctions between white button-down shirts that others with a less trained eye would find identical.<br />
<br />
He knows me well, and he was characteristically prescient when he suggested that bread might just become my raison d'etre here. I mean I do think about other things, I really do, but it's fun to have a reason to take a long bike ride through Paris on a sunny afternoon, and judging by the fact that the baguette I brought home today is already gone (and it's not 5 pm yet) that bakery deserved its award.<br />
<br />
Amusingly, I was researching baguettes when I came across two interesting facts.<br />
<br />
1. The baguette as we know it took shape (quite literally) thanks to one of the government's many laws designed to protect workers. In October of 1919, a law was passed forbidding bakers of bread and pastry from working between ten in the evening and four in the morning. Due to its thinness, the baguette could be prepared and baked in less time than more traditional loaves.<br />
<br />
2. Just today, the paper included a front page article about an 80 page report that came out critiquing the French government for upholding 400,000 "norms," rules that public bodies and private businesses must uphold, going to "absurd and costly" lengths and hurting the economy. They say, "The last time a French norm was scrapped was in 1789."<br />
<br />
According to this article, one of these "norms" is the rule dictating the width of a baguette.<br />
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<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-68795847609828632182014-03-05T01:22:00.000-08:002014-03-05T01:32:23.753-08:00Good To Be Home<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
I'm back in Paris, after a trip to the US that was so short that I'm not convinced I ever fully got over the jetlag, waking up so many times each night that I felt fuzzy every day. My first night back here, I fell into a deep and uninterrupted sleep and woke up when Max came into our room at 6:30. It's almost like I never left, except that things seem more normal now, less foreign.<br />
<br />
For the first two months that we were here, I got hopelessly lost covering the four blocks from the Strasbourg Saint-Denis metro stop to our apartment's red front door on Rue de l'Echiquier. I mean, I got out of that metro at least once a day--so sixty times, minimum--and every single time, I managed to get turned around on the way home. In my defense, the metro station has half a dozen different exits that spit you out onto different sides of streets that seem to have been planned by a blind sadist. All of the neighborhood landmarks--the KFC's, the Carrefours, the cafes with hammered brass tables, the Turkish sandwich shops, Muslim butchers, and countless African beauty salons--repeat so often that they don't really help you get oriented.<br />
<br />
When you're lost, windows full of go-go wigs on styrofoam heads are the stuff of nightmares.<br />
<br />
Still, sometimes I feel like the blind person.<br />
<br />
So I couldn't believe it when I got off a ten hour flight (scrunched in the middle seat), successfully navigated the RER from the airport, transfered to the right metro without consulting the map, and then found the way to our apartment--for the first time ever--without getting lost. The good thing about being as directionally challenged as I am is that it gives you the right to celebrate small victories.<br />
<br />
It may have taken me 2 months, but I did it!<br />
<br />
In my absence, Max and Matt fared just fine, although poor Matt got saddled with a lot of solo childcare as I happened to leave for my trip right when Max was on one of his "vacances scolaires." Again in my defense, when I booked these dates, it didn't cross my mind that Max might have a 2 week vacation just a month and a half after the end of the winter holidays. I wasn't yet aware that he'd be getting 2 weeks off every 6 weeks. Given this fact, the odds were good that my trip might overlap with one of these vacations. But Freud says that there are no accidents, and he might be right in this case. (I mean I <i>could </i>have checked the school calendar...) While I missed both Matt and Max a lot, a week away from your 6 year old is definitely a vacation, even when you're on a work trip. And a school vacation counts as hard work for the parent left behind to entertain him.<br />
<br />
Paris is notoriously dreary in February. Most of the families in Max's class left France for the break, in pursuit of sun or snow. Since the rain made playgrounds impossible many days, Matt and Max spent a lot of time at museums. Max took a 2 hour perfume-making class ("I'm not sure why there weren't more boys in it," he said afterwards, sounding genuinely baffled), and another 2 hour class at the Louvre called "mimer la sculpture," that I'd signed him up for weeks earlier. Max loves making art, and was excited to get to work with clay, but apparently my translation skills need some work. I thought it would be a sculpture class, but it turned out to be a class in which the kids wandered around the museum and "mimed" the sculpture--posing like statues. <i> How French.</i><br />
<br />
The boys fared just fine without me, with one exception. On a trip to a kids' science museum, Max fell over backwards in his chair and hit his head on the marble floor, which necessitated a visit to the French ER resulting in three stitches.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Note to self: never make the mistake of callously suggesting that head wounds bleed a lot, so maybe these three stitches weren't necessary. Never laugh (nervously) at the righteous indignation of the parent who had to experience the trauma of all that bloodshed and sit through the interminable ER visit. Never suggest that said visit was probably so long because they had to attend to serious injuries first.<br />
<br />
Max, over Skype, in a wobbly little voice: "Are you <i>laughing </i>at my wound, Mommy?")<br />
<br />
I grew up with a doctor in the house. All injuries were minor compared to whatever gory surgery my father had performed that day, and his attitude rubbed off. I also couldn't help thinking back to when Max was 4, and he became frantically convinced that a bug had flown into his ear, that he could still hear it "clicking around" in there. We spent three hours at St. Luke's, after which an attending shone a light in his ear and charged us $800 for the insight that a bug might have flown in and out. Or maybe he'd imagined it.<br />
<br />
Later this week, we arre supposed to go to the doctor to have Max's stitches removed, but I've done a little research on the internet and it seems pretty easy to snip each loop and pull them out. Only scissors and a pair of tweezers needed! I'm frankly a little offended that Max, who hates going to the doctor with a passion, told me that he'd rather see a professional.<br />
<br />
"I am a professional," I said.<br />
<br />
"A professional what?" he asked.<br />
<br />
Instead of answering, I told him that our friend Danielle (also a doctor's daughter) actually removed her own cast with a saw.<br />
<br />
He didn't seem reassured, but he said, "If you think you can do it, then Mommy I'll let you try."<br />
<br />
It's good to be home.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-68770061423850478072014-02-20T17:39:00.000-08:002014-02-20T17:39:03.419-08:00The Voluminous Package
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<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The notice in our mailbox said that while we were out, we had
received a "packet volumineux.” This sounded promising, since our mailbox is
quite large. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">We'd actually been at home when the postman rang at 7 pm on a
Monday, but we’d ignored the bell, not wanting to descend five flights for
nothing, figuring someone must have leaned on it by accident. It's not like we
have a ton of friends here, and none who would spontaneously drop by. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">There was no checked box on
the notice to indicate that there would be any attempt to re-deliver the package.
Instead, there was note saying that it
would be left for us to pick up at either the Bonne Nouvelle or the Strasbourg
Saint Denis Poste in two days. That either/or threw me. But we live equidistant between
them, and I figured that if I picked wrong, they’d simply redirect me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Max and I went to Bonne Nouvelle after school on the day specified
on the notice. He was pretty excited to pick up the box, certain that it was
going to contain presents for him—a safe bet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"Bonjour," I said, hoping I’d picked the right post office.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">A man in a yellow poste vest took my notice and typed a long code of numbers into his computer, then tilted his
head as he clucked his tongue. "Ah non. It's not
here," he said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"So it's at Strasbourg Saint Denis?" <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"Non," he said. "It hasn't arrived yet."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"Arrived from where? I don't understand." </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">He took this to mean that his French was beyond my grasp, making a louder clucking
sound of disapproval. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“It hasn’t come in,” he repeated.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"But we live down the block, and it was already delivered to
us. And this is today's date." I pointed at the bottom of the
slip. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"Maybe it'll arrive later." His eyes searched beyond me to the next customer in line. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“Tomorrow?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“Maybe,” he said, and then—clearly eager to get rid of me—“yes, I
think tomorrow. Be sure to bring your identity card to claim it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Max was disappointed, but I told him we’d return right after
school the next day, further tormenting him by dragging him to get some
groceries, since we weren’t going to have to carry a heavy box up five flights
after all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">When we went back the next day, a new poste employee was handling
customer service, a smiling woman in a yellow vest. Before even typing the
numbers into her screen, she asked to see my ID, and I was ready with my
driver’s license.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“Ah non. What is this?” she said.
“La Californie?” She sounded suspicious, like I was trying to pull of some heist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“It's my driver’s license,” I said. “The man yesterday told me to bring
an identity card.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“But this is not a valid identity card here. This serves no
purpose here.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“It’s the same name." I showed her the slip. “The man
yesterday told me to come back today with an ID, and I'd be able to pick up
my package.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"But you need your passport!" </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"He didn't say passport."</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“Ohlala,” she shook her head and grudgingly entered the code into the computer. “Well, it doesn't matter because it’s not here." She seemed almost pleased.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“Where is it?” I said. “I live one block away. Where did the
package go after it left our apartment three days ago?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">She shrugged, but then she disappeared into some back room, and a few minutes later she returned carrying an Amazon box
that held a single paperback. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“I found it,” she said, eyeing me warily before handing it over.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“Do you know why the postman didn’t just leave this in our box?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“It says<i> </i>right here: packet
volumineux.” She smiled that maddening smile again. “I’ll let you take it
today. But next time, you'll have to show your passport.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-75351334390315291332014-02-16T23:42:00.003-08:002014-02-16T23:42:54.708-08:00Melancholy MugglesWe finished reading the last Harry Potter to Max last night, and today I've been walking around in a sad hangover state. Colors seem duller. Time is creeping by. Max has been edgy, too, pushing my buttons, hard to please. We've been ejected from the world that we've been dipping into (okay, drowning in) all fall. We aren't sure what to do with ourselves now, where to go next.<br />
<br />
I used to mock adults who got sucked into the Pottersphere. Grown-ups "queing" outside bookstores all night to get their hands on the latest doorstop. Warlocks (little did I know) and soccer in the sky? Not for me. I'd read the first Harry Potter fifteen years ago when I was living in Japan, and I found it juvenile, not especially thrilling and more than a little geeky, smelling of Ren Faire, a new take on "Magic The Gathering."<br />
<br />
But I'd heard that the books in the series get better, and enough people whose opinions I respect loved the series that I figured it was worth another try once Max was ready. By the time he was six, we'd read everything by Roald Dahl, and I was getting damn sick of <i>The Magic Treehouse</i>, an unbelievably dull series of like 75 books in which a robotic brother and sister named Jack and Annie travel through time to play a part (Forest Gump-like) at key historical moments. It was while reading these books that I realized can read a whole book aloud without processing a single word of it. It made me feel as robotic as Jack and Annie, and also sorry that I couldn't be reading something better, something to make Max understand why a book can be more engrossing and affecting than a TV show. Also, I wanted to get some pleasure out of the time I was spending reading to him, as did Matt. <br />
<br />
We had a copy of Harry Potter in the bookshelf, and both of us would occasionally try to coax him into listening to a chapter, though he resisted at first. The lack of pictures made it seem over his head, and that first book has quite a slow start--as do many of the others, for that matter. It takes a while to get used to Rowling's lackadaisical pacing. The point is to enter and then dwell in that world, and since the episodic plot spans 4000 pages, sometimes it takes two or three hundred pages to get to the "inciting incident" in any particular novel. But little by little, he got sucked in--all three of us did. We started Book 1 in early November, and finished Book 7 in mid-February, which means that it took only 4 months to read the 7 books--approximately 1000 pages per month. It wasn't until I started drafting this--my eulogy for the series, it feels like--that I realize how well they've kept us company through the major transitions of the fall.<br />
<br />
We read Book 2 aloud on the drive up to Oregon for Thanksgiving, where we were leaving our car with my mom before departing, a month later, for France. We spent the majority of a rainy day all tucked in bed, reading the book until we finished it, then "celebrating" by watching the video. (Which became our ritual, upon completing a book). We hurried to a bookstore on the way to the airport and bought Book 3, which was a good thing since our flight back to San Francisco got delayed until 2 am, so we read about 100 pages while lying on the ground in a weird little oasis of a deserted pub at the Eugene airport, where there wa a standing lamp that provided the perfect reading light.<br />
<br />
We kept reading Book 3 while walking down South Van Ness every morning, as a way to motivate Max to trek the mile to school without complaint. (No more car). The power to read while walking is one I honed as a kid, and it returned to serve me well. Sometimes we'd get to his school early, and duck into Carlin's, the cafe on the corner, to read another 10 pages before he had to head off to kindergarten. We were always a little sorry when the clock said 8:15 and we had to stop, and he'd make me promise not to read while I walked back home.<br />
<br />
We read Book 4 on the trip to Paris. We were only about 200 pages into it when we left, and it should have taken at least a couple of weeks to read the next 400 pages, except that our trip went so terribly wrong and we ended up having that 35 hour journey by plane and bus instead of the 8 hour one it was supposed to be to get here. Harry Potter made the extra 11 hours on the bus from Zurich more than bearable--enjoyable even. But by the time we got to our apartment, we were at the end.<br />
<br />
Disaster! Somehow, in the packing, we'd brought Books 6 and 7 but not 5. My mom was rapidly dispatched to send the missing volume. We got the email saying that it was on the way and should reach Paris in a week. But suddenly, a week seemed interminable. We were having fun exploring Paris, but it was cold and different and we were exhausted at the end of each day, which is when we always cap things off with a book in bed. Max had this new home and language to get used to, no familiar friends to play with, and he really missed Harry Potter. I mention these things to justify what I did next. <br />
<br />
After discovering that Ms. Rowling's books are not available in thrifty e-versions (clever billionaire) I did the quickest of searches to see if there might be a bootleg version available for download. I know that as a writer, I shouldn't even have considered such a thing. I had never previously downloaded a book, but some teens I worked with did it often. And we were really jonesing for a fix. Lo and behold! Victoire! Ten minutes later, I'd found a link, and shunted the downloaded PDF over to ibooks, where the 600 page document opened without a hitch on my ipad. <br />
<br />
I felt slightly guilty but mostly rather pleased with myself as I lay beside Max for the next few nights to read to him from Book 5: The Order of the Phoenix. I'd told my visiting mother-in-law that these books were actually very well written, with great pacing and characters but also wonderful language, especially when read aloud, and so she sat in the little couch at the base of Max's bunkbed to listen along while I read this long scene in which Harry and Dudley make up and become buddies after watching a Monty Python marathon. This was weird. Rowling didn't usually make pop culture references--part of the charm of Hogwarts is that it's apart from all that, contemporary and yet timeless, "relatable" but magical. There was also a weird line that I remember about how Hedwig, Harry's owl, looked mangled, "as if she'd flown into the garbage disposal." As far as I knew, there were no garbage disposals at Hogwarts. <br />
<br />
I have no idea who wrote the alternate Book 5 that I downloaded, but they were just good enough that it took 50 pages before I realized that I was reading fanfiction. That's how far I'd come from being the person who mocked adults for reading Harry Potter. I was downloading bootlegs of fanfiction.<br />
<br />
Book 5 arrived shortly, and kept us good company--along with 6 and finally 7--through our first two months here in Paris. For me (and many others, I know) the charm and success of the series is the way that it creates and sustains an entire world, that has a lot in common with ours but lots more possibilities. Who wouldn't want to be able to cast these spells and curses? The characters are remarkably (some might say impossibly) consistent, always recognizably themselves even though you see them grow up over the course of 7 years. Being a "late adopter," I got to watch them grow up and save the world in fast forward. I can sort of understand those people waiting all night to finally get their hands on the next sequel. What's amazing to me is how she wrote the books without ever dumbing down the language or the story, so that they can appeal to her (millions of geeky) adult readers, who can never guess how things are going to go, but they are just as interesting to a six-year-old kid. Max actually surpassed our ability to keep the plot points straight. The only thing he objected to mildly was the kissing, and there were only about 15 pages of romance out of 4000 total.<br />
<br />
Over the past four months, we've been in San Francisco, Oregon, Paris and Switzerland, and we've always had these books as a way to make the time pass on long journeys going from one spot to another, never quite sure where exactly we'd land upon our arrival, but always relatively certain of what we'd find in those pages. Rowling's magic worked on Max, like it has on so many kids. He now understands that a good book is a kind of home, better in a way than any real one, because it can come with you wherever you go. But now that we're done with the last book, I'm afraid we are all going to feel homeless for a little while. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-46295637798469104412014-02-14T02:43:00.000-08:002014-02-14T02:43:05.101-08:00Ma Poule<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Max came home from first grade a week ago with a fifteen line poem tucked into his
red cahier. "Ma Poule" is about a chicken that wears a lot of different colored
hats for different occasions and in different kinds of weather. His teacher’s
instructions were that he should copy it in French cursive and then memorize
it, so that he could recite it in front of his class. </div>
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He had no French at all when we got here, and contrary to what people said, that he'd "pick up in weeks," it hasn't been nearly that instantaneous. After two months, he has learned how to say, “Un poulet, s’il vous plait,” to the man who sells the roasted chickens on our corner. He’s got “bonjour,” “au revoir,” and “merci," and the basic numbers. And that's about it.<br />
<br />
He's going to a tiny bilingual school where the first three hours of the day are taught in English and the afternoon three in
French. The school’s aim is to follow the standard national French curriculum,
so that the kids can join their classmates at grade level if they choose to go
to a regular French school later on. Memorizing and reciting poetry is part of
the standard French curriculum, and so is taking dictation in “French
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Knowing that Max would be returning to the States after this year, his teachers here gave him the choice of learning French cursive or
continuing to write in American print letters. But in spite of the fact that the kid still struggles to hold a
pencil correctly, often jabbing little holes into the page, Max chose to learn French cursive, partly to fit in, but also I think because it sounds fancier. And it is. Matt insists that it’s no
different from any other cursive, but that’s because he never had to suffer
through being tested on its finer nuances. The e requires the pen to skip ahead
before forming a perfect loop. The t should never be crossed. The l only bulges on the right. The upper case q is a beast
that I never got down.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was about Max’s age when I learned French cursive. My elementary school in San Francisco had a similar aim to the
school he’s attending here. It was a French school that was following the
national curriculum as strictly as possible, so that the majority--expat kids
from France--could eventually reenter their own system when their families
returned home.<br />
<br />
One of the reasons we didn’t send Max to a French public school
here is that, in my memory at least, this school was kind of Dickensian. I didn't hate it, but it made a lasting impression. The teachers thought nothing of spanking kids in
front of the class—pants down—and they'd read our report cards aloud at the end of
each term, and then seat us according to our grades: A students in front and
D students in back. Kids
were routinely mocked by teachers, made examples of and humiliated. Monsieur LeJeune had his own son in our third grade class, and he would
regularly call him “la mauvaise graine,” or “the bad seed.” When the boy cried, we consoled him. All of this sounds awful, but it was also a little bit thrilling to unite against injustice, to feel righteous and innocent, like the heroes of our favorite books. Sometimes I wonder what the products of American
progressive education will find to write about. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Before this year, Max was never asked to do any rote memorization. He didn't get homework at his American school, and there were no tests or grades. Knowledge is supposed to be its own reward, I get it, and I understand why bribes are a no-no. So I prefer to think
of the children’s fountain pen that I bought Max as an incentive to do his homework here. And honestly,
all those loops and flourishes in French cursive are totally wasted in ball point. Once
I was at the stationer, I couldn’t resist buying a fountain pen for myself as
well, and an extra cahier too. I vividly remembered learning to shape my French cursive in one of those notebooks ruled with tiny, pale blue horizontal
lines within which to position each element of every letter. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The fountain pen held Max’s interest for few days, but
writing (of any kind) remains a source of frustration. His ideas far
surpass his ability to put them to paper. Who can’t relate?<br />
<br />
The rote
memorization of French poetry, however, has proven surprisingly fun. Within a
couple of days, he’d managed to learn all fifteen lines of Ma Poule. While he doesn’t know
exactly what he’s saying, he gets the gist of it, and I can tell that he likes
the way the words roll off his tongue, the way that he sounds far more
competent than he is.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was just a little older than
Max when my grandfather, our family’s first and most ardent Francophile, paid
me one dollar to memorize his favorite Apollinaire poem. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Sous le pont Mirabeau
coule la seine et nos amours…<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Like Max, I couldn’t have given you a word-for-word translation, but
I loved the cadence of the language, the rhythm of the poem, and I definitely knew that I was saying something
far more beautiful than I had it in me to express. It was rote memorization, not especially creative, but it gave me something to reach for. Not to
mention a whole dollar. And thirty years later, I still remember it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-44505618503258696862014-02-05T02:34:00.002-08:002014-02-05T02:34:32.560-08:00The Cats of Belleville<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwojGnMotEypw2IFU5y2ni8Yf3ij45_bJeo_Lg6Y2pm3WlzTOWsBNr2Rs7b9QE727IYkbFHAfZZvZtIW9JWtooYRZTlH_28T7YKXzvyoihAskLPIzJYxSKY0N89gt0OfUg-2LnowSMlkM/s1600/The+cats+of+belleville.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwojGnMotEypw2IFU5y2ni8Yf3ij45_bJeo_Lg6Y2pm3WlzTOWsBNr2Rs7b9QE727IYkbFHAfZZvZtIW9JWtooYRZTlH_28T7YKXzvyoihAskLPIzJYxSKY0N89gt0OfUg-2LnowSMlkM/s1600/The+cats+of+belleville.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></a></div>
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We were walking into the Parc de Belleville when I saw them: more cats than I could count: black-and-white,
calico, ginger, but mostly a tribe of gray tigers, streaking from
under bushes and benches, darting from behind trees to coil around the ankles of two older women who were bundled against the chill of
the first Saturday in February. <o:p></o:p></div>
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That morning, we’d woken to the percussive sound of rain
pelting the courtyard of our apartment building, and almost abandoned our plan
to walk to Belleville. Every Saturday,
the three of us go for a long and purposeless
walk--flaneur-style. We start in the late morning and don't get home until dinnertime, without much of an appetite, since we stop for food whenever we
pass something that looks good, which is altogether too often. For the
past three weeks, we’d ended up taking more or less the
same route: past the Pompidou, across the bridge covered in locks behind Notre
Dame, down to the cobblestoned bank of the Seine where Max can't really ride his scooter, following it until it turns
into the smoother bike lane leading to the Berge, where Max always insists on a long break in his favorite inflatable tent, and finally to the base of the Eiffel
Tower, where there's a free craft class every Saturday afternoon at the American library, during which
parents can do their own thing for an hour. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Max loves a ritual. So do I. But it's easy for a ritual to turn into a rut. The whole point of being a flaneur is to wander off chart,
to make observations and discoveries that are more likely if you
deviate from routine and get a little lost. I was beginning to see Matt’s point: it's a shame to hide in a tent from which you can't even see the Seine flowing by outside. So when the rain finally cleared around noon on Saturday, we set out in the opposite direction from usual, up
the hill to Belleville, a "transitioning" neighborhood known as “the other Chinatown,” although
apparently this is not a PC term here, where foreigners are supposed to assimilate (if only it were that easy to "become" French).</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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We lured Max out into the cold, up the steep
incline toward Belleville, by telling him that we were on our way to a
playground ranked #2 in the world, according to some website that we’ve subsequently
failed to find again. This website had showed pictures of a playground designed by a famous
architect, with slides carved right into the hillside. The longer we had to climb, the steeper these slides became, as we described them to a whining Max. So it was a big blow when we finally reached this mythic playground and found the gate to the
slides locked, apparently due to the bad weather--according to one bystander--even though the sun had
finally come out. Max was on the verge of a meltdown when the cats started streaming in all directions, toward the two women carrying tote
bags.</div>
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“Look!” I said. Max and I both ran forward and the cats scattered.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Ils sont timides,” one woman informed me. They’re timid.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I apologized, explaining that Max misses his cat, Bowie, who we had to leave in America.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“You just left him?” she asked reproachfully, lifting an eyebrow.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“With his grandmother,” I hastened to add. “Just for this year, while we’re here.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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“Ah.” Her tone
softened and as she started taking tins of catfood out of her bag, popping one
open to dump it into a blue bowl. One by one, the cats returned, each receiving its own special dish, which the two women placed at intervals along the path. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Just the day before, Max and I had been talking about how we
hadn’t seen a single cat since arriving in France. Dogs are a different story. According to a woman who moved here with her
Lab, French landlords aren’t allowed to discriminate against renters with
dogs. Apparently owning one is a human right, while cleaning up after one is optional. The streets are an obstacle course of shivery
little dogs and their startlingly large turds. Maybe the dogs keep the cats away. </div>
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Max is a cat person to the core. Ever since he was a baby, he has recoiled from
the jerky movements and slobbery tongues of dogs, touched their fur with
great hesitancy, only when coaxed. This can be
embarrassing, especially when the dogs that cause him to cower are teacup poodles. I remember when he was still a toddler and we
were staying at the home of friends with a dog, trying to explain that dogs are traditionally considered “Man’s best friend.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“They're not mine,” he said, shrieking with fear as the Labradoodle tried to give him a "kiss," and announcing that he had a mouth like a wolf. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Maybe it's hereditary. Matt and I are both cat people too. Matt’s first cat, which he got when he was in
kindergarten, lived to be 25 years old—still kicking (or creeping arthritically, by all accounts) when Matt turned thirty. Max loves to hear stories of the legendary, ill-tempered Sylvester, who bit the neighbor’s cat in the butt, leaving a tooth behind. I also got my first cat when I was five. Our landlord forbade pets, but for some
reason my parents finally gave in to my begging, with the bizarre condition that I had
to give my kitten a French name. We’d had Pierre August Renoir for just a week when he was sunning on the
windowsill of our third floor flat, he rolled over and tipped out. I remember bolting downstairs, my stomach
cramped with the certainty that I was going to find him flat on the
sidewalk. But when I opened the front
door, he was standing as calm as can be, all four paws intact, looking up at me
like: <i>what’s the big deal, lady?</i></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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You can chalk it up to biology--apparently cats can dislocate their joints in midair--but I'm convinced that cats are at least a little bit magical. The Ancient Egyptians
agreed. At the Louvre recently, Max and
I were checking out the Egyptian gallery when we came upon a glass case of
carved stone animals labeled, “Spirit Familiars.” Not a dog in signt, Max pointed out, adding
that dogs wouldn’t be able to sit still long enough to assist in spell
work. (Nor could he, but that's beside the point).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZzTLBF2FsAJkUHYE6KFHkHcWprdq9xvbySVw-Bjx2y58p6XBRD-VHnwhwseJNaKXJWzVtrv5momUPh8t49Fcq1EoSr7jzC0yEEnZ5PH05vkpHy3JU_qyrQOc4luO2sVqNKH3iRw0s_og/s1600/Spirit+mediums+at+the+louvre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZzTLBF2FsAJkUHYE6KFHkHcWprdq9xvbySVw-Bjx2y58p6XBRD-VHnwhwseJNaKXJWzVtrv5momUPh8t49Fcq1EoSr7jzC0yEEnZ5PH05vkpHy3JU_qyrQOc4luO2sVqNKH3iRw0s_og/s1600/Spirit+mediums+at+the+louvre.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></a></div>
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As a cat person, it’s easy to recognize others from the
tribe. I felt an instant sense of kinship with the cat ladies of Belleville,
watching as they pulled innumerable tins of cat food from their seemingly bottomless tote bags, calling each cat by name.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One of the women was tall and thin, wearing a long tweed coat and a beret (which Max calls "a hobo hat"). She had a look
of smeared elegance, as if she’d walked straight out of a Toulouse-Lautrec
painting. This could have had something
to do with her bruised eye. She’d made
the other one up with purple eye shadow to match. </div>
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“I fell down yesterday and hurt myself,” she
said. “I feel that I must explain, lest you think…” She laughed with obvious embarrassment, and I wondered if she was telling the truth. "Viens Vanille," she called out to a jet black cat. "Come and get your lunch!"</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Are these cats yours?” I asked.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Oh no,” she said.
“Ils sont sauvages.” They're wild. "We just feed them."<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Every day?” I asked, and she nodded.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Antoinette and I have been feeding them every day for
twenty years,” she said, gesturing at her friend, who had remained silent. “There’s another woman, Josephine, who comes
too.” She looked around, as if searching
for her. “She’s very old, and she can’t
manage the stairs as easily as she used to, but she never misses a day. Not even Christmas.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Lucky cats,” I said.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Not so lucky," she said.
“These poor cats have nowhere to get out of the rain. For the ones born here in the park, it’s not
so bad. They’re like tigers in the
jungle—they know nothing else. But the
ones whose owners went on vacation and dumped them?” Her expression darkened.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Look, Helene,” the other woman spoke up at last. “There’s something wrong with Vanille’s paw!” The two of them eyed the black cat with
concern as he limped away. “Perhaps we’d
better call the vet,” they agreed. </div>
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"I thought they were wild," I said, amazed to learn that there is something like socialized veterinary care here. Every year,
a municipal employee comes to trap all of the kittens born in the park, taking them to a vet to have them spayed before releasing them again. The same vet will come if a cat seems badly hurt.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Here comes our favorite,” Antoinette said, pointing to a bushy
gray cat now eating swiftly from a yellow bowl. “Look
how she loves the seafood I brought her! What a gourmand!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The cat was preoccupied enough by this meal to let Max crouch beside her and pet her, which
amazed the women.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Il est mignon, l’enfant,” the elegant woman—Helene—said
to her friend, Antoinette, who eyed Max appraisingly before finally nodding curtly. "Oui," she said at last. "He's pretty cute." I got the sense that she felt
about children the way Max feels about dogs, but might make this one grudging exception, since he was being gentle with her favorite cat.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Our son misses our cat,” I said again. "They've always slept together, since he was a baby."<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Do you have a picture?” Antoinette asked. It felt
like a test, and I was relieved to remember that my mom had just emailed a
shot of Bowie, curled up on her lap. It
was easily retrieved from the inbox on my ipad, and as I showed it off, the cat ladies gushed over him. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“He looks <i>very </i>well
fed!” they agreed. “What a handsome
boy!” <i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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The metaphorical ice was broken. I'd proven that I was one of them--or so it felt. For a good fifteen minutes, we sat in the unexpected sunshine, chatting while Max and Matt explored the park. Antoinette noticed that I was carrying a
pastry box from a Belleville bakery called 140.
“Le meilleur baguette de Paris!” she said, a claim to fame also printed
on the bag. “The pastries there cost
maybe one euro more than elsewhere, but they are at least three times
better!” She gave me directions to
an Algerian restaurant in the neighborhood, where apparently they make their own couscous
daily, and where a whole lunch, “not at all greasy!” costs only seven euros. </div>
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“You should come back,” Helene said, when we finally got ready to go. “It’s the most beautiful park in
Paris, always in flower except two or three weeks of the winter. Unfortunately, that happens to be right
now. Come in spring!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Maybe we’ll see you again,” I said.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“We’re here every day,” she reminded me. “After all, without us, these cats would starve!” <o:p></o:p></div>
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That would take a while, I thought, surveying the decidedly plump cats, each licking the bottom of its own special bowl.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We were all a little sorry to leave, not knowing when we'd return, or if we'd ever see these cats--and cat ladies--again. But on our way home, we had the good luck to stumble upon a lion, performing a ritual dance outside a new Chinese restaurant for the new year.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI8tLLTCzU2CtONIOmUZRiQSneZtO2yrlpLDUZfpn2Pn0stNLE1KeGJois3C8xtVHDWSNw1YSZUzZos44CIoFIAeAH9YeH7us3HZQzi4d7y4iM81dsb9N0LBiipRIEhCZZkJ0fr7476CQ/s1600/Max+and+the+chinese+lion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI8tLLTCzU2CtONIOmUZRiQSneZtO2yrlpLDUZfpn2Pn0stNLE1KeGJois3C8xtVHDWSNw1YSZUzZos44CIoFIAeAH9YeH7us3HZQzi4d7y4iM81dsb9N0LBiipRIEhCZZkJ0fr7476CQ/s1600/Max+and+the+chinese+lion.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></a></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-51534301886406624122014-01-31T05:17:00.001-08:002014-01-31T05:17:33.139-08:00French in Action<h2>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEHfDUxDup5xSC67soSfGR7AkySGVJgNdkWJtk8BSGUcNoaqSoUWh-NecMaRX-sDAR89TpKcE2HAkANq_h1fMWecJUW1sEbR0hvguL1HHxswcHN10atiOXaRGTEkkhRu6dihyphenhyphenh1c-7qvU/s1600/images.jpeg"><span style="color: blue;"><br /></span><span id="goog_519564928"></span><span id="goog_519564929"></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaNWh99TqpuWC3glbYohRLyDsMuNbvPTO3F2UTxq0D0SGkVQdyo0YR0A2sFIY5f4hKl3wTUkBiNPT3eeTjyo_uoSDIC7Vr2UN6rFx8YJ4rkJ4B3IvuhEGoe1IBd9LXCSolc-X7keIbKk0/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaNWh99TqpuWC3glbYohRLyDsMuNbvPTO3F2UTxq0D0SGkVQdyo0YR0A2sFIY5f4hKl3wTUkBiNPT3eeTjyo_uoSDIC7Vr2UN6rFx8YJ4rkJ4B3IvuhEGoe1IBd9LXCSolc-X7keIbKk0/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">"Elle a les jambes longues et fines." - <i>She
has long, thin legs.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="font-size: 14pt;">"</span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Elle a les jambes epaisses." <i>She has heavy legs.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">This comes from an early lesson in "French
in Action," a free online program recommended by one of Matt's professors,
to help us beef up our language skills before coming over here. Filmed in
the 80s, the Yale series features "Mireille," a pretty blond
twenty-something with decidedly long, thin legs, who bounces around in a
strappy sundress (obviously braless), gets hit on by guys at cafe, and argues a
lot with her dysfunctional family.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">This is a weird program, which apparently
gathered a cult following for attempting to inject both comedy and drama into
the tedious business of learning basic vocabulary and grammar.
"Tonton aime <i>beaucoup </i>les enfants!"
Mireille informs us, one eyebrow arched, that her "celibataire"
(or "bachelor") uncle <i>really </i>likes children, as he
demonstrates by hoisting her wriggling little sister onto his lap, leering at
the child in a decidedly Humbert Humbert-esque way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">One of the first phrases we learned from
"French in Action" was, "tu m'agaces!" Mireille says
this in exasperation to her sister, Marie Laure, whenever the child spills a
tray of cookies or hounds her to play yet another round of cards. <i>You're
driving me nuts! </i>This seemed like an odd expression to feature
so early on. Wouldn't "I need to buy one bus ticket please," or
"How much is a baguette?" be more essential to the newcomer to
France? But since moving with a six-year-old boy to this rainy city in the
dead of winter, we've gotten a lot of milage out of "tu m'agaces."
(The lesson in which students are asked to "pretend you're trying to
pick up a pretty woman at a park" has been less useful).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">Matt and I were lazy French students, more often
mocking the "French in Action" videos than memorizing the lessons.
The only other thing I did to prepare for this move was to read Julia
Child’s <i>My Life In France</i>. She opens by describing her first
meal here, sole meuniere, reliving every detail of what was, for her, a
transformative experience. I love the obvious pleasure that she took in
wanting to recreate the magic of that meal for Americans who, at the time when
she was writing, were often limited to frozen fish sticks and jello
salad. (Not that Julia didn’t love her some molded foods).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">Being in France has definitely given me carte
blanche to indulge my own obsession with food. Matt says that I have a
"foodographic" memory, because while others can remember what people
wore or said around them, I can remember everything that anyone ever ate in my
company. I’m pretty sure that my early exposure to French culture is at
least partly to blame, because that's when I remember first being fascinated by
the differences between what people ate. When I went to the homes of my
French classmates after school, their “gouter” was usually white toast, folded
around melting sticks of chocolate, and dipped into hot chocolate. I told
this to a French woman recently, who said that kids here take a baguette,
hollow it out, and cram a whole chocolate bar inside. I still can't get
over how much chocolate French kids consume on a daily basis. And since
Max is definitely keeping up, it might have a little something to do with his
"aggravating" behavior.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">I came to France for the first time in the summer that I was
five. My mom had been asked to be the godmother to a French child, so we
were there for the christening, and she had me keep a travel diary over the
course of the month we spent here together. Now either my writing skills
were limited or my character has been remarkably consistent, because it's
nothing more than a log of what I ate: most notably escargots (which I liked)
and a ton of ice cream. I can still remember being thrilled because the
“boules” or scoops came side by side rather than being precariously smashed one
on top of the other. What’s not to love about a culture that designs a
special cone just for the double scoop?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">When I was sixteen, I spent a year in a host
family in a suburb of Paris. The father had run away from home at 14 and
worked as a “saucier,” a sauce maker, in some of the finest restaurants of
Paris. By the time I met him, he was a businessman and no longer a chef,
but he and his wife still lived to eat and drink. One of our first
activities, “en famille,” was to bottle 500 bottles of table wine, to be
consumed with meals over the course of that year. The eighty-year-old
“meme” or grandmother, was allotted ½ bottle per day—to enjoy solo, with her
lunch. Every Sunday, we'd all sit at the dinner table for a butt numbing
six hours, lingering over a meal that was always exactly the same: grated
carrots with lemon juice and olive oil, butter lettuce salad with a red wine
vinaigrette (my job), a dense and chewy levain bread for which my host father
would drive 2 hours because it was the only "correct" loaf in the
vicinity, and a roasted chicken that the meme had beheaded and plucked that
very morning, her rain boots still splattered with its blood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">In France, there is zero attempt to conceal the
origins of meat, and no part of the animal goes to waste. They take the
"head to tail" movement literally, and I appreciate the absence of
hypocrisy in theory, if not on my plate. Max and I have started to treat
the Muslim butcher shop on our block like a zoo/science classroom. For
some reason, the skinned rabbits and chickens are sold with their heads still
on, often with a few feathers still attached. I doubt anyone eats them,
but I might very well be wrong. As we walked by yesterday, one of the
friendly shopkeepers stopped Max, holding out a beef heart in one hand and a
lamb heart in the other, mooing and baaing to make sure he grasped the
difference. In front of the store, a big chafing dish holds nothing but
roasted sheep heads, blackened eyeballs still in place, grilled tongues lolling
between two rows of teeth. We were ogling a jar of brains the other day
when a woman approached the counter and asked whether she could get “a nice
horse’s shoulder." “Indeed you can!” the cashier declared
cheerfully.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">Just like language, our appetites are the
product of our culture. When Max was two, and didn't yet have
preconceived notions about what he would or would not eat, we took him for dim
sum with his new friend, Raven La, from his preschool. Following Raven's
example, he enjoyed a roasted chicken's foot. We have a great picture of
the two little boys, happily gnawing on those sinewy claws. It cracked me
up when, after describing this to the French woman who had come over for dinner
a couple of weeks ago, she wrinkled her nose and said that this was disgusting--barely
missing a beat before proceeding to tell us how much she enjoyed "le pied
du cochon." Similarly, I'm not sure why I could never bring myself
to eat the slimy Japanese "natto" or fermented soybeans, which to me
smell like rotten compost, and yet my mouth waters when I enter cheese stores
here, which are so pungent that the ammoniac smell wafts halfway down the
block, some of the rinds of the stinkiest cheeses gone completely orange as
they slump in puddles of their own ooze. Yum.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">I have to stop myself from buying too much of
that gooey, stinky cheese. A license to indulge can be taken too far, and
I'm beginning to worry that six months is a dangerous amount of time to be in
Paris: short enough to feel like an extended vacation, but long enough that
one's legs could definitely get on the "epaisse," or heavy side.
Once again, it seems that the "French in Action" folks knew
what they were doing in their curriculum design, picking early vocabulary words
that really matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">The other night, we made lentil soup with
basmati rice for dinner. And because we’re clearly not getting enough
dessert over here, I used the left-over rice to make a rice pudding, flavored
with cardamom and rose water. Because it turned out nicely, I thought I’d
share the recipe and indulge my inner Julia. Hey--when in France...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">The Vie En Rose Pudding (named by Matt)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">3 cups cooked basmati (or jasmine, or whatever)
rice (use up your leftovers)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">2 cups milk—I used “demi-ecreme,” which I think
is 2 percent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">1 cup sugar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">2-3 tablespoons butter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">2-3 tablespoons rose water<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">5 whole cardamom pods<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">1 teaspoon each grated cinnamon and/or nutmeg
(optional)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">2 eggs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">Take cooked rice and crumble it into a sauce
pan. Add milk and bring to a low simmer. Add sugar and butter and
stir until melted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">Add rose water and cardamom pods. I
crushed them between my fingers before adding them to the pot. The whole
cardamom pods are very fragrant, but if you don’t want to have to pick them out
of the finished dessert, you could substitute a teaspoon of ground
cardamom. Add cinnamon and nutmeg, unless you want to highlight the rose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">In a cup, whisk the raw eggs. Add the
whisked eggs to the simmering pot, making sure never to let it reach a
boil. Continue mixing with a spatula or whisk for five minutes, or until
the rice pudding thickens to your desired consistency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">Eat hot or chill. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment--></h2>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-80251451203019135952014-01-28T05:50:00.003-08:002014-01-28T05:53:02.621-08:00Velib!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz6av80G2YBjDULPrAkRJ_yY2bMNOGricD3QpQF2KCCf6gINGQ57mW798T782Zsdd344WjdJ43k_kV4dxotKW5kouXMTDmoBCwvS5XpYx-X5jaZxyjL7xEizcV_NvN5L_7p1bIgagjhFw/s1600/%22My%22+bike.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz6av80G2YBjDULPrAkRJ_yY2bMNOGricD3QpQF2KCCf6gINGQ57mW798T782Zsdd344WjdJ43k_kV4dxotKW5kouXMTDmoBCwvS5XpYx-X5jaZxyjL7xEizcV_NvN5L_7p1bIgagjhFw/s1600/%22My%22+bike.jpg" height="320" width="238" /></a></div>
<br />
"I want to start riding a bike to pick Max up from school," I said to Matt recently, after noticing my athletic shoes lying on the closet floor, right where I'd unpacked them a month ago. "There is nothing like riding a bike around a city to make you feel completely ageless," I remarked.<br />
<br />
"I guess that's getting increasingly important, the older we get," he observed accurately. <br />
<br />
"I'm going to join velib," I said, ignoring his not-so-subtle hints that I might not be the best candidate for the city's almost-free bike service. It's true that I am a bit of a corner-cutter, when it comes to things like following the letter of the law. Also, I have no internal compass. If you want to get someplace, just ask me which way I think it is, and then go the opposite direction. Add to that the fact that the streets here are almost always slick with rain, and his concerns might be founded.<br />
<br />
But I do love to ride a bike, or at least I used to. Back at home, I took a lunchtime spinning class at the gym, and while I liked working up a good sweat in under an hour, the wasted energy of all of those bodies, moving in place in a dark room, to awful music, often struck me as preposterous--especially when it was frequently sunny outside. <i>Why don't I just go outside and ride for an hour? </i>I'd think. But for some reason it was so much easier to motivate to go to the gym, even though all of that frenzied cycling to nowhere did seem like a bit of an obvious metaphor.<i> </i><br />
<br />
<br />
I'd had my eye on the velib bikes ever since we got here. It would be hard not to notice them. Parked side by side at hubs stationed every few blocks all over Paris, these are the world's ugliest bikes. I mean seriously, you couldn't set out to design a more hideous bike if you tried, which they must have done as a theft deterrent. The program is borderline socialist--it costs $30/year for unlimited 30 minute rides, or $39 for the enhanced "passion pass" which gets you unlimited 45 minute rides. The bikes look soviet, with their bulbous, cement-colored plastic frames. According to the French couple who came over for dinner last week, the program hasn't worked as well as the city hoped. Instead of getting more cars off the streets and people out exercising (they share our concern with growing waistlines), there are now 1/3 fewer cyclists in Paris--although honestly, how do they measure these things? People haven't stolen the bikes--it'd be pretty obvious--but there is a trend among teens of dumping the bikes in the Canal St. Martin, maybe as a show of herculean strength, because these things are as heavy as they're ugly.<br />
<br />
In addition to needing some real exercise, I had another reason for wanting to sign up for Velib. I'm trying to fight against the more anxiety-prone parts of my nature and savor the things that make Paris, well, Paris, while we are here for this luxuriously long, yet limited, window of time. Every other time I lived in a foreign country, later I'd have a list of regrets. <i>Why was I so stressed out when nothing was objectively wrong? Why didn't I take more advantage of what was there?</i> Now, whenever I'm torn about something, I ask myself if I'll regret not having done it later. It seems to be working as a strategy. I also love to get something for free (or quasi-free), especially in a country where most things are so very pricey. So I logged onto the velib site, went all out for the "passion pass," and eagerly checked the mail until it arrived a week later. <br />
<br />
Then it took a while to work up the nerve to activate the thing, suspecting--and being absolutely right--that it wouldn't be as easy as it looked to check one of these bikes out from the fully automated kiosks. At least not for me.<br />
<br />
I have a new appreciation for the stress of the illiterate. I can read in French at <i>maybe </i>a fifth grade level, but that exempts how-to manuals and bureaucratese. I barely skim the fine print on that stuff, even in English. The first day that I tried to check out a bike in order to pick Max up from school, I couldn't even figure out where to jam my velib card (it turns out you set it on a flat screen that reads it) and, after asking a meter maid who told me she had no idea and would never dare to ride a bike in Paris, I finally gave up for lack of time. The next day I allowed myself an extra 20 minutes, and after a lot of trial and error (I'll spare the tedious details), as the bike was released from its metal bolt and came free in my hands, I felt a little drop in my stomach. But I couldn't back out now--especially since I couldn't figure out how to check the bike back in.<br />
<br />
As soon as I was cycling, that ageless feeling I'd described to Matt swept over me. I don't mean that riding a bike makes me feel young, exactly, although I do remember the origin of the pleasure, as a kid, of feeling so free and so effortlessly in the moment, able to daydream while observing things, able to feel the speed of moving through space with nothing but my own legs. You don't get that feeling at a spin class. Part of the joy, for me at least, is moving toward somewhere I actually need to be. And that joy is amplified, I must say, here in Paris, where there is no ugly view. On a bike, the cold felt bracing instead of just bone-chilling. I had on one of Max's wool hats, pulled snug over my ears, and a scarf and mittens, and my cheeks stung in a good way. I did get lost a few times, or not lost so much as detoured. I found myself riding in a circle with the traffic around the big ferris wheel, amused that I'd managed to lose my way when the Seine was right there, a straight line leading to Max's school. <br />
<br />
And after I finally figured out how to return my bike, I was only 5 minutes late to pick him up.<br />
<br />
<br />
"Seriously, you should get a velib subscription and we can ride together," I said to Matt hopefully.<br />
<br />
"I think Max could use one parent*," he remarked dryly*. <br />
<br />
* Matt objects to being cast as, "the straight man," but can I help it if that's what he said?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
* If you notice a newly adverbial bent to my writing, blame it on JK Rowling. We are reading Harry Potter to Max right now--on about page 3000 of the whole 4000 page oeuvre, a figure that I find shocking, both in terms of her output and how fast we've been consuming the 7 books, having started this fall and going at a clip of approximately 75 pages per night. It's amazing how much more reading you get done in a country where your Netflix subscription doesn't work. JK Rowling seems to find no line of dialogue complete without an adverb clarifying exactly how something was said. The books would be a fraction the length if she'd followed the standard rule, which is that the line itself should convey the work of that gratuitous adverb. And yet, and yet... Reading to a kid, I find myself noticing that they do help to figure out what the person is not only saying but feeling, in books where a lot of the vocabulary goes over his head. And I find myself coming around, grudgingly, gradually, if somewhat abashedly... <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-32123988215823004742014-01-23T04:34:00.000-08:002014-01-23T04:34:48.895-08:00Alone at the Louvre
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEeFwsC5QR1FJ-kz-_OY_WwYB7gCUYsB8Q0KxK4sim2IcAhuZPyZpPJ_60tixcacoirieJXYpuhskVQ7Ch24fj3rR1g_JZNRJk6cLTpyj5hQtzGhkvdXpmH76hljkvxg8e1bAbr-6j9I8/s1600/Hipster+beard+prototype.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEeFwsC5QR1FJ-kz-_OY_WwYB7gCUYsB8Q0KxK4sim2IcAhuZPyZpPJ_60tixcacoirieJXYpuhskVQ7Ch24fj3rR1g_JZNRJk6cLTpyj5hQtzGhkvdXpmH76hljkvxg8e1bAbr-6j9I8/s1600/Hipster+beard+prototype.jpg" height="320" width="238" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"I can tell that Max is having a blast in France, but are
you?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I got this question from my friend Angela last week, a question I
found disconcerting because it poked at a worry that I'd hoped was unfounded,
about a condition that I hoped wasn't too glaringly obvious. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Not "Paris Syndrome," but Stockholm Syndrome: otherwise
known as 'capture bonding,' in which hostages develop empathy and feelings of
identification--sometimes even love--for their captors.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Before having a child, I never wanted to be That Kind of parent.
The kind who uses parenting as a verb. The helicopter. The
snowplow. (This is my new favorite term,
referring to parents who want to cruise ahead of their kids, smoothing over
every bump). I'd seen people--women usually--who seemed to forget that the
concerns of early childhood (and, some might argue, little children themselves)
are not objectively all that interesting, who seemed compulsively unable to
stop themselves from endlessly discussing every tedious detail of their kids’
nap schedules, making potty training charts, weighing the subtle distinctions
of nearly identical progressive schools, Montessori vs. Waldorf, as if any of
this would make a vast difference in the end--we all wipe our butts eventually,
until we can’t anymore--as if their very memory of the things that had excited
them before giving birth had been wiped clean. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I never wanted to be the kind of woman who thinks of herself, let
alone refers to herself--shudder--as "Mommy." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Mommy doesn't like it when you do that! Now Mommy needs
another glass of wine!</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But Max is on a jewelry making kick (see earlier post about gypsy
rings and his love of bling), and when he recently made me a beaded bracelet with the word
"mommy" spelled out in the middle of it, I
didn't take it off for a week. I pretended
it was an aesthetic decision. True, compared
to his Femo clay necklaces--the hand-made beads so heavy, the weight of a
single strand could break a person's neck--this was a bracelet I could actually
wear, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">simple and “objectively” good looking, with its burnt orange beads
and typewriter-like font on the word spelled out in the middle. Mommy. But I also know that I wore it because I am
in this mawkish state where I'm constantly aware that he's not going to be this
sweet, happy, innocent little kid for that much longer, and I should enjoy
these waning days of easy closeness before they're a thing of the past. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I like to think that over the past six years, I've managed to stake a
little turf around the person I was before I had a child. But Angela's question made me pause, because
I recognized that I have been writing an awful lot about our little outings
together in Paris. About Max and our
Wednesday afternoon adventures. As I’ve
said, the school days are short, and these hours represent active time in the
city, doing and seeing stuff. No one wants to
read about me sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen, much as I do
back at home. But I'm also afraid that without meaning to, I've relinquished more of my own identity than I'd like to admit.
I’ve become “Mommy,” as tagged by the bracelet Max conveniently made me, lest I forget my priorities. And maybe the reason
why I'm scared for this period of easy closeness to end is that I know he's on
the verge of not needing to be "parented" with the same intensity,
and I'm not quite sure what comes next for me, who I'll be then.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In any case, I got a sneak preview on Sunday, when we went to the
Louvre, where I'd managed to sign Max up for an "atelier," where an
art teacher guides a group of kids to see different works on a theme (this one was "poils et plumes," or fur and feathers), and then
they make their own piece of art. Struggling to make myself understood on
the phone, I'd asked whether I could come too, in order to translate.
"You'll have to talk to the teacher," the person told me, but
I'd assumed that it would be fine, given that the class was for 4-6 year olds,
and at our last "atelier" at the anthropology museum, a parent had
been required to accompany each kid and keep them in line. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">On Sunday morning, most of Paris seemed to be asleep. The
stores were closed. The streets were quiet, scattered with cigarette butts. The only people
out were walking their little dogs. The city was bathed in a pearly fog, misty but not too
cold, and Max and I enjoyed our walk to the Louvre, taking
detours through deserted passageways, stopping at Cafe de la Bourse where we
enjoyed bowls of coffee (me) and hot chocolate (Max) and a basket of thinly
sliced toast, which we covered in a dozen different spreads laid in jars on the
table, sampling them all, even the weird kiwi jam and white chocolate spread. My favorite was "syrop a l'ancienne," which
is an apple and pear butter that has been reduced to a tarry sludge that
spreads like honey and tastes as tart and sweet as balsamic vinegar. Max,
predictably, liked the chocolate. It seems that no breakfast here
is complete without chocolate. Even the Special K “fiber flakes” come
with chocolate “pepites.” But hey, at least it's dark chocolate, which is an anti-oxidant, right?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">When we got to the museum, I felt smugly pleased to be able to
bypass the extremely long line of tourists waiting to buy tickets. (Service aside: anyone
who comes here for a week or two with kids should check out the “ateliers”
listed on the website of every museum and try to sign up for one of these art
classes, which take place every weekend and cost about $6 for two hours).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In the special back room of the Louvre where the ateliers meet, I
introduced myself to the man who was going to teach this class. Since he
didn't speak English, I was certain that he'd want me there to translate
for Max. But he shook his head at my request and explained with Gallic
gravitas that it would be too distracting if I were whispering at the back of
the room, and that he preferred kids to come alone. “Oui, j’ai compris,”
I said, chastened and unsure what to do.
Like a good helicopter mom, I'd worked hard to secure this reservation,
redialing the Louvre over and over for half an hour until I finally got through
to a human being, then struggling to articulate my request and give a credit
card number. Like a good snow plow parent, I was determined to make sure
that Max’s experience was fun and stress-free, and he’d told us in no uncertain terms
that he didn’t want to do any activities that were exclusively in French. I didn't want him to miss the opportunity to
take an art class at the Louvre, but I wasn't sure if he could handle being
alone in this palatial museum with a group of strangers that he couldn’t
understand. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"Here's the deal," I said, trying to sound encouraging. "It turns out that I can't go with you, but it's a
drawing class—you probably don't need to understand much French—do you want to
try?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">"Okay," he said with only a trace of apprehension,
making me promise that I'd be right there at the end of the two hour class, and
that we could go draw in the Egypt wing before leaving.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The kids were stuffed into green vests, and like a line of ducks
they waddled after their instructor. As he walked away, Max threw a nervous
glance over his shoulder, and I was reminded of his first day of preschool,
when he left us without crying even though I could tell he was terrified. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Once the kids were gone, suddenly I was alone in
the Louvre, with two hours and no plan. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">This was my second time at the Louvre since arriving in Paris.
We'd gone as a family over the holidays--Matt, Max and his
grandmother and me--when the galleries were packed with so many tourists that it was
hard to see over the tops of people's heads. Matt wanted to see the Robert
Wilson installations, Max was only interested in Ancient Egypt, these things
were at opposite sides of the palace, and our legs were already aching from
having marched all over the cobblestones for days on end. "What do you want
to see?" Matt had asked me, and I drew a blank. Between the pushy crowds
and the whining child, I was frankly ready to leave after twenty minutes,
annoyed to think of how much money we'd spent on tickets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Do I even like going to museums anymore</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">? I wondered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Yes, I realized after just ten minutes of wandering by myself, as I could feel my anxiety lifting like the fog outside the windows. Of course I do. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">So what if Max couldn't speak French? Big deal!</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I thought
of one of my favorite verbs.</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><i style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Il
va se debrouiller</i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">He'll cope.
He'll figure it out. And then I stopped thinking about him, and
instead I thought about what I wanted to see. Not Egypt—that was for
sure. My book group had just finished Donna Tartt's</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><i style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The Goldfinch</i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">, which made me
want to see the Dutch paintings up close again, so I thought I'd start there. But
getting to the Dutch masters took me through paintings beginning in the French
middle ages, and looking at those strange, flat, wondrous works reminded me
of the medieval literature I studied in college, the way that it was so
transparently artificial but contained all of this sharp insight into human
nature at the same time.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> Here we've got a king who had himself painted as a saint. I love the vanity not at all disguised by the gesture at humility. I also love the fey finger awkwardly pressed against the sheep's head. He doesn't look to me like he's a natural with animals. I wonder if the actual king had to pose with a sheep while his portrait was painted? </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 17.77777862548828px;">In spite of the line waiting for tickets, the Louvre seemed nearly empty that morning. I felt almost giddy, like I had the whole place to myself. I could take pictures without feeling self-conscious (or having to tiptoe to photograph over people's heads) and wander in blissful aimlessness, stumbling upon room after room of art that I'd only ever seen in books or postcards, making up stories to go with the paintings, but only for myself, and feeling as if I had all the time in the world. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-16549612287195990352014-01-16T03:52:00.002-08:002014-01-16T03:52:28.703-08:00
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5FuLEYAih-FNKMwWvuK-RJavx9QmY2WyGb6Dc7OlOHm1sUHWV8dnPFI6LxmQzdCTLiBJ_Mr8dE6u43jYEIjAtaJnedCoqscFFUG3eCNkIh7Go50WPBB07KcUmWqzuzVgGvUijNGkFrA4/s1600/berge+d'hiver+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5FuLEYAih-FNKMwWvuK-RJavx9QmY2WyGb6Dc7OlOHm1sUHWV8dnPFI6LxmQzdCTLiBJ_Mr8dE6u43jYEIjAtaJnedCoqscFFUG3eCNkIh7Go50WPBB07KcUmWqzuzVgGvUijNGkFrA4/s1600/berge+d'hiver+2.jpg" height="320" width="238" /></a></div>
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City of Darkness</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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A week ago, Max and I were walking home from his school along the Seine, crossing the picturesque Pont d'Alma, when a woman in front of us bent down and picked up a gleaming gold ring. Now Max happens to be on the constant lookout for golden things, motivated by an interest in ancient Egypt and affection for things relating to pirates, not to mention pure and simple greed. Having heard that my great-grandfather found no fewer than four diamond rings in his life (the stones were all set in one ring that he had made for my great-grandmother) Max is determined to beat the family record, and as a result is always walking with his head in the gutter, and driving us nuts by picking up any gleaming piece of trash--usually bottle caps or rusty hardware, tucked between dog droppings. </div>
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So when this young woman picked up a golden ring and held it out at his level, saying in accented French, "Someone dropped this and it doesn't fit me. Do you want it? Jour de chance!" it was clear that he did indeed think it was his lucky day. I was tired, burdened by bags, and confused. Was she really offering my son this ring she'd somehow found? Why? Was there any reason I should say no? I shrugged and reached out for it, at which point she asked for a few euros to buy a cup of coffee. Quickly realizing that I'd been had, I took the path of least resistance, offered her a 2 euro coin, at which point she got angry and told me that the ring was worth way more than that, yelling at me before storming off. Max wasn't exactly clear on what had just happened, and neither was I, but he no longer wanted the ring. "Maybe it has a curse," he said, echoing my exact thoughts.</div>
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The ring sat heavy in my pocket, and at home I did a quick Google search on "gypsy ring scam Paris," finding out that this is apparently a method of scamming tourists that's as old as time, and always follows the script spelled out above. The handing over of the ring is some kind of defense-weakening, trust-building exercise. It worked like a charm on me, which is why I was left feeling so irritated. I didn't care about the 2 euros, but about having been pegged for a gullible tourist before acting the part. As a matter of pride, I want to fit in! I don't want to be the obvious, bright eyed and bushy tailed American, the fool in Paris.</div>
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The last time I was an expat, I was living in Japan—the first year in a nuclear power plant town, and the second in the small provincial
city of Kanazawa. I arrived speaking the
barest minimum of Japanese, and immediately had to start a job for which I had
almost no training and little aptitude. By contrast, living
in Paris where I can keep doing my job remotely is expat-light. I feel like I
have no right to complain about anything.
I have my family here with me. I
went to a Lycee as a kid where I learned to read in French before English. I lived in France for a year in high school,
and I still speak enough French to communicate pretty much whatever needs to be
said, if imperfectly. For instance, I
managed to explain to the plumber who came over yesterday to see about our erratic water heater that we typically get
about an inch of boiling water in the tub before the flame on the boiler
sputters out. Our showers go from scalding
to icy so fast that I’ve come to understand the stereotype of the unwashed and malodorous Frenchman. Max used to take a bath every
night, but here in Paris, once every three days seems more than enough. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One problem with living in a 17<sup>th</sup> century
building is 17<sup>th</sup> century plumbing.
Apparently it’s as hard for the water to travel up the pipes as it is
for me to hike up five flights of stairs at the end of the day, lugging
groceries, my traveling office (laptop and books) and the backpack of a
six-year-old who likes to pick up rocks wherever we go and give them to me
because, “They’re heavy in my pockets.” This
morning, on the jam-packed Metro, I got dirty looks from people who clearly
found the number of bags I was carrying to be an affront, as if I were taking
up way more than the amount of space that my 1.60 euro ticket afforded me. I would take the glares personally, but
they’re being shot in every direction. One
man, who crammed into the train right before the doors squeezed shut,
apparently pushed another man into a pole. </div>
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“Do you have a problem with me?” he asked. </div>
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“You almost impaled me,” the other man
answered. The way they bickered, neither
one caving or apologizing, made me glad the gun control laws are stricter
here.</div>
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Apparently, more than a handful of Japanese tourists have come down with something called, “Paris Syndrome.” This is the official term (there's an article about it in a medical journal) for the depression, veering into psychosis, that has sneaked up on Japanese tourists who've found that the City of Lights didn’t quite live up to their preconceived illusions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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According to one article, there is an expectation among the Japanese that French people epitomize refinement, the women all chic, the food universally gourmet, that this city is somehow exempt from the grind of modern urban life. “Paris Syndrome” was actually named by the French psychiatrist who was called into one hotel room after another, to treat a string of Japanese tourists suffering from anxiety and agoraphobia, waiting while their embassy arranged return flights to Japan. One man apparently refused to set foot outside after becoming convinced that he was Louis IVX. He must have been appalled by the proliferation of KFC and “Macdo.” A picture on the Pizza Hut on our block shows a pizza with tiny hamburgers somehow baked into the crust. <o:p></o:p></div>
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If I had to characterize the Parisian character, grouchy comes to mind. Maybe
it’s January, but everyone seems to have PMS.
The plumber, trying to arrange his schedule on the phone with his office, got into a fight with a coworker. “No, I can’t come
back tomorrow,” he said in a scathing tone.
“I have plans with my wife. <i>J’ai une vie, moi aussi</i>.” I have a life, me too. Whenever I hear one of these fights, I get
the feeling that I’m eavesdropping, which makes no sense given that the people
are talking in the language that everyone here understands, and making no
effort to be quiet. On the contrary, people
seem to enjoy telling each other off in public.
Again on the Metro the other day, I was absorbed in my novel when a man standing over
me said in the haughtiest of tones, “Madame, vous pouvez vous lever?” Madame, will you get up please? Somehow, that “Madame” felt like the harshest
word ever. There are folding seats in
the standing compartments , and this one had been pretty empty when I got on
the train, and I hadn't realized that it was getting crowded. By standing up, I probably created 3 more
inches of space. Even after I did what
he’d asked, the man glared at me like I was dog shit on his shoe. <o:p></o:p></div>
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That was the same look that Max got at the Musee d’Art et
Metiers: a museum dedicated to the history of machinery, with a special exhibit
on robots. Was I crazy to think that
this sounded like something geared toward kids?
“Non non non!” a guard barked at him when he pressed his nose to a glass
display case. That guard didn’t even
deign to look at me, as if he knew that I couldn’t control my hyper child on
this rainy afternoon. Not that he was
wrong. “Where’s the stuff we can touch?”
Max asked. I was reminded of going to
the home of a childhood friend whose mother had made an elaborate Victorian
dollhouse with working electricity that we were forbidden to play with.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Yesterday was our second “Adventure Wednesday.” I woke up with a sore throat and a panicky
awareness of how much work I had piled up that I couldn’t possibly get through
in the 2.5 hours before I'd have to pick him up from school, and I wasn’t
exactly looking forward to trying to figure out what to do on a cold and rainy
afternoon. It’s been unbelievably dreary and cold for
the past week, making me understand why people who know France well suggested that we
get to Paris for the holidays, when at least the city is festively decorated,
rather than at the start of January, when it’s just wet and dark all the
time. But Max was excited—he’d been
counting down to Wednesday afternoon since Monday morning—and since I couldn’t fathom bringing him back to the apartment that early in
the day, I decided that we’d take a picnic lunch to the “berge d’hiver.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The berge d’hiver is something that the three of us
discovered on Saturday, on a walk that took us from our home to, "L’as de la falafel," in the Marais (where we had amazing falafel that definitely deserves the Lenny Kravitz seal
of approval painted on the window) to the banks of the Seine, where we walked
all the way to the American Library. The
charming children’s librarian was holding a special “wizard and magic tricks”
program that afternoon, which Max greatly enjoyed. On the way home,
again walking by the Seine, we stopped to stare at a huge gray tent that seemed
to be inflated rather than merely propped on the riverbank. </div>
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“Come in,” said a man at the door. “It’s
free!” So we did, discovering a large communal
space with heat lamps radiating warmth from the ceiling, a dozen ping pong
tables, a stage area with twenty or thirty beanbag “poofs” laid out by a trunk
of board games, and tables of free art supplies. There was also a coffee bar, and a long row
of novels with a sign marking them as free.
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After I got Max from school at noon yesterday, we walked the
half hour back to the berge. I’d picked
up baguette sandwiches and a
“double-decker” éclair for Max—called a “religieuse,” to which he has developed a
religious devotion. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“Can we eat lunch in here?” I asked the man outside the
berge.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“I don’t see why not,” he said agreeably. <o:p></o:p></div>
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He also handed me a brochure about upcoming events at the
berge: a free knitting class, and a “ping pong blacklight night for families,”
this weekend. Later, when I suggested
that we should go to this dorky but potentially fun event, Matt reflected that it’s a little weird to come to Paris and
hang out in an inflatable gray tent.
True. But it’s like this
socialist utopia in there, a bubble in which people are exempt from the grouchy
mood pervading the rest of Paris this January.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Max and I ended up hanging out there for a good two hours,
cozy while the rain splattered the clear plastic sheeting overhead. I stretched out on the bean bags and even
read a bizarre French translation of an American YA novel about demon
possession, while he rolled around next to me and drew pictures of monsters,
using the free art supplies. And as we
whiled away the afternoon, I remembered why I like adventure Wednesdays. It’s nice to be forced to have a break in the
middle of the week. There was nothing else I could be doing in the bubble of that tent. It had no wifi. I had no work with me. Time slowed down a little, and I forgot whatever I'd been feeling anxious about. And when we emerged
from the berge, and I saw the Seine lapping at the riverbanks, the Musee
d’Orsay to our right, the Louvre to our left, I couldn’t resist seizing Max by
the shoulders and telling him how lucky we are to be here right now, even if it
is the worst part of winter. The rain had eased up, the
warmth of the berge lingered and we decided to walk home. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We were at the precipice of a bridge crossing the Seine when a squat woman with a long dark braid dropped a gold ring right in front of us.</div>
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"Non!" I barked harshly before she could begin her spiel. "Non non non!"</div>
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She looked sheepish, and let us proceed without interruption, and I felt better than I should about having snapped at her. I'd sounded positively French in my grouchiness! </div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-84947654807388523572014-01-09T01:07:00.000-08:002014-01-09T01:07:07.808-08:00<br />
No that's not a hat...<br />
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Every time I spot the Eiffel Tower I feel slightly giddy. Max's school is just on the other side of the Seine from the tower, about a 10 minute walk over a picturesque bridge. When we emerge from the jam-packed Alma-Marceau metro each morning, there it is, a postcard sprung to life. Maybe in a few weeks it'll blend into the visual white noise. But so far, I still can't help but glancing up at it quickly, almost surreptitiously, hoping none of the natives catch me grinning. It's like a celebrity sighting: you want to gape, but you feel a little cheap and silly gawking. <br />
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If the Eiffel Tower is the ultimate Paris cliche, then it's undoubtedly the ultimate American in Paris cliche to find it beautiful. But it is. I love the new(ish) light show they've put up in the years since I lived here last as a teenager, twinkling up and down its spine on the hour after dark. No doubt everyone knows that when the Eiffel Tower first went up, there were a fair number of folks who thought that it was a blight on the Parisian landscape. I've been doing a little research, and I like the description of it as, "a truly tragic street lamp." I also like the idea that others defended it as "avant garde," because by now it has a vintage kitsch that's part of its romantic appeal. <br />
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Kids love the Eiffel Tower. (That proclamation makes me think of Max's kindergarten teacher last year, who sent home a first letter to parents declaring, "Kindergarteners love baguettes," before asking for volunteers to bring baguettes and "sharp, but not too sharp cheese" to the first K potluck. This same teacher also requested "Organic, 100% pure maple syrup" for the pancake buddy breakfast, which I brought, thinking it was a great way of getting rid of the large container I had in the fridge, only to discover that it had lily pads of mold floating in it. She dispatched a parent to drive to the store then and there for more. But our gourmet kindergarten teacher was right. Kids do love baguettes. Max has been living on them since we got here. But I digress...) <br />
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When we first got here, our friends George and Elka came to visit with their kids, and the kids all wanted to waste no time before visiting the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, the holiday lines looped endlessly (really--we couldn't find the end of the line) and even the children eventually agreed that we should call it a day when we learned that the wait would be more than four hours long. <br />
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But with the holidays finally behind us, I decided to try again with Max yesterday afternoon, launching the first of many "Adventure Wednesdays."<br />
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It turns out that all schools in France have Wednesday afternoons off. That's right, if 2 weeks off every 6 weeks weren't enough vacances, kids here also get dismissed at noon chaque Mercredi. I'd be lying if I said that this news initially filled me with excitement. Max's school time is when we get our work done, and it's already a short school day (what with those crushing metro rides). But with no alternative, I decided to try to see this as an opportunity to spend time with my kid (in Paris!) while he still wants the pleasure (that's debatable) of my company. So: Adventure Wednesdays. We also used the concept to help sell this whole living abroad thing to Max, when he was expressing some reluctance over leaving his familiar world, school and friends behind. ("But you'll have Wednesday afternoons off! We'll go on weekly adventures!") <br />
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I've been thinking about the word "adventure" since we got here. Not only was it the word we kept using to describe to Max what was about to shake up his little world, I also often used it when I was feeling daunted by the upheaval, telling myself that I needed an adventure, having been in the same apartment since the kid was born, in the same job, not having gone anywhere except to visit relatives. But the true definition of "adventure" started sinking in on our 11 hour bus ride from Zurich on Christmas Eve. Matt and I were increasingly incredulous (and sore necked) as the promised "five hour ride" stretched on and on, and all we could see were Pizza Huts and a chain restaurant named "Hippoppotame" on the European highway, which bears an eerie resemblance to the Jersey turnpike. "We're having an adventure," Max reminded us. And no, I don't think he was being sarcastic. <br />
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Indeed, an adventure means not being able to perfectly anticipate, plan for or control what's going to happen.<i> </i>And that is what travel is about, or at least what ends up happening when you travel--for better and (sometimes) worse. Trips put us at cross purposes with ourselves because we spend so much time trying to ensure that nothing goes wrong, doing research and making itineraries and booking tickets, but then we arrive and want to have experiences that we could not have anticipated, to meet people and do things previously unimagined. <br />
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Which a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower isn't... <br />
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That said, Max and I decided that "Adventure Wednesdays" means doing whatever seems interesting and fun. So yesterday, after I picked him up from school, we started with a picnic of (baguette) sandwiches on the banks of the Seine. We walked to a relatively quiet and industrial part of the river where the people who lived and worked on the tied up boats happened to take out their recycling as we were having our lunch. Max enjoyed watching the large cans of trash get electronically carried up and robotically dumped. I had stopped and bought 4 "macarons" at one of the recommended bakeries that we hadn't hit yet: Laduree on the Champs Elysees (a block from Max's school--hey, I had a couple of hours to kill that morning while waiting for Adventure Wednesday to begin). I'm still trying to decide how I feel about macarons. Everyone else seems to love them, but they remind me of raw cookie dough with a crispy shell, or a gob of frosting that's been seared on the outside. I think I prefer a good pain au chocolat. But duty called, and Max and I somehow managed to eat all four of them as we tried to make up our minds about whether we liked the chocolate, green apple or black licorice best.<br />
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The trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower was definitely enhanced by my six-year-old companion. He loved the fact that the elevator was operated by some kind of enormous crank with a cable that you could watch spooling and unspooling, and also that the elevator had two tiers, one on top of the other, kind of like the Bay Bridge. The view from the top interested him less. We decided to come down by stairs--26 flights of them to be exact. Then, we were going to make a trip to the Sewer Museum (ah, the fun never ceases) when we happened to pass a museum of anthropology that was having a mask making "atelier" or workshop for kids ages 6-8. In the spirit of "Adventure Wednesday," I gave Max the choice and he picked masks over sewer pipes (though it was a toughie). <br />
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I was highly entertained by the French exchange between the woman running the workshop and one of the grandmothers who had brought 2 kids to it. The instructor started by saying that she could see quite clearly that some of these children were not close to the minimum required 6 years of age, and as this wasn't developmentally appropriate for younger children, they were essentially being set up for failure. Then the grandmother defended herself by saying, "I can't split myself in half, and I have to take care of both of them, so what do you propose?" The teacher shrugged and responded, "I myself have a three year old and a six year old, and I make other arrangements sometimes, when one of them has a need that the other doesn't share." This went on and on for a while, both sides admirably unbudging. I don't think that this kind of exchange would have happened in the US, or it would have been much more nicey-nice, all smiles and subtext. In any case, no one caved and the class happened and the younger child seemed to do fine. I noticed that I was only one of two parents there on a Wednesday afternoon. All the others were grandparents or "nounous." That, I learned, is French for nanny. I learned this when the instructor showed a slide of Africa and the know-it-all boy in the front (there's one in every room, regardless of culture) raised his hand to share that he once had a nounou from Madagascar, who couldn't be bothered to play with him. <br />
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I have to say that I was impressed by Max, who wanted to be part of this "atelier" and insisted on sitting on the floor with the other kids, even though he couldn't understand a word of the French presentation. When I tried to sit beside him to translate, he told me (nicely, but unmistakably) that I could go back with the grandparents and nounous. <i>Have I already started to embarrass him? </i>I wondered. But he later told me that it wasn't that, but he wanted to try and listen and if I was translating then he didn't have a chance to guess at what the woman might be saying. (I think I actually was embarrassing him a little, but he was trying to spare my feelings). <br />
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I knew, as we toured the museum and looked at all of these really cool wooden and ivory carvings from Africa, that Max was fantasizing about the mask he was going to carve out of wood (or possibly ivory). And I knew, before the teacher got out the box of construction paper, that the reality wasn't going to be quite as exciting. But he adjusted his expectations and rolled with it. We carried his mask--the paint and glitter glue still dripping wet--on the crowded metro home, then proceeded to get lost (yet again--this city is built on circles instead of squares and I can barely manage a grid) in our own neighborhood. The afternoon was an adventure, full of things we couldn't quite have imagined seeing or doing. Even if we did go to the top of the Eiffel Tower.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-46762124344912706672014-01-06T04:30:00.002-08:002014-01-06T04:30:38.939-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Happy "Three Kings Day"</div>
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Systems are not exactly up and running--still no cell phone--but I do have an ipad that allows me to take photographs. This is one of Matt in front of a highly recommended bakery called Du Pain et Des Idees, where I have been wanting to go ever since we got here, but was thwarted by a) holiday closure, and b) the fact that it's only open Monday-Friday. <br />
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Poor Dana arrived in Paris with a list of bakeries and restaurants that she wanted to try, and most of them happened to be closed for a long holiday break. We spend a lot of days walking around with David Lebovitz's "Paris Pastry App," which finds his favorite bakeries by arrondissement, and then locates your proximity to them, only to discover said patisseries shut down for two weeks. They take their vacations as seriously as their pastries over here. <br />
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It was a little alarming, for instance, to get the schedule for Max's new school (he started today) and learn that he gets 2 weeks off every 6 weeks. As our neighbor put it, "There is a very high rate of unemployment in France. This gets them ready." <br />
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Both of our upstairs neighbors have children Max's age--there are two seven year old girls, and a five year old boy. We met them all last night for the first time, and the kids immediately hit it off, already running between the apartments, to Max's great joy. <br />
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"Tomorrow the kids go back to school," one of the parents said wearily, once the kids had vanished into a bedroom. "Tomorrow, our vacation begins." Having just spent a rather intense and compressed (wonderful! exhausting!) 3 weeks with Max, we had to agree. <br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXsfYIGxjhD6DEBYhUfp2eSCh1gZl9F64zFrp6waLVid0xu-uS8wZRehHSVdKerHgxDQVKOh9wBFbLOEccbgajLlagQ_I2yHJXWUmbjOC5vbTqP5KHz8i78qZEp9d_Tqh7XAG2QeSwS0Y/s1600/Max+first+day+of+school.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXsfYIGxjhD6DEBYhUfp2eSCh1gZl9F64zFrp6waLVid0xu-uS8wZRehHSVdKerHgxDQVKOh9wBFbLOEccbgajLlagQ_I2yHJXWUmbjOC5vbTqP5KHz8i78qZEp9d_Tqh7XAG2QeSwS0Y/s1600/Max+first+day+of+school.jpg" height="320" width="238" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">Here is a photo of Max in front of his new school, about to enter for the first time. His question before bed last night, upon learning that French kids don't bring a lunch box to school? "What's on the menu?" <br /></td></tr>
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Here is what was on our menu for lunch without Max (and Mimi's last day in Paris). We debated heating up some soup but decided it wasn't worth the bother. The best of this bunch was the "snail" of pistachios and chocolate--back left corner. <br />
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We're still trying to decode "The French Paradox." How do the natives eat so much butter and stay so lean? Or do they not actually eat? We've spent the past few weeks walking around the city and while here is a patisserie on every block, I don't think I've spotted a single gym. <br />
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But I have seen a fair amount of this:<br />
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Mimi was just noting the svelte legs on this French grandma when she pulled out her cigarette and lit up. Dad quickly joined in. We noted several others at the Luxemburg playground pushing swings and strollers with cigarettes conveniently tucked between their fingers. <br />
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Hey--you've got to do something to keep your metabolism going.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-24904023766141317642014-01-03T02:19:00.000-08:002014-01-04T05:55:06.737-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is a playground not far from us, at Les Halles, where Matt has been fantasizing about bringing Max ever since he spent some time here this fall without us. The playgrounds in Paris are much better than those in SF, if by better you mean more exciting, built with an eye toward adventure and not safety. This is clearly not a country where righteous parents sue because their kids get scratched on the swingset. The structures are high, the ground surfaces hard, and very often parents congregate in chairs strategically placed outside the playground fence. <br />
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How strategically, we only just learned.<br />
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Earlier this week, we stumbled upon a great playground at the Jardin de Luxembourg where there was a circular zip line of sorts. Kids would line up and seize a long pole at the end of which was a padded seat. They then hurled themselves onto it, either seated or (for the taller and braver) standing. This contraption wouldn't fly in the US, and there certainly wouldn't be 3 such metal bars, with no spacing between them, meaning that kids can hurl themselves one after another and (quite often) collide in midair. "Bouge toi!" kids yell. Move! More than occasional tears resulted in parents speaking up from the outskirts, "Ca va," or "Ce n'est pas grave." It's not serious. You're fine. Get over it. This attitude gets a lot of traction in Bringing Up Bebe. It's also one I remember from having been a student at the Lycee as a kid, and I think it has inadvertently infected me and my parenting style, because I find myself sighing with relief. Kids are not made of china, and it's not in my nature to hover. (OK--I'm too lazy and I prefer to read while my kid plays).<br />
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So--back to the point--yesterday we discovered the apex of laissez faire parenting. Matt had gone with Max three times to check out this cool playground near our house, and every time half of it was locked. "It's only for ages seven and up," some playground attendant had said to Matt, who lacked the language skills to ask where the unlocked entrance was. He brought me back with him and we circled the locked enclosure. He was right that the playground within looked wonderful: tall, with curving metal enclosures, especially dangerous. But every gate had a large padlock, even though we could see more than a dozen kids happily playing inside. Matt concluded that they must have jumped the gate, even though it seemed too tall for some of them and so we imagined their parents foisting them over it. <br />
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The truth was almost as good. At 5 pm, we happened to still be circling the fence when suddenly a bunch of parents with shopping bags showed up along with a zookeeper/guard who unlocked a padlock. Children were summonsed, and after a few minutes they abandoned the precarious playground to huddle on the other side of the gate as it was being unlocked. I mustered the shoddy French to ask a waiting woman/mother what was going on, and she explained to me that kids are allowed into the playground three times per day, at which point they are locked in for 3 hours. Parents return at the end of a three hour chunk of time to collect their kids--having accomplished their shopping, taken a yoga class (unlikely), or done whatever else they feel like doing (smoke?) during this period of free babysitting, minus the sitting. This is in downtown Paris, mind you, not some country hamlet. But given how impossible we found it to penetrate the locked playground, it might be a deviously safe system. Although even the lazy/laissez-faire parent in me wonders what would happen if I wasn't even there to say "get over it" when my kid falls down. Now we understand why it's for 7 year olds and up. Max says he wants to give it a try, but I think we will wait until he's "fluent" enough to tell other kids to "bouge" when they fall down in front of him on the zipline. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-8626537965075607302014-01-02T01:32:00.000-08:002014-01-02T01:32:50.316-08:00A week into this adventure, I don't yet have my systems in order, by which I mean that I haven't gotten a French cell phone number yet, so my iphone is just a pod (no "i"), and I can't jap photos to this site. All of this is to explain the unimpressive visual side of this blog. Things will improve! But... I must confess that I have passed a lot of cell phone kiosks (and apparently you can buy sim cards at any Tabac) and opted to wait, a little longer, before converting that benign pod back into a sleek machine that allows me to work anywhere, anytime. <br />
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One of the things I knew instinctually (intuitively? in any case, I was reluctant to fully admit it) before coming here was that I had a smartphone problem. Smartphone is just part of it, really. Like most of us, I had an internet and appliance-driven scattered attention span. I have a job that requires me to be available always to colleagues and students--in exchange for the freedom of not having to be at a particular desk in a particular office. In many--most--ways, this is a well worth it trade. I communicate quickly in writing, and love the freedom of being able to do my work where I choose to do it, on my own time. (Damn that woman who said that we should all be slaves to offices--many of us self-manage very well and thrive outside of pens!) However, (and now maybe I'm proving her point) I had noticed that in the months leading up to departure, as the to-do list lengthened and my anxiety level rose, so did my habit of toggling between tabs online while ostensibly at work, of logging into Facebook from my phone even though I have a sort of love/hate thing about it, checking Twitter, Googling things I didn't really need to know the definition of. I'd read a single piece by a student, write a paragraph response, and then "reward" myself with a book purchase online. This lengthened my alleged work sessions ridiculously. I'd started as a freelancer/"remote" worker in order to be able to write more--but I was having the kind of days that I used to have when I did work in an office, hunched, eyes buzzing, knowing that of the 8 or however many hours I was ostensibly "working," less than half of that time had been put to any real use. But now it was my fault--I couldn't blame the clock. It really started to bother me when I began reading on an ipad and would toggle between my novel and email inbox. I did the same with videos, watching something while keeping a tab open to know if I had new messages. <br />
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Note that I'm using the past tense, as if this were all so very long ago.<br />
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I don't think I'm alone here. In fact, I suspect that this is the norm and not the exception. Sometimes I feel sad for Max because he won't have known a time before fractured attention spans and constantly accessible everything. No wonder there is such a mania among SF, Brooklyn (and Paris) hipsters for all things analog. Once I was talking to the librarian at Max's school, he was asking me if I'd wanted to be a writer when I was a kid, and I said without thinking, "Yes, I guess so. I was horrible at math and science and never really interested in anything besides reading. I guess I had the luxury of not having any choice." He thought that was funny, but it seemed perfectly logical to me and it still does. In many ways, I feel like choices make us paralyzed and miserable. Or at least they can. <br />
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So all if this is to put in words not a resolution exactly, because I'm pretty sure that if you DON'T really want to do something, the surest way to make sure it doesn't happen is to turn it into a New Year's Resolution... But a wish, I guess--that seems lighter and more possible to fulfill in some form. I am not Amish, and I will be loading my cell phone with a sim card at some point this week. But I am not going to get a big data plan for it. I am not going to have email on it, or text messaging. Even as I would tell people (see Paragraph 1) that my job "requires" me to be available all of the time, let it be known that I am not a brain surgeon, and there is in fact no message that couldn't wait a couple of hours for a response. No, I'm not that important, and neither is 99% of the stuff I waste time with on my phone and computer. Over the past week without these devices binging and buzzing all of the time, I've had a greater sense not only of restfulness but also the days have seemed--have been--longer. Louis CK has this routine about how he won't let his daughters amuse themselves on his cell phone on car rides or in restaurant waits because boredom is a crucial part of the human condition and he wants them to learn to tolerate those lulls. I'm not quite there. (God help me if I'd ever take Max to a restaurant without some kind of device--god help the restaurant). That said, I have noticed over the past week that the "boring" periods are becoming less so, almost as if I could feel my fractured attention span knitting back together.<br />
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Or maybe it's being here. Every time I go outside (even inside) I want to pinch myself. Some people say that Paris is a museum and not a city, but it doesn't feel that way to me. I love our neighborhood, with its endless corridors of African hair salons (Jesus Cosmetiques! Gloire A Dieu Beauty), Indian restaurants, Hallal butchers, second rate boulangeries (and second rate is still pretty damn good), fur stores, and "hipster" bars, including the one right downstairs where Matt and I watched a French man dancing by himself for a good half hour the other night, white man's overbite and all. I love lying in bed and looking up at the whipped cream moldings on the ceiling, which are cracking in places, and wondering who exactly specializes in repairing ceilings made in the 1800s and how they would even begin to go about that. Same for the cracks on the building that faces us across the courtyard. It's so picturesque in its decrepitude, with these peeling gray shutters and window boxes inside iron grilles on every floor. Will those cracks ever be filled or will the building just eventually--in another 200 years?--crumble? I'll take a picture when I get my phone working. Eventually... For today (with two days of vacances to go) I'm taking Max ice skating at the temporary rink in front of City Hall.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-400107093954531432013-12-28T01:21:00.004-08:002013-12-28T01:21:58.151-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg9m5IZaVYZ0TLZa0oZRaD9cH_HgX8PvDlTFGTn2HXMUcGfPXdqhx0T-9zlDYfpITeA8GHbtmQ3iW4IMurrj77permYfEsKlx_TgFkPOWhXN6x6deUVhpj0TAD-5L6JxM6t3uc3PJWo6Y/s1600/max+stairs+photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg9m5IZaVYZ0TLZa0oZRaD9cH_HgX8PvDlTFGTn2HXMUcGfPXdqhx0T-9zlDYfpITeA8GHbtmQ3iW4IMurrj77permYfEsKlx_TgFkPOWhXN6x6deUVhpj0TAD-5L6JxM6t3uc3PJWo6Y/s320/max+stairs+photo.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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This feels like the perfect picture to start with, in spite of the fact (maybe because of it?) that Max is a tad blurry. Who isn't a little blurry when the jet lag is fresh? I love these stairs leading to our apartment's front door, even though I will say that I think twice before running back up them to grab something forgotten, and even though my legs are more than un peu sore a week into this adventure. <div>
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It gives new meaning to "l'esprit de l'escalier," when you think of the perfect retort to a snarky remark once you're already on the staircase and it's too late for your comeback. <br /><div>
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After walking 3 miles up to Sacre Coeur and back yesterday, Dana told me that her legs were so sore that she felt like a newborn colt. The strange thing is that I swear I walked all the time in San Francisco, too, especially the past month when we didn't have a car and were walking Max to school every day. Is it the cobblestones? Or are these stairs to blame? But they are beautiful, and I like imagining their installation, and the fact that they've endured since the apartment was built in 1820. One of my favorite places is my friend Stephanie's family's vacation house on Blakely Island, an island that is only accessible by small plane or boat, where the house feels like a 60s time capsule as a result because it's so hard to get building materials and furniture on and off the island. This 5th floor walkup reminds me of that in its 1800's way. Need a new floorboard? New bathroom fan? But do you *really*? </div>
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I can see why our landlord hasn't cleared out a lot of her family's things, and I'm grateful for her book collection. One of my favorite things is having a limited and subjectively curated collection of books from which to choose. When I lived in Japan, the selection in English at the local public library was: 1) The Bridges of Madison County, 2) Breakfast at Tiffany's, and 3) Alice in Wonderland. Here at the apartment there are a lot more to choose from (thanks to the fact that we're renting from a couple of profs, one of whom is British) and it includes a few Harry Potters, PD James, Bleak House, Julian Barnes and Rentata Adler. </div>
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Lest I seem too virtuous going on about reading and walking, let me add that Dana and I were on a "tour de pastry" as we walked, using a poorly functioning David Leibowitz "Paris Pastry" app that lets you find his favorite bakeries and read about his favorite pastries wherever in the city you are. The lemon yuzu tart that we ate at Gontran Cherrier bakery was incredible. In its uncloying tanginess, with a perfectly crisp yet eggshell thin butter crust, it put to shame the formerly delicious seeming lemon tart we'd bought at a nameless bakery. We also got a pitch black squid ink baguette to take home and eat with a cheese so runny you could puncture it with your finger. The bread was a novelty but I'll take a regular baguette next time. <br />
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I will say--I like a culture where every single time you pass a patisserie, no matter the hour of day, people are sitting in the window, eating the most beautiful pastries you've ever seen, and the bars are similarly full of people drinking wine and enjoying themselves at all hours. My own puritan work ethic has not caught up with me yet, and I'm hoping that it doesn't find me for a while.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-43746106853208328672013-12-25T01:42:00.003-08:002013-12-25T01:42:53.541-08:00<div>
First night in Paris</div>
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The Watrous-Schumaker trio (we don't all actually have a hyphenated last name, but I'm so tired that it seems shorter somehow just to go with Max's) has arrived in Paris, France after a mere...35? (again, too tired to do the calculation, but that seems about right) hours. I was about to write "35 hours in the air" but that would also be shorthand. In fact we spent fewer than 10 of those hours in the air. It would be tedious to type out all of the ways in which this trip went awry. But since I started sharing this, I will impose some of the details upon you. <div>
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1. On time departure from SFO. See excited photos of Max, Malena and Matt about to embark on adventure, repeatedly saying so to Max, who is duly in the spirit/mood after having been somewhat apprehensive a while back. 2. Easy flight to Chicago. So far so good. 3. On time departure scheduled from Chicago to Paris. Chicago is where winter weather can go so wrong, right? Things look great. 4. Three hour delay while sitting in seats in Chicago in a plane that would've seemed vintage back in the 70s. Ashtrays at every seat, malfunctioning flushes on the toilets, teeny TV's every 10 rows or so. They tell us that there are 2 malfunctioning oxygen masks. No on is in those seats, but apparently the plane can't fly if 2 masks (that--let's face it--would never save anyone's life "in the unlikely event of a water landing") aren't working. Mechanics come on board to "fix" the masks, which means taping them up under duct tape and plastic sheeting. We are told that this isn't good enough. (Really?) Mechanics come on board again. The plane is declared good to go, but then a light malfunctions. At one point Max is invited into the cock pit (yes, the plane is THAT old-school) where we see about 10,000 lights. It's hard to imagine how one malfunctioning would even be noticed. After 3 hours on the runway we take off. They have repeatedly told us, "Our flight time is only 7 hours, which is RIDICULOUSLY short, and so none of this matters!" 5. After about 7.5 hours, they come on to announce that Paris is having a "tornado," and we are not allowed to land at Charles De Gaulle. NO planes are landing! This is what they say. They tell us that no one will miss connections since the airport is essentially shut down. 6. An hour later we are rerouted to Zurich and told that we will be put on a bus ("with sandwiches!") and taken to Paris that way. We are told it will be a 5 hour bus ride. 7. I'll spare some of the more boring (what? More boring than what we've heard so far? Can it be?) details. It took over 10 hours to bus across the autobahn (or whatever) into Paris. There were indeed a lot of sandwiches. We arrived at CGG after midnight on Christmas Eve. We got to our apartment at 2 am, at which point Matt (mostly) lugged 9 pieces of luggage up 5 flights in our 1820 apartment.</div>
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All this said, we are here! </div>
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And all things considered, it could have been a lot worse. For instance, Max really was a great kid from start to finish of the journey. (My new mantra: It's about the destination, not the journey). He made origami star wars figures. Read about 150 pages of Harry Potter 4. (OK, was read to). Ate a LOT of chocolate (first American, then Swiss, then French). Came to understand that the word "adventure" actually means not knowing what's going to happen at any given moment. Managed to be contained in a seat for 1.5 days without exploding (I didn't realize it was possible).</div>
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The group of humans on the 10 hour bus ride from Zurich was amazingly uncomplaining and decent. There was even a young woman whose birthday was yesterday. Would I have been complaining nonstop? Absolutely. But she just curled up and napped and at one point one of the other ladies on the bus initiated a group sing of "Happy Birthday." Would I have been mortified? Yes. But this young woman video filmed it on her phone and then said that she would keep this forever. </div>
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Arriving in our actual apartment was definitely the highlight of this "adventure." The 5 flights of curving stairs are beautiful, especially when you're not tasked with carrying all of the luggage. (Really, someone had to hold that child's hand, right?) It's old in the best way, with creaky wooden floors and clanking radiators (actually, I wish they'd clank a little more right now, because it's a cold Christmas morning) and the bed felt MIGHTY comfortable last night at least. We'll see how it feels in a less dire state of fatigue. Max was excited to drive through our new neighborhood (the 10th) and brimming with energy, only sorry we couldn't, at 2 am, "go on 2 walks and draw the gargoyles at Notre Dame." We had no time to grocery shop for Christmas as planned, but we have a lot of chocolate. Things could definitely be worse.</div>
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It is the destination, not the journey!</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-81474815676659961082013-08-26T22:02:00.003-07:002013-08-26T22:02:40.529-07:00It scared me when the woman on the plane next to Max and me told me that she was a preschool teacher at a Friends School. She was so clearly that kind of person who announces that they're Buddhist but is obviusly seething beneath the carefully constructed zen veneer, a brittle facade that could pop off at the slightest provocation.<br />
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In this case, the provocation was Max's humming.<br />
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"Is he an unusually musical child?" she asked me, flipping her long gray hair.<br />
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"Um, I don't really know," I said, vainly believing that she was picking up on something (she had already told me that she taught preschool). "He might be." I strove for modesty. "His dad is a composer, but I mean he's only 5. He hasn't taken lessons yet or anything." But as I yammered on, something about the way she was eyeing me started to clue me in to the fact that she might not in fact be paying me, or him, a compliment. "Oh wait," I said. "Is his humming bothering you?"<br />
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"These aren't noise-canceling headphones," she said, without a whiff of apology. "He hasn't stopped humming since we boarded this plane." (It had been 10 minutes). "If he keeps it up, I'll have to kill myself."<br />
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That seemed a little dramatic. At the same time, I felt both horrified and flabbergasted. I couldn't tell if I was the asshole or if she was. Or if Max was. Well, probably we all were. The funny part is, I make it a habit of never talking to my seatmates on airplanes. In fact, I recently talked to a friend about how even if I happened to be seated next to someone I might have a great deal in common with, someone I'd even be friends with in real life, I'd rather not figure it out. All I want to do is sit there, get absorbed in my trash magazine and overpriced snack, and not talk. And most of the time, when I have violated this rule of mine, I've greatly regretted it. But for some reason--actually, because this woman was reading Olive Kittredge, and I thought that anyone reading that excellent book couldn't be bad--I'd violated this rule again, and opened up the portal of conversation that then allowed her to tell me that my child's humming was going to lead to her imminent suicide. <br />
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What she didn't know was that we'd spent the past 5 days in New Jersey eating an average of 5 quarts of frozen blueberries per day, popping them mindlessly while watching vast quantities of Netflix. My grandmother stockpiles them in the early summer, and freezes them to last the year, although after our visit she will be lucky if they last the next 3 months, since every time Max asked for "one more container," I'd say, "Oh, we really shouldn't," even as I tiptoed back downstairs to raid the freezer again. They were highly addictive, tart little popsicles that left us (well, Max in particular) with extremely foul smelling farts, when consumed in those quantities. And being on the plane is already a fart-inducer. The smells emanating from his body were truly not to be believed. And true to form, our cranky Quaker friend had to comment.<br />
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"Does he have terrible indigestion?" she asked.<br />
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"I guess," I said. "I'm so sorry."<br />
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"Well, there's nothing you can do about it."<br />
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"Still. Max, try not to fart so much!" <br />
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By the way, I never got those people who claimed that their own kids' diapers smelled like "buttered popcorn." Nothing kicked in in when I had a kid that suddenly made his shit (or farts) smell any better to me than to anyone else. It was a toxic plane ride, for sure. But I can't say that I didn't derive a tiny bit of (mortified) pleasure from it too.<br />
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Oh, and Max starts Quaker school this week. <br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-60491644058062356282013-04-07T09:17:00.005-07:002013-04-07T09:17:50.600-07:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This week we lost one of my favorite critics, Roger Ebert. I remember watching him as a kid, loving his humor and warmth, his verbal and corporeal excesses, as they stood out against poor Gene Siskel's comparative austerity. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I fell in love with Roger Ebert again when he wrote his odd rice cooker cookbook, and I started reading about how he'd become a food writer (and cookbook author) after losing his tongue and jaw to cancer, how he wrote about the memory of food once he could no longer taste or digest it. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When I lived in Japan, where there were no ovens in home kitchens, there was a "banana bread in the rice cooker" recipe that circulated among expats hungering for western food and the particular pleasure of baking. It was very moist, a steamed cake, but I don't think I would have made it if I hadn't been forced to by reduced circumstances.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ebert wrote beautifully (he was always a beautiful writer) about how food remained in the present tense for him, even though eating shifted to the past tense. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be."</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Recently, Matt and I were talking about what we'd do if we had a year left to live, and I found myself wondering if I would continue writing or give it up and enjoy myself--my glib phrasing. Matt immediately said that he'd keep writing music, but I wasn't so sure. This was a week when writing hadn't been going especially well, I had too little time for it, and I was nurturing the fantasy of what it would be like to have a life where the weekend was really a weekend, and there wasn't always that feeling of homework hanging over your head. But reading over</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> interviews with and articles about Roger Ebert made me reconsider. It's clear that he used writing to stay in the present tense even as he was dying. It's also clear how much pleasure he got from the writing itself, even as he was giving it back to others with his words. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Such as: </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a 'fat pig' in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have 'the physique of a slave-trader.' He is angry at me because I said his 'The Brown Bunny' was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival...</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">it is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'"</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thank you, Roger Ebert, for reminding me what really matters. I have no idea where you are, but if you'll indulge a moment of schmaltz, I like to imagine that you've got an unobstructed and panoramic view of this world you loved so much, and something good and spicy (maybe Indian) with a frosty rootbeer to wash it down. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3981034231309586493.post-69580419182495533622012-01-15T22:09:00.000-08:002012-01-15T22:09:03.645-08:00Happy King Junior DayMax keeps referring to MLK as "King Junior." The other day, he got into our bed at around 4 am and proceeded to orate about how, "King Junior wanted things to be more fair, and it wasn't fair how some people had to ride on the back of the bus, so he made it fair so everyone could ride on every part of the bus." After listening for a while, I said to Matt, "I think he thinks that Martin Luther King was actually a king," and Max interrupted and said, "No he wasn't. He was a HERO." It's pretty fun to hear a four year old figuring this all out, with some guidance from his preschool teachers, who seem to have their own special curriculum de-emphasizing race and stressing fairness. It's a Spanish preschool, so he's getting all of this in Spanish, and perhaps there are some language gaps. I'm also reminded of last month, when the topic of discussion was "families," and he'd come home and say, "You have to respect ALL families. For example, if a child has no mother and no father, you still have to respect that family...."<br />
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Max loves nothing more than public transportation--bart, subways, busses--and right now he's really focused on the bus anecdote. He usually wants to sit in the back row, however. Tomorrow, to celebrate "King Junior Day," we are going on a train ride.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1