French Lessons

Happy, um, Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!  That’s what a few folks wished me last week, up here, north of the 49^th parallel.

 

Thanksgiving!  Yeah.  Right.  You’re a bit early, aren’t you?  But of course, my good neighbours were talking about Canadian Thanksgiving.

 

The difference, I thought, was a big one.  In the US, where I grew up, Thanksgiving was huge.  Absolutely huge.  Family and extended family would gather every year, with great regularity, on the fourth Thursday of November.  About 40 of us would descend on one home as dusk crept into the sky.  The hosts were responsible for the turkey and stuffing.  Aunt Ramona always brought green beans with bacon bits and crunchy onions.  Aunt Nancy’s specialty was always rice pudding.  My mom always made us suffer through Jell-O salad:  green Jell-O mixed up with cottage cheese and pineapple bits, solidified in a bundt mold and served on a thin bed of iceberg. 

 

“Always” was the operative word in the family.  Thanksgiving was always the same; we only got older.  For dessert (as rice pudding and Jell-O “salad” hardly qualified), we’d always endure the great pumpkin pie debate.  I was in the mild corner.  Grandma Peterson’s pie – dear as our matriarch was – always was clobbered by nutmeg.  And then, bellies full, the guys would waddle to the den, where they’d watch football.  Or sleep.  The women would scurry between the dining table and kitchen, dirty dishes always clattering, high-pitched voices always chattering.  It was a division of labour that drove me dotty.

 

Like the holiday or not, Thanksgiving is a matter of celebration in the US.  Always.  Our family was hardly alone.  Thanksgiving is among the busiest times in US airports as families flock together for the purposes of consuming vast amounts of turkey and despairing over all they ate.  Perhaps some folks even spare a thought for the country’s founding fathers, the Pilgrims who schlepped their way across the Atlantic in 1620 – those hardy folks who endured that first, harsh winter in the New World with little food or shelter, the ones who cooperated with local Indians and learned how to grow corn and barley and pumpkins.  US Thanksgiving celebrates the Pilgrims and the crops that sustained their early days in our yet-to-be-established country.  Some people believe that Thanksgiving exists merely as the starting gunshot for the Christmas buying frenzy.  Yes, big sales are part of the US Thanksgiving tradition, but the holiday is much more than that.

 

I moved out of the US in my early 20s, but Thanksgiving followed me.  Whether living in England or South Africa or France, I usually found an American to share the festivities.  But I brought others into the fold, too.  I often cooked the bird myself (or as close to a whole turkey as I could find) and introduced Brits, Norwegians, Swiss, Ukrainians, South Africans, Irish, Indians – basically anyone who was willing to eat – to the American tradition.  Once I even cooked for a Canadian called James.  He was a starving student and was pleased to take part in a once-a-year gorge-fest, even under the US name. 

 

There was one guy, though, who ruined my Thanksgiving stats.  Thanksgiving Thursday years ago, I’d baked a pumpkin pie to share with colleagues at the British investment bank where I worked; Thanksgiving was, of course, hardly a holiday on that side of the pond.  “Is it sweet or savoury?” was the typically British reaction to the pie’s muddy appearance, but everyone ate the stuff – even if it wasn’t their new antidote for scones and clotted cream.  I cut a particularly large wedge of pie for the lanky, 20-something guy who was temping for us.  Young, skinny guys are always hungry, after all.  The temp moved on to a different firm a couple weeks later.  When I cleaned out the top drawer of his desk, I found that big piece of pie.

 

Thanksgiving – the proper, US Thanksgiving, whether celebrated in the US or afar – is big.  Among Yanks, it’s practically evangelical.  It may seem like the launching pad to Christmas, but it’s a proper holiday in its own right.

 

Which made me all the more curious about the Canadian version.  The “Happy Thanksgiving” declarations along Toronto’s streets seemed more polite and less zealous than I was used to.  Often they were followed by this stunner:  “Are you celebrating?”

 

What, there’s a question? 

 

Thanksgiving being a Monday – the second Monday of October, the same day Americans call Columbus Day – my Canadian in-laws decided to eat on Sunday, the day earlier.  Sunday becoming inconvenient, they moved the feast to Saturday.  Canadian Thanksgiving, I learned, is flexible.

 

In my quest for understanding, I asked Pierre:  What’s Canadian Thanksgiving all about?  He wasn’t sure. 

 

Do you guys (meaning you Canadians) even have Pilgrims?  I asked.  Um, no.  I don’t know.  Pierre’s intelligent response was followed by an excuse:  I don’t think we even celebrated it in Quebec (where he grew up).

 

Which, I presume, makes Canadian Thanksgiving a bit less wholly Canadian.

 

Canadian Thanksgiving, I have learned doing my own research, is, indeed, wholly disconnected from any notion of Pilgrims.  There are no speeches about the country’s founding fathers and their miserable journey across the Atlantic.  The feasting, if there is any, is wholly linked to the harvest.  End of story.

 

And then I discovered that I may have been a smidgeon wrong about the Canadians having less allegiance to their Thanksgiving heritage than their southern neighbours.  Through a highly un-statistical survey, I found that Canadian folks actually celebrate the holiday more than I’d given them credit for.  One Canadian friend, in fact, insisted that Canadian Thanksgiving had more merit – and deeper roots – than the US one! 

 

This friend recently returned to Canada after years living on American soil.  It was Canadian Thanksgiving’s mid-October timing that she celebrated.  It was practical.  Canadian Thanksgiving falls before Halloween, not after.  Her pumpkins were still beautiful, perfect Thanksgiving decorations yet un-massacred by her children.  The October timing also meant that Canadian Thanksgiving remained separated from Christmas festivities – and, well, that a harvest feeling was still in the air.

 

Okay, she made some fair points.  But here was the clincher:  Why on earth, my newly-returned Canadian friend wondered, did the Americans change the date of their Thanksgiving?

 

Ha!  So American Thanksgiving is a bastardized Canadian holiday!  Who knew? 

 

True, Canada is north of the US.  It is, after all, the Great White North.  The country’s growing season finishes before the US one, so earlier harvest celebrations make sense.  But Thanksgiving has remained a steadfast holiday in the US, falling on that fourth Thursday of November (or to be technically correct in the pre-World War II era, on the last Thursday of November), basically since 1863.  That dates back to the Civil War! 

 

It’s the Canadians who changed their dates around.  In post-US Civil War year of 1879, Parliament declared November 6^th as Canadian Thanksgiving.  Over the years that date floated around in October and November with the whims of the time.  For full disclosure, some sources say there was a ten-year period after World War I when the US and Canada celebrated Thanksgiving on the same day – the Monday of the week in which November 11^th occurred.  But soon the holidays went their separate ways again.  The Yanks went back to celebrating at the end of November.  And it wasn’t until 1957 that Canada’s Parliament fixed its standing date for Thanksgiving at the second Monday of October.

 

So the Americans’ end-of-November date has deeper roots than the Canadians’ mid-October one.  The Yanks have been celebrating longer.  Or maybe not.  Also according to history books, the first traditional US Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, the year after the Pilgrims’ wretched Atlantic crossing.  The Canucks easily gazzump this date.  Looking for a northern passage to the Orient, the English explorer Martin Frobisher landed in what today is Newfoundland.  He eventually formed a settlement there and held a ceremony to give thanks for surviving the long journey.  That all happened in 1578.

 

But there is an earlier attested Thanksgiving celebration – perhaps a one-off – that happened among Spanish settlers in 1565.  Today this spot is known as Florida.

 

History, schmistory.  Who cares.  What matters, the really marvelous thing about Thanksgiving, is this:  The day is a worthwhile holiday.  Yanks might claim it as their idea.  Canucks – that large swell of the population that celebrates – might think the holiday was their brainchild.  But doesn’t everybody want to be the mastermind behind any good idea?

 

Joyeux Action de Grâce, my French teacher wished us after class last week.  He’s a robust man, sturdily built and full of wit and drama.  He grew up in Provence and then took a Canadian wife. 

 

What – are you going to celebrate? I asked him.

 

Bouf.  He shrugged his ample shoulders.  It’s a holiday about food.  Of course I’ll celebrate it!

 

He had a point.  Like my French teacher, I was the outsider looking in.  Who’d possibly turn down a food-fest?

 

So Pierre cooked the Canadian bird.  He made all his mother’s traditional favourites – though these dishes hardly graced any Thanksgiving table in his childhood home.  Alongside the turkey, Pierre prepared his mother’s stuffing (one that I personally detest).  He made mashed potatoes.  Squash is right out in his book, but carrot and turnip puree worked just fine.  Pumpkin pie was a complete no-go, too.  He threatened to bake a maple syrup pie, but his daughter saved the meal with an apple variety.

 

As for me, I’ll keep my heartfelt “Happy Thanksgiving”’s until November.  I’ve already brought the holiday to three foreign lands.  Why stop evangelizing the proper holiday just north of the border?

Kinder, Gentler

They call it the “kinder, gentler country.”  At least that’s what my Quebecois husband Pierre calls it.

 

Kinder and gentler than what exactly, I’m not sure, but I’m betting a Canadian’s tag of his homeland has something to do with his southern neighbour – a country that happens to be my old stomping ground.

 

Whatever Canada’s affiliation with compassion and affability, this country is where I find myself these days.  And I’m not just here.  I’m really here.  It’s the first time in a quarter-century since leaving my childhood home that I’ve landed somewhere and am meant to be staying for good, forever and ever, to the end of time.  Amen. 

 

Which, if I’m honest, fairly freaks me out.

 

My entry to Canada in mid-July started well.  Magnificently well, actually, after our family’s year-long stay in France’s Côte d’Azur.  There were no particular immigration formalities.  No hearty, back-slapping ‘congratulations’ on my new choice of home.  No fireworks bursting over my head.  But this entry to Canada will remain engraved in my memory.

 

The first person I met in Canada – other than the faceless guy who stamped my passport – was this man.  

Yes, for real.  After a transatlantic flight his hair was spikier than in the pictures, and his face was more lined.  But he was, indeed, Sting.  The musical legend in the flesh.  The only person who once ranked as my screensaver.

 

Things in my new, adopted country were looking positively fabulous.  My former screensaver loitered with a buddy, some guy with a guitar strapped to his back, amid an oblivious airport crowd.  I cornered the megastar at the end of a luggage belt in the bowels of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

 

I’m so sorry to bother you, I said, discarding any idea of intimidation or propriety.  It was now or never, I realized.  Suitcases began to tumble out onto the circulating belt.  Sting turned his head toward me.  He looked at me.  At me!  And his eyes really were that blue.

 

I have to meet you, I told him.  You’re my musical hero.  You and Bach.

 

The line, I thought, might catch his interest – if it wasn’t also true.  Passengers moved around us to collect their bags.  A bellhop hovered.

 

Bach?  Sting said.  He’s a bit older than I am.

 

Yeah, he wasn’t available for a photo, I said, so that’s why I’m counting on you…. 

 

I tried to look hopeful.  My musical hero was gracious, just as I’d heard he was.  He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and we posed for Pierre, who loitered behind my camera. 

 

At Pierre’s hip stood our daughter Laurelle.  She watched the scene through big, brown, four-year-old eyes that had been alert for 20-some consecutive hours, her jaw slightly dropped.  Why was Mommy behaving this way around some strange man?

 

Sting nodded toward Laurelle.  She has no idea who I am, he said.  Isn’t that great?

 

My mum doesn’t either, I told him.  I signaled over my left shoulder toward my mother, who waited by our hand baggage.  I told him that she’d asked me whether Sting was a person or a group.

 

But wait a minute, you say.  Sting may have been kind like a Canadian, but he hardly is one.  Why mention the episode?

 

First, because I can’t help myself.  It’s just too good not to share.  Second, if I’m searching for a reason, because throughout our conversation – can I call it a conversation? – not a single Canadian pestered the weary megastar at the baggage belt in Pearson Airport.  It’s a fairly startling observation given that just two nights later, he performed under a threatening sky and pulsating laser beams to something like 110,000 or 120,000 cheering fans at the Québec City Summer Festival.

 

No, the good Canucks left my hero in peace.  Canadians are polite.  They are, indeed, kinder and gentler than this American neighbour anyway. 

 

Which is something I normally I try to be.  So I’m hoping – under normal circumstances anyway – to fit in in the Great White North.

 

To tell the truth, I’ve never been terribly worried about relocating to Canada.  It’s a welcoming country.  According to US Immigration Services, Canada boasts the highest per capita rate of new citizenships in the world.  Too, Canadians speak English and French, making even my second language studies profitable in the land.  And importantly given its latitude, Canadian shops sell goose down-lined everything. 

 

What’s more, the culture in Toronto (where I now live) seems – how can I put it? – a happy mix of what I know best.  Toronto is the convenience of Chicago (near where I grew up) and the multi-ethnic and Queen-bowing culture of London (where I spent most of my adulthood) – all wrapped into one, neat package.  Toronto will suit me just fine. 

 

But hold on, you stop me again.  Not so quickly.  Toronto’s not American.  It’s not British.  And didn’t you just come from France, the beloved subject of all those previous blogs?

 

Ahem, yes.  And to tell the truth, settling into the big smoke of Toronto from lazy, seaside Antibes hasn’t been as seamless as we expected.

 

“I can’t believe how frenetic it is,” Pierre said to me that first week as we walked along Yonge Street, one of Toronto’s major arteries.  Bulky, North American-style cars and trucks roared past us.  (And why wouldn’t they, given that Yonge Street once ranked in the Guinness Book as the longest street in the world?)  Shops and signs populated every street-level cavity of apartment towers along this stretch of the road.  People scurried past us on wide sidewalks, their faces and languages streaming into Toronto’s melting pot from around the planet. 

 

Even Pierre, who previously lived nearly three decades in the city, faced some re-adjustment.  Laurelle and I, newcomers to Canada, faced a steeper climb.

 

“Mommy,” my four-year-old daughter asked me on several occasions, “why are there so many shops here?  Like the restaurant and Starbucks and shops that sell things?”  Compared to Antibes, the variety was mind-boggling to her innocent head.  “And why are the eggs white?”

 

Even the simple task of parking a car exposed my foreignness in this land.  In the Côte d’Azur, discovering new parking techniques was one of my favourite hobbies.  I was a trainspotter with a different obsession.  I figured out what constituted illegal parking and what could be deemed permissibly illegal.  Finding available parking within clogged city centres was something of an art form.  Cars humped sidewalks, nosed into parallel slots, even perched in the raised, central circles of roundabouts.  But a French car never, ever parked on a zebra crossing.

 

A couple weeks ago I drove my boxy, North American 4x4 to a Staples store on lengthy Yonge Street.  I turned into the store’s small parking lot tucked behind the shop.  It was chockablock with vehicles parked around the perimeter walls.  One car hovered in the lot’s central corridor, waiting.  Shortly a car moved.  I hesitated, waiting for the first waiting driver to snag the spot.  Instead she drove toward my 4x4’s window. 

 

“Are you waiting to park?” she asked me.

 

“Yeah….but go ahead,” I said.  “You were here first.”

 

“No, no, I feel badly,” she said. “Go ahead.”

 

“You’re joking,” I nearly said, but didn’t.  I could hardly believe my luck – or the complete submissiveness of the Canadian population.  Did she think that my errand was more pressing?  That I was in some mad rush to buy pencils and rubber bands?  Never, ever – let me assure you – would such a scene unfurl in any parking lot in the whole of France.

 

I inched my truck into the available space in Staples’ parking lot.  Only then did I see the “No Parking” sign plastered on the perimeter wall.  And the notice about unauthorized vehicles being towed. 

 

Towed, schmowed, I thought.  The parking space was so big – so glorious and so blooming obvious – that I didn’t even need to pop on my hazard lights to borrow it.  (And no, I didn’t get a ticket.  Or towed.)  Gentle AND kind, I tell you, are these good Canadians. 

 

Okay, ambushing Sting and now this.  I guess I do need to work on that kinder, gentler thing.

 

Most of my early Canadian education has dealt with the legalities of being here.  As I’m meant to be staying here for, well, a good amount of time anyway, there have been details to attend to.  Things to carry me from being a lower-case-v visitor to an Upper Case-L, Upper Case-I Landed Immigrant.  A full-fledged Permanent Resident.

 

And so my learning process truly began, like everything begins, with the government.

 

Salle d’attente, I was reminded, is the French phrase for “waiting room.”  I saw those words everywhere on Canadian’s bilingual signs in government bureaus.  I spent a good chunk of time studying their meaning.

 

At least the time let me mix with fellow newcomers.  I could’ve enjoyed a lingering, hot pancake and Maple syrup breakfast with the changing community in the salle d’attente at Service Canada as I awaited my Social Insurance Number.  And I could’ve washed it all down with a spicy goat curry.

 

I got to enjoy the company of Canada’s bureaucrats, too.  During sequential visits to Service Ontario, the provincial equivalent of Service Canada, I became all chummy with the clerks in the driver’s license division.  They’d come to know me.

 

Weeks later in the same governmental bureau, I waited for my provincial health card.  I swear the focus group gathered in that salle d’attente could’ve solved all loggerheads of NAFTA by the time I was in front of a clerk.

 

But no one was hostile.  No one was unkind.  This is Canada.  These folks were just a smidge bit inefficient or – more likely, given Canada’s open arms to immigrants – overwhelmed. 

 

(It is for this reason, dear readers, that I’ve been a bit absent.  I apologise.  I’m sorry one friend and faithful follower had to send me an email entitled “now you gave us this tempting thought”, only to underscore the fact that after promising a French-Canadian sequel, I’d left you high and dry.  The short story is I’ve been whalloped by my new governmental buddies.  And to be honest, there have been a fair few contributing factors, such as the “bronchitis-like” thing Laurelle imported from France, the search for doctors and extracurriculars and school uniforms, the opening of bank accounts, the house construction, and the moving boxes – the number of which was too high to be within the realm of social acceptability.) 

 

But never mind.  I do carry hopes of a kinder and gentler, less fussed and less bureaucratic Canada sometime in my near future.  This inspiration became evident during the king of all governmental processes for imports like me:  the quest for Permanent Residency.

 

Years and miles of computer paper after Pierre and I began my PR process – having sourced medical reports and photographs and fingerprints, old emails confirming our courtship, and police records from the US, Britain and South Africa – I finally amassed all necessary documentation in August to “land” in Canada as a Permanent Resident.  All I had to do was leave Canada, re-enter, and ask the attending immigration officer to make the final stamps.  Easy-peasy.

 

Or so it should’ve been.

 

Several days ago Pierre (a Canadian), Laurelle (a dual Canadian-American) and I decided to properly “land” me, the family Yank.  We’d make the occasion into a family outing.  I dressed carefully, for multi-cultural Canadian success:  American top, French trousers, Moroccan beads, Croatian sandals.  Our threesome hopped into the German 4x4, listened to a British CD while driving to Niagara Falls, and took a jaunt on the internationally celebrated Maid of the Mist.  We ate Japanese sushi in the sunshine while listening to some guy croon old Van Morrison tunes.  Then to complete the journey, Pierre, Laurelle and I would make a brief crossing into the US, and return to Canada across the Peace Bridge, 20 miles further along the US-Canadian border, to go through my paperwork.

 

The US welcome was anything but warm or efficient.  The border guard saw the unstamped Canadian Permanent Residency visa in my US passport and asked whether I’d properly landed in Canada yet.  No, we told him, that was the purpose of today’s excursion.  We would cross back over into Canada at Fort Erie on the Peace Bridge.  (This crossing, our lawyers had advised, was the most hassle-free approach.)

 

What should’ve been a mere wave through American borders, followed by the requisite “Have A Nice Day,” instead holed our family up in a well-packed, ripe-smelling, and culturally-diversified hall on the second story of the US immigration building.  A small photo of President Obama smiled down on a passive crowd.  Our family had no number.  We knew no wait time.  We had no idea why we were jammed into the room.  And we had no passports.

 

A good hour of biding time in oblivion with a feisty four-year old gave me a good idea why non-Americans love to hate US immigration.  When we finally received our passports again, they were accompanied by a slip of paper saying we’d never passed through US immigration.

 

Which, as we headed toward our truck to drive into the US, made no sense whatsoever.  For a second time we explained our “landing” plan to a nearby US immigration guard.  He tore up the slip of paper – that precious piece of paper for which we’d waited blindly – and sent us on our way.  No problem, he said.  Just hop over the border.

 

Fortunately our luck soon changed.  Thirty minutes later we approached the aptly named Peace Bridge from the US side into Canada.  We parked the 4x4 and I took my papers into a bright, new immigration building staffed by ten Canadian officials.  Only two other customers occupied the building with me; we three enjoyed the attention of all ten officers.  It would just take a moment, one immigration officer advised.  And with a flourish of stamps and two hearty ‘congratulations,’ I was on my way.  A Canadian Permanent Resident.  I was duly welcome to a kind, gentle – and at least on that day, efficient – Canada.

 

Pierre, Laurelle and I found the perfect way to celebrate.  We drove back to Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side, of course).  The community around the falls – how can I say it? – reminded me of Las Vegas without a drop of glamour.  We parked and bought some strong doses of good ol’ Dairy Queen ice cream.

 

Stationed along Niagara Falls’ kitschy main drag, we devoured the American sundaes on Canadian soil – under the gentle gaze of a waxen Egyptian pharaoh.

Thanks to overwhelming demand, French Lessons is turning Canadian for a spell.  French-Canadian, we could say, as our little family occupies the other side of the Pond during the cooler months.  (“What timing!”  I hear you say.)

 

So you’ve just stumbled on French Lessons for the first time?  By word of mouth, by chance – or through its upcoming mention in Vanity Fair?  And you really want to read about things French?  To you, bienvenue! 

 

We all know that life hardly changes at lightening pace in France; that’s part of the country’s enduring and frustrating charm.  Why not settle in for a bit and wander through prior posts?  While you’re at it, let me know what you think.

 

Pressed for time?  Got it.  Here are some of my favourites – but don’t be afraid to drift further afield:

 

o    For anyone seeking glitz and glam:

ü  Trigger of the Vanity Fair note:  Postscript 4:  Madoff’s Legacy (11 June 2009)

ü  Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or:  In Aid of Mozart (30 May 2009)

ü  Life on the Cap:  Lunching on Nuggets (22 January 2009)

 

o    For those wanting to learn a second language or culture: 

ü  Studying French:  The Beautiful Language (15 May 2009)

ü  Unwritten rules:  Bonjour Ritual (26 March 2009)

ü  Sale shopping:  Talking Shop (11 February 2009)

ü  Roundabout theory:  Round and Round (17 October 2008)

ü  Dog poo:  It’s a Doggone World (10 October 2008)

ü  Culinary cargo:  Addicted (3 September 2008)

ü  Buying a fish:  A Fish Story (29 November 2007)

 

o    Especially for parents:  

ü  French pre-school:  French Polish:  Parts 1 & 2 (28 June and 1 July 2009)

ü  French for kids:  Ce n’est pas juste (5 June 2009)

ü  School lunch:  Bon Appétit (19 November 2008)

 

o    Especially for women:  Farmer Brown (17 September 2008)

 

o    And particularly for guys, the day Bo Derek came to lunch:  10, 11, Men to Boys (9, 10, 11 June 2007)

 

Then to you, my enduring and cherished supporters, don’t scrap your subscription!  Now that I’ve already gone a bit French, I can hardly wait to see what oddities the good Canucks offer up from the Great White North.  The frequency of my posts will be more monthly than weekly, but we have yet to figure out the gritty details.

 

What’s more, a new series of bleu-blanc-rouge-style French Lessons will spring from this Côte d’Azur writer’s block mid-next year, serving up a fresh array of French lessons that seem to pop out of every cobbled and star-studded crevice.

 

À très bientôt!

La Vie en Rose . . . Fades Away

The moose is calling.

 

Canada’s national animal symbol is actually the beaver, I hate to report, but I can’t work out how a beaver might sound.  And frankly, do I really want to advertise that sort of symbol being attached to my new country of residence?

 

After a full year rooted to France’s good soil, our final few days have slammed into my little family, full-throttle and without warning.  They’re a bit like that pool of rainwater that accumulated on Bellevue’s terrace last February and crested onto our balcony’s shuttered doors – those first, overflowing droplets that seeped through giving way to a magnificent, three-story cataract within our home’s cylindrical, marble stairwell. 

 

Yes, it’s exactly like that.  Our last few days in la Côte d’Azur (until we return next year, that is) have plastered us all of a sudden, out of the blue.  With twinklings of glory, magnificent send-offs, and a whole lot of clean up afterward.

 

Yet the closure of this chapter also has come at a gradual, even agonizing, pace. 

 

·         In May I began outlining which blogs I should write before putting French Lessons on an extended holiday.

 

·         I started calculating the number of cantine tickets to buy for Laurelle’s school lunches – whether the carnet of 10 was worthwhile, or if I should spring for single vouchers.

 

·         I’ve dumped oodles of agonizing hours into address changes.

 

·         I’ve noticed that the expiry date on our long-life milk is in August. 

 

And then a crushing realisation:  The milk will last longer here than we do.

 

So I’ve taken time ahead of time to organize our life here, hoping that a bit of pre-planning will achieve some semblance of normality for our family in these last, cherished weeks and days.

 

My attachment to life here wasn’t always so intense.  February, for example, had brought the midterm exam.  A pop quiz of sorts. 

 

Pierre and I met our Denver-based, culture-hound friends Jay and Emily in Paris for a couple days.  One night over a mound of salt-encrusted, roasted beets, Emily popped the question:  How did life in the feted Côte d’Azur stack up to our original hopes and aspirations?

 

Emily’s was an obvious question in many ways, but my brain shimmied like the bubbles that sprang from my glass of champagne.  Yes, I was enjoying my time immensely, thank you – what’s NOT to like about life in the south of France? 

 

But as my thoughts multiplied like those dancing champagne bubbles, I knew the full answer wasn’t quite so simple.  Folks here were nice enough, I said, but I wasn’t making real, life-long friends.  Not that I’d ever set out to do so, mind you.  I always knew language would be a barrier.

 

A francophone himself, Pierre’s response to Emily’s pop quiz dealt with his brain.  Sure, life in France was fabulous, but he missed the intellectual stimuli he knew in North America – the business deals, the broker chats over cups of coffee, the budding prospectors who’d waltz through the office with sparkling drill results.  Not that Pierre would change history, no ma’am, but he already was stir-crazy.

 

Never one without two.  Shortly after the first inquest, I went for coffee with a new Welsh writer friend Lynne, who’d recently settled in Antibes.  She popped her question. 

 

Could I live here?  Lynne asked.  Meaning, could I live here forever?

 

No, no I don’t think so, I said.  I blamed the language thing.  (Lynne’s French is far superior to mine.)  Living in Antibes was great and all – and here I trod carefully to respect my friend’s own recent choice of residence – but I knew I could never stay forever.

 

The month of May began our jam-packed visitors’ book – a standard feature for Côte d’Azur households.  May also brought a new onslaught of questions.  First up was Kathy’s.

 

An effervescent connector who’d just jetted in from Utah, Kathy enthused over us, our sunshine, our view, our geraniums, our lettuce.  Life was perfect here, she declared.  Exuberantly perfect.

 

Which, yes, sometimes it is.  But my enthusiasm didn’t exactly match hers at that moment.  So Kathy asked me:  Had this place lost its magic?

 

No, no!  I’d replied a bit too quickly, a bit too passionately.  And that made me muddle over the issue more enduringly.

 

There were the daily realities of life in the south of France that well-meaning visitors didn’t get, I later explained to the enthusiastic Kathy.  They didn’t know how awful it was to get things fixed.  They didn’t appreciate the travails of parking in a city having certainly twice as many cars as slots.  They didn’t endure the weight of my grocery bags that I dragged while searching for my illegally parked car.  Those were the headaches that troubled only folks like us, les habitués. 

 

But there was something more.  It was I who’d made a valiant effort to downplay the cute stuff in town.  To not remain in continual awe of la Côte d’Azur’s crooked streets and the poetry of its restaurant menus.  Magic, after all, wasn’t real, and in staying here a full year, I needed to live in whatever real world I could create. 

 

A few weeks later it was Doctor Laurent who launched the inquisition.  His invitation to dinner chez nous was long overdue.  Now, seated on Bellevue’s terrace – outside his small cabinet on Boulevard Albert 1ere and stripped of his usual white coat – the good doctor was more gregarious than ever.

 

Dr Laurent wondered:  Now that I’d enjoyed life here for nearly a straight year – the beauty of this magnificent place and goodness of its food – could I live here?  Again meaning, could I live here forever?  

 

I could hardly answer his question.  The doctor’s soliloquy continued.  After all, he pleaded with my husband Pierre, his wife’s background was so European.  She loves Europe.  She IS, in fact, European!  He couldn’t take me away to frigid Canada!

 

Dr Laurent is right in many ways.  At the pivotal age of 24, after a single year in London, I’d fallen in love with the place so enduringly that I ended up staying for 12½ years.  If not exactly European, I’d love to be considered international.

 

Dr Laurent was Welsh Lynne to me all over again:  a local, or newly proclaimed local, who wanted me to share the love.  But get this:  Just three months after Lynne had posed the same question, my response felt different.  My French had gone up a notch.  I’d become more engrained in life here.  I had more friends – even the notion that I’d work to keep some of them after heading across the Pond to that howling moose. 

 

Yep, you know, Dr Laurent, I’d happily stay on a bit longer in la Côte d’Azur.

 

But I can’t.  We can’t.  It’s not just about me anymore.  And anyway, the French taxman’s bite is just too horrifying for those Francophiles who fail to push off in time.  We can (and will) return next year, but for now, well, there’s no other way.  And I’ve always known it.

 

School is out, and I’ve begun counting the things I’d “meant” to do when we first arrived in Antibes, the list I’d begun when life was awash with possibility and a whole year spanned before me.  I won’t be taking that pottery class, or the painting one.  I won’t learn guitar.  I won’t improve my sailing.  (“You have only so many hours in a day,” I can hear Pierre telling me.  Again.  Even Dr Laurent had begun telling me to drop the to-do list and go wander along the beautiful beaches.)

 

Tackling life more positively, I also start measuring what our little family HAS accomplished in this year.  Each of us has achieved something toward his or her basic goal in living here:

 

·         Four-year-old Laurelle survived a year at maternelle, emerging with the tongue (if not the manners) of a little French girl. 

 

·         I’ve survived a year surrounded by foreign language, even extracting a quite undeserved “excellent” from my French teacher, Madame Sire, who, when I speak, still gives me the LOOK (that thing French folks do when they tense their eyebrows and jut out their necks as they strain to figure out what some Anglo might be saying). 

 

·         And Pierre, well, there’s Pierre.  He managed to actually be here.  His goal sounds the simplest among ours, and it is – but it was tough enough for him to fulfill.  (He has just returned from a three-day jaunt to Nova Scotia for a game of golf.  And hey, why not?  (Okay, the full story is that it was with Tiger, but the principle of his itchy feet carries on.))

 

Our outbound flight taunts me through the barrel of a gun.  My to-do list screams.  The suitcases!  The address changes!  The rental cars!  The suitcases!  The toiletries inventory!  The blog!  The suitcases!  Those wretched suitcases!

 

As Antibes’ sandy beaches begin to pack in the sun worshippers, in that proverbial, south-of-France fesse-à-fesse fashion (that’s to say, butt-to-butt), I try to silence the to-do list and soak in my dream of life in la Côte d’Azur:   

 

·         The beauty Monet understood when he painted our very view:  Antibes’ medieval city jutting into a blue, blue sea – these days their waters spotted with the latest luxury yachts and sailing vessels; 

 

·         The stream of white-grey clouds that hover low behind Old Town Antibes on turbulent days, with the seas beneath Bellevue’s terrace churning a chalky teal hue against deep, angry skies; 

 

·         The peach, rose, goldenrod and indigo sunsets that ignite our nighttime sky on clearer eves; 

 

·         The goodness of French soil and what it produces – even as I dwell a little longer at market stalls, heavy bags dragging me down, just to choose the ripest, fattest cherries from one vendor and the most succulent cœur de bœuf tomatoes from another.

 

And what better way to recapture the very magic I’d purposely bulldozed those few months ago than to use new eyes?  Like those of my younger brother Steve, who visited from the US last month.  He’d gone out for a stroll one late afternoon and returned to Bellevue with a crusty baguette wrapped in our local boulangerie’s paper.

 

“I just walked to a real French boulangerie,” he said almost incredulously, his face alight like I’ve rarely seen it, “and I bought real French bread!”

 

Ah, the simple things.  We must remember.

 

Now fireworks explode up and down the Rivieran coastline.  ‘Tis the season.  Bastille Day ushers in the silliest part of France’s silly summer.  And our supply of long-life milk is running dry. 

 

I hear the moose.  I must pack.

 

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French Lessons is cruising along the Croatian coast this week. 

 

À bientôt until next week’s post, the final one in this series.

 

French Polish: Part 2

In writing last week’s post, French Polish:  Part 1, I unearthed a vein so rich in material that I simply had to divide it into two.  Mining the storyline of my own North American kid attending a French maternelle was simply chock-a-bloc with us-versus-them run-ins and a few sublime ah-ha’s.

 

Last week we established exactly how Pierre’s and my then-three-year-old, English-speaking daughter ended up at a French maternelle this year – how we chose to follow this course despite the fact that French instructors, in a style that’s ultra shocking to North American parents, sometimes call their pupils “nulles” (zeroes).  We discovered École St-Philippe Néri.   We met the teacher of la Petite Section and her aids, and the 33 kids in their charge.  We learned about la consigne (directions) and how Laurelle refused to follow them.  We emerged from an episode of strangulation (with Laurelle playing the brute).  We discovered jewels.  And then Laurelle discovered the French language, unlocking both her tongue and layers of built-up, school-imposed frustration. 

 

Finally, a long month and a half after the school year had begun, it was time to get on with real life inside a French maternelle.

 

What was most striking to Pierre and me about schooling in France was the uniformity.  Again, had I read Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow’s Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong before arriving in the country last summer, I wouldn’t have been so surprised at what I found. 

 

“All pre-university education in France has three common features:” Nadeau and Barlow write, “national standards, uniformity of education, and authoritative teachers.”  They flesh out their statement with observations and statistics, like:

 

·         “The French education system is specially designed to serve the interests of an extremely centralized country…A good basic education is available to all....”

 

·         “About 20 percent of the twelve million pre-university students attend private schools, but four private schools out of five are actually subsidized by the State and follow the national syllabus, which is controlled closely by the State.”

 

Indeed, Laurelle’s St-Philippe falls into this category, being described as “un établissement privé sous contrat” (a private establishment “under contract”).  That’s to say St-Philippe follows the French national syllabus and its teachers are paid by the State.  The happy upshot is that our annual – ANNUAL – bill for sending our kid to private school amounts to a mere EUR 500, after refunds from the State toward meals taken in the school’s cantine.

 

·         “[France’s 950,000] teachers and professors belong to one single system called the French Ministry of Education.  The main objective of the Ministry is to dispense education uniformly throughout the French territory.  There is no concept of local needs or particularities.  Teachers are theoretically interchangeable….”

 

Pierre and I actually figured out this point about uniformity on our own.  Cold weather had crept into the area early last winter, and so all 33 kids in Laurelle’s maternelle class needed to learn how to put on their coats, all by themselves. 

 

Laurelle demonstrated the three-step process with glee one afternoon in our family room.  She laid her long, bulky winter coat on the floor, unzipped and face up with the hood at her feet.  Next she knelt over the coat and put her arms into the sleeves.  And then in one final flurry, she stood straight, lifting her coat and flipping it over her head and onto her body.

 

The first few times she did this I got whipped in the face. 

 

Then we noticed something peculiar – at a local restaurant.  We’d finished our meals, and while Pierre occupied himself with the bill, I gathered markers and other sanity-saving tools.  Neither of us had noticed Laurelle placing her coat on the restaurant floor – in close proximity of an older couple seated nearby.  One, two… – before we could warn the couple, they had lurched away from the flying coat.  They already knew.

 

What made the incident clearer to Pierre and me was one of Laurelle’s picture books.  La Maternelle dealt with life at a French preschool.

 

La Maternelle fascinated Laurelle.  It captivated us, too.  One page demonstrated how kids learn to put on their coats.  One, two, three.  Another page showed a hallway outside the maternelle classroom, little coat hooks beneath each child’s name and photo – just like the hallway outside Laurelle’s classroom.  Another page showed napping arrangement with little beds lined up in a big room, each child hugging one special doudou (stuffed toy) brought from home – just like during Laurelle’s sieste. 

 

The more we read La Maternelle, the more we got it.  This book was St-Philippe.  It was EVERY maternelle in France.

 

If the kids’ days evolved in cookie cutter-fashion, we soon learned that their subject matters did, too. 

 

In these early months Pierre and I never received written feedback about Laurelle’s progress.  We’d relied on patched-together, (verbal) Daily Reports and the occasional smiley or straight faces that appeared on a particular item of work.  Laurelle’s life was mostly smiley and occasionally au coin.

 

From Christmas break onward, through, parents joined the scholastic circle.  We could review our child’s progress every few months on the Grid. 

 

The Grid (my name for it) was an impressive, eight-page list of competences that each student was to acquire during his three years in maternelle – the instruction before primary school.  Next to the list of attributes were three columns that indicated which lessons the child would learn during Petite Section (as Laurelle attended), and which were designated for the following two years (Moyenne Section and Grande Section).   The competencies were subdivided into seven sections and then further into subsections, with these sorts of goals targeted for la Petite Section:

 

ü  Acquiring language (speaking, understanding, vocabulary and courtesies)

ü  Discovering writing (listening to stories, recognizing names and numbers)

ü  Preparing to read and write (learning rhymes and correct pronunciations)

ü  Becoming a student (speaking, responding, not interrupting, following rules, cooperating)

ü  Using the body (running, jumping, sliding, rolling)

ü  Discovering the world (five senses, comparison, organization of the day, right vs left)

ü  Feeling, imagining and believing (singing, listening for pleasure or movement)

 

A blue “X” appeared in each box for a competency acquired during Petite Section.  The same report would follow each pupil through Moyenne and Grande Sections, with green and yellow “X”’s, respectively, appearing in these later years.

 

Sometimes Pierre and I shook our heads at the maternelle’s rigidity.  At the slowness of its pace.  The kids didn’t even start holding crayons until January! 

 

At the same time, we marveled at the balance and well thought-out corridors of teaching, ensuring that no one was left behind (without meaning to sound political.)  Gone – well gone – was America’s over-effusive praise for scribbling.

 

The system’s effort in teaching manners deserves a separate note here – if only for its charm.  Listed on the Grid’s required competencies for la Petite Section were salutations (bonjour, au revoir); courtesies (s’il vous plaît, merci); rules of politeness (not interrupting); and rules of behavior (respecting other people and their belongings, following rules).  What’s more, Laurelle’s teacher Aurore taught her students to greet her each morning with a kiss on the cheek – a rule that our daughter sometimes actually remembered! 

 

As the year moved on, Laurelle’s Grid became populated with gorgeous blue X’s.  Then lo and behold, in mid-February, the end of Term 3 (in a school year that divided neatly into five parts on account of long school holidays), parents received their first, personalized, written feedback.

 

“Laurelle,” Aurore began her note in French, your first language isn’t French, but you have found your place at the heart of the class, making friends and progressing enormously to rapidly acquire vocabulary that allows you to share at school.  Bravo!  You are brillante…. 

 

Brilliant!  My girl was brilliant!  She was hardly a nulle!  I could hardly hide my delight – and relief.  I brushed over Aurore’s last sentence about Laurelle needing to follow the rules better.

 

Daily Reports improved – that’s my memory of them anyway during this period of brilliante work – with the most enduring hiccup relating to naptime.  Laurelle hadn’t exactly reverted to her Term 1 antics during la sieste (one time jumping on her canvas bed with such barbarity that she broke it in a mighty crash), but she was hardly sage during this period of enforced quiet. 

 

So we adjusted our rules:  If she couldn’t actually sleep during naptime at school, then she needed to rest – and do so quietly.  No talking.  No singing.  No tapping.  No chirping.  And no jumping.  No good sieste meant no jewel.  (We’d added a new, nap-related rule to our reward system outlined in French Polish:  Part 1).

 

Laurelle’s pink and purple crystal jewel pile mounted.  Jewels became a pillar of our family life.  One winter Sunday during the children’s sermon – we attend an Anglican church in Cannes – the speaker drew parallels for the kids between God, their Heavenly Father, and their fathers here on earth. 

 

“What does your father give you when you make him happy?” the leader asked a group of 15 gathered children at the front of the church.  A good 200 folks in the congregation listened in.

 

Laurelle was the first to answer the question.  Her little voice rang clearly in the large hall, “He gives me jewels!”

 

Term 4 at St-Philippe ended in mid-April.  Aurore again dispersed the Grid and a new note.  But before reading it, I learned that I had a talker.  Aurore explained that it’d become necessary to separate the big talkers during group work, interspersing them with the quiet ones.  It was the only way to get anything done in a classroom of 30-some preschoolers.

 

Here’s why she sought me out with this little bit of organizational theory.  Not only was my daughter one of the talkers.  She was THE talker of all the talkers.  Talking was hardwired into her personality.

 

Great, I thought, Laurelle is getting the language.  Term 4’s note explained more fully.

 

“Laurelle,” Aurore had written, I wish that you would participate more because often you prefer to talk with your neighbours!  I congratulate you for all the progress you have made in French as well as for the excellent work that you’ve done!  Continue your efforts and understand that I am interested in you but that I also have to occupy myself with 31 other students.

 

Pierre’s colleagues often refer to him – jokingly, respectfully and, I fear, truthfully – as a “shit-disturber.”  It’s obviously hereditary.

 

The end of the school year came quickly for Aurore.  She went on medical leave for a scheduled surgery.  Losing a teacher for the last month of school is hardly ideal – sad, even, when you’ve lucked out with a devoted one like her. 

 

Given France’s policy of uniformity, though, teachers are imminently replaceable.  That’s the theory anyway.  Clémentine, Aurore’s stand-in, looked like she just graduated from school herself, but we ran with it.

 

The final weeks have been good ones for Laurelle.  She has taken her stuffed killer whale Orquebella in the car every morning, instructing the beast to have a good day at school, to listen to la consigne and to sleep – and noting that she wants a Good Report after school.  Once at school, Laurelle has swept into the classroom, bestowing kisses and hugs on whichever classmates she favours that moment (neatly circumventing a kiss to Clémentine’s cheek as the new teacher doesn’t reinforce Aurore’s set greeting).  My little socialite then has led a bevy of girls (not boys, who are often “scary”) by the hand to make up rules for some new game.  Hardly a dull moment. 

 

And Laurelle has returned home in the afternoons with Good Reports.  “Mommy, mommy,” she has called to me, spinning into the house like a Tasmanian Devil.  “I had a good day!  I was sage and I dormed!”  Which is perfect franglais for saying she was good and that she slept.  A two-jewel day.

 

Either things have improved wholeheartedly at the tail end of school – or else Clémentine is a bit of a softie.  (Laurelle has since confirmed that her new teacher doesn’t have so many rules.) 

 

My little one recently brought home her Term 5 and Year-End report, written by Aurore from afar.  The letter had a familiar ring:

 

“Laurelle,” Aurore wrote, “all your competences are practically acquired, bravo!... Really good progress the whole year with the acquisition of a new language and several other competences, congratulations!  Just a little more attention to following the rules!”

 

Looking through Laurelle’s final blue X’s on the Grid, there was no difficulty figuring out exactly what Aurore meant.  My daughter has absolutely no problem with the head stuff.  But the yawning holes in her trail of blue X’s were these: 

 

ü  Saying bonjour and au revoir, s’il vous plaît and merci

ü  Not interrupting others

ü  Respecting other people and their things

ü  Following rules dictated by adults

 

Again, Nadeau and Barlow had been right.  French kids do learn their manners much earlier than their peers.

 

Sending Laurelle to a French maternelle – giving her the chance to pick up a second language and culture at a time they’d sink in – had been one of our central motives for living in France this year.  At this juncture, I’m considering a gambit to stay on a second year.

 

 

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French Polish: Part 1

Would you do it all over again?  I asked Pierre a couple days ago.  Our year in France is winding down, and before our heads turn completely back overseas, it seemed a worthy question.

 

Yes, he would.  And the most worthy reason for having been here, he said, was Laurelle’s year at school.

 

Sending our then-three-year old to a French preschool, giving her a proper, full year at maternelle, was one of our key reasons for coming to France this year.  Or that’s what we’ve been saying anyway. 

 

Truth be told, our original purpose was hardly so visionary.  We’d just wanted to experience life in France for a year.  Then we caught hold of a more decent aim:  to bestow a second language and culture on our three-year-old daughter when her brain’s synapses could best take them in.  That motive was easy to explain to the rest of the world, and so Laurelle’s year at maternelle shortly became the reason we’d come to France.

 

Whatever the history, Laurelle has nearly survived the whole year at maternelle.  And while it hasn’t always been pretty, July 2^nd will mark her final day in la Petite Section, the youngest group, at École St-Philippe Néri in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins.

 

I’ve managed to survive the school year, too.  Before we even arrived in France last summer, I was fairly terrified about putting my sweet little jewel into a maternelle.  It was the teachers’ attitudes that tortured me.

 

My own French language instructor at l’Alliance Française in Denver, a woman who’d grown up in France, once explained that French teachers hardly encourage pupils with the confidence-building, you-can-do-it, just-pull-up-your-bootstraps mentality that I gained from American education.  That rah-rah spirit had made me pull up my bootstraps even higher.

 

In France there are no carrots.  There are sticks.  A French teacher’s pat line for a difficult child, my Alliance Française instructor explained, is “Tu es nulle.”  You are nothing.

 

Never, not ever, would anyone – ANYONE – label my lavender-scented angel as a zero.  Even at times when she wasn’t so sweet smelling.

 

Don’t worry, my instructor had told me. The label only starts in grade school. 

 

Terrific.  All I knew was that our family was embarking on something completely foreign to me – and we were using our beautiful treasure as a lab rat. 

 

Perhaps I should’ve read Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow’s Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t be Wrong before returning to France last summer.  Or maybe I’m lucky I didn’t.  In their effort to explain French culture to Anglos like me, the authors devote a fair chunk of the book to French schooling. 

 

Here is their most telling line:  “…the point of school in France is not to develop personalities.  Teachers see their objective as the transmission of knowledge.  Education is theoretical and formal.”

 

And formal education begins at la maternelle.  I had a baby girl coming from an American preschool where she’d received jubilant praise for picking up a crayon and making it scribble.  She could speak perfect, preschool English but could hardly make her way in French – not even to ask for la toilette. 

 

Yep, she was ready for theory and formality alright.

 

But most all French three-year olds get onto the bandwagon.  “Kindergarten is mandatory at age five but optional at age three,” Nadeau and Barlow explain, “and 88 percent of French children are placed at la maternelle at this early age.  So French children learn to adapt to social norms very early in life.”

 

The bandwagon is full-on, too.  It is true that most young schoolchildren in France have Wednesdays off.  But they work hard the other days.  St-Philippe disallowed half-days for preschoolers from late October, and so even their youngest pupils rack up 33 hours at school each week (assuming there are no public holidays or strikes – something one mustn’t assume in France).  This French pre-school statistic outshines the average US school week of 32 hours – and that number includes American students who can drive and buy cigarettes.

 

I’ve already written a bit about Laurelle’s school year.  In early September last year, she’d joined a class of 33 pupils – none English-speaking except for her – under the careful (but obviously restricted) surveillance of a single head teacher and two aids.  Aurore, the head, was a vivacious thirty-something, her French words rolling out of her mouth as quickly and authoritatively as the tight curls that sprang  from her scalp.  Maria, the primary aid, cast an older, somewhat gentler disposition, seeming happy to follow Aurore’s lead.  Manon was une stagiaire, a young trainee.  (Manon would leave at Christmastime with no replacement, leaving the large preschool class to two adults.)

 

The actual bricks and mortar of St-Philippe hardly jibed with my early childhood memories.  True, I grew up in the US Midwest where space is more abundant, so I could accept the squeeze within Laurelle’s classroom.  Too, there were no lunchboxes; St-Philippe operated a separate cantine with hot food cooked on the premises.  (It’s France, after all.)  La sieste was taken in yet another hall, where each child kept a small canvas bed.  This was how the French did preschool.

 

But in selecting St-Philippe for Laurelle, one of its bigger strengths – in addition to its educational reputation – was the courtyard.  Not that it was particularly fancy.  There wasn’t a single patch of grass to temper its sprawl of gravel and asphalt.  There was no sandbox.  There was no rambling jungle gym (though the youngest pupils did have rights to a plastic slide occupying their private corner).  What St-Philippe did have was space.  Its courtyard was a good half-city block in size.  And a handful of large, leafy trees peppered its greyness.  At least my daughter could breathe – and that mattered to a mother from the US Midwest.

 

The beginning of Laurelle’s school year was tough – the weeping and wailing at drop-off – and then the routine got generally better (Cry Me A River, dated 5 September 2008.)

 

I’d meant to write something about strangulation next but never got around to it.  The short story:  Maxime, a small, wiry boy in Laurelle’s class with fine facial features, had parked himself at the crest of the slide (the one and only) during recreation time one day, and he wouldn’t budge.  Laurelle wanted to go down the slide.  Without knowing how to use the French language, she could hardly ask Maxime to move.  So being the bigger of the two, she tried to strangle him.

 

After school that day, Laurelle’s teacher Aurore told me in fast French about this most frightful incident.  I quickly learned the French word étranglement.  It sounds similar.  The inward grasping motion of Aurore’s hands confirmed my theory. 

 

I, the American mother of the American girl, was horrified.  I tried to explain – with a polite smile – that in fact, we were a family of sauvages who’d shacked up on France’s good soil.

 

Just then Maxime’s father came to the door, the young stranglee in his arms.  Aurore retold the étranglement story, this time to both parents.  The second go around really suited me because at last I could grasp the finer, more terrifying details of the matter. 

 

I apologized profusely to little Maxime and his father on account of my young sauvage.  I began scouting for Maxime’s bodily injuries and conjuring up dormant mental ones. 

 

Maxime’s father shrugged his shoulders.  No big deal.  And he was off home with his boy.

 

That’s the way many French parents seemed to deal with misbehavior.  On the other hand, we – this being Jennifer (our nanny), Pierre and I, all of whom are Canadian or American – normally asked Aurore for a quick, verbal, Daily Report on Laurelle’s behaviour at each collection time.  Did she follow la consigne that day? 

 

La consigne, or directions, had become one of my new vocabulary words.  It actually had become one of my new focuses.  Unlike my offspring, I’d always been a rule-follower.  I still remember my humiliation during naptime one afternoon in kindergarten when I didn’t get a gold star sticker on my forehead.  Now la consigne is a feat I’ll never forget. 

 

Few, if any, parents of Laurelle’s classmates seemed to enquire about their kids’ antics during the day with the firm intent of correcting misbehaviors.  The mother of Eléonore put the idea succinctly as we lunched one autumn day.  When her kids were at school, she said, they were the teachers’ responsibilities.  Clack.  End of story. 

 

Nadeau and Barlow already had figured this out:  “French parents are, on the whole, quite authoritarian about child rearing,” they wrote, “and they teach their children to respect rules from a young age.  Parents’ work isn’t lost when kids go to school because the same authority is granted to teachers.  French children generally exhibit good manners and speaking ability at a very young age.”

 

We, however, are North Americans.  We couldn’t help but intervene with problems (étranglements and otherwise).  We introduced jewels. 

 

After a particularly nasty patch at school, Jennifer helped Laurelle agree a list rules for good behavior.  Good behavior could be a Good Report from school regarding la consigne; it could be no fussing at bedtime; it could be no instances of hitting or talking back.  Good behavior meant  Laurelle could put a jewel into a special glass jar.  Bad behavior meant no jewels were awarded.  Particularly bad behavior – like extreme tantrums or lying – meant jewels were removed.

 

Over time Laurelle’s earned jewels – pink and purple plastic crystals straight from Maxi Bazaar – would create a sparkling mound.  Amassing 20 of them meant she got a prize – a new colouring book or a princess snow globe or perhaps paddles and balls for the beach.   

 

It’s a simple concept, but the jewels seemed to help.  One week arrived when Aurore actually described Laurelle as sage.  Good.  Well-behaved.  For the first time in her career at St-Philippe, Laurelle managed a full week when she hadn’t end up au coin (in the corner).  She hadn’t succumbed to her usual classroom craze:  While the good little French children helped out during clean-up, my daughter would avoid work altogether and demand (in English?) that everyone watch her perform a song and dance.

 

What really made a difference in Laurelle’s life, though, was the French language.  In October, just six weeks after the school year had begun, Laurelle began speaking French.  It was a revelation.  It wiped away layers of frustration.  Daily Reports improved significantly.  We heard the phrase au coin with less frequency (not that it ever went away completely), and the notion of étranglement evaporated.  (More on Laurelle’s language acquisition in Çe n’est pas juste, the blog dated 5 June 2009.)

 

Having battled the early blazes, we could now focus on the wonders of real life at a French maternelle. 

 

French Polish:  Part 2 will appear in next week’s posting of French Lessons.

 

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All in the Family

Over the weekend I was flipping through The Riviera Reporter, the Côte d’Azur’s English-language, what’s-on rag.  Inside was an interview with an American living in the area, a guy called Robert Adelson, the curator of musical instruments at Nice’s Musée du Palais Lascaris.

 

The Riviera Reporter had a simple question for Mr Adelson:  How does he like living here?

 

The American answered like a diplomat.  He called his experience “transformational.”  There were good things, and there were bad things. 

 

People don’t really get to know their neighbours, he said.  That was his bad thing.  (Same here, as I’ve already noted on this site:  A Most Charitable Neighbourhood, posted 15 December 2008.  No one baked chocolate chip cookies when we moved in either.)

 

Adelson’s good thing about living here was his chance to slow down a bit.  The French cherish their personal time.  They burn less midnight oil at work.  A lot less.  And instead they invest their hours with their families.

 

Put into enlightened phraseology, the French work to live – not the other way around.

 

This is all good stuff, Mr Adelson, I agree.  But let’s talk about reality. 

 

It’s bad enough that everything closes on Sundays around here.  Sunday is, after all, not an uncommon day for shops to close in some parts of the civilized world. 

 

It’s bad enough that there are no grocery stores or cafes open 24/7.  In the early days, I admit I was hopeful.  I’d seen a few shops advertising their hours as “non-stop.”  But that’s hardly 24/7.  “Non-stop” simply means attendants don’t skive off each day for a two-or-three-hour lunch break.

 

But in the south of France, it’s worse than that.  Much worse.

 

Here, most places close for a long lunch and on Sundays – AND on Mondays, or maybe Wednesdays, or maybe Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and then whenever the moon is full or the barometer falling, and if an inkling for some free time should strike.  It’s the sort of thing that really bugs a modern person. 

 

And while there is some reprieve from this French regime during the feted “season” (which is basically now through August), I’ve spent hours contemplating how on earth businesses can make a go of it.  At one point I began to fear that our little family of three had moved from a properly functioning, world-class city to some old-fashioned, backwater, seaside resort.

 

But then, our time here has unfolded.  The longer we’ve stayed, the more we’ve become part of the place.  There’s a great cohesiveness to the whole machine and – I hesitate to say it – I think I might actually begin to get it. 

 

“Family time”:  It’s not just that Europeans like to go on holiday.  Holidays alone, I fully agree, are a terrifically admirable cause.  Work hard (or as hard as you can in a 35-hour French work week) and play hard.  It’s a terrific motto.  We all recognize the two-week-a-year American holiday phenomenon is shear torture.  (I’ve had upstanding college friends who would regularly quit jobs just to take extended, overseas holidays, and then return to the US to pick up something new.  I, myself, holed up in London for most all my banking career with five-plus weeks of holiday each year.  At one point, I shunned a perfectly good job offer because the holiday allowance would slip by a week.)

 

No, this concept of “family time” is more than holidays.  I’ve begun to twig that it actually forms a fundamental link with some basic customs in French society:

 

1.     Families stick together.  There’s a lot less of the far-flung family thing here, with parents stationed in Indiana, sister working in New York, father once-a-month in London, and brother taking an NGO job in Uganda.  Folks stay put.

 

In fact, things are so local in the south of France that they redefine the meaning of the word.  A while back I was visiting with some members of our local port, la Port de la Salis, asking questions about the neighbourhood’s history.  One chap, a retiree with a gift of the gab, told me he had no idea what had happened here.  “C’est pas mon quartier,” he said.  It’s not my neighbourhood.

 

So where are you from?  I asked. 

 

He pointed backward toward Antibes’ own Fort Carré.  Over there, he said.  On the other side of the peninsula.

 

Ah, of course.  Foreign, very foreign, indeed.

 

That family units stay in one place is highly practical when it comes to children.  With our own four-year old in tow, we’ve figured out this message with clarity.  Extended family allows Rules Two, Three and Four to exist in French society:

 

2.     Many (most?) French schools – such as Laurelle’s – operate on a four-day week:  Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.  Wednesdays are off. 

 

Try floating that one in Manhattan.

 

But here in la Côte d’Azur, it’s no problem.  If Mom and Dad are tied up during the work week, there are inevitably grandparents and aunts and uncles nearby to fill in with the kids on Wednesdays.  Andrea, a cute, four-year-old boy in Laurelle’s class, gets dropped off and picked up at la maternelle by such a variety of extended family that I’ve stopped trying to keep the relationships straight.

 

This prompts a corollary to Point Two:

 

2a.  French children enjoy serial school breaks.  We’re not just talking about two weeks off at Christmas and one at Easter.  No, sirree. 

 

In France, there are ten days off at Toussaint (All Saint’s Day, November 1^st).  There are two weeks off at Christmas, another two weeks in February for les vacances d’hiver (winter break – why not?), and yet another two weeks off at Easter (a break which, this year, didn’t actually coincide with Easter, but heh, who’s splitting those hairs?).

 

Who deals with the kids on these extended breaks?  I think you know.

 

3.     The French love striking.  We all know this.  Les grèves are a national right in France, and the people use them quite adeptly, as featured in En Grève, my blog dated 26 November 2008.

 

Generally speaking, the ripple effect of une grève should be enormous on daily lives.  But not here.  Les grèves are part of the fabric, and there are ways to deal with them.  Schools shut while teachers strike?  Parents can’t get home from work because the trains have stopped?  No worries.  Extended family fills in. 

 

4.     Ditto for les jours feriés. National holidays have hit France with a vengeance lately, wiping out nearly every attempt at industriousness during the month of May.  Same thing for the so-called ponts, or bridges – the extra national holidays that creep in on a Friday when Thursday is a public holiday, or on a Monday when Tuesday is a day off. 

 

Take l’Ascension.  This year the public holiday fell on Thursday, May 21.  Friday, the 22^rd, naturally formed un pont, creating a sweeping four-day weekend – at least for the region’s children.  Families – often generations of them – bought ice creams and spilled out onto the local beaches.  Meanwhile I ask myself who had the vaguest idea behind that holiday weekend that everyone celebrated with such glee.  

 

But again, hiccups to the normal week are no problem.  There are relations. 

 

These breaks from normality are, in short, one reason why foreign folks like us – those who truly are not from le quartier – have a tougher time in France.  We have no in-bred (literally speaking) support system.  First we have to figure out the place, and then we have to figure out how to deal with it.  (And thus there’s one good reason we employ a nanny.)

 

5.     Families work together.  Mom-and-pop shops here are hardly getting wiped out by French Wal-Mart.  A full 93% of French businesses have less than 10 salaried employees, garnering enough popularity to deserve their own acronym in French economic statistics:  les TPE, les très petites enterprises (very small businesses).  To be fair, it’s la PME, la petite et moyenne enterprise (small and medium businesses, those with 10 to 250 salaried personnel) that are the country’s workhorses; they create a full 2/3 of French jobs.  But the mom-and-pops remain a vital organ in the functioning of the French system.

 

“Our” boulangerie, for example, the one just down the road, is owned by a family.  A sister café opened recently down the street – and is run by the brother of the boulangerie owner.  Several blocks away, Café Kanter, our favourite Antibes bistro, is linked with a restaurant of the same name in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins.  A mirror-image, mile-high millefeuille dessert was our giveaway:  the two Cafés Kanter are owned by branches from the same family tree.  Meanwhile in nearby Cannes, Bernadette and Cathy, a mother and daughter team, own Dimension, my favourite women’s clothing shop.  Bernadette’s two sisters have similar shops with their own daughters in Antibes and St Tropez.  These are a tiny smattering of what’s out there – and represent places our family frequents.

 

Which brings us back to that beloved issue of shops closing at lunchtime – or any other time that darned well pleases the owner.  The excuse may be food.  It may be a doctor’s appointment.  Or – and I pull this one out of reality as I’ve often marveled at the daredevils who jump waves off Antibes’ beaches on gusty days – the kiteboard may be calling:  The wind has kicked up, the waves are surging, and a go on the sea is simply a predestined right. 

 

No worries.  You own the shop?  You’re the boss.  Just shut the doors – without explanation or notice. 

 

Sometimes folks schedule days of closure midweek, every week, because it suits the family structure.  Like the husband and wife team who run Le Coquelicot, another of our favourite bistros.  They keep the lights off every Wednesday.  School’s out and, what else?  The owners have a kid.

 

French business has priorities.  They aren’t necessarily profits.

 

Family businesses, generations in one place, Wednesdays off school, grèves and an endless series of public holidays – all these elements work together in unexpected harmony.  I’m not sure who’s the chicken and egg here – it’s all a tangled web really – but the pieces seem to fit together.  And, as we’ve witnessed firsthand, the whole mess is something you only truly appreciate only after living here.

 

So family time it is.  Mr Adelson has a point – and his thought becomes stronger once we unpack it.

 

If I’m honest, it still bugs me when I find half the local shops closed on Mondays or for a few hours every midday, but I’m beginning to understand why it happens.  I am also getting used to the helter-skelter.  I shop in the mornings now and fully expect, beforehand, that I’ll get about half as much accomplished on Mondays.  And I thrill in watching the kiteboarders, admiring their courage and their lust for freedom – and the fluidity of the system that allows them out onto the surging waters.

 

Shortly our family will leave the haphazard, strapped-together madness of la Côte d’Azur.  Once resituated in Toronto, Canada’s big smoke, will I rejoice in my life’s newfound efficiency? 

 

Or will I wonder what happened to all those things the world loves to hate about France?

Postscript 4: Madoff's Legacy

Just inside the doorway of VIP, our local estate agent’s offices – smack in view of whomever cares to see – stand five large containers of personal effects belonging to one of the world’s most infamous people:  Bernie Madoff.

 

One of these containers is a large, black suitcase, zipped tightly shut.  The others are sturdy moving-house-style boxes, two of which lie open at the top.  A few stray papers poke out of one.  Another reveals a straw hat and bag and a pair of white sandals that belong to Bernie Madoff’s wife Ruth.  Visible, too, is a pair of men’s navy canvas Lacoste loafers, the little alligator lying face-up in the box. 

 

Those shoes were for the boat, Angela tells me in French. 

 

“The boat” would be the Madoffs’ (ever-so-aptly named) Bull, one of their Cap d’Antibes assets that Angela hasn’t yet managed to sell.

 

Angela is equally well-known around here.  People know her as Angela, just Angela – like you talk about Celine or Madonna or Cher.  I make this observation to her.  She grins and nods vigorously.

 

Following on from Lunching on Nuggets (my blog dated 22 January 2009), I can now report that the Madoff home on Cap d’Antibes has SOLD.  Despite the wretched economy and trail of bankruptcy proceedings, our local real estate agents – the very same folks who sold us Bellevue and who watch over the house in our absence – these good folks have returned a bit of revenue into the vast, black hole that surrounds the Madoff legacy.

 

“It’s my legacy,” Angela says of the boxes.  She seats herself behind one of VIP’s antique wooden desks.  I sit across from her.  The thick files stacked between us relate to Madoffs’ property. 

 

I’m still wondering what else is inside the boxes.  It feels wrong to touch them, voyeuristic even to get too close, and so I’m considering how I might get a casual, closer look.  Angela notices my curiosity.  “There’s nothing special inside,” she tells me.

 

Angela was the kingpin – or the queenpin – in the transaction that closed May 19, the Madoff property being offloaded to some Russians.  She sold the place furnished, books and all – except for the so-called legacy stuffed into cardboard boxes and a big, black suitcase. 

 

I detect some sadness in Angela’s voice.  She had links with these people.  She draws a page from her files and shows it me.  It’s a clipping from a glossy magazine, a photo of her clients, Bernie and Ruth, decked out as celebrities in their cocktail best – the same friends she has known and dined with over the past 15 years on the Cap d’Antibes.  It was Angela who had sold them the now-offensive property (in Ruth’s name).  It was she who Ruth Madoff had phoned last December, unsure whether the queen of property was willing even to talk to her.  (The queen was.)

 

The day I visit Angela in VIP’s offices, she’s decked out in her usual get-up.  Not that there’s anything usual about it.  Today’s selection is a lavender knit, short-sleeved dress, adorned by six necklaces (at least that’s the number I can count) bearing an array of bobbles.  One necklace is large enough to count for three; it’s encrusted with large chunks of turquoise.  She wears five bracelets (of the glittering and hardly-small variety), two rings (an amazingly modest number, although each ring has the square acreage of six), and big, rhinestone hoop earrings.  Turquoise eyeshadow lines her lids.  Turquoise-green swirled reading glasses perch on her scalp, which is squeezed tight by a long, turquoise-and-hot pink floral scarf tied at the nape of her neck.  Later I unearth a turquoise encrusted hairclip sunk within her pile of hair. 

 

This is Angela, and there is nothing unusual about her dress today – relatively speaking for Angela anyway.

 

The fact that she was happy to have that year-end chat with Ruth Madoff would’ve seemed a coup for the newly ostracized woman.  From informal Cap d’Antibes research, I’ve learned that no one in Ruth’s family is communicating with her – not her children, not Bernie.  No, her husband is dressed up in an orange jumpsuit these days, tucked away in a nine-square-foot cell (including shower and toilet) that’s situated in the terrorist section on the 13^th story of a Manhattan building, with an elevator that only reaches the ninth.  Access to each and every floor above nine requires clearance through an air-locked chamber.

 

But someone went to visit Bernie recently, and that’s his bankruptcy lawyer.  Angela flashes me a copy of his passport page from her files.  He’s in his early 40s and bears a crop of dark curly hair and olive skin.  Angela describes him as gentil, or kind, adding that he fell in love with Cap d’Antibes, the see-and-be-seen Pom Pom bar in Juan-les-Pins, and the celebrated Eden Roc restaurant.

 

This gentil lawyer visited Bernie in his orange jumpsuit.  Their conversation centered on the sale papers for his pad on the Cap.  Angela takes a copy of the document from her files.  There, in the bottom left-hand corner, is Bernie’s jagged signature, a condensed, photocopy-gray scrawl centered within the seller’s box on the form.

 

The speed of the whole transaction is one that has astonished onlookers.  First the court had to approve Angela as sales agent for the property.  She signed stacks of legalese from the New York State Attorney General’s office, agreeing not to talk to the press and such.  

 

Then, once she had the job, it took Angela only 47 days to get a deal and a firm contract on the property.  The bankruptcy lawyer, frankly, couldn’t believe it.  He and Angela had developed a sort of rapport during the short period, with the Cap d’Antibes sales agent emailing the New York lawyer almost every day to report showings and conversations over the estate.  But the fact that Angela had maneuvered the extra hurdles of an overseas jurisdiction and the property’s connection with a well-followed bankruptcy case made her feat even more astounding. 

 

I was up until 1:00 a.m. faxing papers, Angela says.  The New York lawyer emailed her wondering how ANYONE in France could be awake at such an hour and WORKING.  “You must be crazy,” he wrote.  As she replays the scene for me, she enjoys this description of her as folle.

 

Angela told the lawyer that, in fact, she was German.  That should explain everything.

 

The reputed industriousness, yes, perhaps, but not the speed of the sale.  And taken from a New York lawyer’s perspective, probably the long distance of the transaction, and possibly even the name of the reality office – VIP – stepped beyond the usual bookwork, too.  Everything seemed just a little off-kilter.  So the New York bankruptcy lawyer finagled a quick trip to the French Riviera to check out the legitimacy of Angela’s deal.

 

Angela met the curly-haired lawyer at the airport.  She grins at me even more broadly in telling this part of the story.  The lawyer took one look at her, she says – and here she gestures subtly toward her attire, referencing whatever multi-layered, swirly, hot pink and turquoise outfit and bangles she’d chosen for the day – and the chap said, “Now I know you’re crazy.” 

 

Angela relives those days and finishes on a high note, her eyes twinkling with the fact that the lawyer declared her as even more folle on the day he left the Cap.  But he knew one thing for sure.  The Madoff sale, crazy or not, was real.

 

Angela has sold the Madoff home.  She has sold the Madoff car as well.  One of the thick files on her desk holds these papers.  She opens its front cover and waves a set of car keys and a Peugeot ownership card.

 

Now she’s moving onto Bull, the boat.

 

At this rate, I reckon you should keep your eyes peeled in the local markets.  While the contents of the four cardboard boxes and suitcase are meant to ship overseas to their rightful owners, the freight costs are not insignificant.  And who knows where that money would come from. 

 

There are the Madoffs’ former housekeeper and a boat captain, Angela reminds me.  They could inherit the legacy. 

 

But, if only for a good dinner party story, I think I’ll keep my eyes open on market days for a smart pair of navy canvas Lacoste loafers.

Ce n'est pas juste

Lately I’ve been recalling a conspiracy that was launched one evening a few years ago, while Pierre fed Laurelle from a glass jar of mushed-up peas. 

 

My husband and baby daughter were seated at our kitchen table in Denver, Laurelle like toy sentry stationed squarely in her Eddie Bauer high chair.  As he spooned, Pierre babbled away to my baby in his Quebecois French about who-knows-what. 

 

Then I overheard a sentence I could understand.

 

Papa’s voice was all cutesy and engaging.  He spoke in English.  “Pretty soon you and I will be able to talk about things,” he told Laurelle, “and Mommy won’t be able to understand!”

 

Ha!  Never, I thought.

 

Never, I vowed.  And so I’ve plugged away at the French language.  Seven-some years later I’ve ended up with a working knowledge of Anglophone French, as I described in The Beautiful Language (my blog dated 15 May 2009).  I can get the technical bits of the language, but try as I might, I fear I’ll never sound like a local.

 

Today’s post, on the other hand, could be called The Beautiful Language 2.  Or better yet, French for Four-Year Olds.

 

Now four years of age, Laurelle has been gathering her command of the French language for precisely four years.  Put one way, that’s a lifetime.  Put another way, her efforts are only half of mine. 

 

In short, I’ve been struggling at French nearly twice as long as Laurelle has been ALIVE.

 

Worse, Laurelle’s French – unlike mine – is perfect.  As my child plays with schoolmates on the playground after school or makes friends with other pint-sized swimmers at the beach, she’s my little French girl.  It’s as if no one suspects she has an ounce of English-speaking blood in her. 

 

Until her mother swoops in and opens her big, smiley, American mouth, that is.  Until I try to fit into the conversation and completely blow her cover.

 

“Ce n’est pas juste,” I say to the local parents.  It’s not fair.  The other adults often find this comment funny.  I do, too – but I don’t.

 

The world is even less fair when you consider that the French language actually underpins a couple of our family’s “life goals” (if I may use such an inward-reaching term) in living here this year.  And we’ve fairly turned our lives inside out to achieve them: 

 

For Pierre it’s straightforward.  He’s taking a first stab at living abroad. 

 

For me I get a first stab at living abroad in a foreign language.  Ah, the language thing. 

 

And for Laurelle, well, it’s a chance to attend maternelle, French preschool, and learn a second language with the same fluency as her first.  There’s that wretched language thing again.

 

I shouldn’t be competitive with my own daughter.  Honestly!  But if Laurelle accomplishes her “life goal” in a single year, I don’t know whether I should punch the stars out in hearty, romping joy or in a self-centered funk.

 

The language thing is just so darned easy for little ones.  Too darned easy.  Ce n’est pas juste.  They enter a foreign land with blank slates, their minds free of all preconceptions about whether French is easy or difficult to learn – even whether the language is beautiful.  French just IS.  It is the way people around here communicate.

 

By the time we reached France last summer, Laurelle was three, and she at least understood the language.  Pierre had spoken French to her over the changing table, her backside thrust into the air awaiting a clean diaper.  He’d explained, as only a Frenchman can, that this jar of yellow mushed-up food tasted like juicy mango while that beige paste was organic chicken and rice.  He’d read French-English picture dictionaries (think “dog – chien, tree – arbre”) and storybooks with real plots (think Elmer flying in the wind). 

 

So last summer Laurelle understood the language.  Or at least she understood the bits she heard over and over again – like stuff about diapers, strained foods, and flying patchwork elephants.  What’s more, while her English language vocabulary was quite stellar (and I’m not just being her mother speaking, promise), my child spoke exactly no words of French. 

 

In September last year, on entering her first day of maternelle, Laurelle went from being the classroom’s original chatterbox, the one with the greatest command of language – to the pupil in a class of 33 three-year olds who said the least, who knew nothing.  She couldn’t even ask for the loo.

 

My precious, precocious baby soon learned – as did I – that the phrase French schoolteachers bellow to misbehaving subjects is “au coin.”  Go to the corner.  But I’ll write more on Laurelle’s school experiences in another blog.

 

And then, voilà.  My daughter began to speak the beautiful language.  By mid-October, a month and a half after school had begun, her little, button mouth began to form French words.  Her first words were those she picked up at school.  She mingled them with evident pride into her usual English conversation, often on school nights when our family convened at the dinner table:

 

 Ecoutez!  (Listen!) 

Arretez!  (Stop!) 

Regardez!  (Watch!) 

Regardez-moi!  (Watch me!) 

Vas-y, Papa!  (Let’s go, Papa!)

 

I quickly realized that Laurelle’s new French vocabulary was made up of verbs.  Verbs – those wretched, impossible, French verbs!  Her every use was conjugated into the imperative form (commands), always choosing the second person plural vous, just as her teacher would in addressing 33 three-year olds. 

 

But now, of course, I am speaking like an adult trying to learn French.  Three-year olds don’t worry about first- or second- or third-person anything.  They don’t conjugate verbs in their heads.  They just talk.  They launch themselves straight off a ski jump and never look back.

 

But what impressed me most about Laurelle’s acquisition of language – other than the fact that she’d managed to do it at the ripe age of three – was its perfection.  Her pronunciation of the beautiful language was, well, beautiful.  Hers was perfect, local pronunciation.  That’s not exactly Parisian French, it should be said, and it’s certainly not Quebecois.  No, Laurelle’s is good “06” French.  French with a sing-song, southern softening that comes from the sunshine lifestyle in Département 06, basically the French equivalent of “State Number 6.”

 

Take the letter R.  The Chinese characteristically have trouble with all Rs that crop up in our English language.  Anglophones barely look twice at the consonant.  Single R, double Rs.  Never mind, it’s all the same sound.  Rrrr.

 

The letter R is not so easy in Romance languages.  The Rolled R gave me years of trouble in high school Spanish classes – both the long-rolling Double RR and the more subtle Single R, its short-form cousin.  After years in front of a mirror, I could finally get my tongue to flutter behind my front teeth in the fourth year of class.

 

The French R is doubly cumbersome.  First off, there’s a fundamental question:  Do I pronounce the letter, or not?  If so, there’s the second issue of how. 

 

In the south of France, locals attack the R – at least in my view – with a rather German bravado.  They throw a throaty, phlegm-like sound into the middle of their words.  That’s supposed to be an R.

 

Soon, my pronunciation-perfect Laurelle soon began tossing the phlegmy R into her own conversation.  The first time I heard my rose-scented jewel utter such a guttural sound, I nearly coughed out my own phlegm.  I don’t know what it is about kids, but their accents – whether British or French or Texan – are stronger than those of adults.  Same with the phlegm-y thing.  Laurelle, like her peers on the playground, executes her Rs with terrific prowess.  They even muddle her name:  Lau[phlem-y thing]-ELLE.

 

Of course there are those famous French vowels, too.  I still struggle with them.  I write flashcards with music notes in their corners to indicate words where I’m working not on their meanings but on their pronunciations.  Invariably, correct pronunciation involves getting my vowels right. 

 

Vowels are all theory to a four-year old.  (Mommy, what’s a vowel?  What’s a flashcard?)  The sounds that little ones can form in their mouths are distributed along a much less punctuated scale than the adult version.  They are like musicians without a home country.  They can be fluent in the Western tonality made up of flats and sharps (so-called half-tones).  And they can jump straight to a Middle Eastern scale, intertwining new sounds between half-tones to create quarter-tones.  But kids never worry about what half-tones or quarter-tones might be.

 

So let me illustrate how this anti-Mommy conspiracy has blossomed over the past year.  Take Laurelle’s first friend at school.  Her name is Clotilde.  Early in the school year, I suggested to Laurelle that we might invite Clotilde over for a playdate.

 

“It’s not Claw-TEELD, Mommy,” Laurelle told me strictly.  “It’s Clo-TILD.”

 

My baby began correcting me.

 

Things got worse.  One morning shortly thereafter, Laurelle was watching a morning episode of Dora la Exploratrice.  To be fair, to be juste, I wasn’t actually engaged the cartoon, just listening in.  Dora was outlining her journey in the day’s episode:  forêt, lac aux crocodiles, le grand buisson bleu.  Forest, crocodile lake, the big, blue – what?

 

“What’s le grand buisson bleu?”  I called to Laurelle.

 

Her voice was that of a teenager rolling her eyes.  “It’s the big, blue bush, Mommy.”

 

My baby began teaching me.

 

Recently when Laurelle and I walked toward our car after school one day, she said with some urgency, “Key-ma-pel-AY?”  Then again, “Key-ma-pel-AY?”

 

I hadn’t a clue what she meant.  The sounds mushed together, just like French had sounded to me at the very beginning – one, continuous sound stream devoid of discrete words.    

 

So I had to ask my daughter.  “What are you saying?”

 

She replied quite simply, “Who called me?” 

 

Of course.  Qui m’appelé?  Key-ma-pel-AY.  She had said it perfectly.

 

And thus, my baby began translating for me.  The mushy-peas-in-an-Eddie-Bauer-high-chair experience came slamming back into my face.  The conspiracy had come to fruition.  Father and daughter actually could enjoy their own, perfectly pronounced, Mommy-protected conversation.

 

It seems that Laurelle, my little Laurelle, has two language boxes in her brain.  It is true.  Granted, at times they do get confused.  A couple months ago I overheard her breathless explanation of the English board game Candyland to Anitou, our occasional, French sitter.  Laurelle taught the game to Anitou in French English.  That’s to say, in English with a French accent. 

 

Et voilà, she said.  If you get the card with the kahn-DEE….  Or else there’s the card with the ice CREEM…

 

Poor, sweet-souled Anitou.

 

There are times, too, when Laurelle amalgamates her languages.  “I want to explique you,” she tells me.  She wants to explain something to me.  (So here’s one good reason for me to continue French:  to translate, on occasion, my daughter.) 

 

Or she sometimes says, “I want to pleasure you.”  (Now where’d she pick up THAT phrase?)  Fortunately my own studies of the French verb plaisir (to please) have revealed that it’s more cumbersome for Anglos to use correctly.  I get what Laurelle is saying – and why she’s saying it that way.  The rest of it we can fix later.

 

But most of the time Laurelle’s two brain boxes remain segregated.  We drive to school in the morning chattering away in English.  I walk her to the building and up to her classroom door, arrange her coat and backpack on the allotted pegs – and do it all in English.  Laurelle then crosses the threshold of the classroom door, and she shifts brain boxes.  She greets her teacher with a perfect “bonjour” (often kissing her cheek as good French schoolchildren do) and then joins up with the nearest flock of girls (boys are bad – we’re at that age).  My baby shifts language gears like I do a car’s clutch – unconsciously, innately.

 

Genius, I think.  Pure genius.

 

So today, literally this morning, Laurelle attains language-learner nirvana.  Pierre and I bring Laurelle to our pilates class this morning; a low-grade fever keeps her out of school.  As we finish the last minutes of our workout, the next client arrives.  A pretty, forty-something blonde in sports gear, she stows her belongings and joins Laurelle on a small balcony that overlooks the pilates studio. 

 

I hear the two of them chatting as I finish my leg pumps.  The blonde woman is learning that Laurelle is four, that she is missing school today, that Dr Laurent is coming to dinner tonight and Kaiya coming for a tea party tomorrow, that her stuffed dolphin doudou comes from Marineland – and then Laurelle’s cross-examination begins.  Has she ever been to Marineland?  Does she know that there are orques (killer whales) at Marineland?  And that the dolphins do a show, too, but only in the afternoon?  Kind, patient woman.

 

As I reclaim my chatterbox, the woman reveals that she, too, has a little talker.  But yours, she wonders, which is her first language?  Is it French or English?

 

Ah, if only someone would ask such a question of me.  Just once.  Ce n’est pas juste.