There’s no surer sign that one’s skill is improving in some arena than when he begins to question his own competence in that sphere.
Plato, or another one of the greats, surely said it more eloquently. Probably in six words or less. But I swear this idea, clumsily presented here, must count as one of life’s great truths.
I remember when my age consisted of a single digit, and I sat on my bedroom floor reflecting on a flurry of seemingly horrid news delivered by the TV’s talking head. If I just had a couple hours to spare, I’d thought while staring at the avocado-colored shag, I could work out all the ills that plagued President Nixon and his crew.
Now my age is well removed from single digits. The news is overwhelmingly sour, and I haven’t a clue where one begins in sorting it all out.
But I have at least studied economics. And I do know what a negative number is.
Life’s great truth is abundantly evident for me on this side of the Water, too. Take the French language. Francophone friends constantly tell me how my communication skills have improved in the last year. Meanwhile, and with some regularity, my tongue ties itself as I speak and I’m forced to revert to a Stone Age point-and-show charade.
Equally irksome is French driving. During our earliest stays in France, I flat out refused to join la Côte d’Azur’s Formula One racing track. Then I put my mind to it, put my pedal to the metal and my heart in my throat, and I got around fairly decently. I squeezed through pinholes. I humped curbs to park. I screeched toward upside-down, red-and-white triangular signs saying “Cedez le Passage,” yielding to oncoming traffic only if my life depended on it. I refused to give up my right-of-way when, at least according to the French way of thinking, it was mine to keep.
Put into horridly sexist terms, I refused to be the “woman driver” that Pierre rebukes around town.
A couple days ago my dear husband was admonishing an indecisive, lane-swerving driver along the A8 tollway. As we cruised past her maroon sedan, I quickly pointed out that she was, in fact, a MAN.
Michael, our English visitor from Finland, occupied the front passenger seat. He offered a quick retort. “Yes, he’s a man,” Michael said. “But there are female male drivers, you know.”
Squashed in the back seat with two other women, I said something about being a man myself. But in that instant, of course, I unwittingly ratified Michael’s use of the word “female.”
My driving successes in France – if they can be called that; at least I’ve managed to get quite regularly between points A and B without a pile of traffic tickets – stem largely from a decade of driving in London (adjusted in obvious ways to accommodate France’s right-handed traffic principles). Also critical has been my adoption of Pierre’s Number One Traffic Rule: He Who Flinches, Loses.
Not that a driver should break French traffic regulations. But if another motorist looks as though he may not be quite as fluent in the language of traffic as you are, just be sure that he’s the one looking at your taillights, and not the other way around.
Just as my taillights have gained regular audiences in the area, though, my appreciation of French driving principles has gone the way of the country’s language. It’s all got a bit tougher. I worry whether I’ve been an obnoxious, male female driver around town.
My awakening, of course, had to do with that most vexing arena in world of traffic. Roundabouts.
Unlike much of the US, European streets are littered with these hub-and-spoke-shaped monsters. Easily enough, I summoned my London driving days and applied these rules to the French rondpoint. If a car is driving within the center of a rondpoint, I told myself, that vehicle has the right of way. I only can enter a rondpoint when there is space available for my car.
There was, of course, only one minor difference to remember while navigating these hub-and-spoke behemoths, and that was to execute the circle in a counter-clockwise manner. But as I say, it’s a minor point.
My British rules worked fairly well. Sure, every now and then – and oddly enough, often in the same couple rondpoints – a car already within the center would stop to allow me, the incoming driver, to enter the circus.
Weird.
Obviously a woman driver. Or a female male one.
But there was no reason at all for me to adjust my driving technique in the face of these daftly polite folks.
Until the other night I dined with a visiting Canadian friend Monica and her local French friends Micheline and Maurice. Monica offered into conversation that the scariest thing about living in France must be the driving. And specifically, the scariest of all scary driving things must be des rondpoints.
Not so, I boasted. All you have to do is apply London rules and turn the opposite direction.
“Non, non,” Micheline and Maurice countered.
And thus, just like my command of the French language, I saw my grasp of the French road system shriveling back to its infancy.
The French rule? “C’est simple,” Micheline and Maurice explained. All I have to do is apply the broader French principle for intersections: He Who Enters On The Right Has The Right-Of-Way.
Which, of course, makes no sense whatsoever to an England-educated driver who is driving in France.
As one spins around rondpoints here in a counter-clockwise manner, the driver who enters a rondpoint ALWAYS does so on the right. By this crazy French rule, the incoming driver ALWAYS has the right of way. Which means that traffic could just come to one, massive, screeching standstill within the rondpoint, forever and ever, without end, because no one has the right to budge. Traffic – a word translated rather enticingly by the French as la circulation – would just plain fail to circulate.
Which may actually explain quite a lot about French circulation.
But it’s not that simple, Micheline and Maurice countered. The right-hand right-of-way works only when a driver is approaching a rondpoint that DOESN’T have one of those upside-down, triangular signs saying “Cedez le Passage.” In other words, when the driver IS asked to yield, he gives right-of-way to traffic already within the rondpoint.
Bigger rondpoints, the French couple further explained, likely would instruct drivers to yield.
Bigger rondpoints, I silently interpreted, are simply British.
Which is all just dandy, until you find yourself behind the wheel of a car and, wishing to drive in France like a Frenchman (and here I specifically use the masculine form of the word), you attempt to put the big-versus-little rondpoint differentiation into practice.
The biggest problem, I now find, is trying to work out how one behaves WITHIN a rondpoint. I always enter it based on the British, yield-first principle. Safety first. But then, once twirling around its nucleus, I realize that I’ve not actually glimpsed whether this rondpoint is a British-form, “Cedez le Passage” sign-bearing one, or the French type where he-who-enters-on-the-right has right-of-way. That poses a problem: How do I behave toward other incoming vehicles?
Circling the pavement, do I just do the male thing and ignore other drivers wishing to enter on my right? Or do I come to a halt within the rondpoint and courteously (and possibly correctly) allow some new car to enter the circle on my right?
At first I was hung up by my constant failure to observe simple signposts. How could I have missed a blazing, red-and-white sign? Then I realized that, often times, there was no chance to spot a “Cedez le Passage” marker, if it existed at all.
Looking back – which is hardly an advisable thing to do mid-rondpoint – I began to notice that the sign might be hidden behind an immense, flowering bush. More likely, the culprit was a delivery van, illegally hitched up on a curb at the rondpoint’s mouth, blocking entirely from view the space where an all-important sign may or may not exist.
In the days immediately following Micheline and Maurice’s driving revelation, I formed my own, new driving principle: Follow The Car In Front Of You. Which works perfectly well, as long as the car in front is headed where you are.
Then I simply decided to follow Micheline’s ultimate suggestion. I would drive with blinders on. I would stomach the idea that occupying the French road network is a gut-feel, heart-in-the-throat practice.
Put more emphatically, I would ingest the fact that – just as with the wretched language – I basically know nothing about France.
Perhaps I will just rest within Bellevue’s walls until I get smart again.
Comments