Two very tired boys at the Charles de Gaulle train station ... 11 am, August 3, 2007
We’ve arrived. Strange to look around and be in a place that is officially home for the next year, but not feel it yet. It’s someone else’s house, someone else’s town, other people’s history. But good god it’s beautiful. The first night was as strange as one might expect it to be: arriving exhausted with the sun going down and someone handing us the keys to a house. Here, where it can be unpleasantly hot during the daytime for six months of the year, all the bedrooms are on the ground floors of houses. Makes sense, but it’s bizarre to sleep under your kitchen.
Max and Ben pronounced the house perfect upon arrival, but not because the building itself was of any interest, but because they found a certain of my promises sound: the backyard is indeed full of lizards. Ben had caught one within fifteen minutes. I was more pleased by the fact that I walked straight out the back door and picked a perfectly ripe yellow plum off of one of “my” trees and ate it standing in the shadow of the graveyard wall like some kind of successful farmer. Outstanding in my orchard.
We lugged the thirteen objects of varying sizes into the house—I hope I never travel that heavy again—and began to unpack in a daze. Upstairs we put the few groceries Anne and Bernard, our angelic landlord, had gone to buy before the stores closed. Eggs, brie, a loaf of farmer’s bread. There are two fridges and a freezer in the kitchen, the second fridge being a storage facility for frying pans, of all things. I said to Bernard, “Vous préferez vos poêles fraiches, hein?” which is a very clever thing for an Anglo to say on his first night in France. That is, if “poêles” means “frying pans” as it does in Canada. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Here, a person who says that to his landlord mere minutes after meeting him has suggested to him that he likes his ovens fresh. I just hope that’s not a euphimism too.
Max came into the kitchen and told me to close my eyes (this is a pre-magic trick/surprise ritual) and placed a clanking mass of something into my palm. A handful of heavy, iron keys. “Where did these come from?” I asked him. “They were in the doors.” “What doors?” “All the doors,” he said, at which point my sodden brain recogized that my six-year old had taken the key out of almost every door that locks in the house. Twelve keys. A challenge worthy of Solomon, but probably not after twenty hours of international travel. “Oh for God’s sake, Maxime, how I am get these all back into the right doors?” He smiled anxiously at me and took one back, saying it went into the door we were standing beside. (It didn’t.) When he went to bed, I trudged from room to room and tried, first, twelve keys in one of the doors, and then eleven in the next, and ten in the next, and so on, and then it occurred to me that all he’d done was present me with the best metaphor for our peculiar situation. A good frame of mind, it turns out, to be in. Now I know how to open the first twelve doors in my new life.
Our first meal: two freshly baked pizzas in Leon Blum park. Kids swinging in the play area behind us, dogshit wafting over from the dog run in the other corner. All of us pie-eyed with exhaustion. Then to bed, the boys instantly asleep even though it was really 4 o’clock in the afternoon for them. And Anne and me, in a strange new bedroom where, very recently, a nice old lady slept. I lay awake for some hours, despite my tiredness, with my nerves jangling, and that dreadful song by Offspring with that voice croaking keep ‘em separated banging off the insides of my cranium.
***
Cultural Adjustment Department, first entry: French cappucino to go.
Don’t order cappucinos to go in France. Probably don’t order them at all. This is a French cappucino: a shot of espresso (so far so good), covered with six inches of whipped cream. If you order this to drink inside the restaurant, it will come in a big glass with a handle on it. If you order it to go, it comes in a thin plastic cup, like a mini beer cup, that begins to soften and melt the moment they put the espresso into the bottom. Therefore, it must be consumed very quickly or thrown into the garbage. If consumed quickly, a smell like that which comes out of a pot with a whole corned beef cooking in it will emanate from your mouth because you will have cooked your own tongue. If you throw it into the garbage, you will have wasted a 3 euro coffee ($4.20 Canadian) but you will live to tell the tale without a lisp.
