La vie en famille

blue streak

2009-02-23T12:14:00.002+01:00

We live next to a hospital, so the sights and sounds of ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars are a daily part of the background of our lives (may I also point out that the view from my bedroom window frames a lovely copse of trees on the hospital grounds – if it weren’t for the sirens, you could believe you were in the suburbs. Really.). In the same way, living in a house with me provides another auditory backdrop – swearing, particularly if I’m driving, or there’s too much stuff piled at the front of the refrigerator that falls out when you open it, or someone accidentally hits me in the head with a matchbox car turned projectile. I’ve tried, I’ve really tried to hold my tongue since G started not just talking but actively annexing everything he hears into the live Petri dish of his vocabulary – but everyone has to have one vice, don’t they?

Baby B, on his trip to North Carolina a couple of weeks ago, picked up his own first word, “uh-oh,” which he generally uses in its appropriate context, but sometimes just drops into thin air all on its own, like a mild interjection. He’s probably right, given any set of circumstances at any given time around here.

I thought I had escaped with time for good behavior the day that G, playing with a few of his cars in the back of the living room, exclaimed “Oh, CRACK!” loudly but firmly several times when his cars had an unfortunate collision.

But then, last week, we were driving to the babysitter, along a main city artery which had shut down to one very slow-moving lane of downtown traffic because of a giant Lincoln, with its right blinker on, trying to parallel park in a space that was clearly too small for it. Of course this caused the left lane of traffic, annoyed by the stupidity of trying to park in rush hour traffic, and buoyed by the sheer good luck of being in the other lane, to increase its collective speed precipitously, and for each car to pull up just close enough to the car in front to obviate the possibility of letting in any stranded cars in the right lane. In response, the right lane cars also turned on their blinkers and started honking madly, except when the traffic light changed, leaving enough room for one car to accelerate, rev its engine, and zoom out into the flow of traffic. This was almost always the car directly behind the Lincoln trying to park, which then would have – in theory -- left enough space for the car to attempt to pull into the parking place, realize the error of its ways, and drive on. But instead, the next car would pull up immediately into the space vacuum and block the Lincoln, again. It’s like Sisyphus on Georgia Avenue.

We were not running late, so my own annoyance meter was running pretty low – when the fifth or sixth car pulled right up behind the Lincoln, I think I said something like, ‘oh, come on.’

At which point G, from the backseat: “Well, dammit.”

(S pointed out later that, considering my mouth when I’m driving, it could have been a lot worse).

I stifled a giggle, and said, “What do you mean by that word, honey?”

In the new, instructive tone he’s using for everything these days, he said, “That’s the word you use when somebody gets in your way and it’s really annoying.”

It’s hard to fault him for his logic.

“Hmm,” I said. I don’t really like that word. “Do you think we could use another one instead, like kaplooey?”

He thought about it for a second. “No, mommy,” he said. “Dammit’s better.”

Again, logic.

Eventually we settled on a word of G’s own invention that sounds vaguely French, which seemed appropriate. It was really more for the sake of the conversation than anything I’ll bring up again all that often, under the assumption that either the dammits will go their own way, or they won’t, without my highlighting.

Later that day, I noticed a funny thing about our bedroom door. Our house had a marbled history before we bought it, and while the renovations (none of them to our personal credit) are wonderful, bringing the house back to its original modest shine, occasionally a little message from the difficult years will wend its way to the surface. Even under several fresh coats of expertly-applied paint, it turns out that in the late afternoon light you can still see that someone, years ago, carved the words A_ _ and B_ _ _ _ with some kind of sharp object across the front of our bedroom door. It’s a loopy, heavy scrawl, and seems meant rather personally, whether the two words are connected or not. I think it’s weirdly charming – like our own archeological nameplate – if I am the B_ _ _ _, does that make S the A _ _?

But it’s clearly something we’ll have to deal with before G starts to read.

at home

2009-02-02T03:17:00.002+01:00

It’s a gorgeous day after several weeks of weather that have really put the “bleak” in midwinter. We took the boys to the park wearing nothing but fleece sweatshirts over their clothes, instead of the heavy, bulky jackets which recently caused G. to wail “It makes my arms too fat and I can’t twirl my hair!” (he has a permanent tangle at the back from this self-soothing activity). It was such a pleasure to watch them run around (or in B’s case, toddle around) unburdened, like little champagne corks followed by endless showers of bubbles.

Now everyone is sleeping, and I am alone in the sunshine, in my living room, looking out across the bare trees and the hospital grounds and the patches of melting snow. And today, for the first time since we got back, I feel deeply, exactly at home. Somehow the passing-through-ness has lifted with the weather (hopefully less briefly, since we’re getting more snow this week). I can imagine remembering this afternoon years from now, in some other place, and being glad. It’s been a long time coming.

Last night we were looking at our two boys, the almost-toilet-trained and the almost-ambulatory, and trying to remember what it was like when G was at B’s stage. We don’t really believe that he ever was, G having skipped entirely the solemn, wry and contemplative baby stage and emerging fully formed, like Athena, except naked and rolling in a barrel. With sparklers attached. I am constantly resisting what feels like an unfair urge to cast B as the yin to G’s yang, the calm beside the storm. He has every opportunity to prove us wrong. But we do start to wonder if we’ve been exaggerating, a bit, just how lively things have been since G joined the party.

So I went upstairs and unearthed a CD with some old videos of G from the first winter we lived in Paris. We slid it into the laptop and clicked on the first video we saw – G in his first pair of rubber-soled shoes, walking across the dining room floor in our apartment. There it was, the 1000-watt smile, barely containing the canary. And underneath our encouraging voices, a strange, persistent noise. After a second, it came to me. It was the thumping of G’s shoes, like timpani, as, at fourteen months, he made his way across the floor. It’s G’s world, and we really do just live in it.

B, on the other hand, is silent as a sylph. He has shown no interest in walking more than a few steps, but he can get to the top of the stairs without making a sound. If he wants attention, he raises one finger in the air, as if he is politely making a point at a meeting. He bursts into absolute highbeams every time G enters the room, and his second favorite game is throwing cereal to Lucy.

In a couple of weeks our babysitter is moving both boys to a bigger site that, thankfully, also exists in her kingdom (more, someday, about working, commuting, the morning oatmeal ritual, and the pleasures of sitting by myself at a desk). I worried, with that peculiar combination of protectiveness and embarrassment, if there were discipline problems around the edges that we weren’t hearing about. “Oh, no,” said M, when I ventured a question on the phone. “I was just watching him all day the other day, and how frustrated he gets that he can’t just move through the other children. He can’t help running into them – he just wants to get across the room, and they happen to be in the way. It just doesn’t seem fair for him to spend the day in time-out just for being a three-year-old boy.” I was flooded with relief. Having always been the child who sat in the corner with a book, being the mother of the one ricocheting around the room is strange and uncharted territory. It requires adjustment, like finding out you are related to Herbert Hoover.

But we let G stay up late to watch Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl, and he curled up next to me on the sofa, leaning into the crook of my arm. After a few minutes of football, to which neither his father nor I could give too much illumination, he said, “Too much pushing in football. It makes me nervous.”

I said, “Me, too.”

repatriation

2008-10-26T21:01:00.001+01:00

Eight weeks, three relocations, several home improvements, one storage delivery of more crap than I thought it was humanly possible for us to own and leave lying dormant for two years, and a stealth gastrointestinal virus later, I’m back. To anyone who still checks in here occasionally, thanks, and I’m sorry.

I can report that the disorientation has receded, but not completely. I’m still startled by the voices of strangers talking to me, though as a consequence I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of unplanned and unrehearsed chatting. Even more fun has been watching G adjust to this very un-French volubility. It tracks well with his natural gregariousness, but he can’t quite handle it being the norm rather than the exception. It’s like being forced to eat ice cream every day. The pinnacle was when a strange woman stopped him mid-tantrum in line at Costco and said “That’s not the way you treat your mama, honey. Here’s the way you treat your mama.” And then she gave me a big hug. He was speechless.

Cars and roads are big. Even our urban grocery store is the size of a city block, with the dairy and the deli at opposite mileposts, and I often find myself exhausted in the middle, trying to remember where the peanut butter is (at the dairy end, next to the yogurt, go figure), and wondering if I should just give up and go home. I haven’t yet, even though we’re at that stage of larder-stocking where every trip to the store involves locating the invisible but essential staple item without which you cannot make X for dinner -- only to come home and find that you don’t have a big enough pot. Even with the load of storage items delivered, there are still big gaps in what we need for everyday use, and I find it increasingly hard to remember where anything is. The response to approximately 78.5% of G’s questions is “It’s on the boat, honey” (the response to the other 11.5% is, “No, you might kill yourself.” Welcome to the world of the almost three-year-old boy. There are many wonders here.).

And, of course, as we try to configure our lives into something more stable and predictable, the boys are changing every day. B is crawling and pulling himself up to standing; any minute we’ll have to install a gate on the stairs. He has a two-toothed smile to rule the world. G speaks more and more in complete paragraphs, and has mastered an elocutionary hand-gesture (we’ve been watching the debates) that he uses for emphasis to define his place in the world (“I have a problem, mommy,” he says, making the gesture Obama uses to mark a place in the air for middle-class misfortunes. “I can’t eat the big oatmeal because my mouth is too small.”).

The thing that’s happening fastest is that G is losing his Frenchness, a thing so elusive I didn’t realize he had it until we returned to the states. The first weeks of our return, he was dismayed every time we went to a park that didn’t have a fountain; he was also fascinated by garden squirrels, which in France are exotic woodland creatures and do not inhabit city parks. These things made me realize that G’s first conscious impressions of the world, his mind’s eye Rolodex for the important nouns of childhood, are completely different from my own, sounded out with a distinct image and accent. He’s already adapted to the new realities of Washington with the cheerful pragmatism of a toddler – he never feels at sea in the supermarket – but I hope that, little as he is, somewhere those images will hold, a dissonant echo to remind him, and me, where we’ve been.

by the sea, by the beautiful sea

2008-09-06T00:13:00.001+02:00

Here we are at the North Carolina coast, with the ocean literally on our doorstep. We’ve gotten to watch the sunrise every day since we got here, a glorious consolation prize for the jet lag that still has both boys waking up well before God herself does. Yesterday G sat on my lap as the pinky blaze crept up over the horizon, backlighting the clouds à la Cecil B. DeMille. His mouth dropped open (letting loose a few chunks of Raisin Bran) and he gasped, “Someone painted the sky.”

It’s lovely to be home, lovely that G’s grandmother was sitting next to him to hear him say something so rare and wonderful instead of only reading or hearing about it much later, when some of the magic had worn off in the retelling. It’s also lovely that two weeks from now we won’t be boarding another international flight. On our flight over, I only had to lock myself in the bathroom once with the baby, crying (me, not the baby – the comma is important), but it’s still not an experience I’m eager to repeat. And yet I can’t believe that means we’ve really left Paris for good.

On our long walks down the beach – some of which G is joining us in this year, matching our slower pace with a stride that advertises the two inches his legs have grown past the bottom of all his pants – I pause every time someone waves at us or stops to say hello (which is exactly every time we pass another human on the beach). I’ve been away a long time, I think. Do I know you? I wave back uncertainly, and smile.

And then I remember we are here, in the southern United States, not Paris, where a greeting is a sign of intimacy born only of many years of cautious interaction, a place we were just approaching as we left. I had forgotten what it’s like.

The weather here is as warm as the greetings, and it’s helping to thaw me out, keeping me relaxed even as I avoid facing up to all these sea changes in our lives. I’m normally the first one to get excited about a big change, but the sadness of leaving Paris plus the disorientation of packing up all our belongings and the children has me off my paces, a bit.

Beach houses in North Carolina all seem to be decorated out of the same central warehouse, stocked with pastel and sunset-hued furniture and an endless supply of decorator prints and beach-themed tchotchkes (plastic dolphins, surfboard-shaped doormats). This year’s house has a number of painted wooden signs, made to look slightly weatherbeaten, each with a different exhortation in a different font – “Relax! It Doesn’t Get Better Than This!” “Run your toes through the sand!” They have the effect of making me slightly anxious. Suppose I don’t toe the line?

And tonight, a hurricane is rolling in, a storm small enough not to require evacuation but large enough to bring in some pretty spectacular weather. We’ve laid aside flashlights, diapers, and bottled water, and all up and down the beach there’s a sense of waiting, like a slightly held breath. I’m looking forward, a little, to the storm, and the rain, and the calm after.

goodbye stranger

2008-08-25T14:47:00.002+02:00

We leave Paris in a week, and it’s making me emotional about the strangest things. I’m not a saver, and yet I fetched out the cancelled bus tickets from the bottom of my purse for the two lines we take most often and stowed them in the pocket of B’s baby book. It was an awful, rainy day on Friday, but it was the last of S’ vacation, and so we went to the Louvre and had lunch among the horrible humid crowds in what is basically an underground mall food court and I still misted up as we walked back to the bus in the driving rain.

“Boy, you really do love Paris, if you love it today,” S said, and he meant it as a compliment. But I think it is the complement of the sublime and the ridiculous that truly gets me about our life here, the constant refraction of my daily life with small children against such an eternally beautiful backdrop, the crowds and the rain notwithstanding. It’s as if the cliché of Paris (which is true) is a defense against the mundane repetitiveness of raising a toddler and a baby – my nostalgia for their babyhood will be shot through with Parisian light (and a healthy helping of soaking rain).

For example: the week before the Louvre, we were out and about on a very specific errand, which was to find and buy a plastic toilet-seat insert that will allow a thinking-seriously-about-potty-training G to sit on the grown-up toilet without falling in. The errand was designed partly to encourage G in his endeavors, partly to distract him from his obsession with putting various objects – coins, small toys – down the corrugated hose that vents our air conditioner to the outside. You can imagine that my house is divided as to whether introducing a new level of chaos is such a good thing, especially just days before we pack up all our worldly possessions and change continents (S’s attitude: continents, continence, what’s the big deal?). Anyhow, it turns out that the toilet-seat insert -- which, after visiting the supermarket baby section and the droguerie (home of all orphaned home supplies, from mop buckets to small appliances), we finally found at the pharmacy -- is called, in French, a “siège reducteur.” Now I, for one, would be delighted to own a device that would reduce the size of my rear merely by sitting on it. And I am also certain that such a device exists in France, and can also be bought at the pharmacy, but it likely is not made of blue plastic and shaped like a hippo (instead, it vibrates and you have to rub a special cream on your fesses before using it). But for G, onward and upward.

As we left the pharmacy, seat in hand, a bunch of dudes who looked like they were in no particular hurry to get anywhere were drinking beer and passing around a small radio that was blaring, improbably, Supertramp. G smiled and waved, they smiled and waved, and we went on home to put the seat in the potty. I meditated a little on the idea that there is a time and a place for everything, and how that is underlined by the formalities of French culture and the beauties of Paris – that it opens up to make a place for us, and the tour buses, and the bums listening to Supertramp, is nothing short of a miracle. And for a moment I began to trust Paris to show me the way to an elegant leave-taking that will maybe impart a little borrowed grace to me as I go.

Then G came running in from the bedroom saying, Mommy, come look where I peed. Sadly, the siège reducteur was dry as a bone. It turns out the air conditioner hose has uses beyond toys and small change. Elegance, not so much, but I’m grateful all the same. Paris, thanks. We’ll miss you more than you know.

old stones

2008-08-03T14:04:00.002+02:00

France is as full of monasteries as it is of other old things – some working, some crumbling, and even some belonging to the Carthusian order, the unusual monks about whom I wrote my graduate thesis, in a land long ago and far away. (The Carthusians were also recently brought into the international spotlight through the documentary film “Into Great Silence,” which I haven’t seen yet but opened to long lines in New York and Boston, making me feel retroactively hip). On two previous occasions I’ve been within spitting distance of one of these monasteries but was unable to visit, due to complications of itinerary or under two-year-old. But last week in Loches, where we spent a marvelous holiday imposing on the hospitality of G and M, we discovered quite by accident that there were ruins of a Carthusian monastery only about 25 km away – in fact, our hosts had been to see a set of one-act plays presented there. We had no special plans for the week and decided on a day trip.

The Chartreuse, or Charterhouse, of Liget was founded by Henry Plantagenet as one of the many penances strewn across the UK and France as acts of contrition for the murder of Thomas à Becket (nothing says “I’m sorry” like a nice bouquet of monastery). At its height there were 20 learned, probably aristocratic monks – including Richelieu’s brother – leading a contemplative life in a rather lovely setting deep in the Loire valley. The monastery was almost completely destroyed at the time of the Revolution, and the monks had to escape for their lives through an underground passageway in their sous-sol that went over half a mile through the limestone (and served originally as a connection between the monastery and the servant brothers housed down the road at the Corroirie). After the Revolution, the land – including all the old stones – was bought back from the republic by an aristocratic family that had survived the Terror, who built a manor house on the property and have more or less lived their ever since.

How do I know this? I got it straight from the mouth of the great-great-grand nephew (or something like that) of the land’s most recent purchaser.

When we arrived at the monastery – which, like many French monuments, is private property open to the public at the discretion and generosity of the owner – there were signs indicating that we should park at the road and then pay a call at the “lower house” to be admitted. Unfortunately, there were a number of lower houses, one of which seemed to be occupied by a party of German painters having lunch, and no clear place to make ourselves known. Just as I started to talk to a couple of curious Germans, two boys about twelve or thirteen years old came up the hill toward us and our stroller and gave us a cheerful wave. They were both wearing tee shirts, shorts and wellies (the latter item of clothing leading me to believe that the level of their enthusiasm in greeting us had much to do with avoiding some kind of chore). "Vous voudriez voire la monastère?” the taller one asked politely. “There are some leaflets at the bottom of the hill,” he continued, “but I can give you a guided tour if you want.” We did, of course, want, and so the six of us set out across the forecourt of the manor towards the ruins of the church and the old monastery walls.

The tour was excellent – heavy on the blood and destruction, but also very correct about the lives and habits of the brothers. I found myself distracted as we walked around, though, not just by the second language and my two-year-old, but also by my growing infatuation with our junior tour guide. Like many other French boys his age that we’ve met, he was incredibly gentle with B and made much of G, in what seemed like a natural inclination. I don’t know if it’s just manners bred in the bone, or the fact that generations of government encouragement of familles nombreuses virtually ensures younger siblings and cousins for just about every French child, but it’s a patience I’ve come to appreciate. I was also impressed by his attention to small details, like the giant chestnut that stood in the place of the original monastery well, or the legend of the naughty monk, who, when caught out skipping vespers in order to drink the last of the monastery wine, crawled inside the oak barrel and was turned to stone (this stone barrel now sits on top of a trickling fountain next to a sign that reads “Eau non potable.” Tant pis.). And he didn’t rush through the details as if they were memorized from index cards – he had a sense of the story, and at the appropriate moments even paused for effect. Most of all, though, I was entranced by the sound of his French, which rolled out in fluid prose that seemed to have bypassed entirely the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and come directly from the court of Louis XVI. There were none of the French equivalents of um, or you know and he didn’t use any slang, which not only made it easier for me to understand but also made me feel like I was in the middle of a movie whose main plot device was to have the adolescent hero possessed by the ghost of his great-great grandfather. It would have to be called something like “Jean-Louis and the Revolution,” or “My Dinner With King Louis.” It was all quite wonderful.

At one point during the tour, G did something especially hair-raising, I forget what, and I scolded him by calling out his full name in three long, drawn-out syllables, in the French pronunciation.

“I’m sorry, what did you say his name was?” our tour guide asked. I told him.

An amazed smile bloomed across his face and he said, “That’s my name, too!”

I said something like, well, I hope he can live up to the honor – and then I took his picture. I plan to use it for future reference as Exhibit A in child-rearing. Even if there was more than a little noblesse oblige involved there, it was still an impressive display – only made more charming by the fact that, as we walked back up the hill to our car, both boys were being screamed at by their older sister (cousin?) for spraying water out of the barrel-fountain.

It was only a minor slippage, considering. Because most twelve year old boys I know, if they’re talking about old stones, they usually mean Keith Richards.

*The photo is of a small window featured in the lower story of each monk’s cell. Their food was passed in through this window every day, so as not to interrupt their study and prayer. Sometimes I would like to have the same thing for G.

bad mommy

2008-07-19T00:23:00.002+02:00

It was a fine morning yesterday, and with B ensconced happily making eyes at the babysitter, G and I had a date. I’m trying to make sure that he and I get some individual time together so that our relationship doesn’t devolve into the litany of Don’t (hit your brother, scream so loudly, open the refrigerator door, cause me to be institutionalized before I turn forty). Plus he’s a pretty amusing small person, all told, and it makes me feel like I’m being a better mother.

When I asked him what he wanted to do with our special time together, he said, “I want to go to the coffee shop.” The current object of his toddler obsession with achieving adulthood is the hot beverage – “want warm coffee/hot tea in my special own cup” is a pretty common refrain chez nous, especially if I happen to be drinking one or the other. (Lest the caffeine police break down my door in the next instant, both “coffee” and “tea” for G are a cup of microwave-warmed milk. For the “tea” I have to dunk my tea bag in the cup for half a second to achieve verisimilitude; it is not necessary to add anything to the “coffee,” for reasons mysterious to me. The “special own cup” is a tiny coffee mug some blessed soul gave us when G was born – it looks like a cross between a diner mug and Oliver Twist’s tin cup. So you get the picture). Since we were going out anyway, it seemed like a good time to up the ante.

Our home being Paris, the city of a thousand charming cafes, and we being ourselves, the ugly Americans in residence, we went to Starbucks. The awful truth is that the four cafes nearest our square are in a race to outbid each other for supercilious snottiness, and while I might enjoy a whiff of that when I’m out on my own in the afternoon, it’s not the best environment for a date with G. And the French people making American-style Italian coffee drinks v-e-r-y slowly in our local Starbucks are unfailingly kind to G and me. Exhibit A: le chocolat chaud.

G and I had made our way to the coffee shop by the usual toddler tacking – like navigating a very small sailboat through an extremely choppy sea. Once we’d made it safely into port (i.e. inside the doors of the shop), I settled G on a green velvet armchair by the window and told him sternly to stay there while I ordered our drink. Naturally he popped up next to me five seconds later, nose barely clearing the service counter. I was in the middle of ordering a moyen chocolat chaud, and the young woman at the register grinned – yes, grinned – past me at the mop of blond hair and said, “C’est pour le petit?” I nodded yes, and immediately she pulled up two paper cups, smaller and smallest, like two-thirds of the three bears, and said, “I can make it in the little one so it’s easier for him to drink.” Before I could even thank her, she said, “And I’ll make sure they don’t get the milk too hot.” Merci beaucoup.

G was practically levitating with joy by the time the drink arrived, waving the green straw (une paille, one of those startling words that is exactly the same descriptive metaphor in both French and English) I had unwrapped and given him, like a tiny epée. The hot chocolate itself was an exquisite example of the genre, topped with an escargot-like ribbon of whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate (I also love the phrase for whipped cream, crème fouetté, which sounds like cream made crazy. But I digress). The pleasure of watching G inhale the hot chocolate through the straw was as intense as it was brief. He sucked it down in two long, professional pulls, leaving a halo of chocolate and milky froth around his mouth. We sat for a few more blissful minutes, enjoying the hit, and then took a little tour of the coffee shop, testing out various tables and chairs for comfort and commenting on the artwork.

And then it was time to go home.

My elder son, as you may have noticed, likes a little drama. When he’s happy, the angels are singing; when he’s sad, the world is black, black, black. (Here is where my own mother can insert something about “chickens,” “home,” and “roost.”). When I said the words, “It’s time to go home,” he emitted a long, low moan, like the creaking of a bellows, and then began to keen “NO H-O-O-M-E! NO H-O-O-O-O-O-O-M-E!” at the top of his lungs, and steadily, as we exited the coffee shop and began to make our way down the street. People actually stopped to watch us – I know that French two year olds have tantrums (sometimes), but apparently they do not involve flinging oneself on the filthiest part of the sidewalk and rolling in discontent. I believe this is called restraint. Flinging and rolling for G, on the other hand, are tantrum standbys, and are one of the many aspects of his behavior/ my parenting that have been cause for observation and commentary by our Parisian neighbors. (Once, walking home from the garderie, a woman of a certain age in spotless white woolen pants watched G thoughtfully for a while as he rolled in mid-rage on an oil slick at the entrance to a parking garage. “You know he’s going to get dirty that way,” is what she told me.) Other popular subjects include the state and appropriate seasonality of my children’s clothing, the safety of my double stroller, and G’s gender. I like to think that we provide some entertainment value.

Anyway, as we neared the end of our long march and approached the doorway to our building, I noticed the homeless woman who lives in our neighborhood coming up behind, and eventually past, us. She’s probably about seventy and clearly not all there – she swathes her whole body, including her head, in rags of various colors and provenance, and she talks to herself in a constant stream. I appreciate that even in our snooty neighborhood, people are generally kind to her. We’ve never had much meaningful interaction, as she is terrified of both the dog and the stroller, but I try at least to be respectful about giving her space. Well, yesterday I had neither dog nor stroller, only a vociferously unhappy toddler – which must have been inexplicably less terrifying, because as I began to haul G unceremoniously over our doorframe, she turned around and began making her back toward us in a way that was clearly purposeful. She did not stop until she got about a foot away from me, and she looked down first at G before fixing me with a baleful glare. And then she said, in very clear French, “Vous n’etes pas une bonne maman.” “You are not a good mother.” And flashed a grin at G and went on her way.

au revoir, les enfants

2008-07-11T12:34:00.005+02:00

Today is the last day of garderie, the little nursery school where G has spent the better part of Monday and Wednesday afternoons for the past year. I didn't realize that this was the last week until this past Monday -- there is a slightly Byzantine system of "regular time" versus "holiday time" (is it like ordinary time in the church calendar? I don't know.) that I tried to understand for several months until I just gave up and showed up when I was told. Anyway, most months have a bit of each, so when I paid for July's holiday sessions back in June (there are different accounting systems for each kind of time), I assumed that Madame le directrice would prompt me for the regular payment, just as she does for the kleenex and boxes of dry biscuits and the fact that I really shouldn't be giving the baby his pacifier any longer. But here we were, a week into July, and not a word. So on Monday afternoon, after I had dropped G off with the teachers, I asked if I could pay for the rest of July.

Madame looked confused (not an expression generally viewed on the lady in question) and said, "Mais, ce n'est pas necessaire. You have already paid."

"I know I paid for the holiday time," I said, "but don't I need to pay for the rest of July?"

Again, confusion. "Mais, aprés cette semaine, il n'y a plus. C'est fini. It's finished." She gestured at me with both hands in the air, briskly but not unkindly, as if to wave away my stupidity which was an embarrassment to us both. And she threw me a bone: "But he can come back on Tuesday to say goodbye, if you like."

And that was that.

As much as whatever actually happened at the garderie was and remains a black box to me -- they whisk the children away the minute you arrive and encourage you strongly to vanish, so that they can continue with the black magic, the infant sacrifices, and the nursery rhymes, I suppose -- it has been a constant in G's life and now it is done, the first unstacked block in the structure of the life we've built in the last couple of years. So I'm feeling disproportionately unsettled and not a little sentimental, even near tears a couple of times today.

I've actually had more conversation with G's teachers in the last two weeks than in the entirety of the previous year -- they seemed to like him, they always smiled when I picked him up -- on account of some mild behavior problems involving, unless my translation is completely in error, his lying down on some of the other children when they did not comply with his wishes (or maybe just didn't appeal to him). That is how I found out that up to that point he had been "un des plus cooperatifs." No one seemed to be very worried, they just wanted to let me know. I was a little distressed, of course -- no one wants her child to be a bully, particularly not when they have several times the body mass of their playmates. Still, the last few weeks on the playground haven't revealed much more violence beyond the usual two-year-old capriciousness, and he really does try to share (even if it occasionally takes the form of "you'll bloody well take this car if it's the last thing I do."). And the reports from the last days have been glowing.

I'm not really sure what will happen when I pick him up today. I don't even know the names of all his teachers, and it is hard to say that I will miss the garderie beyond the spare hours it has given me these many afternoons. And yet these are people who know my child, who have not hurt him, who have taught him, among other things, a startling amount of French, a good bit of manners, and how to bend over in a yoga position to have his diaper changed. Valuable life lessons, all. Who knows what great novel may come pouring forth from G when he sits down some afternoon with a dry biscuit and a cup of warm apple juice?

I might cry, I'm sure I'll feel silly, and then I'll take him home, leaving another tiny piece of childhood behind on Avenue Victor Hugo. I think this is what they mean by nostalgie.

manhattan transfer

2008-07-01T14:30:00.002+02:00

Many thanks to S’ sister, who, by getting married there, gave us a reason to spend four glorious days in New York. We were a little worried about the Atlantic crossing with the boys – based on past experience – but it was, if not pleasant (when is air travel, ever, these days?) a non-event in both directions.

Outside the events of the wedding, our trip seemed dominated by transportation and architecture. With only four days, there was a lot of getting from place to place, and it was amazing how the landscape – the “built environment,” as they say – kept changing so dramatically within a relatively small footprint. It’s so much more kinetic, so much more dense than Paris. It’s the energy and the density that binds everything together, even as the buildings range from human-scale brownstones to industrial refurbishments to the skyscrapers which seem to belong in New York in a way that is just stage setting almost everywhere else. Maybe it’s the island. We availed ourselves of cabs and car services for our many trips across the boroughs – a slightly guilty luxury for us, and a huge treat for G, who rides in cars so rarely over here in Paris. Everything from the seatbelts to the locks to the automatic windows was endlessly fascinating. We were lucky to wind up with all our fingers and everyone still in the car. The car window was also a great vantage point for viewing all the other cars and trucks and things that go – New York being also, as a two-year-old’s eye will tell you, a paradise for motorized vehicles of all kinds. B just took it all in as usual, importing with him the French philosophy of “rester zen.”

I had wondered what it would be like to be back in the States after being gone for so long, but New York, a city I love, made for a soft landing. I’d been warned that things might seem diminished, tacky, or just bizarre, that I would be aware of how much we still owe to Europe in the way we make cities and how much doesn’t translate well in the crossing. But it was all just wonderful. New York, if anything, looked better than the last time I was there – the weather, the people and the place were all pulling out the stops in terms of charm. People smiled and greeted us regularly on the street, even as they all seemed sort of good-naturedly busy in a way I realize I have missed. Europe does so much so beautifully, but it doesn’t bustle. New York’s noise and brusque friendliness were a bright counterpoint to Paris’ peaceful reserve, and the new seemed less to clash with the old than just to be pleasantly different.

The wedding itself was in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which by all right should seem like a big, faux-Gothic pile, but instead, with its sped-up, jumbled history, owns the several city blocks it occupies as if it has always been there (it has certainly always been under construction). So when my beautiful sister-in-law stepped out from behind the construction screen covering up the better part of the central nave – as if she had been playing a game of hide and seek and just stopped in to get married – with the noise of the glorious cathedral organ erupting behind her, it didn’t seem at all like an imitation of European architecture or religion, but more like a magnificent re-imagining. Like New York just shrugged and said, “This is the way we do it here.”

(Or maybe it’s just that everyone’s vision is getting blurred. Only the week before we had been in a 17th century French church for the baptism of an American baby by an African priest. Everything in French, and no one was speaking their mother tongue). I cried at the wedding, of course, and had to wipe my eyes on a diaper, which was the only thing available.

The reception was in the fabulous, peeling Elizabethan hall next door, where we danced the night away and took turns holding all the babies. We saw so many of our family and friends we could hardly process it – a whirlwind. It left us wanting more. So that part of it, at least, it makes it a little easier knowing, as we do now, that our time in Paris is rapidly coming to an end and we’ll be going home soon, for good (well, for awhile). I haven’t wanted to write about it yet – I’m not quite ready to finish things up here, but who really wants to hear my sorrows after two very full years of getting to live in Paris? It seems unsporting to be sad.

Anyway. At the end of the wedding reception, the bride and groom, who had doubled back to pick up a forgotten bag, were accidentally left behind by the car service and without a way back to the hotel. So my sister-in-law stepped into the street in her wedding dress and hailed a cab. The startled cab driver said, “Is this for real?” and when they said yes, he gave them a ride for free. My sister-in-law gave him her bouquet. The whole time we’ve lived in Paris, I’ve felt like that cab driver. But it won’t be so bad to be back.

the dinner party

2008-06-13T21:38:00.002+02:00

S has had a week of late days at the office, rough for him but coming to a thankful end soon. Last night he got in about 10:30, and just as he sat down on the couch and eased off his shoes the dog started to do a desperate little dance.

“I’ll take her,” I said. If I’m awake enough, I like to take Lucy on her last walk – it’s a little time alone in the world after the kids are asleep. I fetched up the leash and little plastic carry-bag (I take my responsibility seriously as a citoyenne propre), and hooked her up to go.

S half-rose up from the sofa. “Take a longer walk, if you’re up for it, and go all the way to Champs-Elysées. Then you can tell me if I was hallucinating on my way home. There’s something strange going on up there.”

It was a gorgeous, cool, clear night after a day of storms, with a brisk breeze blowing away the last of the rain clouds. Lucy and I hustled up the avenue, past all the buildings lit up exactly like the houses in those familiar Magritte paintings (it turns out those are the only ones that aren’t surreal – the light just looks like that in early summer). As per usual, the street was empty until we got about a block from the Arc de Triomphe, where little clumps of people start to trickle down and around.

When we got around the circle to the Champs-Elysées, it was just as S had described it – hundreds of people, dressed entirely in white, were sitting down to dinner at makeshift camp tables and folding chairs. The tables were fully set with white linens, china, crystal, candles and flowers, and yet it was all clearly a bring-your-own occasion – every table had different china, crystal, and flowers, and behind at least one chair at every table was stowed a rolling grocery cart that had recently held all the provisions. Everywhere you looked there were people toasting and laughing and the sound of clinking silver on china. Other than the monochromatic dress code, it appeared to be an aggressively ordinary crowd – French people of all ages, but mostly the middle, who looked as if they would be equally at home hosting a tasteful soirée before the symphony.

I found a quiet spot and stood with Lucy to watch, along with the other passersby. Lots of snapping of pictures and video, some appreciative honking from the street, but very few people seemed to be approaching the crowd – it was their party, after all, and we were just along for the ride. A few minutes before eleven, a tall, slim gentleman with salt and pepper hair, wearing a white guayabera, made his way through the set of tables nearest us, saying, “A vingt-trois heures, n’oubliez pas d’allumer les feus.” So of course at that point, we had to stay to see.

Things went on as they were for a few more minutes, and then suddenly, as the clock struck eleven, the people at every table started lighting holiday sparklers tip to tip, until the entire Champs-Elysées was sparkling from the Arc De Triomphe all the way down to the Place de la Concorde. It was a wildly beautiful moment that took the whole event from something you were simply pleased to have walked past to something permanently imprinted on your brain. I think I actually applauded. The diners stood up and waved their sparklers in the air, shouting at their friends across the street and hooting back at the passing cars, until the last of the fire went out.

I didn’t want to wait around to see things start to disassemble, so I turned Lucy toward home, only to catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, just visible over the rooftops. It was sparkling, too.

I don’t really want to know what they were doing out there, though I’m sure within the next couple of days someone will explain it to me, and then I’ll have another piece of my Parisian cultural lexicon in place. I like that for now there aren’t any extra words or layers of meaning, just the memory of all those fizzing lights, lifting all the petty grievances of the day away on the night air in a few minutes of pure delight.

scenes from the life

2008-06-04T17:09:00.001+02:00

G is sitting on his bed in his pajamas, holding the National Geographic Explorer snowmobile in one hand and the matchbox pizza delivery van in the other, banging them gently together with a look of total absorption.

“They are fighting, mommy,” he says solemnly, mid-bang.

“Oh, no,” I say, in my best learning-opportunity voice. “How sad for them. Let’s think about what they might say to each other if they, um, used their words.”

I take on the persona of the snowmobile. “Please don’t hit me, pizza delivery van,” I say. “It makes me so sad. I just want to be your friend.”

“I’m sorry, snowmobile.” (I say, as the pizza delivery van). “I was feeling angry, but I don’t want to hurt you. Let’s be friends.”

“See, honey,” I say, brightly. “They are talking it out.”

He smiles at me fondly, benevolently, as if to forgive the special kind of drugs I must be taking at the moment.

“That’s very nice, mommy,” he says. “But now they are fighting again.”

Whack. I’m clearly going to have to work on my tone.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on the phone with Mme. Marron after another tough day wrangling G away from the garderie. Lying on the floor, I believe, was involved, along with a refusal to put on a jacket. Sandrine, his teacher, knelt down beside him and in a firm, even voice, said, “G, you must get up now and put on your jacket immediately. Maman is very tired and it is very naughty not to help her.” And lo, immediatement, he got up, the jacket was on, and we were out the door.

“Why does this never work for me?” I wondered.

“Well,” said Mme. Marron, “it’s because he senses that deep down you don’t really care whether he puts the jacket on or not.”

And I don’t, really. I like to believe that my parenting philosophy is invested in general principles, but that’s only true if I admit that principle number one is “How does this affect my peace of my mind and the probability that I will either a) drink an entire cup of tea while it is still warm, or b) have access to ten minutes of uninterrupted reading today?” If a or b look available over the course of a given afternoon, I’m likely not to be too pressed. G is already much too aware of this highly personal ratio to mommy’s displeasure (heaven forbid he had been whacking me with one of the toy cars). Whenever it looks like things are going south for him in the trouble department, his first question is “Are you happy, mommy?” And then he brings me a magazine. So I guess it’s all working out in its own way.

We’ll just have to put B in charge of the teakettle.*

*note: for those of you who maintain any interest in the saga of the coffeepot, last week I walked into Darty on a whim and they actually had the verseuse for my coffeepot in stock. I was able to locate, purchase, and walk out with my new coffee carafe in under fifteen minutes and for less than twenty euros. We’ll see how long the feeling of triumph lasts.

this week at our house

2008-05-28T15:28:00.002+02:00

It’s sleep deprivation central around our house these days. Yesterday afternoon I was looking for some extra clothes hangers for the laundry, and I couldn’t get into the hall closet. The previous day we had had a talk about trying to leave the closet keys (very popular items in the toddler set, as they are old fashioned skeleton keys that look like they might unlock the Treasures of the Universe) in the same place all the time, on top of the bookshelf in the study, next to the television, so as to avoid the frantic and futile search that happens five minutes before we absolutely have to leave the house, every time.

And yet, when I looked there, the keys were not. Also not on the mantelpiece of our bedroom (another likely culprit) or in plan C, the broken coffee mug that holds change in the living room. So I called S at work.

“Hi honey. Any idea where the closet keys are? I looked in all the spots and I can’t find them.”

“Oh, they’re in the closet on the high shelf. G was messing around this morning and I was just trying to get them out of his way quickly.”

“Inside the closet, really?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“The closet that I closed after you left, because G was still messing around in it?”

“That would be the one.”

“With the keys locked inside it.”

“Um, yes.”

We actually have a spare key to the closet, somewhere, and the babysitter and I spent a half hour looking in every drawer, under every bed, and behind every piece of furniture in an attempt to locate it. But it was not until I sat down on the floor (and almost fell asleep on it) and tried to imagine our apartment from the perspective of someone under two feet tall, that I found it in the third place I looked – inside the fireplace, under the screen. Unfortunately that kind of role-playing is not exercising any success in locating a very large suitcase that has gone missing, seemingly under our noses, and which we thought to use in our transatlantic flight, tomorrow. We’re good, we bought a new suitcase, but if we happen to have lent ours to you any time in the last few months, would you let us know?

In completely other news, the prince is currently out of residence. Two mornings ago when we walked past the villa, three taxis were idling outside and the entrance doors were flung wide open, revealing a fleet of suitcases lined up in the hall (suitcases: plain black Samsonite; hallway: plain white marble, like a bank entrance; more disappointment, all around.). We never saw the prince, but by midafternoon the kitchen was shuttered, the staff door empty of lurkers on cigarette break, and the security guards melted into air, leaving only their car behind them. The car, a battered old Peugeot 205 (but red), would be hard-pressed to challenge a perpetrator operating only on his own speed. And then, this morning, the car was gone, too. I miss him, our neighbor the prince.

As you may have guessed from the royalty, we’ve landed in a neighborhood a bit outside our batting range. Inasmuch as the washed and unwashed are always rubbing elbows in a city, we’re still the ones dependably bringing down property values every time we step outside. It makes for fantastic window voyeurism, especially at night when all the chandeliers are lit. One neighbor appears to have a Brancusi in the living room; another has covered the wall above the marble fireplace in the salon (normally occupied by a gilt mirror) with a flat screen plasma television at least five feet across. There’s no accounting for taste.

But my favorite neighbors are the family just across the street. Though we’ve never met, our street is only about 20 feet wide, so that when the drapes are open we’re afforded pretty intimate views of each other’s lives. They are a multigenerational family who have long, exuberant Shabbat dinners every other Friday night. The action shifts from the salle à manger to the salon and back again quite effortlessly, like the bubbles shifting in a lava lamp – one minute everyone is around the table, the next the kids are dancing in the living room, talking on cell phones, and then the older men open the windows and lean out for a smoke.

All of this takes place in a lovely apartment of grand proportions decorated in high baroque. All the furniture has feet, the wallpaper in the dining room has painted foliage, and if it can be gilded, well, why not? It’s all clearly expensive, yet has a free-for-all quality that makes me sure this is a fun house to live in. I often wonder what they think of us, looking across the way at the same vintage molding, accented only by IKEA. Oh, and Legos. It must be a little confusing.

As a way of preserving privacy, I’m sure, we never acknowledge each other, even when our eyes happen to meet in the middle of opening or closing a window. This little ruse helps to maintain a sense of dignity when you’re halfway through dressing after a shower and realize you forgot to pull the drapes. Or just walking around your apartment in your husband’s t-shirt carrying a half-naked baby. We all pretend we’re not looking, but of course we are.

The other day, for example, I noticed that the drapes to the petit salon (normally not on public view) in the other apartment had been left open, and stopped for a long moment to stare in. I saw the green velvet drapes, the lovely red sofa backed up against the window, the brass lamps – and, on the opposite wall, what could only have been a portrait of Madame in her prime, 40 years ago. And when I say prime, I mean: Not. Dressed. It wasn’t a reclining nude – hardly – but instead Madame was seated bolt upright, swathed lightly in a diaphanous veil, staring straight out at the viewer with one of those early Gainsborough portrait looks that says “Gaze on this if you dare.”

I was so startled I had to go back into the kitchen for a second cup of coffee, and when I had recovered sufficiently to return to our living room the drapes were drawn again, blotting my view and any chance the neighbors had to see the coffee stains dribbling down my shirt. I think we would like each other if we met, I have always felt sure of it, after a year of watching the Friday night dinners through the window. But if it happened now, what on earth would I say? There really are no words.

Tomorrow we will be flying over the ocean for the first time since G was a baby, to celebrate a family wedding we couldn’t be happier about and to see people we love who haven’t seen G walk or talk and will hold B for the first time. And I will get to meet my nephew, born just a few weeks after B, which makes me so excited it almost makes the world spin faster. But did I mention that it is the whole ocean we will be flying over? And that we will be very high above it, and that it is very deep? Part of me would rather strap on a pair of wings, hold my babies tight, and hope for the best. But you have to do it, and hope for the best, and for patient people in airport security. We’ll be back next week.

a thousand words

2008-05-21T16:57:00.004+02:00

This adorable thing

is the “free gift with purchase” we got for accumulating 15 customer loyalty points at the local toy store. I had actually forgotten we had the card, I was so delighted to emerge victorious, unbroken, and unstained from an all-children-included trip to the toy store to buy a birthday-party present. The item in question is a tablier (apron), intended for wear during messy or creative activities (G should pretty much be wearing one at all times, along with a helmet). It’s part of the general school supply list here for every child under six, and multiple versions are available in every shop come September. It says a lot about the deep vein of orderliness in French society.

But what says more to me is that this, the customer loyalty gift, doesn’t have a single logo printed anywhere on it. Not even on the tag. If that’s not “you’ll be back” confidence, I don’t know what is.

No wonder French lovers are legendary.

left to our own devices

2008-05-13T23:09:00.001+02:00

We had the day off on Thursday for V-E Day, or Victoire, as it is known here. There were ceremonies all day long at the Etoile – rows of old soldiers straggling, if the word is not too disrespectful, up the Champs-Elysees and culminating in a wreath-laying at the Arc de Triomphe. It was a warm day, but not too, for which I was grateful on behalf of the veterans and their companions. Every year there must be fewer and fewer of them who can make the march – fewer and fewer of them period, really – and their halting steps seem to hint at something sadder lost in these days of darker, less penetrable wars.

We only happened on the ceremonies, though, in the middle of more undirected wanderings – the luxury we gave ourselves for the holiday (well, S, anyway) was A Day Without A Plan. We started out in the late morning by dividing and conquering; I held down the baby front while S diapered and dressed the two-year-old. Then we got everybody in the stroller and headed our in the general direction of the Trocadero. (I had two tokens in my pocket “just in case” we passed by the Eiffel Tower Carousel, as well as extra diapers and snacks – that’s a day without a plan in my world, you’re welcome.)

G elected to get out and walk most of the way. He was cheerful, but even more dawdly than usual. Besides his usual pauses to examine pigeons and fenceposts and to pick up suspicious trash, he kept stopping every fifty yards or so to pick at his shoes. Because I am such a thoughtful and understanding mother, this drove me completely insane. Finally, about twenty paces from the carousel, he stopped completely, raised his arms, and said, “Mommy hug,” which in G-speak means “pick me up, now.”

And when I reached down to pick him up, I saw that he was wearing two left shoes.

As in, from different pairs.

A query to the responsible party came up with this: “Hmm. Well, those were the ones he brought me.”

I started to say something about how letting two year olds make their own decisions not being the best idea, but then I thought about the root meaning of the word “paternalism,” and what I really want my boys to learn (beyond handwashing and basic hygiene) about picking the shoes they march in, and I decided to shut up.

We took off his shoes, he rode the horse, we came home.

petit prince

2008-05-11T23:49:00.002+02:00

I’ve just confirmed we live next to royalty.

Ever since last winter, there has been an unsubstantiated rumor that one of the villas on the private side street that connects with ours in the next block was owned and/or about to be occupied by a prince from an unnamed eastern state. This would have shades of Madeline and the son of the Spanish Ambassador (although G would have to be Pepito), except that a week after the rumors started flying, a ten-foot high, electronically controlled wrought-iron gate was built across both entrances to the side street, perhaps not the most obvious nod to neighborliness. Our babysitter A, who has lived on the other, non-gated side street for 20 years and is in the know about such things, swears that all the residents on the other side were pressured into agreeing to the gate, but that the prince paid for it all. I have definitely seen more than one elderly person pausing to swear at the gate when they forgot the combination.

On my walks with Lucy, I’ve determined that both a swimming pool and a tennis court seem to live on top of the roof of the villa in question. There is also a lot of staff, mostly visible taking breaks in the basement-level English style kitchen that fronts the road. Today I saw two men unloading a raft of groceries into the kitchen. Want to know what mysterious royalty drinks? A lot of supermarket brand water, apparently. It’s a little disappointing – I mean, how can we really build up a good head of envy unless the super-rich do their part and actually bathe in Veuve Clicquot?

In the last week, a permanent security guard has appeared at the villa end, although again, this is not as impressive as it could be. Fantasy security guards either dress like gendarmes (the best hats) or commandos (just scary in general), but the two guys that trade duty here wear plain tee-shirts that say “Securite” on the front in faded letters and they mostly lean up against their cars.

I kind of like these downmarket details. Is the prince pennypinching? Is he trying to say, hey, gates and tennis courts aside, I’m just a regular guy? Would he be up for un express at the corner café?

Tonight, on our 10 o’clock walk, the security guard spoke to us as we passed by. He was actually sitting all the way inside his car this time, so I had to scan a moment to place the disembodied voice.

“You all walk past here every day, huh?”

“Yes, sir, we do.”

He got out, and reached down to scratch Lucy behind the ears. “She doesn’t bite, right?” he said, and laughed.

“So, must be someone pretty important who lives here,” I said.

“Well, it’s a prince,” he admitted, and named the country (which pretty much met and rose all my expectations for the day).

“Wow,” I said. “That’s quite a neighbor.”

He shrugged without committing. “English?” he asked. (The question was about nationality, rather than native tongue).

“No, American.”

His face broadened into a smile that indicated this might be the least boring thing that had happened to him all evening. “You have such an election coming up,” he said. “I’ve been reading.”

“Tell me,” he added, “Are you for Obama?”

where i'm calling from

2008-05-01T22:19:00.002+02:00

Or, having a baby in France, part 1.

The night before we actually had B, I thought I was going into labor, and so we called the hospital. It’s is a surprisingly inexact science, this going-into-labor business, and I’m ashamed to say I was just as in the dark the second time around as the first. I even dithered around with S about whether we should actually call the hospital – I’m not sure how to say “I just have a feeling” in French, and I was certain that even if I did manage a translation it would earn me nothing more than a routine dismissal, probably from the hospital telephone operator (oh, these Americans, how they have lost touch with themselves. They do not even know when they are in labor). It would seem awfully disorganized of me not to know.

In the event, when we finally decided to call the hospital, there was no signal at all on the telephone. Not when we called the maternity wing, not for the main switchboard number, not for the emergency unit. No ring, no dial tone, nothing. At first we thought it was a problem with our own telephone, but the phone rang and the line dutifully connected when we tried a friend. None of my imagined contingencies for childbirth had involved not actually being able to contact the hospital. We panicked a little – well, actually, I panicked a little, and insisted S call the police to get to the bottom of the problem, or at least determine if the American Hospital of Paris (which is a private French hospital located, in point of fact, in the close-in suburb of Neuilly) was now a giant, smoking hole in the ground and therefore unable to deliver me of a child within the next twenty-four hours. S said, “They are just going to ask me why on earth I thought they would have access to that information and make me feel stupid.” But he called both the Paris and Neuilly police anyway, sweet soul. The result? They wondered why on earth he thought they would have access to that information. The Paris police added that it was not in their jurisdiction, either.

After a couple of hours, we finally got through to a receptionist at the hospital on a patched in cell phone, who sounded harried but apologetically admitted that the whole switchboard at the hospital was down. No, she didn’t know why. She was able to call the maternity department internally while I was on the phone, but not to transfer me. The result of that conversation was “If you think you are in labor, come in. If you don’t, stay home. It’s up to you.” I could feel the gentle exasperation even by proxy, and I felt guilty, even though I wasn’t the one with a broken switchboard. It just works that way here – there is always a protocol, even for the unpredictable, and not to know it and react accordingly is just bad manners. I decided to stay home, partly because I didn’t really think I was in labor, partly to avoid facing the midwife on duty, and finally because I wasn’t sure my hole-in-the-ground theory was completely off base, yet. The induction we had scheduled for the next day with my doctor, in the event that the baby didn’t come, was starting to look better and better. I had worried that it was a little like cheating; now it seemed like not tempting fate.

And so we went, and they gave the baby a little nudge – what they call un coup de pousse here, a tap of the thumb – and after an extraordinarily civilized amount of time, B was here, and everything and everyone was wonderful. The doctors clapped each other on the shoulders in congratulation, and possibly also because, since B had outstripped his predicted arrival time by two hours, they could easily be home in time for an apéro. The sweet midwife stayed a few minutes past her shift to come visit the baby in our room. I thanked her, and she said, “Every time it is a gift to be part of such a sweet moment.” And then we stayed on for several days in a beautiful sunlit room – B, his linens, a lot of dairy products, and 24-hour BBC coverage of the Davos economic forum in Switzerland. Only one strange thing – everyone to whom we mentioned the phone debacle of the night before our arrival was completely mystified, to the point of denying that it ever happened. “I didn’t hear anything about it,” said the incredibly polite administrator who checked us in. “Perhaps it was just a very busy night in the urgence.” The ward nurse said, “Oh, no. Things like that don’t happen in Paris.” Good enough.

On the day of our departure, however, I called home to the apartment to let the grandparents, and Gus, know that we were on our way, but I couldn’t get through. Our line was out of service.

the ballad of the sad carafe

2008-04-30T14:05:00.002+02:00

You may remember the dear departed coffee carafe from several weeks back. As it turned out to be more than tedious to replace it (online research revealed that we had, in fact been given the correct réference, but alas, the wrong carafe, and I could imagine this happening by mail order and store visit ad infinitum on into the future), I decided to take the practical route and buy a French press. It’s elegant, it makes exactly the amount of coffee we drink on any given morning, and since it has no electric parts it has no voltage issue to hinder its transport when we move away from France.

I did a little comparison shopping, decided we were not classy enough or accident-proof enough to merit the top-of-the-line Danish Bodum, and so instead went with an anonymous Italian model whose cap and press were a cheerful shade of yellow. I brought it home from the local coffee shop and S and I congratulated ourselves on a Job Well Done.

Such bright, shiny plans on a bright, shiny morning, when all our hopes were clean and new.

The third time we used the new press, when S poured the boiling water over the coffee, a hairline crack appeared at the lip of the press and began to spread downward, along with a trickle of brownish water that quickly became a large puddle on the countertop. S swore, I mopped, and then when I took the dog out for her morning walk I did what any sane person pressed to the edge of the undercaffeinated brink would do – I brought home an extra large Starbucks daily brew in a carryout cup. Sometimes principle has to go right out the window, along with pride.

It was the weekend, and so the following Tuesday (it took me that long to work up my courage) I washed and wrapped the cracked press and carried it back to the coffee shop, where the two vendeuses were engaged in some stockage, including a couple of new versions of my press. I explained the situation in the French I had been practicing under my breath all the way to the shop – desolée de vous déranger, en train de verser l’eau bouillante elle est aperçue la fissure…c’est pas normal, ça…si on pourrait l'échanger…

All to no use. Vendeuse #1 widened her eyes at me and said, But madame, I cannot possibly exchange an item that has been broken. Her colleague, who had the face of a worried spaniel, shook her head in silent agreement. I tried again, smiling gently, hopefully. But surely you understand, madame, that the item was broken in the course of its utilization for the purpose for which it was designed (this, a sentence I had especially practiced, sounded exactly this stilted in French, I am sure. Except with the wrong pronouns.). I mimed pouring hot water, and my surprise at the breaking glass.

She shrugged and smiled sadly. Yes, I do see, she said, but I am not in charge here, and I cannot take responsibility for the exchange. If you can come back on Monday when the manager is here, perhaps…I cannot promise anything. She turned back to her stockage, and that was that.

I wrapped the broken press back up in its tissue and receipt, walked home, and set the bag on top of the table in the foyer, where I would be certain to see it on Monday on my way out. On Sunday morning, I decided to wage war against entropy in our house, which began with collecting stray legos and baby shoes, ran straight through banishing small drifts of paper, and wound up with remembering I needed to clip the baby’s nails and where on earth had I left the clippers. And so I rifled through the cachepot on top of the foyer table in search of the clippers and caught the bag with the coffeepot inside with an energetic elbow, tipping it over. Out of which fell the press, smashing into a thousand pieces on the floor.

One of which, no doubt, contained the original crack.

For the moment, I have switched over to tea.

you can call me al

2008-04-23T20:08:00.003+02:00

We all got frisked in the airport on the way down south to visit some of our oldest friends last weekend, even G, who seemed to enjoy his patting down so much I was afraid he would ask for more. It was the most polite frisking I’ve ever had, and if not done in a spirit of fun exactly, there was a whiff of apology and quota-meeting about the whole thing. One security agent even held B and cooed at him while the other agent checked me with the wand. G was wearing his flashing-light Spider-Man boots, on reflection perhaps not the best airport wear, but all I was thinking was that he could put them on and take them off by himself, which seemed practical at the time. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” was really the theme of the whole packing endeavor (who needs shoes?), and G’s behavior throughout, and yet we were met with such graciousness and goodwill at every turn, such astounding and effortless-seeming preparedness – the laundry basket fitted out as a baby crib, the breakable dishes silently migrated to upper cabinets – that I’m still marveling at the thing.

The Côte D’Azur really pulled out all the stops for us – hiking on Friday in the high meadow in our coats in the shadow of a low, feathery cloud that actually seemed to be following us, and then riding the ferry and picnicking on Saturday in shirtsleeves on an island beach in view of the alps. Looking back it feels like one long bright ribbon of conversation, walks, sunlight, and good things to eat, punctuated by occasional episodes of G actively trying to kill himself on rocks and terraces.

I loved seeing B held by so many hands that I mean to make a part of his life for the duration, the ease of being with old friends (even when being with us is not easy), and the special joy of seeing that the life they have made there is such a good and happy one. All four of our friends – Mme. Marron, husband C, and daughters J and E -- look wonderful, but the girls, whom we have known almost since they were B’s age, are so radiant now it makes my ribs hurt. They are smart and graceful and funny and make it seem natural that the first thing any well-brought up person ought to say upon entering a room is “what can I do to help?” And to keep saying it after three days of toddler is almost showing off, don’t you think? J and G continue to have their mystic connection – she remains the one person who can, without fail, calm him down – and E is, as always, the most serene and grown up of us all.

On our last night at La Bastiole, sitting on the terrace with an apéro of champagne, smoked salmon, and matzoh (it was the first night of Passover), C looked over at B, who was sitting in his carseat on the table, and said, “You know, he looks a lot like Paul Simon.” This was duly registered, and then we all got distracted by the size of the full moon, which was floating over the Mediterranean for all the world like a hot air balloon, and we called the girls outside to shiver in their sweaters and take pictures.

A while later over dinner, which had been pushed to an aggressively European hour in order to give G time to fall in his tracks and go to bed, Mme. Marron laid down her knife and fork and gave B’s carseat a gentle rock. “Do you all know,” she said thoughtfully, “where B is going?”

“No,” I said, thinking it was something existential. “Where?”

“He’s going,” she said with a satisfied smile, “to look for America.”

B looked blandly up at both of us with his monkey-button face, and I burst into helpless laughter.

“And do you know what’s on his feet?” she added.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Diamonds.”

It went on like that for the rest of the evening, pure silliness, tears rolling down our faces, observed by patient husbands, forbearing daughters, and the boy himself, clearly waiting for the day he could go meet Julio down by the schoolyard. At one point Mme. Marron said, “I don’t even really like Paul Simon.” But I don’t think either of us had laughed that hard in a long time.

In French you “render” a visit, which I like a lot – it’s more muscular than “make” and less transactional than “pay” (well, ok, if you take out the sense of “render unto Caesar”). My Anglophone ears hear the softer echoes of what render means in English, which take up several columns even in our small-type OED – to create, to transform, to give. I really felt it this time, sitting around the table with our chosen extended family, in a borrowed country amid borrowed beauty that belongs to none of us, and yet somehow being together made it home. And for that I truly give thanks.

rumble on the 52

2008-04-10T15:00:00.002+02:00

A little more ethnographie from the world of the Paris bus.

We just came back on the bus from meeting some friends at Parc Monceau, a nineteenth-century era park so well-groomed that all the ladies match their little dogs. Our crowd was slightly less elegant, and peanut-butter-stained, but G and the love of his life, Amelie, were so adorable walking everywhere hand-in-hand that a Frenchwoman stopped to take their picture. Points to us. We sat down in the sun next to a sweet elderly lady who warned that her small dog was “trés méchant” on account of having been hit it its youth, but that she would be watching carefully and we should not worry about our children being bitten. Said dog was lying on the ground, asleep. After that comforting bit of dialogue, she added, somewhat mysteriously, that you should never lend your dog to anyone, it’s a bad bargain. We tried to absorb this advice with all the seriousness with which it had been given, and moved a little further to the end of the bench. She was true to her word, though, and we didn’t hear a peep from her King Charles.

Tooth and claw were a little more evident on the ride home. The bus was packed with the post-prandial crowd – there were three strollers, which is technically not allowed, but they let us get away with it. At the Étoile, an elderly fat man lumbered aboard and planted himself in the middle of the aisle with a look that dared anyone to challenge him. At the next stop, even more people got on, and the bus driver switched on the canned announcement advising everyone to move to the back of the bus. An old woman wearing blue mascara and a fusty chignon poked the man in the shoulder. “Go ahead, sir,” she said (in French), “move to the back of the bus.”

“Move it yourself, b***.” (The French word he used was connasse, which is not very nice at all).

There was a pregnant pause, marked by the collective stopping of breath from everyone within hearing distance.

“I would,” she said clearly, drawing herself up to her full height, “but your fat ass is taking up all the space.”

The collective breath released with a grateful sigh. Touché.

“Shut up, you old hag,” he said.

“You shut it,” she said, shoving her way past him.

“Looks like you could use a diet, too,” he said, to her back, but his heart wasn’t in it.

When she got to the back of the bus, she grabbed the door rail. “My god, what an annoying old shit,” she said.

The woman standing next to me and I couldn’t help it – we burst into a fit of giggles. Old people. Cursing. On a French bus. (The only even remotely similar situation that has happened to me here was when I was pushing G around the grocery store with a full cast on his leg, and an older woman in a Chanel suit said, “Oh la la, ça c’est la merde, ça.”)

In English, I am known to appreciate a well-placed “gros mot,” but I would never dream of attempting it in French. Someone gave us a dictionary of French argot before we left that has carefully placed stars next to the words that have the most, er, shock value, but I’m still playing it safe, trying to make sure my subjects and verbs agree. I’m embarrassed to admit, however, that after more than a year and a half here, I’m more proud of being able to understand that conversation on the bus than of being able to read Molière. Vive L’Academie Française.

here comes everybody

2008-04-09T22:58:00.002+02:00

I just saw this review of a new book by Clay Shirky, which is basically about why everyone should learn to stop worrying and love the internets (I do, I do). I love that the title is Here Comes Everybody, since it’s what G shouts every morning when he wakes up and heads for the kitchen. And then there’s the reference to James Joyce and HCE, the hero of Finnegan’s Wake. I love that, too, as the Wake makes a great cheeky metaphor for the web – vast and incomprehensible on the surface, but with a little faith and luck, when you dive in you’ll probably find what you’re looking for.

The last time I lived in Europe, a hundred million years ago, I was part of a Finnegan’s Wake reading group in Budapest. The entrance fee was a bottle of Bull’s Blood red wine (67 cents at the corner store) or a bag of snacks, and we discussed a page every week. We were all poor English teachers – I think the total of my possessions was four black sweaters, a coat, two pairs of pants, and a stack of old New Yorkers that came with the apartment I shared with two other book group members – but we were multi-national, with Hungarians, Americans, English, and a few real Irish among the regulars. I was the impostor, since I was the only group member who had never read past Dubliners before joining, and who went on to study medieval, instead of modernist, literature. But no one ever seemed to blame me, and we had a lot of fun getting tipsy over etymologies and wild speculations. One member played ringmaster/discussion leader each week, and I remember spending the afternoon before my session holed up at the British Council Library, which was housed in a gorgeous nineteenth-century pile on one of the city’s most beautiful avenues, poring over a key to mythology and a couple of old books of literary criticism (a prefiguration of graduate school, sadly, it wasn’t). That year was the longest, coldest winter Central Europe had seen in decades. I remember crossing the Petofi Bridge one night on the way to a group meeting and seeing ice chunks floating down the Danube. Another night I slipped on a patch of black ice outside a group member’s apartment and probably cracked a bone in my elbow – but not the bottle of Bull’s Blood I was carrying.

Joining the group – though I’ve never been much of a joiner – was the little wedge that opened up my life in Budapest, creating a little community for me there, and it’s still the lens through which I view that year. Budapest was beautiful, scarred and strange; still near enough to the Communist collapse that the shiniest, best-renovated buildings all housed fast-food restaurants. The young people I hung out with had been part of underground democratic political groups while I was filling out applications to university. The day I called the number on the flier I saw in the café behind the law university, I was having a fit of loneliness inspired by the lack of cognates. From there I moved on to Joyce, a couple of great roommates, singing in a symphony chorale directed by Kodaly’s last music student, bunking six to a sofa on a weekend trip to Lake Balaton, visiting the Turkish baths, and teaching English to the defense attaché for the Greek government, who asked me if I might consider a sideline job as his mistress. And all this in the days before Facebook.

I don’t feel nostalgic for that time – a high speed connection and craigslist would have made remarkable enhancements to my time abroad, and S and I would be able to seed a college fund on that year’s investment in long-distance phone calls, which we now make for free across a DSL cable. Although I will be able to tell my children, without lying, that I had to walk a mile (well, a kilometer, anyway) uphill and across a bridge in order to have access to email. But sitting here in another magnificent old apartment building at an easy walk from a different river, the past suddenly seems like, well, a long time ago. And I feel fond of it, those early steps that started me down this road before I even knew I was on it. Here comes everybody, indeed. I wonder if it’s even possible to buy Bull’s Blood in France.

bus stop butterflies

2008-04-06T16:54:00.002+02:00

I just looked out the window to the bus stop, and lo, a couple of butterflies have drifted into our neighborhood, in spite of the rain. Normally we are a very beige, brown and black quartier – it’s all about tailoring, not color (well, tailoring and fur). But the two women standing at the bus stop, both lovely, both d’un certain age, apparently did not get the memo. The one on the left is wearing a bottle-green twill raincoat with – can it be? – gaucho pants made of some kind of stiff black taffeta, plus knee-length snakeskin boots with a small heel. The one on the right (sadly, they do not seem to be traveling together) is wearing an orange velveteen belted trenchcoat that matches her sweater and her hair. I could die happy.

This morning we went back to the Luxembourg Gardens for a pony ride, before the rain, and we ran into a group – a bridge club? a chorus? a community orchestra? – having some kind of organized meeting next to the orangerie for which they had commandeered a number of green metal chairs and laid in refreshments in plastic containers of ascending sizes. In the smallest container, macarons of multiple flavors. In the medium sized container, petits fours. And in the largest, enough chouquettes (like small beignets) to feed an army of ponies. I did not see the coffee but I know there were smart aluminum thermoses lurking somewhere.

I realize that I have not yet written much about the baby, or, by corollary, the experience of giving birth to him in France, in a French hospital. It seems like having one of each in America and in France would be ripe circumstances for comparison, but every time I try to write about it I either run straight into cliché (oh, the French!) or sentimentality (oh, the baby!). But there is still a lot to say. I’ll try again soon.

dirt and other pleasures

2008-03-28T17:50:00.002+01:00

I promise to write something soon about something other than my two-year-old – what I’ve been reading (just finished No Country for Old Men, getting ready to start a new Penelope Lively); further progress on figuring out whether the man with the Dalmatian and the Jack Russell and the man who gets a manicure with his chow are actually the same person; the cheese shop; and sweet baby B, who is smiling at everyone these days and seems halfway to turning over. But living with a two-year-old like G and not writing about it is like living in South Florida and not writing about the weather. It defines your life even when it isn’t blowing the roof off.

Yesterday we went back to story hour at the American Library (a mild success), and then went to the playground on the Champ de Mars afterwards with my friend H and her two daughters, Amelie and Rose, who are just a little bit older than the boys. We all had a crepe and then set the ambulatory children loose on the playground. For the first time G. and Amelie actually played with each other instead of staring at each other balefully over peanut butter and jelly. They climbed up the ladder on the monkey bars several times; they got on the seesaw and rocked maniacally; and then they finished up the hour with G introducing Amelie to the pleasures of stomping in mud puddles and then trying to fill them up with sand.

As we were leaving the park with everyone strapped back in the strollers, H said to me, by way of wondering observation, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Amelie this dirty.” I looked over at Amelie, in her navy coat and cotton leggings, and try as I might, I couldn’t see a speck. Then we both looked at G. He was encrusted in mud and sand all the way up to his thighs, and his hair was clumpy with sand and even a little bit of blood where he had bashed a glancing blow off the monkey bars. As we looked, he was trying and failing to stuff a very large rock in his pocket. Without saying another word, H and I just burst out laughing.

adventures in appliances

2008-03-27T17:27:00.002+01:00

On Monday morning G woke up before the rest of us and decided, considerately, to make his own breakfast. S discovered the evidence shortly after G wandered into our room about 8:30 with a diaper in need of attention. He dumped G straight into the bath and then passed into the kitchen to get a drink. It was a bit like it must feel to walk into a house after a robbery. The refrigerator door was open, and on the floor in front of it were two wheels of Camembert in their open boxes, each with a healthy chunk bitten out. The two loaves of spice bread I had made the previous afternoon had been torn from their foil wrappings and the tops raked off, as if scavenged by wild dogs. And the carafe from our coffee maker lay on the floor, in pieces. All in all, a nice morning’s work.

So instead of walking down to the Eiffel Tower to see the Petit Village de Paques (bunnies! A six foot tall Easter egg!), we made our way to Darty – the French equivalent of Best Buy or Circuit City – on the off chance it would be open, in search of a replacement carafe.

The fleet of gated and locked storefronts all along the way dimmed our hopes, but when we got to Darty the automatic doors parted – oh happy day – and we strolled into an empty store staffed by half a dozen employees all wearing the expression you would have on your face if you had drawn the lot to work on a public holiday. And we had walked in with a two-year-old who promptly ran into the middle of the flat screen television display.

Nevertheless, we made our way down the escalator to the petit électromenager, where, upon scanning the wall of coffeemakers, we saw that our model was not on display. It was our first inkling that this would not be so easy. The attendant assured us that replacing the carafe – which is called a verseuse, or pourer, in French, to differentiate from the vessel you would use for water or wine – would still not be a problem, but he wondered what model it was we had in our house, chez vous. I said that it was the purple one, just like the electric teakettle on the shelf above his head.

Well then, he said, you just need to go upstairs to the cashier and tell them you need a replacement verseuse for the Philips Cucina coffemaker, in lilac (yes, we have a lilac coffemaker. And a matching electric teakettle, too). Just like that. And he waved us away with a smile. Or me, anyway – I had to go locate S and G over by the washing machines before we could go upstairs to the cashier station.

When we got upstairs, our reception by the two men manning the station was much less friendly. “There are a lot of Philips coffeemakers,” said the first. “Do you have the réference (model number)?

“The man downstairs told me to tell you it was the one in lilac,” I said.

“That doesn’t help me,” said the other man, who was looking at the computer screen. “I need the réference.”

“I don’t have it,” I said, “but I could show you the model.”

“Couldn’t you just order it on the website?” said man number one. (I did not ask him why it was not possible to check the website, in the store, for the reference. Such things are futile.)

“I’ll just go downstairs and see if the other guy knows the réference,” I said, not entirely politely. This time S and G had migrated to the telephone display, so I fetched them again and said to S, “I think you’re going to have to handle this one from now on. I haven’t had my coffee yet, and I can’t be held responsible if I say something grumpy.”

“No problem,” he answered. G was thrilled to ride the escalator again.

Downstairs, I corralled the same attendant who had helped us before, in passing, and said that upstairs they had asked me for the réference.

“Really?” he said. “And you told them it was the one in lilac?”

Indeed.

“Well, then, just tell them it’s the soixante-quinze-quatre-vingt-deux.” (I write out the numbers here because to my American ear that sounds like sixty-fifteen-four-twenty-two, while the number we needed eventually to transfer to the cashier was 7582. And still. No. Coffee. Because we were there to replace the coffee pot. I make my point.)

S confirmed the number and went back to the cashier, while I took Gus to the TV display, where approximately one hundred television were showing the trailer for the Lord of The Rings. The battle scene was probably too much for a two-year-old, but the horses had him riveted in his tracks and so I decided to let it rest.

Five minutes later, S arrived carrying a small cardboard box. We opened it with trembling fingers, but alas, it was not the carafe that goes with our coffee maker.

I went back to the cashier. “This is not a match for our coffee pot,” I said.

“It is not the coffee pot you have chez vous?”

“No, it is not,” I said.

“But that is the soixante-quinze-quatre-vingt-deux.”

“But it is not my coffee-pot.”

“Then you will have to go home and get the réference.” He made the little French gesture, usually so charming, that is a small shrug with the palms lifted up, that means ‘there is nothing else I can do.’

S had noticed downstairs in the appliance display a shelf of orphaned coffee carafes of various shapes and sizes. “There’s one that looks kind of like ours,” he said. “It’s four euros. Let’s grab it and get out of here.”

And so we did, with only ten more minutes and one bloody nose on the escalator to show for our pain. We walked home in growing sunshine and G sat on S’s shoulders and sang the itsy-bitsy spider at the top of his lungs. The plane trees along the Allée Maria Callas were beginning to bud. I gave the baby his pacifier and decided it was warm enough to take off my scarf.

At home, I settled into an arm chair with last week’s New Yorker while S went back into the kitchen. Thirty seconds later, he appeared at my side and kissed me on the top of the head.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked.

“Yes, much,” I answered.

“Not so grumpy?”

“I think I’m over it.”

He smiled. “Because the coffee carafe doesn’t fit.”

13 ways of looking at a blackbird

2008-03-23T16:50:00.004+01:00

One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was a book S gave me called Trente-six vues de la Tour Eiffel. The reference is, of course, Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji, but it’s also an homage to a late-nineteenth century series of lithographs also called 36 views of the Eiffel Tower, commissioned when the tower was first built. Patience with the double references is well worth it (if you’re not lost already, imagine holding a mirror up to a mirror and trying to check your hair in the reflection of the reflection) – it’s an almost painfully wonderful book. It describes visually what I can never get at, exactly, in words about the Eiffel Tower – a structure that has become emblematic of Paris everywhere else in the world is also actually visible from almost everywhere in Paris. So it becomes a way of locating yourself within the city, in the same way that Paris, for many, is a way of locating themselves within the world (“We’ll always have Paris.”). And then a structure that was built with no other purpose than to be tall and beautiful and impressive becomes laden – but not heavy, not ever heavy -- with all kinds of meaning. A reference point.

The book’s author, André Juillard, is most famous as an artist of the bandes dessinés (BD in France, graphic novel or comic art in the US, variously), and the pictures profit from his gifts of minor shading and economies of expression. My favorite is view 17, “dans un grenier.” In the eaves of an old attic, a jumble of forgotten stuff piled around a desk. One dimly lit window. Among the stuff: broken chairs, andirons, a cracked washbasin, photo albums, tourist paraphernalia – the flotsam of life. On the far corner of the desk, a lamp in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, with a cockeyed shade. The author’s comment reads: “Between a model of the bateau-mouche and some old Lombard albums, the heart can, with some strain, balance. But the Eiffel tower-lamp, alas….” There’s a dissertation somewhere on the relationship between desire, loss, and kitsch.

The absolute best of the Eiffel Tower tourist trash, in my opinion, is a small glass model about four inches high, that comes equipped with a battery powered base that shines multicolored lights through the model in a repeated pattern, like tiny, spangly searchlights. You can buy these models from any of the touts around the Chaillot Palace for 2 euros, if you are very firm. Each comes with its own red velveteen case. I have given one to my mother and one to Mme. Marron in the south, and if S cannot stoop so low I will buy one for myself before it’s all over. Doubtless to end up in a corner of our attic one day, hélas.

The image is of a motion lamp of the Eiffel Tower. I can only dream.

passeport

2008-03-21T17:25:00.002+01:00

The other day I took B to have his passport photos snapped. After seven – no, eight - weeks we’re finally beginning the process of establishing B’s bona fides as a person filling up his own space in the world; in his case he needs a US passport, a social security card, and a piece of paper called a Consular Report of Overseas Birth. As always, there is a circular and dependent relationship between these pieces of paper and the data needed to procure them, but we have a form for all that and I’ll worry about it later.

The photo studio is just off the fancy shopping street that runs behind the embassy. It’s really a glorified copy shop staffed by a couple of bored teenagers in pegged pants; the “photo studio”, complete with flash umbrella, is an open closet in the back of the shop exactly one steep and dangerous step down from the main level (using a baby carrier puts me in a constant state of vertigo; it seems that the only thing that keeps me from feeling like I’m about to teeter off the steady plane is being able to see my feet. It’s like constantly living in a funhouse of wobbly bridges and receding staircases, only not that fun).

Anyway, I unstrapped B, hung my coat on the peg, and followed one of the teenagers into the studio, where the idea was to hold B up high enough to be seen in front of the backdrop by bracing him against my leg, which was meant to be propped on a rickety barstool complete with a rotating seat. How we managed this without complete disaster is beyond me, but it at least accomplished the necessary goal of having B photographed awake and with his eyes open. The look of surprise is not feigned. It’s a sweet picture, while looking not at all like B now and most definitely not like the B of five years in the future, when this passport will finally expire and we will be living somewhere far from Paris, probably. Becoming a parent is pre-loaded with the application software for nostalgia, but I do think about this large piece of my children’s early lives, and my early life with children, being left behind here.

While waiting for the photos to develop, I rifled through a display of postcards on a rack, in a series called Paris Poeme – classic photos of the city inscribed with a quotation from a French writer (though not necessarily a poet). They were clearly not a popular item – though not vintage, most of the cards had warping edges and were beginning to lose their shine. One card had a cheesy picture of old-school Parisian waiters standing in front of a café and popping the corks off bottles of champagne. The Appollinaire quote below read “Ecoutez-moi je suis le gosier de Paris/Et je boirai encore s’il me plait l’univers” – “Listen to me, I am the gullet of Paris/ And if it pleases me I will drink the universe.” I don’t know what Appollinaire would have thought of the postcards, but that scrappier, blowsier personification of Paris made me smile, living in these more polite and organized times. I liked the Whitmanesque flair. And it reminded me why I like living a city with children – one can take the stance of drinking in the universe even when it’s more like drinking from a firehose…

We’ve had a number of visits lately from old friends from various parts of our lives, all of whom have been gracious enough to roll with the flow of our unpredictable yet not exactly exciting life. M was here over the weekend, and it was great to be reminded again of why she is one of my all-time favorite whipsmacking conversation partners. Her account of the visit, posted here, puts it better than I ever could. And I don’t think anyone will ever accuse me again of exaggerating. Thanks, friend.

Meanwhile I bought another set of plane tickets for a trip south. The triumph of hope over experience, no doubt, but we are sure looking forward to it. I imagine the famille Marron are nailing things down as we speak.

in the garden

2008-03-02T15:37:00.003+01:00

We woke up to a glorious morning last Sunday, so we packed up the boys and took the bus to the jardin de Luxembourg. I am often convinced our memories of Paris will be packaged as one long parade of Sundays – it’s an unwritten law in France that Sunday is family day, and on a Sunday afternoon it can seem like everyone is going somewhere with a bouquet of flowers (but where do they buy them on Sunday?) for mother or grandmother or Aunt Agnes. And all the parks are full, full. So I suppose it’s inevitable that our Sunday outings, more than any other, make us feel part of the fabric of things. And we don’t even have to visit Aunt Agnes.

The magic of the Luxembourg Garden, though, is that it’s Sunday every day. There is simply no time that you can pass through that gate without seeing multiple generations participating in perfectly executed rituals of leisure. For me, it’s the apotheosis of civilized society – the example I would hold up for Why We Are Not Likely to Blow Ourselves Up Yet. Case in point: there is a coat rack anchored in concrete in the middle of the boules playing area, alongside a kiosk where you can buy un éxpress to sharpen your game. It’s probably my favorite place in Paris, even though the competition is tight – it makes me happy in a simple and uncomplicated way, and I look forward even to the bus ride. I think S looks forward to it, too – it’s an easy bribe to make me happy, and you get to be outside to boot.

The jardin is a peaceable kingdom, ruled by fonctionnaires (and not, as it might seem on first glance, by the gendarme types in fancy dress guarding the French Senate, which is the former Medicis palace facing the fountain. They pretty much stick to their own business unless you walk on the grass somewhere near the Senate. Understanding which pelouses, or lawns, are actually meant to be trod upon in the jardin de Luxembourg is not for the faint of heart.). The fonctionnaires each preside over some domain of directly administered activity, such as the man who rents the toy sailboats, and the sticks to push them with, at the pool in front of the palace, or the one who takes the tickets and turns the crank on the crank-operated carousel on the west side of the park. The fonctionnaire closest to my heart, truth be told, is the one who operates La Roseraie, otherwise known as the best public toilet in the known world. It’s as if you have magically stepped off a garden path into your own bathroom, at home, except that an impeccably groomed, bespectacled bald man greets you at the door (this would be startling at home, of course, but it feels quite welcoming otherwise). La Roseraie has become somewhat of a pilgrimage point for me, having spent all my time in Paris with small children, and about half of it pregnant. But many a visiting unbeliever has been converted to the faith.

The fonctionnaire-administered activities are all run as concessions, so that there is a small fee for participation in these particular pieces of liberté, egalite´ and fraternité. But the fonctionnaires wear their mantle of authority, and commerce, quite lightly, and the sublime sense of order generated by their presence spills over into more informal practices. Joggers, strollers, chess players, tai chi practitioners, and sun worshippers share the space quite comfortably and without interrupting one another. In a way, it does seem like a democratic paradise there on the Left Bank, though, good republican that I am, I’m not sure you would have the same quality of orderliness in a country that had never been ruled by a king.

When we arrived at the jardin on Sunday, we entered at the southern gate and came down a long allée that leads directly to the palace. We stopped at the pool to watch the boats, and then took a turn along the north side, sharing that allée with the joggers. At the Orangerie, people had dragged the green metal chairs that populate every Paris park to the south wall of the building and were sitting in twos and threes, taking in the sun. Since I had the baby strapped in front and was walking a few paces slower, I had a good view of G narrowly avoiding collision with a number of joggers and then winding his way among the sun worshippers, flirting like crazy. G has never met a demographic that he does not take as a challenge to assault with his charm. S just followed along behind him, murmuring in French when it seemed appropriate.

We had strategized for a limited time window by confining our walk to the north and central parts of the park; on the west side, in addition to the carousel, there is an enormous and wonderful fenced in playground (also with a fee) that is a magnet for G but also a destination point in and of itself. We thought the day seemed better for strolling and not too much planned activity. G is still a little too small to understand the theory of boats and sticks, and is mostly happy to run; however, there had been some discussion between the parents about the ponies.

All along the central allée of the park, you see, a group of very patient, if slightly grumpy, men give pony rides to children (the description of the men applies just as well to the ponies). The animals are loosely roped together in two groups of about six each; one group also boasts a green and orange painted wagon. Up to last week, G had shown an enthusiastic but cautious interest in the ponies – I was able to convince him to ride in the wagon on one visit with friends, but a deep love for the stationary horses on every carousel in Paris had not translated into wanting to ride on one that was warm and breathing and smelly. Last Sunday, though, G walked right up to the nearest group of ponies and patted one on the backside (he cannot read the sign that says not to pet the ponies, and his parents, they are slow on the uptake). After some energetic finger-waving and tut-tutting from the pony men, we extracted G and determined that he really did want to ride a pony this time. S gave over the money and one of the men hoisted G up onto the pony in question, a small fat white one with a dirty forelock and swishing tail.

G sat up straight and tall in the saddle – and for once, not wiggling – while the man tied him onto the horse with a rope and fitted his feet into jerry-rigged rope stirrups that hung about five inches above the regular leather ones. When the man pointed, he grabbed onto the saddle horn with both hands and hung on. Once the last small child was tied firmly into place, the same man who had managed G took the lead rope and guided the ponies into a slow walk across the gravel. S and I were both watching G’s face as this happened, and it’s a moment for which I will be grateful the rest of my life.

Since G started talking, it has been customary for his life to unfold with running commentary, even if no one seems to be within earshot. When the pony underneath him started moving, my child was struck dumb, and he did not make another sound until the pony stopped again at the end of the circuit. I think there were just no words in his limited vocabulary to describe what he was feeling.

Well, maybe one. When the ponies stopped at the post, he looked up at S and said, “More.”

S paid up. We watched him go up and down another time, sitting up on his pony, smiling to himself as if he were receiving a visitation by angels. We braced ourselves for a tantrum when it came to the end of the ride, but he was so completely exhausted by joy he practically collapsed into S’s arms. S asked the man what the pony’s name was that G had been riding. It was Dondi. We told G, who then patted the pony on the face and said “Bye bye Dondi, see you next time.”

On the way home on the bus, G cuddled up into S’s arms and said, “I love Dondi, I love Dondi so much.” G has his own little pantheon of things and people dear to his heart that merit that grave pronouncement, ranging from our friends’ daughter J to our old friend D from Washington to, well, falafel. As strange an assortment as it sounds, it’s not random. G understands “like” as a word for describing things that give you pleasure of one kind or another – he likes yogurt, and Sesame Street videos, and slides. But he also grasps “love” as a word for something more transcendent – a connection or experience that leaves you different than you were before. He and J were born under the same difficult, but wonderful star; our friend D taught him part of the alphabet and told him she remembered when he was born (the first person outside of what he understands as his family to know that); “falafel” is a code word for the times when yes, we eat falafel in the Marais, but also for the first time he got to ride the train without being strapped into the stroller. And now Dondi has been added to the list.

That G understands this at two both exhilarates and scares me -- the capacity to feel such complete happiness also leaves you vulnerable to cataclysmic disappointment. When I watched his face as he rode the pony I could feel my heart breaking, and I also wished I had the power to make him feel that way every minute of his life. There is a Richard Wilbur poem in which he describes the experience of watching his daughter try to write a story – talk about exhilaration and disappointment -- as being something like the time a wild bird was caught in an upstairs bedroom of their house. The family could not approach the bird, but could only leave a window open and watch the creature throw itself against the wall again and again until it finally found the opening and cleared “the sill of the world.” The last lines of the poem read:

“It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.”

Now I understand what Wilbur meant. I think we’ll go back to the jardin de Luxembourg tomorrow and look for Dondi again. At least I can give him that.

The image is of the boules playing field in the jardin de Luxembourg. If you enlarge the image, you may be able to just see the coat rack in the middle distance.

a small update

2008-02-20T14:15:00.005+01:00

We've all been sick with a cold the last several days -- G running a fever on and off for most of it, meaning that his last relevant contact with the outside world was garderie last Wednesday. Since then, it's been all Sesame Street, all the time, to the point that I fear even relatively non-toxic television is creating the monster I warned myself about (several times he's woken up half-in, half-out of a fever dream, keening "watch Sesame, watch Sesame." God help me). But how else do you keep a two-year-old still and calm without narcotics?

After an astonishing run of mid-February sunshine, making everything glisten like a celluloid dream (Paris in winter seriously dilutes the willing suspension of disbelief engendered by films like Charade and Funny Face; the last two weeks, even sleep-deprived, have revived my faith in Audrey Hepburn, at least), this first fever-free morning dawned cold and damp and grey as yesterday's oatmeal. The idea of going outside seemed even less inviting. I explained to G, gently, that I could not be held responsible for the brain rot certain to ensue if we spent yet another morning watching video, and that we would have to spend the morning in the living room playing. With toys. And books.

He took it pretty well. We put the baby in his bouncy seat by the fireplace (yes, that little monkey, about which more later), and G diddled around the room for a while, repatriating several toys and large objects and winding through a few rousing choruses of "Miss Lucy had a Baby." I worked in a mug of cooling coffee and a few stolen glances at a year-old New Yorker. Then G crawled up in my lap and danced a plastic polar bear over my knees for a few thoughtful seconds. He patted the arm of the couch fondly and said, "There's a man in there."

"Oh, really," I said. "Who is he?"

"Oscar," he said.

"Tell me about Oscar."

"He's a green man. And he's a grouch," he added, sadly. "Yeah."

"Oh well, we all get grumpy sometimes," I said.

"Yeah," G agreed, more drawn out this time, as if in heavy sympathy. He patted the couch again, and brightened. "Oscar loves la poubelle," he said.

I had to turn my face to hide the smile.

"I take out la poubelle with Daddy," he said.

"Yes, you do."

"It's yucky." Session concluded, he found some Legos and threw them over the back of the sofa, managing not to hit me or maim his baby brother.

Garbage in, garbage out, indeed. I guess we're safe with Sesame Street for another day.

waiting

2008-01-18T13:39:00.000+01:00

We’re at the point now where the baby could arrive any minute. It’s raining, as usual, and so instead of being out walking, my usual time staller, we’re all just sitting around the house reading tea leaves and making bets. It seems appropriate that we live across the street from a bus stop. I see people standing out with their umbrellas, craning their necks around the corner, checking their watches. I can relate.

Off and on, G stands over at the corner, talking to his plastic animals and singing – we’ve told him what’s going on, and about half the time it seems to dawn on the edge of his growing consciousness, and the rest of the time it’s business as usual. His regular number is the Twinkle, Twinkle/ Baa Baa Black Sheep/ Alphabet medley. But yesterday morning, he was singing a tune I couldn’t place at first, until I remembered that our bedtime repertoire includes a little bit of the Beatles. He had changed the words to suit his own vocabulary and, maybe, circumstances: “And then while I’m away, I’ll be good every day, and I’ll send all my loving to you.” And then he smiled and gave me a hug.

It reminds me these things are worth waiting for.

everybody on the bus

2008-01-17T19:02:00.000+01:00

Even though we live on a relatively busy street, the only real noise disturbance we ever get (besides the occasional muffler-less scooter) is from the city bus. Our apartment is just a couple of doors down from the intersection of a narrow but heavily trafficked one way street (ours) and a slightly wider two-way street. And it is at this intersection that a major city bus route is required to execute an exactly ninety-degree turn to continue south toward the suburbs. Even Haussman’s relentless 19th century modernizations were not made with buses – or Parisian parking anarchy – in mind. Here’s the general traffic picture:

The four corners of the intersection are each anchored by businesses of varying levels of activity – the pharmacy has mostly foot traffic, the fancy Joel Robuchon restaurant has intermittent deliveries as well as valet parking, and the bakery and interiors shop both get about one major delivery per week. In addition, our street, because it’s one way and has a bus lane, is ripe for the double-parking for which Paris is legendary. As long as there isn’t a major delivery truck parked with its lights blinking near one of the corners, or a car double-parked in the livraison zone for the bakery, there is exactly enough room for the bus to swing down the street without hitting a parked car, a store window, or a pedestrian. About twice daily, this is not the case. The bus gets struck halfway in and halfway out of the intersection, like a woman trying on a dress that is too small in the shoulders. And there’s nothing for it except to blast the horn at regular intervals until the offending driver comes out of wherever he or she is lurking and moves the car or van. These people show an amazing lack of chagrin relative to the inconvenience they’ve caused, or maybe it’s just a peculiar French reaction to public shame – they generally walk out at a brisk but not hurrying pace, eyes straight ahead, and drive on without acknowledging the situation with so much as a hand wave. I’ve even seen a couple of folks dare to saunter. The honking has just become a backdrop to our day.

Narrow streets and big buses being what they are, I’ve seen the same scenario play out all over Paris, though never with quite as much élan as the one time I was lucky enough to be a passenger on the afflicted bus. This time the bus route led through a narrow side street along one side of a park, and the offending automobile was an SUV stopped about three feet in front of the bus stop right next to the “No Parking This Side” sign. After about three minutes of impasse, the bus driver let out a gentle but firm toot. After seven minutes, and a couple of more toots, several passengers got off the back of the bus, figuring their feet were faster means of transport at this point, and one man stepped up to the front of the bus to try to explain to the driver, by a series of energetic gestures, that there was actually enough room for the bus to pass through the bottleneck, with just a little direction. The driver patiently explained – using his own gestures -- that a certain number of meters clearance was “requise par loi,” and that he didn’t intend to have his license revoked in order to save a couple of extra minutes.

The man sat down. The rest of the passengers exploded into a high, excited murmur of differing opinions of what might happen next, how long we would be there, and what the driver ought to do – nothing brings out conviviality like minor calamity – when, at 15 minutes, the driver’s voice came over the intercom system. “Mesdames, Messieurs,” he intoned, in his best radio voice, “Veuillez gardez vos oreilles, et je vais resoudre le problème dans quelques secondes” (Ladies and Gentlemen, if you will kindly guard your ears, I will resolve this problem in a few seconds). And with that, he laid on the horn loud and long for about 90 seconds straight. At which point an elegant Parisian woman in high-heeled boots came dashing out of a nearby shop as fast as her legs could carry her, waving her arms in apology. Several other passengers actually applauded as we moved on.

Match point. This kind of road rage I can live with.

small discoveries

2008-01-11T18:38:00.000+01:00

I just walked past the travel agency in the building next door for what must be the thousandth time; but only for the first time noticed that there is a giant stuffed rooster on the receptionist’s desk. Stuffed as in taxidermy, not toy. No other decoration in the office at all, except for some worn travel posters. How could I not have seen this before? What does a stuffed rooster have to do with train timetables?

This is why they say the French are enigmatiques.

beau geste

2008-01-10T18:37:00.000+01:00

G and I went to fetch S home from work early on New Year’s Eve so we could spend the afternoon together. The bus ride home shuttles for several stops between the Champs-Elysées and the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré – one of the swankier shopping streets – so we are often treated to some pretty rare plumage getting on and off the bus. That afternoon, a pair of older women got on the bus a couple of stops after we did, carrying a few tastefully muted and very expensive shopping bags.

The younger of the two women was wearing an elegant but not very interesting ensemble of camel-colored coat and tortoiseshell glasses that both matched her hair. Her older companion, however, was luxuriating in the privilege of having crossed the line from femme d’un certain age right on into grande dame, taking no prisoners along the way. She wore an ankle length black fur of curly lamb trimmed with silver fox at the collar and cuffs. Underneath were black leather boots with two-inch heels. It was an astonishing coat and I couldn’t take my eyes off it, not least because I was afraid that any minute G would dart off across the bus yelling “bear, bear!” and try to pet it. The curly lamb caught the light every time she shifted and made her whole form seem to shimmer and sparkle, like someone’s very classy fairy godmother.

The women had gotten onto the bus in the middle of an animated conversation and, taking two facing seats across from us, continued it throughout the bus ride. Mostly the younger woman talked and the older woman nodded, occasionally signaling a comment by pointing the pair of gloves she was holding in her right hand. They started arranging their parcels for departure a stop or so before the Etoile. In the moment before standing to go, the grande dame reached up and patted her hair gently with her cupped right hand, and I was filled with a sudden wave of nostalgia.

I can remember almost every older woman in my life making this same gesture at one time or another (generally not while wrapped in silver fox) – whether it was in preparation for a night out, a quick check in the mirror, or, more often, a nearly unconscious moment of reckoning between one activity and another, as if to say “There, that’s all settled.” It’s a lovely little movement, even if it has more to so with the hairstyle it is protecting than the air of restraint and elegance it suggests, and it’s a shame that it’s probably doomed to pass from our lives with the speed and inexorability of the dodo. I don’t want to start setting my hair in curlers or changing my clothes for dinner, nor do I mourn the kind of baggage that way of life could provide in spades. But seeing it here still made me smile.

I was talking to a friend last night about how it would be so much easier sometimes if we were able to wear only one of the many hats both assigned at birth and accumulated over time – daughter, mother, person-with-too-much-education, girl raised in the south, traveler. It’s not much to whine about, but the noise in the metaphysical closet is sometimes a bit too overwhelming to leave much room for grace. Next time I feel like tearing my hair out, I’ll try to remember to pat.

sapin de noel

2008-01-02T18:19:00.000+01:00

We decided to dispose of our Christmas tree in the dead of night on New Year’s Eve. It had done as valiant a job as could have been expected of a last-of-the-lot, discounted tree in the face of a toddler, a dog, and a fiercely radiator-heated apartment. When the grocery store clerk sold me on the tree – no doubt spotting my eye for an end of season bargain – he was quick to praise its olfactory benefits (oh, madame, il sentira comme la fôret! – oh, madame, it will smell like the forest!), while glossing over its probable life span in our home. When I asked him if it were likely to last until Christmas – at the time it was about a week before – he glanced nervously at G in his stroller and pronounced, “Quinze jours, bien sur.” Fifteen days.

He was right about the smell, anyway – every needle that dropped, in profusion, on our living room floor smelled wonderfully of pine and frost and the outdoors, the poor tree’s last gasp of its origins. In Paris, most Christmas trees are sold at the florist, wrapped up tightly in netting to give the appearance of a tall, skinny mummy. I find it charming that you can buy a Christmas tree at the florist, though I guess it’s really just the city version of a garden shop, but it’s an expensive charm in our neighborhood, especially, and so we took advantage of the large, American-style supermarket down the street with its bank of less delicately netted, but much cheaper, trees. My mother-in-law was still here with us, bless her, and I was suffering a bout of decidedly unromantic sciatica, so anyone strolling the rue des Belles Feuilles around three o’ clock a week before Christmas was treated to the vision of the small parade of me pushing G in his stroller at a glacial pace with my mother-in-law trailing behind us, hoisting the tree, like the cut-rate version of Birnam Wood, bewaring the ides of December. It’s hard to express the depths of my shame.

Clunking along with the stroller was a hanging plastic bag holding the buche, a flat piece of log with a hole gouged in it for the whittled end of the tree to be fitted into. Now, I’m sure that there is some methodology of tree preservation that goes along with the log – it’s certainly prettier, and a lot less sloshy, than the metal Christmas tree stands I’m used to, and it goes up with a lot less swearing. But short of spritzing the branches with mineral water and hope, I’m honestly not sure what it is. Our tree turned out to be the sensitive sort, and if you so much as looked at it unkindly it released a dark shower of needles shivering to the floor. By Christmas Day it was a bit unsightly, and by New Year’s it had passed on to disreputable. It was so dry I was sure that anyone drinking a glass of brandy in its vicinity would produce enough fumes to send it, and us, up in flames. So when S said, “It’s time,” I was happy to divest the tree of its few garlands and tin foil star in preparation for the disposal.

I had wondered, privately, how we would ever get the thing out of doors and out of our apartment without releasing a drift of needles that would risk alienating all of our neighbors and the gardienne. But S had already thought this through. “I’m just going to open the window and drop it out,” he told me.

Now, we live only on the second story, but even that short drop bears the appreciable risk of being over a narrow sidewalk with parked cars to one side and large plate-glass shop windows to the other – neither a good option for breaking the fall of a used Christmas tree, not to mention how you might explain that, in French, to an insurance agency. We considered for a moment what would be the best angle of descent, and finally decided it would be safest to remove the buche from the bottom of the tree rather than to depend on it as ballast. We waited until G was in bed, opened the window, and did a quick check for passersby before S squatted on the sill and hurled our tree into oblivion. Then he leashed up Lucy and took her with him to drag the tree over to the unofficial “dumping spot” down the street (I suppose the theory was that Lucy could defend him against any well-meaning citizen who might yell at him for improperly disposing of holiday waste).

By the time they came back inside, I had swept up a pile of needles big enough to fill a decent-sized, fragrant pillow. “Oh, my God,” S said, looking at it. “When I dropped the tree out the window, it lost the rest of its needles. I mean, every single one. What I dragged over to dump was nothing but a bare branch.” For some reason, this struck me as completely hilarious – what other kind of tree would we manage to buy in Paris than one that would wind up naked, lying on a dump, well before Epiphany? – and I started laughing helplessly. The next morning, out with Lucy, I would see a legion of dumped trees of varying sizes, all lush with needles and in much better shape than our tree had been even when I bought it (our own bare tree had been moved, for unknown reasons, and by an anonymous reveler, to rest gently against the side of a parked car).

In the meantime, after we swept up, we did manage to wake up G in time to walk over to the Eiffel Tower in time to ring in the New Year with a cast of thousands. In addition to the twinkle, there were a lot of noisemakers, champagne in plastic glasses, and homemade fireworks – an altogether satisfying experience for a small boy. When we got home, he didn’t even notice that the tree was gone.

*this really is our tree. I was not kidding.

bright lights, big city

2007-12-31T17:58:00.000+01:00

Since we slid past the winter solstice over a week ago, the days have been getting longer, but I don’t think anyone has noticed yet. It’s still dark when we wake up and dark again by a few minutes past naptime. Paris really pulls out all the stops on holiday lighting – the Champs-Elysées is a corridor of blue lights and icicles, and I’ve recently learned that even my beloved electric light trees in our local fountain are the product of a city-sponsored contest, “Paris Illuminates Paris,” which has invited lighting designers to unleash their imaginations on city streets since 2004. The spangly tree-of-lights display at Place Victor Hugo actually has a title – “Sapin Féerique” – though come to think of it I’m not sure if that refers to the metal trees G and I watched get hoisted in the fountain with a crane, or the lights in the real, bare trees surrounding the place. Frankly, these look flung up a bit too casually for a “lighting designer” (it’s what I like about them), but maybe they are going for a total effect.

The whole “by design” nature of the lights is a testament to a well-administered modern city, but it kind of puts a kink in my romanticized imagining of Paris as having organically evolved over the centuries to feed the felt needs of the human psyche, boiled down to a longing for light, especially in winter. And yet, what makes it less magical that this patient illusion of beauty is planned and worked for (and who did I think put up the lights? Elves?)? After all, other than the benefit of a river running through, Paris is short on beauties of geographical accident and long on those that are the cumulative effort of human imagination, carefully tended over time. And when you add to that how far north we actually are, and the vagaries of Parisian weather – let’s just say it isn’t the quality of the eternal sunshine that gives us the “city of light.” Instead, even without the holiday extravagances to carry us through the dead zone of the shortest days, there are streetlights and river lights and the most beautifully lit monuments known to man. At night the decorative statuary on the Grand Palais actually looks as if it is on the verge of rising into the heavens. The crown jewel, for me, anyway, is the Eiffel Tower, which, in addition to being lit constantly with the usual dramatic monument fare, twinkles for absolutely no reason at all, every hour on the hour, for ten minutes. The effect is just glorious – almost enough to make me believe in god, and certainly enough to earn my undying gratitude to Mayor Bertrand Delanöe, who caved to public demand and extended the twinkles indefinitely past their splashy debut for the millennium. When our little neighborhood darkens the holiday lights in mid-January, I’ll depend on the Eiffel Tower to get me through – February, particularly.

And then…we’ll have a new baby in a few weeks, and it’s prompted us to start having conversations about what our life might look like when we go home to the states, as ultimately we must. We talk about it as “going back” even though physics and experience tell us there is no such thing. My life here in Paris still feels so new that I expect things to be different every day – when I called to make an appointment at the salon where I last had my hair cut, oh, nine months ago, I was utterly surprised that the same person who cut it before was still there, would still be able to cut it again. While it seems normal, expected even, that two or three small storefronts across from us have already closed and reopened as new entities – the suspicious video shop is now a real estate agent; the unfriendly toy store is, as of tomorrow, a lighting supply. Yet somehow my vision of home, like any place left behind, is frozen in amber. When we left the states I was barely a mother; we’ll return with two little boys, not babies, even. So I don’t know if it will be more disconcerting for things to seem completely familiar or completely changed. Stranger still, I’m sure, is the huge place Paris will occupy in our imagination once we’re gone, in inverse proportion to the faint blip we’ll leave on the register of the city. “Our” Paris will be its own reflection, no deeper or truer than any, giving the lie to the faint sense of ownership or belonging that we feel over the average tourist. The specific memories that, to us, belong to Paris forever – G’s first steps, nighttime visits to Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter, the action of lifting a stroller onto a thousand Paris buses – will simply close over without a ripple into Paris’ collective consciousness. Which is fine; they’re our memories, not Paris’.

We’ve been getting the annual check-ins with friends and loved ones, cataloguing a year in which, again, we’ve failed to keep in touch the way we might have or wanted to. Mostly blessedly ordinary lives and passages, moreso because of the few wrenching changes we’ve heard about, which leave me sad for days. Even if a calendar is no more significant than a way for humans to keep tally, some people we love are coming into 2008 with too much left behind and too heavy a load to carry forward. I’ll be thinking of them when we pop a clandestine bottle of champagne and, weather willing, wake our son to let the tiny lights on the Eiffel Tower illuminate the first few minutes of our new year.

Bonne année, everyone.

early mornings

2007-12-18T17:12:00.000+01:00

It’s been a long, hard pull this month, and we’ve been up a lot in the wee hours, not just contemplating our existential condition. Almost exactly one month ago today, we were having a quiet post-bedtime dinner with friends when G appeared in the doorway, blinking a little against the bright lights. It seems that in one lightning flash all the strategic engineering for not only climbing out of his crib but also for opening the bedroom door had fallen into place. No wonder he looked a little shocked. None of us has been able to recover equilibrium since.

At first, G just seemed bewildered that a couple of simple physical acts could so thoroughly displace his world. We moved his mattress to the floor of his room, and for the first two nights he reluctantly went to sleep there, albeit with many interruptions and a final relocation to our bed. Then he just became enraged.

The crib exodus happened to fall exactly in step with a nasty virus brought home from the garderie that felled both G and me, as well as a ten-day separation from S, who had to go back to the US for a conference. It’s not that G didn’t want to sleep, it’s just that it’s hard to achieve a state of steady regular breathing, let alone unconsciousness, when the world as you know it has completely shifted under your feet (and your mattress), and you’re too small to be able to blow your nose by yourself. There was a lot of screaming. We were both sick and miserable, and I alternated attempts at comfort with desperate fantasies of child abandonment. It got to a point where I would find him leaning against the wall in the hallway, eyes half closed, wailing, “Close your sleepy eyes! Close your sleepy eyes!” It’s a line from a lullaby I sing him, but it punts in well as a cri de coeur. When his eyes were open and he wasn’t wailing, he looked hard at me as if he wanted to do me extreme violence, and often did, hitting me with a force that underlined his frustration that the one person who ought to be able to do something about this was clearly falling down on the job.

Mme. Marron, who with her family graciously hosted us through the worst of the stint, put her hand on my shoulder at one point and said gently, “He’s going to be really interesting to have dinner with in eighteen years. It’s what you have to hold on to.” That and being able to drink again in about six weeks.

In the last week, we’ve achieved a tenuous balance that involves G going to sleep – s-l-o-w-l-y – in his “new” big bed (the single bed from our spare room, tarted up with some splashy IKEA textiles and a stuffed hippo), and then coming in to sleep with us at about 2 am. Our bed, she is very crowded, and no one is really getting what I would call a good night’s rest. Some nights I have taken to just giving up and getting up – it makes me much less grumpy than lying there with eyes wide open. I read, I stare out the window, I rustle around the kitchen – but mostly just enjoy the suspended silence that is the one reward of this fractured schedule.

One of the last few mornings, much to our surprise, Lucy and I actually found ourselves out on the streets at five a.m. I was up because G. was in bed with us, flinging limbs across my rapidly decreasing corner of mattress and banishing me to the study. Lucy was up because I was up; her dim sense of the circadian, whatever they may say about dogs, being completely undone by anyone being out of bed with the lights on. After I had been reading in the study for about half an hour, I heard her heave off the bed and start a restless tap-tap-tap across the bedroom and down the hallway. A couple of minutes later, she poked her head anxiously into the opposite door of the study, her eyes saying, “Hey, Vertical Human, time to get going.” So I pulled on a sweater and jacket over my pajamas and we went out.

And it was a beautiful early morning. I’m not often up at this hour, let alone outside. This time of year (or maybe every time of year, how would I know?) it’s still pitch dark, and in the mists the streetlights look like giant fireflies. You can understand why a thousand ersatz paintings have tried, and failed, to capture the same mysterious effect. At five o’clock the middle of the night is bumping elbows with the crack of dawn – while there weren’t many of us out, we were evenly divided between those just waking up and those just finishing their evening. On the first corner, a man was delivering eggs to the bakery; the next doorway spit out two men with rumpled hair and glasses, papers under their arms. They shook hands and wished each other a bonne fin de nuit.

At the end of the block, I could see a young man and a much older man walking arm in arm, with some difficulty, as if the older man were being supported as they made their way along. As Lucy and I got closer, though, and stepped aside to give them room on the sidewalk, it became clear that it was actually the older man doing the supporting, ramrod straight and impeccably dressed in a camel hair topcoat, cordovan dress shoes, and a cravat – a cravat! – at 5 a.m. The young man, in a black leather jacket, was listing hard, and singing to himself – coming off the end of a long night, I supposed. I hesitated to acknowledge them, from a combination of learned Parisian reserve and the clear the protective anonymity of that time of day. The older man kept his eyes grimly set forward and Lucy and I kept going.

But then, at the end of another turn around the block, punctuated by enthusiastic grate-sniffing and other business, we met them again, coming off the place. This time there was no way to maintain polite ignorance – we had to speak to each other. By this time the young man had stopped singing to himself and was just hanging heavily against his supporter, head down. The older man hesitated briefly, and in that moment it occurred to me that this was no one-off drunken airing out but something of a nightly ritual, the evidence of who knows what hidden sorrow. It was impossible to determine their relationship to each other – friends? lovers? father and son? – but I could feel the weight of it, and its shared sadness, pressing against us in the cold air. I held Lucy to one side and said “Bonjour, monsieur.” He glanced down at my belly and then back up at my eyes. And then, instead of saying anything, he inclined his head and tipped an imaginary hat to me – the most courtly of gestures at the strangest of moments – before walking on.

I don’t know if he was wishing me well against the cold of the morning, or against the whole future of 5 am and the things it might bring. But I hurried home to the warm apartment where my boys were just stirring, waking from a restless night that suddenly seemed easy. And for the millionth time since G was born I wondered how we ever survive, these brittle piles of bones covered with such fragile, fragile skin.

strike out

2007-11-20T16:29:00.000+01:00

I’ve been working on something intelligent to say about the strikes in Paris vs. the strikes in Hollywood, the weather, and some things I’ve been reading, but they will all have to wait. It’s 4:00, it’s raining, and my toddler still has no pants on – that’s just the kind of day it’s been. If I weren’t eight (almost) months pregnant, it would be time for a toddy; instead, I’m taking myself out for a cup of tea. Tune in tomorrow.

Or maybe Thursday.

In other news, G (pantsless, of course), was negotiating a particularly tight spot between the sofa, my legs, and the coffee table this morning, in order to get to the toy he had shoved between the sofa cushions. After a moment’s contemplation, he decided, finally, to shove the coffee table a few inches backwards and delicately step over my ankles. In the middle of the procedure, he looked up at me, beamed, and said, "Excusez-moi, mommy."

At least one of us is learning French. And I even got the respectful vous. I take it where I can get it, boys.

tie me up, tie me down

2007-11-15T17:39:00.001+01:00

The nostalgia for my prenatal yoga class back in Washington finally drove me to search out a yoga studio here in Paris, though I was dubious about what the results might be. No offense to the francophone yoga practitioner – while I admire with all my being the ascetically toned “serious” yoga body, I do love my yoga to come with a healthy soupçon of affirmation and aromatherapy. And, preferably, some tinkling bells. I haven’t spoken very much with my inner self lately, but I find it comforting to assume I have one. This is really not very French at all, unless it involves a leather couch and an hourly rate.

The yoga studio in our neighborhood is on the main shopping avenue running up to the Arc de Triomphe. It’s actually more than a studio – it’s an Institute, which provides teacher training to its most serious students along with reluctant classes for the hoi polloi. The main space has big windows facing onto the street – discreetly shielded by sheets of frosted glass, installed to about halfway up, like bifocals – between a small brasserie and a shop selling fancy underwear. But you enter the studio through a courtyard door, accessed by a wrought-iron, glass-plated gate (When I went to the class for the first time, I actually got stuck in the courtyard on the way out. Most Parisian exterior doors have a wall button that you have to push in order to be let out of the building. Try as I might, I could not find the button for this exterior door, and only managed to succeed in opening the glass-plated window in the wrought iron – which of course I could not get to close again. I had to wait for my rescue, Estragon-like, until someone else was coming in the building, all the while being fanned by the cold wind gusting in through the wrought iron).

There are heavy red velvet curtains just inside the door, to keep out the cold, which you push through to get into a foyer with a small reception desk facing a set of bookshelves on which you are meant to leave your shoes. All this was familiar enough that I did not let myself be deterred by the extensive health questionnaire I was asked to fill out as precursor to yoga pour femmes enceintes – in France, pregnancy is a condition, which accords you all sorts of privileges and special treatment that I accept guiltily and gratefully, but may the anger of the gods fall upon you should you lift anything heavier than a hatbox or a champagne bottle. I only began to worry a little upon entering the studio space itself. It’s in what used to be the main salon or ballroom in the building’s previous life, still hardwood parquet floors with a grand fireplace and lots of decorative plasterwork. But directly beneath the plasterwork the walls are hung with wooden boards, which themselves in turn are hung with ropes and various tackle-like equipment. Silence reigned in the studio, even as a teacher or two appeared along with a few more lumpen pregnant women. I just stood in the middle of the room in my yoga pants, waiting, as the rest of the women started dragging out mats and pads and bolsters and strange looking wooden contraptions. Finally one of the teachers told me rather gently to sit down over there.

The yoga teachers (named Helga, Nanette, and Alexandrine) do not dress in the height of yoga chic or ballet tights, as I might have imagined. Instead they wear tee-shirts printed with the Institute logo and short, gathered knit bloomers. The whole effect is very Soviet-era gymnastics team, equal parts severe and silly. The teachers are presided over by Madame, who is married to the studio founder, is invested with an iron rod in her spine, and wears a skirt instead of the bloomers. She didn’t stay for the whole class, but every time she drifted into the room all the teachers suddenly looked like they were being tasered.

The fact that I noticed this at all is something of a wonder, since most of my conscious thought was taken up in absorbing the truly strange things that were happening to me. Instead of beginning with music or any sets of vaguely meditative stretches, the little clutch of teachers clustered around me and busily set to with a mass of straps, pillows and wooden blocks, arranging me and my limbs over the back of a low wooden arch in an uncomfortable back bend and then using the straps to fasten me in place. All of this happened with a minimal exchange of words – as happens often here, I felt like I had stumbled into a system whose rules had been inscribed in everyone else’s DNA, and that it could only be incomprehensibly rude for me to question what I ought to know already and would certainly come to understand in time if I were only patient and attentive. So by the time I thought to weakly raise my voice – what happens if there is a fire alarm? – the teachers had already moved on, in their bloomers, to the next pregnant woman and were out of range.

This went on for the next silent hour-and-a-half, and I moved from the wooden arch to a folding chair to a sort of balance beam to finally hanging from one of the wall-ropes like an untidy side of beef. I had a pounding headache, which I mentioned hesitantly to Helga, the most approachable-looking of the teachers. She scurried off to consult with Madame, with whom she returned, and they both stood gazing at my shoulders for a few minutes, frowning. Apparament it was all a question of posture, and the answer to the question was that mine was very bad. Madame sucked in her breath, planted her feet on either side of me, and wrenched my shoulders into the proper position while Helga exerted an equal but opposite pressure on my spinal column. I gasped, and Madame tut-tutted – “It is difficult the first time but it will be better when the muscles are re-educated.”

At that point Nanette, the smallest teacher, took the opportunity to ask Madame what she ought to do next with her particular pregnant lady. Without letting go of my shoulders or turning her head, Madame hissed, “Nanette, I am sick and tired of telling you one hundred times what you should already know. Go away.” Poor Nanette slunk away, and I wanted to. Re-education indeed.

It’s clear to me that the problem isn’t really the yoga, but actually about managing the sense of disjunction that is always present under the surface as a foreigner in another country. Most of the time I find the displacement exhilarating, a tonic. But the class was the first time that instead of a displacement I felt a dislocation, like a phantom limb wrenched out of joint. I thought, maybe I just don’t belong here. And of course, I don’t. That’s the point. But I like to feel more in control of my stranger-ness, and I suppose there was something distressingly literal about being tied up in a dark room where no one would talk to me.

I stayed through to the end of the class, and even came to one more – no one could say I didn’t try – but the next week I checked out a prenatal yoga video from the American Library featuring a long-legged blond Californian in a catsuit who softly coaches me through the poses while sitting next to a running stream. G and I watched the video together the first time through, comfortably ensconced in a pink armchair and letting our inner selves imagine the actual work of stretching.

note to handbasket: we’re on our way to hell

2007-11-07T22:13:00.000+01:00

G has reached a new milestone this week – he now understands the concept of bribery.

On Monday morning, during the usual contortionist stroller-wrestling match, I finally crouched down next to him and in my best soft-mommy voice said, “Now, sweetheart, I need for you to be a good boy and cooperate because mommy is very tired. If you can climb into your stroller all by yourself like a big boy, mommy will give you a trick-or-treat” (we have a bag full of more or less nasty/wonderful Halloween candy in honor of the holiday, which isn’t really celebrated here. Since G hasn’t really had candy before – though he’s had his fair share of pastry and cookies, mind you – we’ve taken to calling all of it “trick-or-treat”).

G stared at me for all of three seconds – what brave new world is this? – and then crawled right into his stroller. Just like that.

So I gave him some candy.

Since then life has been pretty merry in our fallen, candy-trading universe. My happiness has taken on the sheen of a snack-sized Snickers, at least until God strikes me down with a parenting manual blow-to-the-skull.

Or all of our teeth rot out of our heads.

a tempest and a teapot

2007-10-27T00:43:00.000+02:00

Go away for a couple of weeks, and when you come back, the president is getting a divorce. This week’s cover of Elle France is all Cécilia Sarkozy, curled up catlike in a dark sweater and riding boots, proclaiming “Je veux vivre ma vie sans mentir” (I want to live my life without lying). This, and a Paris Match exclusive, just days after the president’s office at the Elysée Palace issued a terse announcement and a “M. and Mme. Sarkozy will not be commenting publicly.” Just one of the many things that makes Madame such fun to watch. Allow yourself to imagine, just for a moment, the same thing unraveling in the US. Well, no, you can’t. And frankly, in spite of the well-known collective Gallic shrug at the private life of politicians (so sensible), this is not exactly par for the course here, either. Discretion being the better part of valor and all that. It’s quite the pyrotechnic flameout for the thoroughly modern president, and everyone’s enjoying the show.

While the president was acquiring a vacancy in the master suite and a very public headache, I got myself a new teapot. It is made of tempered glass and has a fine tracing of cherry blossoms painted along one side. The design of the teapot, called an Egoiste (see, there’s a link here somewhere), dates back to the earliest days of fine tea-drinking. The small pot, which holds enough water for about two and a half cups of tea, nestles into the top of a wide-mouthed teacup (also painted with cherry blossoms, if you were curious). The nesting feature says not only “this is mine and mine alone,” but also warms the teacup. Neat. I’ve seen pictures of Egoiste teapots in silver filigree as well as, of course, Sèvres and Limoges.

My own Egoiste teapot has a flaw – it is missing its lid – and therein lies the tale of why a house that also shelters the Engine of Destruction would contain a teapot made of barely-more-than-eggshell-thick tempered glass. Just before we left on vacation, I decided to take my visiting cousin to my favorite teashop, a tiny gem I discovered on the walk to my ob/gyn’s office (all things have their rewards). The shop doesn’t serve tea, only sells it, but behind and to the left of the counter is a tiny table and chair where the shopmistress can sip a cup and read chapters of a novel while waiting for custom to arrive. When I saw that, I fell in love. Madame herself is nothing less than adorable – finchlike in manner and in the way she wears one piece of bright color, with a touch of restraint – and she loves tea. Even though I am at heart a Tetley’s tea bag kind of girl – it’s better suited to my habit of leaving half-drunk mugs of tea all over the house – I have bought obscenely expensive tea from this shop at regular intervals just for the pleasure of the purchase.

My cousin wanted to buy some flower tea for her girls, and my teashop, of course, sells their version of the latest tea phenomenon in little silk sachets with a satin bow. So, while she browsed the different possibilities, I decided to take the time to examine the shop’s collection of tea-related merchandise. These include a large number of cast-iron teapots, in various sizes, a bit of porcelain, and then the tempered glass. Ignoring everything I’ve ever read or heard about the clumsiness of pregnant women (and my own ample evidence of same), I reached straight for the cherry blossoms. And as soon as I had it in my palms, my hands quivered, the pot shook, and the lid leapt off like a fish, shattering on the wooden floorboards.

I insisted on buying the teapot, of course, over the distressed noises of Madame, who kept saying, “Oh, ça m’ennuie ce qui vous a passé!” (literally, “it annoys me that this has happened to you!”) as she whisked up the glass bits, wrapped up the teapot, and threw in a flower tea sachet for my pains. I told her it was like getting an unexpected present for myself, and that I was lucky that the teapot was still usable. She pressed her hands together and told me she still wished it hadn’t happened this way – and I think she really meant it.

I, on the other hand, was just saying all those things to make her feel better and cover my embarrassment, while promising myself not even to look at the Visa charges I had incurred for my pains. But I surprised myself on the walk home by actually being excited about the teapot. Living in France for me has been an interesting confrontation with my relationship to the pleasure principle. Paris is a city of luxuries, both big (the couture shops on the Avenue Montaigne) and small (chocolate, tea, silk scarves), but they all have the common denominator of being understated, complicated, and requiring for their enjoyment a certain education in taste and a belief in the mysticism of the experience, not to mention the expense. Perhaps it’s just a reaction to my Calvinist upbringing, but I’ve always liked my pleasures a little faster, brighter, cheaper, inserted directly into the vein. I want to be the sort of person who can make a meal off of an exquisite pair of coffee-colored calfskin boots for ten years, but I’m actually the person who loves the petroleum product faux-motorcycle boots bought at the flea market for ten euros. I’m much more magpie than modiste. And while I appreciate the understated – the smooth hair, the browns and grays that make you notice the cut of the clothes – I sometimes feel a little stifled by the lack of cheap thrills, and undermined by the realization that I just look better, dammit, with messy hair and mismatched clothes. It’s just the way it is. But somehow buying a superfluous teapot that I broke myself, covered in red flowers, no less, made me feel like I was turning a corner. That perhaps I’ve been in Paris long enough now to stop playing the invisible – and monochrome – tourist, and be the person that I am. Je veux vivre ma vie sans mentir.

Image is a teapot-shaped gas station on an old US highway. Yep, that's pretty much me.

rainy day wishes

2007-10-02T18:23:00.000+02:00

It’s been seeping rain here in Paris for the last several days – the kind that works its way down into the deepest sidewalk cracks and releases odors that have been hiding there, possibly for centuries. When I take Lucy out for a quick walk, which consists of ducking and weaving between awnings for a long block, her nose quivers with barely suppressed passion for all the ghosts who have gone before. It’s a depressing fact – you can still see the Eiffel Tower through the mist, but when it rains in Paris everything smells a little like pee.

In dubious concert with the weather, we’ve also had the first strike of the season, courtesy of the cab drivers. The taxis blocked off most of the Left Bank, it felt like, driving up and down and beeping their horns, and wreaking havoc with the bus routes. I missed any announcements by newspaper or radio while stumbling around in my usual morning fog, and only discovered the strike while vainly trying to get across the river by bus to join the American Library in Paris. Well, actually not vainly – when the bus stopped for good a few blocks shy of the river, I got out and walked, a vision of fertile loveliness with damp hair, no umbrella, and completely unsuitable-for-the-weather ballet slippers. And not one of the striking taxis took a moment of pity. I made accidental eye contact with one of them, who looked back at me as if to say “Lady, I got nothin’.”

This in a city where the only times I have been propositioned (it’s three and counting, now) have been since I was visibly pregnant. It’s as if all the negative points I am assigned for non-glowing hair, stains, and unacceptable choices in footwear are knocked out of the park by the bonus of “rollicking good breeder.” It’s a little disconcerting, but nice, after the bizarre contradictions of being pregnant in the US, where you are invisible until the moment you touch a cup of coffee or start to eat a piece of soft cheese, and the pregnancy police zoom in. I like the louche appreciation, even if it’s just because I’ve proven capable of bearing the heir to the throne. (Pregnancy also breaks down the otherwise unbreachable rules against sharing personal information with strangers here. Yesterday the boulanger smiled at me and said, “You’re getting nice and large, madame. Another boy?” I was so startled I almost dropped my baguette).

But I digress. The point is, I made my way through rain and strike to the library, which bears out within its walls the comforting familiarity of every public library at home, including the New Yorker cartoons and newspaper articles taped to the pillars as inside jokes between librarians. There’s a research room, a children’s room, a periodicals section, and of course the rows upon rows of hardcover fiction in crinkly plastic covers. I got a memoir by Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood’s latest, another book I can’t remember but was on my list, and a board book about monster trucks for G. I even remembered to bring my carryall bag.

I love the part in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway discovers Sylvia Beach’s lending library. She lets him take his first set of books without paying, and when he gets home he and his wife get completely carried away by the new imaginative (and gastronomic, of course – that old connection between words and food) horizons that access to books implies.

“We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink,” Hemingway says.

“We can have two drinks.”

“Then we can eat somewhere.”

“Don’t forget we have to pay the library.”

“We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.”

“And we’ll never love anybody else but each other.”

“No. Never.”

Poor Hemingway, even knowing all that he did to wreck things for himself. We’re actually going to Beaune this weekend, so we’ll have to raise a glass of Burgundy in honor, pregnancy police be damned. And the next time it rains, I’ll be able to stay home and read.

*Hemingway quotation from A Moveable Feast, Scribner edition, copyright 1964 by Ernest Hemingway Ltd.

appeasement

2007-09-28T09:13:00.000+02:00

Yesterday morning I caught sight of my rear view in the mirror while getting dressed and it caused me to reel back in horror. I know it’s basic physics – without something in back to anchor the rapid expansion out front, I’d just topple over like a faulty Weeble. It was the same way last time, and much to my relief the Brobdignagian proportions shuffled back to something like their former selves. And yet, today, I am not relieved. I am convinced that this latest incursion is a malevolent relapse, a gathering of forces for a secondary assault. It’s like that horror movie where the evil hand tries to kill the rest of the body (after first killing a lot of other people). Not personification, exactly, but more like synecdoche’s evil cousin, where instead of the part coming to symbolize the whole (and we won’t even go there), it secedes instead and stages a revolution.

It wants to take over the world.

S must have heard me whimpering in front of the mirror – or noticed the furrowed brow – because he interrupted his own toilette to ask what was wrong.

“It’s huge,” I said. “It’s revolting.”

He looked for himself. “It’s definitely bigger,” he said, and then added, catching my facial expression, “but it’s cute.”

I burst into tears, which no patchy assertions of “beautiful,” “natural,” or “necessary” could contain. S slunk out and went to work. I’ve been feeling a little sensitive since my last doctor’s appointment, when Dr. Napoleon indicated that I had “un peu trop grossie.” It didn’t help that he followed it with a “c’est pas grave,” or that I know that French doctors seem to expect women to gain exactly nine pounds and for their babies to emerge smoking Gauloises and quoting Sartre. Instead I’ve been watching, with growing alarm, the host of tiny pregnant women in my neighborhood, who appear simply to be escorting a smallish basketball out front, like a chic handbag. And not a sign, not a hint from the back that anything is going on.

I might as well strap on a sandwich board. It feels like the final physical betrayal of my Americanness – no matter how much I try to blend in, speak correctly, swathe myself in ever-increasing yards of “slimming” and anonymous black and decorous scarves, there is still the unstoppable urge to enlarge, envelop, and advertise. (That’s not a flag I’m waving, sir, it’s just my - - -).

S called, midday, cautiously, to check in on the state of things.

“How’s the world domination coming?” he asked.

“Still actively plotting,” I said. “Still huge.”

He thought a minute.

“Maybe you could just give it the Sudetenland."

le jardin du paradis

2007-09-21T10:06:00.000+02:00

It was strange times yesterday morning at my fruit-and-vegetable-stand, Le Jardin du Paradis. Now, most fruit-and-vegetable-stands have similarly hyperbolic names – La Bonté de Dieu, La Richesse de Mon Jardin, etc., etc., but I think this one is meant to distract from the fact that the stand is located in Paris’ biggest eyesore of an indoor shopping center, plunked underneath a disastrous high-rise apartment building that looks like something that was rejected by the mother ship (seriously, I would love to know the size of the bribes that got this built). Still, I am loyal to this particular stand, because of their amazing lettuces and also because of the couple running the stand, who, if not overflowing with warmth (it would be un-Parisian), always greet me with a friendly smile and let me take my time. Monsieur is a giant man with rumpled hair, sausage fingers, and a very delicate way with a tomato; Madame is whippet thin with sparkling round glasses and a deft hand at the cash register.

But when I arrived yesterday, both Madame and Monsieur were huddled behind the orchard fruits, glued to a television screen. Their faces were so somber, I was sure I was stumbling on some kind of epochal news moment, like the death of an ex-president or Brigitte Bardot. As I walked into the shop, the screen crackled and Monsieur faintly swore; they both looked over at me with such intense reluctance I almost said I would come back later. Madame’s eyes were actually glistening behind her glasses. With a final longing glance back at the screen, Monsieur heaved himself around to the center of the shop and asked if he could help me. I made my requests as quickly as possible and Monsieur weighed, wrapped and stacked my purchases with heretofore unseen lightning speed. When I was ready to go over to the cash register, Madame had still not torn herself away from the television, and so I used the opportunity to come closer and see what they were actually watching. The camera had zoomed in on the faces of two anguished lovers, clearly in heated conversation, although the reception fuzz was so noisy I couldn’t understand the French. As I watched on, waiting for Madame to gather herself, I realized that the blond woman looked very familiar, though I couldn’t quite place her. I scrolled through the short list of French actresses I know until it struck me quite suddenly that the helmet of hair being sported by both players was about as un-French as you could get. As was the swelling background music, tinny and familiar as well.

And it came to me. They were watching The Young and the Restless, dubbed into French. Vive l’Amerique!

* The above image is a cast photo from the Young and the Restless. The blond in question, incidentally, is the woman standing just to the left of the cake, Melody Thomas Scott. I don't actually know who she plays, but she's been around at least since I was in high school. And don't you think Le Jardin du Paradis would be a good name for a soap opera, by the way?

get me a ticket for an aer-o-plane

2007-09-19T22:22:00.000+02:00

G and I are bearing the scars of our first flight à deux, and we are bearing them bravely. We spent a wonderful weekend in the hills above Nice with our friends Mme. and M. Marron and their daughters, the current fervid center of G’s tiny but expanding universe (he’s woken up every morning since calling their names).

It was a busy weekend of hiking, eating, dog-wrangling, and escape-hatch finding, and we subsequently arrived at the airport on Monday afternoon napless and still raring to go. We spent a long time at the Air France ticket counter dealing with the possibly insurmountable bureaucratic challenge of G having been issued a ticket at Paris Orly the previous Friday under my last name, when the name on his passport and carte de sejour is undeniably different. Perhaps the lady at the counter was actually worried that I might succeed in smuggling the world’s tiniest terrorist into the heart of Paris, which would all be traced back to her lack of due diligence at the ticket counter, or perhaps she was just exercising her duty as a true fonctionnaire. Either way, the final issuing of our tickets involved multiple consultations with colleagues and a trip to the back office, behind a mirrored door.

During the wait, G got a bit squirmy, a situation which was not improved by the snaking security line or the subsequent few minutes in the departure lounge before boarding. I kept him mostly distracted on my lap with cookies and airplane-spotting, but still the one time I let him down to stretch his legs, he darted behind the check-in desk and almost boarded another plane before we managed to stop him. This was just a harbinger of things to come.

In my oh-so-infinite wisdom, I had chosen the 4:00 flight back to Paris – the last flight you can take after a morning meeting in Nice that will still get you home in time for dinner. The plane was packed, and mostly with men in expensive suits carrying Hermès briefcases. There were a couple of other families on the plane, but instead of corralling us in the back along with the small animals and the flight attendants, the way they had done on the way over, we were dotted around the plane, every man for himself. G and I were squeezed into a window seat beside two of the expensive businessmen, who blessedly gave us tolerant smiles and then pretended we weren’t there. This attitude soon began to require expanded powers of imagination, as Air France proceeded to hold us on the tarmac for 20 minutes with no air conditioning while we waited for a delayed connecting flight.

G does not like to be hot. In fact, being hot probably falls on his list somewhere just above taking medicine and only slightly below being stuck with a poker. He also doesn’t much like being confined. As the plane got hotter, I think he reasonably thought to himself, well, I’ll just get down off Mommy’s lap and walk around for a minute until the situation improves. Except that no one was allowed to get up in the face of imminent departure, and he would have had to crawl over three people to get anywhere, anyway. I said no, he wiggled, and I tightened my hold some more, haunted by visions of a resourceful G actually crawling under the seat in front of us.

Realizing he had reached the end of his options, G started to scream. Loud, piercing, unrelenting screams of a depth and decibel level that are unimaginable unless you have happened to experience them personally. A friend visiting over the summer who witnessed the screams during a particularly reluctant nap session said to me afterward, “If I heard a child screaming like that without any reference, I would call the police.”

The woman in front of us asked to be moved. The flight attendant came over and asked us if everything was ok, which in polite language the world over means, “Can’t you do something about your child?” The American woman sitting behind us, who didn’t realize that I could understand her, or even hear her over the screams, said to her companion, “It kind of makes you rethink having children, doesn’t it?”

I actually thought about how difficult it would be for us to ask to get off the airplane and rent a car.

And then, finally, they turned the air conditioning on, and revved up the jets, and we took off. G stopped crying almost as soon as the first blast of air hit us, although he didn’t stop wiggling or eliciting evil glares from the woman in front of us who was not, in fact, moved. At the end of the flight, we slunk off the plane, avoiding eye contact, gathered our luggage, and got a taxi home. The taxi driver smiled at us and told me that G had beautiful eyes, and I was so grateful I gave him an enormous tip.

To all of you without children who have ever flown with me and my counterparts, I am sorry. If there were any other way to get from here to there, we would do it, even if it involved drawing our own blood with a dirty needle.

Twice.

garçon

2007-09-19T13:01:00.000+02:00

So we went to have the second echographie (ultrasound) last week, in yet another Haussman-era apartment building remade into gracious offices. The monitor for the ultrasound machine actually sits in the fireplace of the former salon, which makes for elegant, albeit strange, viewing. The radiologist is yet another member of the Corsican medical mafia to which I’ve gained entry through my OB, and he speaks the same confident, Italian-voweled French that both delights and completely flummoxes me. (I’m at the point now that most everyday interactions don’t involve too many hand gestures, but at the doctor I generally find myself reduced to pantomime. I feel like I enter the building with a giant, glowing question mark over my head, the Alfred P. Newman of pregnant women. It makes my doctors take a vaguely paternalistic attitude toward me, which in other circumstances would irritate me no end, but I’m actually finding it sort of placid and comforting to play stupid.)

Anyway, after a few minutes of reading French Elle in Barcelona chairs, S. and I were ushered into the examining room. The general suavity of French doctors, who lean toward tailored suits under their white coats, preferably with open-necked shirts and a little chest hair showing, only heightens the strangeness of lying on a table while another man smears Astroglide all over your belly. But after a couple of seconds, the doctor directed our gaze over to the monitor and started pointing out pock marks in the moonscape that turned out, to our delight and surprise, to be our baby’s fingers and toes. I was concentrating on the counting – un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq – that verified the correct numbers belonging to each appendage, when I heard S say, in French, “hey, is that a --?” The doctor stopped in the middle of counting to shush him dramatically and say, “but does maman want to know?”

When I had assured him that maman did indeed want to know, he paused again for effect, pointed back at the screen, and said “Voilà le zizi!” (yes, that’s what they call it, which I think explains a lot about French sexual attitudes all the way back to Molière). And it really was like a magic trick, the tiny penis appearing out of the swirling void. Also, don’t you think every man on the planet secretly wants to say "Voilà!” every time he opens his fly?

The doctor seemed so proud, as if perhaps he’d had something to do with it, and he and S. beamed at each other for several seconds before S. turned to me and said, “So I guess you’re going to be outnumbered!”

Yes, but not outclassed. Voilà.

**********************************************************************

A word about the above image – let it be said that I have never, in any restaurant, on any continent, referred to a member of the serving staff as “garçon.” I just couldn’t resist the visual joke.

homeopathie

2007-09-10T09:34:00.000+02:00

I’ve been meaning to write about the vet for a while now, but broken legs and other things interposed. Earlier in the summer, Lucy woke up one morning with symptoms that could only entail Armageddon for a household that contained a pregnant person and a toddler. Poor Lucy, sad-faced under the best of circumstances, looked positively humiliated, ears and tail pointing straight downwards in misery. I made an immediate call to the vet around the corner.

I had been curious about this vet since we moved in – the office is in a corner of the same building where our good friends N and T live, as well as our regular babysitter, and it has charming lace curtains at the window with “Veterinaire” spelled out, apparently in masking tape, on one pane. The “homeopathie” treatment advertised on the doorplate has given me pause, as I wonder if our extremely lowbrow mutt isn’t exactly the sort of 16th arrondissement client for homeopathic veterinary medicine. But since it’s three minutes walk from our house, I had been keeping it in mind for emergencies just like this.

It turned out Mme. la veterinaire answers her own phone, is very nice, and suggested I come toute de suite as her first morning appointment was running late. She didn’t raise an eyebrow when I showed up with dog, baby, and stroller in tow, and even offered to help me get the stroller up the steps into the building. She directed me to sit down on one of several ice cream parlor style chairs arranged around the waiting room, which was painted the exact same pink as our vet at home, but didn’t smell as if a single dog or cat had ever crossed the threshold. We waited a couple of minutes until two young women came out of the examining room, empty-handed, and then Mme. came back out and ushered us in. She left the exam room door open so G. could supervise the proceedings from his stroller, and immediately coaxed Lucy onto an examining table that rose smoothly from floor to examining height on a hydraulic pump, just like at the garage. I was impressed and the dog was only mildly freaked out, which was a minor achievement considering her temperament.

I had actually checked the dictionary before even calling the vet to try to find some of the specific vocabulary I might need for the diagnosis – these symptoms not being traditionally included in a college French course, let alone polite conversation. Even so, once I promptly missed the softball of “how long has she been feeling this way?” the conversation quickly devolved into franglais – meaning that the doctor switched into perfect English while I vainly tried to continue answering in French without appearing rude. Whether this worked or not, the doctor was very patient, and at the end of the interchange said, “Now I going to give her an injection and then I will give you some medicine. Excuse me for just one moment.”

And then she bent over behind her desk to extract the limp body of a cat, which she deposited on the countertop behind us. She arranged its legs, leaned over its head for a minute, said “Bon,” and turned back to me. “Would you hold her head please?” she said. For one wild moment I thought she meant the cat, whose eyes were wide open in sedated bliss, and I hesitated. Then I noticed that she was holding Lucy’s collar, and I gratefully took her place. The cat just stayed on the countertop for the rest of the time we were in the office. The only other mention of its presence was when the doctor asked me to come back later for the paperwork – “I’m in a bit of a hurry, as I have two cats here.”

I don’t have any idea where the other one was (tucked in the closet?), but I think “I have two cats here,” is an excellent explanation for just about any set of circumstances. And Lucy has been right as rain ever since.

orthopedia

2007-09-07T10:55:00.000+02:00

I had a little conversation with myself last night, after G. was (finally) in bed. It went like this:

Me: How’s it going?

Myself: My feet hurt. And they look ugly.

Me: We need some new shoes.

Myself: But Parisian shoes are so disappointing, and expensive. Unless you are willing to pay upwards of 400 euro, they still just look like Payless. Not that I mind Payless, but not for 100 euro. And did I mention my feet hurt?

Me: I think it’s time for Target online. How about these babies?

Myself: That is not going to solve our walking problem.

Me: I know, but I feel better about Myself already.

Myself: Me, too.

guidebook moments: exhibit A

2007-09-05T16:33:00.001+02:00

Among the things I will remember about living in Paris: stepping into the vestibule at St. Sulpice last Saturday afternoon as the organist was playing a Bach fantasia (which one, I have no idea – I also didn’t know that St. Sulpice’s organ is world-famous until a friend pointed it out, because a) I am an amateur admirer of organs and b) I assume on face that all organs in Paris churches are probably world-famous…). You could almost hear the organist cracking his/her knuckles as he paused for dramatic effect between one big, booming set of chords and the final extravagant, athletic flourish, filling the whole building with sound. All those stops, they were definitely being pulled. And yet it was ridiculously perfect, and brought tears to my eyes, because I’m that kind of person.

In Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (I’m that kind of person, too), one of the main characters uses pipe organ-building technology during World War II to create an early-days computer that can be used to decode German messages. It’s this giant hulking assembly of glass tubes so fragile that it also has to constantly run a cooling system so that the tubes don’t explode. St. Sulpice’s own hulking assembly is made of metal and wood and decorated with carved angels, and not likely to explode, but in this lovely building where the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment step up and shake hands (what on earth did they say to one another?), there must be a similar wedding of science and mystery, endlessly cloaking and uncloaking.

The thing about living in Paris, depressing as it is to admit, is that you forget you could do these things, any minute of any day, and instead you get caught up in the same worn trough of laundry and post office and what’s-for-dinner (and, okay, we have A LOT of laundry). It takes a moment of surprise to bring you back up to face with your absurd good fortune. Anyway, I felt really lucky, coming out of the church, and all the way home on the bus.

In other news, G. had his first haircut this weekend. It had gotten so long in front that he was unable to see, and in constant danger of crashing into things (not on purpose, anyhow). I made S. grab him in a wrestler’s hold while he was still wrapped up in a towel after his bath, and kind of cleared away at the brush with the scissors to create something that approximated a fringe over the eyebrows and above the ears. I hesitated to go much shorter without risk to life and limb. The result is that he can see, and we think he looks dramatically different, but every old lady we pass on the street still says, “Oh la la, qu’elle est mignonne!” (“Oh, isn’t she cute.”) But that’s a battle for another day.

qui peut y résister?

2007-08-29T16:17:00.000+02:00

Our neighborhood is starting to wake up again this week, at the beginning of the rentrée. The ghost town was strangely peaceful, but I’m enjoying the new noise and bustle, especially the sound and sight of children everywhere (how could I not have noticed that G.’s voice was the only child’s I heard for almost a month?). The bakery downstairs, which we missed more than I care to admit, reopened Monday morning. We can smell baking bread again when our windows are open, and more importantly, we have renewed access to the city’s best baguette tradition – guidebooks be damned. The bakery lady has returned from her holiday tanned to exactly the same shade as the crust of this favorite baguette (while I am as pale as only someone who has spent the entire holiday month of August in a rain-soaked city can be), and she had a special smile for G. and me when we came in. And the cheese shop, oh the cheese shop – even the fresh paint job doesn’t compete with the smell of S.’s favorite Livarot.

It’s a different case at the butcher next door, which also opened on Monday morning, a week later than advertised (who’s counting days when you’re on vacation?). Here is where I have to admit that I haven’t yet visited a French butcher, that while it is among my goals to begin regularly patronizing a butcher before we leave France, I am intimidated by butchers and cuts of meat in general, and by this butcher in particular. He is young and attractive and stands in the doorway of his shop smiling out over his bloodstained apron in what can only be described as a confident leer. In the shop display window, alongside the dried sausages and foie gras, there are photographs of the fancy restaurants that he supposedly supplies. But I don’t really believe this is his business at all. I’m convinced that behind the heavy wooden doors at the back of the shop, there is no meat locker, but instead a boudoir hung in red satin awaiting the discreetly paying customer. For one thing, there are hardly ever any customers in the shop. When there are, it is always elegantly dressed women of a certain age who never leave with any packages. For another, the little “Be back later” sign on the door has four small clock faces decorated with a lipstick print instead of numbers, over which is inscribed the motto: “Le boeuf de mon boucher, qui peut y résister?” Yes, that really does translate literally to: “My butcher’s beef, who can resist it?” Me, I think I can.

This morning I noticed that the butcher has added to his display window several large, artily framed photographs (perched on easels, no less) of disturbing, glistening stacks of raw meat. I’m not sure how this fits into my gigolo butcher theory, but it does something to me. I wonder what else September has in store for us.

daytripping

2007-08-27T15:17:00.000+02:00

I had an outing. Over the weekend I drove down to Fontainebleau with a friend who needed to recharge her car battery after a month’s vacation. S. agreed to manage the small person for the afternoon, so there were no extra diapers or car seats involved. The little town of Fontainebleau is about an hour’s drive from Paris, but it seemed like we were there even before we’d caught up on the summer’s activities. One exit off the autoroute, a roundabout, and a few blocks of narrow streets and there she blows (blew?) – several generations of French kings’ elaborate fantasia of a hunting lodge. My uncle Charlie would have taken one look and said, “What were those boys thinking?” And not a deer in sight.

After all the additions, Fontainebleau isn’t actually that much smaller than Versailles, but it seems like it’s on a much more intimate scale. It might just be that the tourist traffic is so much lighter, even in August, that you can walk along at your own pace instead of being borne aloft by the crowd surge. You can even pause halfway along Francis I’s grand gallery (built mainly so he could go from his bedroom to church without going outside) and look in both directions without getting knocked down. There’s the bedroom where Anne of Austria held court, and the completely fabulous ballroom conceived by Francis but not built until after his death (the ballroom, in turn, has almost completely walled in the beautiful late medieval chapel with hundreds of naughty – not medieval -- cherubs painted on its coffered ceiling). The horseshoe staircase where Napoleon made his departure for Elba (Adieu, mes enfants!), and the redecorated bedroom suite where he kept the Pope imprisoned until he signed the Concordat.

With that many bits of overlaid history, there are bound to be some ghosts. I saw mine everywhere. He was small and blond and had the exact facial expression of one of the putti on the chapel ceiling. When he wasn’t flirting with the museum guards (why else would they be smiling?), I heard his footsteps on the King’s Staircase, which I felt distinctly that he must have needed to climb up and down exactly twelve times all by himself. We came into the palace guardroom just after he left it, the velvet rope still gently swaying and the giant Sévres urn on the center table shifted several inches closer to the edge. And when we stumbled onto a concert demonstration of baroque French opera, it was certainly he who caused the young singer to miss a beat, by scrambling down the aisle and straight up onto the stage…Clearly, I have a problem.

The last time I came to Fontainebleau was during my first and last real trip to Paris before we moved here. I was still in college, on a trip that started in Spain and ended up in the Netherlands, and I stopped in Paris for a week to visit my friend who had just started her graduate school research. She was living with some unfriendly nuns on the Left Bank, and my visit coincided with that of some other friends of hers who were driving a car back from Luxembourg to London. We decided to drive down to Fontainebleau for the day, and after visiting the chateau and walking in the forest, we made our way slowly back to Paris. We stopped along the Seine and went swimming (well, some of us did) in our underwear, and when we had dried out we had dinner at a little riverside restaurant, on the lawn, as the sun was setting. I had snails for the first time.

This time, my friend and I drove straight back to Paris. As we entered the parking garage, I bought some ice cream and noticed the carousel that would surely be the main attraction if we bring G. back here sometime. Across the street, a wedding party was gathering in front of the park gates to have their photos taken in the garden. The bride and groom were in cream silks, and most of the rest of the party were in similar shades of summer, except for one very, very fat woman in heavy black crepe with a bright fuchsia shawl and a matching ostrich feather in her hair. I thought about her all the way home.

escape artists

2007-08-24T11:05:00.001+02:00

When we moved to Paris, we made the difficult decision to leave one of our dogs behind. Ruby was – and still is – an exuberant lab with a funny face and a sweet personality. But we just couldn’t keep her at home. At least a couple of times a week I would glance out the window and see her, either in the act of scrambling over the fence or already running full bore down the middle of the street. We built a six-foot fence; she dug under it. When people came to visit, she bum-rushed the door. It became a familiar sight for either S. or I to be circling the alleyways within a four-block radius of the house, trying to find the trash can that would stop Ruby in her tracks and allow us to wheedle her home. In the meantime, our other dog would stand at the window or in the yard, dumbstruck. A fellow shelter adoptee, her attitude seemed to be, “hey, two squares and we get to sleep on the bed. What the heck is your problem?” When we brought Ruby home, she always seemed happy to be with us, but not repentant, either.

Having a baby in the house only complicated matters. I had privately sworn to myself not to abandon our first set of dependents in favor of the human one. I had deeply absorbed the earnest animal shelter lectures about Responsibility Forever and Not Giving Up When it Gets Hard. But the mad dash around the alley got complicated with the added logistics of a floppy newborn to negotiate, and I had visions of locking all of us out of the house by accident in the middle of winter, me half-dressed in my bedroom slippers, G in a flimsy onesie, Ruby triumphant. And did I mention that she was also a terrible, lunging leash-walker and was unpredictably aggressive with other dogs?

On the other hand, Ruby was fabulous with G. Endlessly patient and gentle, she would lie on her side for an hour and make a living cradle while G. kicked his feet in the air and batted at her ears. That kind of trust and patience was something that took our other dog much longer to develop – she spent months circling the baby at a safe distance, and even now, having reached a co-dependency détente which revolves around shared and discarded food, she will still occasionally give me looks that say, “I am only doing this for you.” Ruby never did anything for us – she did things because she wanted to, but she always did them with joy.

When G. was about three months old, Ruby broke free from her leash, ran across a park, and forced S. to execute a pavement face-dive in order to stop her from going after an elderly poodle. Our already significant nightmares about Ruby roaming the streets of Paris suddenly assumed some Technicolor detail, possibly leading to an international diplomatic incident. And so now Ruby lives in the mountains, on a farm – really, with one of S.’s cousins – and we live here.

But in a bit of the universe’s glorious irony, she is still with us, in toddler form. There is no park gate, no doorknob within reach of a handy chair, that G. cannot breach. We’ve all become very accustomed to his rear view, speeding away as fast as his short legs can take him. He does it all with absolute glee, and when he cackles I swear I hear Ruby barking.

My glamorous life

2007-08-21T15:11:00.000+02:00

Besides the obvious challenges of managing carsickness on public transportation, maintaining some vague sense of personal style while wearing maternity clothes and carting around a toddler, and keeping myself from eating my body weight in Haribo Tropical Fruit ( a mystical urge, really), it’s gotten to that stage in this new pregnancy where sleep is not my friend. Normally I am one of those lucky people for whom sleep is a nearly instantaneous two-step process; I lie down, I fall asleep. Over the years this has caused a lot of abruptly abbreviated conversations and snide comments from my spouse, who is of the slower to sleep variety. It’s usually not a good idea to try to talk to me about anything meaningful after 11 pm. – you won’t get much.

But not now. Both the permanently stuffy nose and the indigestion (don’t ask), get worse when I lie flat, so I usually start the process of delaying the inevitable by moving the dog, propping up on a pillow, and pretending to read for a minute, while actually thinking about the common sense misfire of now having to raise two children who are likely to outweigh me before their combined ages add up to five (will I have to stand on a chair to project authority?). When I think I might be sleepy enough to counteract the discomfort, I wiggle down in the bed, shove the dog out of the way again, and try to assume a position that might be conducive to rest. Lately this has involved extra pillows. The other night, all my moving and shaking seemed to be accompanied by an inquisitive silence from the other side of the bed, whose occupant was attempting to remain as still as possible in the process. Finally, after a last energetic round of piling, punching, and shoving, came the question: “Are you building a fort?”

Yes, I am.

Liberty

2007-08-16T09:03:00.000+02:00

G. got his cast off a few days ago. His time in the cast roughly coincided with the amount of time the computer spent in repair purgatory, so we’ve all been stumping around the house in grumpy moods lately. By the time of the cast removal, G. had become impressively skilled at using the cast as counterweight, which enabled him to walk around the house pirate-style, swing himself up onto chairs and furniture, and threaten me at diaper-changing time.

Without the cast he’s now a little reduced, as if he’s lost his superpower and special costume all at once. He will only gingerly put weight down on his new, noodly leg, and prefers to sit on the floor in a sort of moody, yogic squat until someone comes to pick him up. I think we have a few more days of grumpy left.

In the meantime, our entire neighborhood has emptied out for the August vacation. Many of the shops have posted cheerful, handwritten notes wishing everyone “bonnes vacances” and mentioning the date of return. Other have just slammed down the security shutters as if they don’t care when they might come back. We’re down to one bakery (the snooty one) and two grocery stores, but it’s hard to feel deprived about walking an extra block for bread. Paris is left to us and the tourists, and I’m kind of enjoying it, thinking of all the crowded, hectic places I might be instead. I also like the idea that, however removed it might be from reality, the wheel of commerce could just stop turning for awhile, or could turn somewhere else, and everything will be, well, just fine. Like a world where even Sisyphus might catch a break.

fracture de cheveu

2007-07-08T13:50:00.000+02:00

Yesterday G. was running across the Trocadero, hellbent on destroying a display of tiny Eiffel Towers, when he skidded on the marble, slipped and fell. We are regulars at the Trocadero, and G. has a special relationship with the touts there – they love him and try to give him little toys, and he tries to destroy their merchandise. It works for them. Anyway, when he got up, he wasn’t crying, but he didn’t want to put any weight on his right foot. S. brought him straight home, we made a quick consulting call to the nurse mother-in-law, and then it was direct in a taxi to the emergency room at the children’s hospital. (May I just put in a plug here for children’s emergency rooms? All the weekend emergency rooms I’ve ever been in were full of barfight victims and large people coughing up strange substances – all of whom have a perfect right to be in the ER, and I’m sympathetic to their plight, but it sure dialed things down a lot to have my sick child in a room full of other, well, sick children).

It turns out it was a good thing we went. Two X-rays and a couple of hours after our arrival, they found a hairline fracture in his right calf bone (the tibia? Yes, that one.). At that, I have to say my respect for my tiny engine of destruction went up about tenfold. He hadn’t cried at all the whole afternoon, except when the very nice French orthopedist tried to put him on the examining table, and that was much more en colère than douleur, as she put it. I think that earns him a place in the tough guy annals right up there with John Wayne, and Hannibal, and Steve McQueen. Or, as our visiting friend said, when G. figured out how to drag his cast behind him, at a pretty brisk clip, within ten minutes of coming home: “I like this kid. A lot.”

G now has a cast – old-school, plaster, weighs about ten pounds – from his toes to the top of his thigh, which he has to wear for a month. It is more hilarious than pity-inspiring, especially now that it sports a black duct tape stripe around the middle where G. has already managed to bash in a weak spot. Every indication is that he’s going to get along just fine, and I’m feeling an extremely guilty enthusiasm that my G.-chasing duties just got a whole lot easier for about thirty days. Still, when I rocked him to sleep last night, the heavy cast clunking against the armrest, his damp, sweaty hair (which is going to get especially sponge-bath stinky in the next few days) spilling over my neck, I felt my own hairline fracture crack a little, somewhere under the sternum. I’ll take the crashes and bashes, I’m signed up for multiple trips to the emergency room. But just – stay a while.

what so proudly we hailed

2007-07-05T09:08:00.000+02:00

We had a quiet expatriate independence day yesterday. It rained. But in honor of the festivities it seems appropriate to share this article I came across recently, which documents the raging success that is McDonald’s Europe, headed by a Frenchman who may be next in lead to run Mickey D worldwide. The success seems to have something to do with gas fireplaces, unobtrusive signage, and the personalization of local menus. It’s certainly a small miracle of differentiation – our student babysitter, before she became a vegetarian, swore up and down that the French Big Macs were better than the American. Mostly I was impressed that the author managed to score an interview with José Bové and his moustache. And maybe I won’t feel as guilty when I finally give in to my recent, relentless pregnancy urge for a double cheeseburger and fries. I might even co-opt G. right along with me. So there. Vive la révolution!

she's gone and done it

2007-07-02T16:17:00.000+02:00

It’s July, and we’ve lived in Paris for almost a year now. When we arrived last September, the crowds of tourist were starting to thin; now the first flush of lost-looking people in matching tee-shirts and sneakers – or backpacker gear and dirty Birkenstocks – is starting to make its way along the Champs-Elysees. I’ve given about eight sets of directions to the Arc de Triomphe, but so far it hasn’t really affected our lives much. Being here certainly has, though I struggle to say exactly how. It still seems like a ridiculously good stroke of fortune that we get to live here at all, that we aren’t tourists ourselves – who gets to run away to Paris when they’re boring and old and have a dog and a toddler? And yet I can’t overemphasize the sheer mundanity of most days, where the most challenging cross-cultural thing that happens to me is figuring out how to say “bloody diarrhea” in French before I go to the vet.

Since we got here, G. has learned to walk and talk (well, sort of), and I’ve done a pretty good job of documenting all that on a family website for the grandparents and forbearing friends. But I’ve done a pretty terrible job of documenting anything else. Why not? Well, I didn’t fall in love with a Frenchman, I haven’t launched on a beautiful journey of self-discovery, I haven’t learned to cook, and I’m not (thank god) renovating a crumbling but charming farmhouse in a picturesque part of France. Still, some folks have been kind enough to ask what I/we have been doing in the interim, perhaps on a blog, so I’m starting this one (a bit more anonymous than the pictorial blog, to protect the guilty). Here goes. What else is an overeducated, underemployed, tired mother of a walking id to do?

Image is a cover shot of "French for Dummies" French edition, Editions Générales First, 2001.