I spent all day yesterday watching the grass grow / and what I learned is that grass really grows slow ...

Now that my time here is drawing short, I’ve started to wonder about what it will be like to come home. This has been such a bizarre experience, in many ways, and it’s been incredibly, unbelievably, breathtakingly fast. So much to integrate in such a brief span. (Pause to ponder the ontological and epistemological dilemma?) It’s been almost like being punched in the stomach, or having the wind knocked out of you. You have to let your lungs refill, slowly. And at first you screw your eyes up; you have to clutch your stomach for a minute before you can blink, and look about you. And even though it feels good to breathe, it hurts a little, too.

Weird image, right? But it fits, in its warped little way. I think that one of the things that no one could tell you before you did something like this is that it isn’t exactly fun. First, you wouldn’t believe them if they told you, and second, I think once you’re home and distant the things you miss become more prominent. I think in the same way that, here in France, I’ve missed being able to pinpoint and evaluate people and things the way that I can in the States, I will, once I go home, feel the absence of other people who know that these familiar things do indeed have different names, different ways of being described. I learned them. I feel like … that’s something.

I’m foundering, here. It’s absurd how tired I am. I had a lovely-but-strange conversation with my grandmother last night – yesterday was her birthday – in which she shared with me her hope that I’ll get married before she dies. Actually, it began with her telling me at length about her neighbor, whose cochlear implant surgery transformed her life, and the most meaningful example of this transformation is, of course, that immediately afterwards she began a wonderful relationship with the most wonderful man. His drawback, evidently, is that he has to do everything his own way, and, after six months of dating, he hasn’t yet asked her to marry him. Letting pass the assumption that he was the one who must perforce do the asking, I merely remarked that six months didn’t seem all that long to me, barring the intervention of buns and ovens and things of that nature. I learned, to my great surprise, that my insatiably traditional grandmother thought six months was quite sufficient, and that long engagements were also quite silly. The Berlitz approach to relationships, I suppose. I almost fell over when she said that she thought it was best for people to spend as much time together as possible when dating – thus facilitating the total immersion. I’m not sure if this is coming from the point of view that it’s best to rope the man in and tie him down before he can get away, or if it’s more a case of well-does-it-really-signify-who-we-marry-anyway, but it was all a bit too “truth universally acknowledged” for my comfort.

I suppose I’m saying all this because it kind of blindsided me. Not having my grandmother tell me that she wanted me to get married (and for the record I don’t know that she’d repeat the same logic if asked another time, being notoriously capricious in her ideology), but rather the concrete confirmation of someone having a vision of life so utterly different from my own. That she and I were so literally in such completely different places. She’s planning my imaginary wedding from her kitchen in Tennessee, oblivious to my actual life here in France. And I’m here, inhabiting a life as different from that as if it were on Mars.

So coming home. It’s not just the knowledge that everyone will think I’m pretentious if I’m fussy about cheese, or use French phrases because the English expressions don’t suffice, or that I won’t be able to find my favorite brand of cookies. I feel like I’ve been thrown off balance, and now that I’m finally getting my footing again, I’m getting hit from the other side.

I am as comfortless as a pilgrim with peas in his shoes -- and as cold as Charity, Chastity or any other Virtue. - Lord Byron

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. - Alfred North Whitehead

It’s funny. Bizarre, almost. But I find as I grow in my acquaintance with myself, that the things I love the most are the things to which I have the most initial resistance.

One’s parents are always a good example. Those people who frustrate and demoralize you, whose attention and approbation you desire and who you are always certain you have failed to impress. But whose counsel shapes the decisions you make whether you intend or no.

I’ve tried not to be a writer, I’ve tried not to be a doctor. I’ve tried extremely hard not to define my relationships, at which I have failed spectacularly, as most of us do.

And France becomes another chose comme ça. I had this Babar-and-Madeleine understanding of French, and this Foucauldian adoration of France as a concept (which couldn’t be more vexed, complicated, inapropos, right?). And I came to France unhappy and dissatisfied with … well, with a great many things, I suppose. I’ve already pointed out that I was quite unhappy in Paris. And now I find myself missing it, find myself feeling like I found something there that I wasn’t quite ready to name or claim. I’ve become one of those American writers who love Paris. Well, each cliché guards a grain of truth, as they say.

Talking in clichés. At least an ability to talk in clichés signifies an ability to talk. It’s astounding, though, how much one can actually communicate with a vocabulary more limited than American political awareness. It’s conversation in the verbal Dust Bowl: you just have to make do with what you have. In my struggles with this language, I have asked my host family for the drought instead of the hair dryer. I have tried to explain the concept of a “giant ladle in the sky” (une grande louche en ciel), as the only way I knew how to describe the Big Dipper. They tell me that I speak French as though it's Spanish; I think because I can’t always suppress my impulse to pronounce all the letters in the words, and because I gesture so much when I speak. Once again, it’s functional rather than artistic. I came to France and learned to mime.

There are still a great many things I don’t understand. I can’t fathom how the French can pull off outrageously tapered jeans, or moccasin-type leather boots laced up to the knee, like fur trappers. I don’t understand why Converse cost 60 euros. I have lost all patience with squatting in the bathtub while I try to rinse off the soap before it dries on my skin, with the suggestion of warm water trickling from the end of the hose attached to the bathtub nozzle. (Granted the French use something like half the water we do in the States.) I have no idea how to exit conversations. I have yet to learn the French equivalent for "Alright, well, I gotta run, but I'll see you later." So I'm continually just saying "Well ..." and pointing in another direction, as if I'm signalling into the wings before I walk offstage. I could use more personal space. I’d like to be able to talk on the phone as much as I want; I’d like to go through an entire day without feeling like a buffoon (do I really accomplish that at home, though, either?); and I’ve reached a point where I wouldn’t mind dumping the entire contents of my backpack into an incinerator. But one can’t blame France for that.

I do know the side of the canal that has the best sidewalks.

I've learned how to dodge the fowl along my walk to school through the Jardin des Plantes. It’s still dark when I leave the house, and now it’s started getting cold, and I can see my breath in the mornings. By the time I get to the Jardin, though, the sun’s coming up, and actual roosters are crowing in the flowerbeds, and geese are padding along with orange beaks and outstretched necks, waiting for Christmas. Once a mama duck crossed the path in front of me, trailing her babies behind her and looking for all the world like she'd stepped out of Robert McClusky's Make Way for Ducklings.

I have become accustomed to the sound of churchbells. They sound every half-hour, at least, here, and at six in the evening when I walk home from the library, they’re glorious. Sometimes I forget to listen to them.

I got over my fear of the people sans domicile fixe, the functionally homeless who make their homes on the east side of the canal, among what look like dozens of bags of assorted cloths, squatting under every bridge like trolls.

I finally learned how to use the phone, how to buy stamps at the post office, how to ask for more salt, less salt, or no salt at all.

After hours of painstaking labour, thick-fingered fumbling hunched over my desk in the middle of the night, I taught myself to roll my own cigarettes. A habit I'll probably have to give up aux Etats-Unis. On a parle de missing things?


'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that,' says my pride, and remains adamant. At last - memory yields. - Nietzsche