For those who have aussi been forced to traduire les paroles de Georges Bressons

For my SIT cohort: Vous me manquez, deja.

There are so many, many things about the time we spent in France that I won't ever be able to explain to anyone else.

You are the thing I miss most about France; the people who understand my awe and terror of Leila (Ghregh??), who were likewise trapped for a semester in salles trois, quatre, and tres, and who likewise learned which ordinateurs dans la salle informatique were the least unacceptable (including the one you had to beat on to make it work properly, selon the directions ecrit on the petit panneau).

We loved Eric and loathed the Atelier d'Expression; we suffered ensemble through brebis and Aveyron and Ariege and torrential rains and beaucoup trop many tours.

We answered the question "What *surprises* you about France?" for the 200th time with smiles and without flogging anyone to death.

We parl-ed in constant Franglish (and sometimes even Frangleshpanol).

We discovered the English books and American TV shows a la Mediatheque, and we escaped from all those Algerian/Tunisian/Moroccan/"French"men without too much incident, eh?

We introduced Paris to the Car Bomb.

We outed Greg and Laura.

We learned what happens when you put unleaded fuel in a diesel engine.

We cartooned our teachers.

We know which one of us speaks the slowest, whose voices are so soft you can't hear them on the telephone, who has to preface all her interactions with French people with a long self-deprecatory preamble, who absolutely cannot speak in public, who doesn't like space, who touches everyone's hair, who makes the most derisive faces.

Who *always* has to talk with her hands. :)

Without Sam, who was there for the Thierry debacle from the beginning and who knew but didn't judge about the girl from the Lolita Cafe whose calls I quit returning, I never would have shared l'Ancienne Belgique, or eaten the best Tibetan meal of my life in St. Germain. I want to retire to your sheep farm, in Scotland, New Zealand, the San Juan Islands ...

Without Marissa and Greg, I never would've known for sure that no man is sorry that he'll never carry a baby, or that someone can love both Tom Waits and cute puppies with the same fervor, or had someone to smoke, drink gin and tonic and talk dirty with, or learned the merits of loose-leaf Gauloise, or played pool beside the Mediterranean.

Without Tricia, no one would have understood why Joey was NOT SPEAKING FRENCH! or the debate over the meaning of San Diego, or the only way to bag a classy lady (take her to the gun show ... and see if she likes the goods), or why I spent a French semester in a glass case of emotion. Or the deep significance of "America - fuck yeah!" and "Qu'est-ce que c'est haut, chien?"

Without Matt, I'd never have learned the difference between porn and "erotic films," or been able to meaningfully discuss the degustation of fried chicken, biscuits, and macaroni and cheese, or the joy of leaving your bread on the plate with your food.

Without Rebecca, no one would have answered my English with French, and there would be no one to carry on my Santiago de Compostela legacy. (I'm counting on you, girl.)

Without Ellen, who should absolutely NOT become an RA, I'd never have given a shit about caves or ultimate frisbee, or quaked in fear merely at someone's scowl, or learned to avoid Maison Pillon, or discovered the infinite variations possible for "Eeewww."

Without Laura, there'd have been no one's love life about which to speculate, and I never would have met the only girl who could make ice interesting, and whose patience will surely one day merit canonization. Keep that one in line - I know you will. Will you invite me to the wedding if I give you guys an ice pick and a pair of giant tongs?

Without Abi, I'd never have eaten the closest approximation of real Mexican food France has ever seen, or listened to three different versions of Romeo and Juliet in succession, or been able to replace the birthday song with Estas son las mañanitas. (Gracias para siempre.)


Without Brittany, I'd have had no pirates in France, no fellow Boulder, no one who was sick more than I was, no stories of Enrique, no one with whom to faire le bis back in Colorado. "Malheureusement, j'ai casse mon parapluie dans l'Aveyron! Et toi, tu as casse le tien, aussi, je crois. Il y avait beacoup trop du vente! Et Greg aussi, il a perdu le sien quand meme. Il faut accheter un autre, a cause de la pluie, sinon on va etre trop mouiller!" (I wanna say something. I'm gonna put it out there; if you like it, you can take it, if you don't, send it right back ... I want to be on you.)

There aren't any words for you, Julie, my Berkeley copine. Thanks for being at St Bertrand de Comminges that day, for watching the hours of montages, for laughing at Pink and Christina Aguilera, for eating raclette, for loving Ani and Orishas and Alicia Alonso, for knowing Dar Williams and Mollie Katzen, for telling me about Cuba and helping me decide about Africa, for that day at the library. For being the other Californian, the other dancer, the other American in the French host family milieu. Cheeseboard, Lovejoy's, the Ferry Building Farmer's Market, Cowgirl Creamery, Point Reyes, burritos in the Mission, Big Sur await. Come to Boulder and I'll introduce you to the snow.

Vooooiiillaaa. Tout a fait.

Ai, ai, ai.

Si vous n'existeriez pas, dites-moi comment I would have made it through the past four months. Moi, je n'ai aucune idee. Quand je suis arrivee en France, I would not have believed how much you all would mean to me. Mais, vraiment. *Vachement.*

A bientot, kids, et je vous remercie pour tous les fromages.

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

The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can ...

... pursuing it with eager feet, until it joins some larger way, where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say. - Tolkien, The Hobbit


I find I am something of a hobbit, myself, of late.

I was talking a few postings ago about life here in Prat, where I've been left to muse quietly on the variegations of cheese degustation. It's funny; it's as though after whining for ages about being discontented, Toulouse shook my sweaty hands from her apronstrings and dropped me into an isolated corner of the country, 'to think about what I'd done.'

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Of course, I always do.

Another thing Bernard, my host father, is particular about is coffee. A man after my own heart, eh? They give me coffee - the lovely, excellent, perfect coffee from a drip coffeemaker that I have been craving for months - every morning, in a swollen cup like a bowl on a saucer, and I sit by myself and dip my bread in it and read my book and sip my coffee and look out the window at the foothills of the Pyrenees. But Bernard also has a little Nespresso machine that works with these little pellet things of espresso that he orders on the internet and of which he is charmingly proud. He loves to demonstrate the ease with which one can drop them into the machine, and then the two of us stand with folded arms and wait for the espresso to appear ('The pressure, the pressure is the thing, Avie,' he always says, and I nod as though I had no idea until he told me), staring anxiously at the spout as though waiting for an explosion.

He just walked in, actually, as I was writing this. 'Est-ce que tu veux un cafe, Avie?' No joke.

We share espresso a couple of hours after breakfast, again just after lunch, another around four or five in the afternoon, and the final cup after dinner. (After the first few nights of lying in my bed wondering how many verbs I could conjugate in my head, I found out there was decaf.) He loves to see if I can taste the difference between the ristretto, the arpeggio, the roma, and he was delighted when my preference was for the strongest one. I think my presence here is an excuse for the family to have all of their favorite things as often as he wants - if his wife notices how many pieces of chocolate he's had, or he flicks his eyes over her third glass of wine, it's all in the name of letting Avie try things.

I actually find myself lying quite a lot, for simplicity's sake. People are much happier when they can introduce you to something as though they invented it. And that's true, in a way. Everyone has their own manner of enjoying quelques choses, and thus, in France at least, each time is the first time. But more on that another time.

I do think that the quiet tasting of cheese, of wine, the appreciation of truly wonderful coffee - and indeed the insistence upon the necessity of such things - is quintessentially (attention: this is not to say *exclusively*) French, and is in itself a kind of resistance. We have a petit pause for a cup of espresso, and we have ten minutes where we sit on the terrace and talk about my studies, or the neighbor who insists on burning all his brush, or what lovely weather we're having even for the end of october, or how remarkably fine is the coffee.

Yes, it's irritating that the shops close for three hours in the middle of the day. It made it easier for me when I discovered this was irritating to the French, at times, as well. But one shrugs one's shoulders, raises one's palms, and says 'eh.' It's France. The culture of preservation and conservatism involves a distressing amount of navel-gazing, it's true. But it also cultivates a connosieurship that is built upon things that can all too easily be lost, or squandered. And it's incorporated into the rhythm of life with a minimum of fanfare.

It's a morsel of Zen, in its fashion. It's an ability to enjoy small things without impinging upon the rights or freedoms of any other person. And it supports itself, creating the space it needs to grow and thrive.

Life is nice in the little French garden of my mind. I'd like to stay and wear pink gloves and cultivate tomatoes and pansies. I'd like a little apartment three floors over the narrow street, with lavender shutters and rosemary in the windowbox.

I will also be happy to go, to get back to my cellphone and my literary theory, my madcap furious rush to learn everything there is to know from books, and in one day.

I will continue to take on too much, to try too hard, to fill my days too full of classes, works, aims, friends, troubles.

But life is long, and more than that, it's broad. There's room in it for the wrinkle between my eyebrows, for the callouses on my heels. You have to be willing to be unhappy, for a while. You're going to be anyway, from time to time. I would like, myself, to be able to see that not as a failure to live properly, as an affront to my sensibilities.

There's a French coffee press that's waiting for me in some box in some person's house, somewhere in Colorado. Sometime around three months from now I'll be living in my next apartment, my own apartment that's only mine, to which I have the only key. I'll be laughing at my students, laughing at my friends, laughing at myself again. Recognizing all the things I forgot I owned. And sometime around three months from now - it'll be quick because I'll tear through all the boxes looking for it - I'll find my coffee press. I won't make the coffee any differently than before; I like the way I've always made it. And it probably won't be French; in Boulder, I usually buy Mexican or Costa Rican. And I won't sit on the terrace, because in Boulder, in January, it's snowing and freezing.

But I will think about France, about drinking coffee in France. About how you can't see a thing until you walk away from it. About the pause.

I might even buy a cup swollen like a bowl, so there's room to dip my bread in.

A map can tell me how to find a place I have not seen but have often imagined.

When I get there, following the map faithfully, the place is not the place I have imagined. Maps, growing ever more real, are much less true.

In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born in have traveled all over the world. The journey is not linear. It is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.

Fold up the maps and put away the globe.

If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.

At this point in my life / I'd like to live as if only love mattered / as if redemption was in sight ...

... as if the search to live honestly / is all that anyone needs : no matter if you find it. - tracy chapman

She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear?
- jeanette winterson, sexing the cherry

I think it is so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

I’ve been having a Monkees moment in Toulouse, of late. Even though it’s France. I walk every day past rows of houses that are all the same. The mother in me complains about how hard life is, and the kid just doesn’t understand.

When you start dissecting your life in terms of a Monkees song, let alone speaking of yourself as multiple persons, you need a change of scenery.

Right now I’m staying in the petit village of Prat, in the departement of Ariege, with the foothills of the Pyrenees in view when I open the shutters of my bedroom window.

I like it here.

I’ve also developed a strong desire for a pair of Wellington boots.

This morning, a ray of light shone through the fog. I was dipping my pannetone (a brioche-y sort of Italian bread thing with raisins and orange peel) into my bowl of coffee and thinking about a conversation my host father here in Prat, Bernard, and I had had the previous evening about the very important manner in which one must slice a wedge of cheese: one cuts perpendicular to the apex of the triangle up to a certain point, at which time one switches to the sides of the cheese and begins to slice perpendicular to the base. Evidently children often fail to do this properly, which is highly irritating.

I’m mentioning this not to bore you into leaving off this narrative or to point out once again how fussy and peculiar the French can be, but because I realized how practical is this insistence. Simple, and indeed intuitive, and yet it hadn’t occurred to me. But if you don’t cut it that way then you get down to the rind and you’ve wasted a great deal of cheese that you can’t really carve away.

We also debated the difference in taste the pasteurization of milk makes, and whether cow, goat, or sheep’s milk makes the best cheese (I prefer goat, which he says women usually do). But don’t think about feta, or about that soft white chevre that you often see with the herbs around the sides of it. I’m talking about a plate with three wedges of pale yellow cheese, darker beige rinds that, essentially, look the same. But he could see the difference immediately.

All this sounds like blatant snobbery, doesn’t it? This was the kind of thing you were expecting, when I came to France, for me to write about all the nuances of the cheese I was tasting, for me to come back babbling about wines that are oakey or fruity or floral or ashy or earthy or lalala. It is snobbish, on the surface, and I have striven to err on the opposite side of caution in my interpretation of France, of the French. I am afraid, in a way, to write about cheese or even to enjoy cheese when I know that people (even people I know) are hungry or lonely or exhausted or unhappy. But there is, I confess, another side to it all.

For one thing, before I make him sound like a pedant, Bernard – late fifties, retired, loves to make intricate photo presentations with music and special effects on his computer, runs for two hours every day with his eleven-year-old Weimareiner, Leika – also likes Pink. Yeah, that Pink. Nevermind that he doesn’t understand a word of the lyrics. He also likes Christina Aguilera, but I think we can forgive him for both because he doesn’t speak English.

We in the United States, as we leftist yippies in our Patagonia jackets and our rope sandals and our Thai fisherman’s pants made from organic hemp (they have a word for us in French, too – they call these sorts of people “bobos,” or bourgeois bohemians, which needs no explanation, eh?) love to point out, are a culture of consumers. We have things like SUVs and 200 channels and iPods and limitless supplies of hot water and enormous refrigerators and dryers for clothes and petrol that is, despite everything, still cheaper than in Europe. And 24-hour grocery stores (not to mention 24-hour gyms or gas stations or restaurants or anything at all that never closes) – these things are uncommon, and some of them are nonexistent, in France.

And for what? Well, the obvious answer is that they’re available and generally affordable and quite nice, thank you very much, and why not be comfortable if one can be?

Why not, indeed?

Well, in a way, it’s all insulation, isn’t it? Yes, I know I’m being philosophical from here in my little French village, but indulge me. I already warned you that I wanted Wellington boots.

In our way, we as Americans make a kind of helter-skelter, madcap attempt to stay happy. To remind ourselves that we’re not famished or exhausted or all that poor. To barricade ourselves against unhappiness.

I have a friend whose grandmother emigrated from Russia as a young woman. She’s been in America for over half a century but she still keeps the pantry absolutely stuffed with canned goods and powdered milk and preserves as though waiting for the apocalypse.

The inverse of that story is an anecdotal account of the siege of Carcassonne, a medieval village in the south of France, not too far from Toulouse, as it happens. The story goes that the town had been besieged for some ridiculous amount of time, a year or something, with no sign of letting up, and when the people were just about to run out of … well, everything, the leader of the town (who I think was a woman, actually) had them catapult the last pig stuffed with the last bit of grain over the ramparts into the enemy’s camp. The idea was to impress upon the opposition that they had provisions to waste, that they were so well-stocked that they could afford to use food as ammunition. And, so the story goes, it worked: the other army decided they were beaten and packed it all up and went home.

Oh, to be Prince Caspian, afloat upon the waves …

Here’s an interesting meditation. One of the things that has occurred to me is the difference between coming to a place like France and going somewhere, like, say, to India. In some ways, coming here is more difficult. What I mean is, if you go somewhere like India, you’re just so absurdly different. Your clothes, the color of your skin, the manner in which you comport yourself. Every facet of your existence confirms your separation. If you go to France, on the other hand, well … you look just like everybody else. Okay, fine; you’re probably less painfully fashionable. You wear too much North Face and bootcut denim for a native, and you probably don’t knot your scarf properly. But it’s one of the issues I think we all have with life here – that it’s too close to the same.

The same but not the same.

If you’re in India, you take your difference as read. Franchement, as the francais love to say. You know your life is going to be less than facile. Of course one doesn’t speak the language. Of course everything looks / tastes / smells / sounds bizarre. Of course one feels the continual buffoon.

It would be cool if I could learn French to Schoolhouse Rock. Right? A squat little cartoon Napoleon in a tricornered hat and epaulets, with his hand tucked between the gold buttons of his coat (although I don’t know if he would ride a huge white horse or a donkey in the cartoon version), who would teach me, through a catchy and cunning song about some glorious victory, when to use the imparfait and when the passe compose. Or a troop of charming student revolutionaries who would take me on a tour of Paris to illustrate the difference between quel and lequel, or celui-ci and celui-la, or the impenetrable prepositional mélange that is dans, en, a, de, pour, and par. (Throw in vers, envers, and the difference between sur, au-dessus de, sous, and au-dessous de, add some champignons, and you have a recipe for a French aneurism.)

I’m sure my grammar teacher (who is without exception the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person and who, I am convinced, never says anything that isn’t accurate) would not agree with me, but French prepositions prove that there are some things about languages that work just because they do. It’s the same thing we’d say about English – uh, I’m not sure why you say it that way. It just sounds right.

What fun is being cool if you can't wear a sombrero?

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

All of us here en France are struggling. Of course they’re fake struggles, the struggles of the first world. The ways in which the civilized individual tousles with itself, and I’m worn out apologizing to myself for that. But. We’re all tired of cheese, as well.

Tired of Turkish toilets, of neat little piles of French dogshit everywhere on the street. Broken bottles and everyone’s litter, but all the shops close at seven o’clock at night. Of sausage with everything. Of weird little pillows with buttons in the center.

The French LOVE to ask, ‘What surprises you about France?’ Toujours, this is the question. Out teachers (who are French) ask us; our host families ask us; the people we meet ask us. What surprises you? What kind of question is that? I ask myself if this is something we demand of people in the United States, and I honestly don’t know. If it is, then I’ve learned how irritating is this query. Why irritating? Well, why the question? It’s because one perceives the glee behind the inquiry. Perhaps one envies the ability to ask such a question, because to ask it implies an intimate acquaintance with the thing interrogated. I know France; let me see how your assessment measures up. Because you don’t know it. Okay, fine – I’m well aware of that. And that knowledge is the rhizome of that elusive malady called homesickness. No, it’s not that you’re weak, you miss your mama, or your friends, or your favorite hamburgers. What you miss is that peculiar understanding of your surroundings. The conventions of commonplace everyday interaction. Knowing how something will feel, before you touch it. How to call a thing by name.

I was taught a month ago / to bide my time and take it slow / and then I learned just yesterday / to rush and never waste the day / Now I’m convinced the whole day long / that all I learn is always wrong / And things are true that I forget / but no one taught that to me yet. – phish, character zero

This is something that I’m well aware is not a unique sentiment, but if I have been surprised by one thing, it’s that I had to come so far from home to acknowledge things I already knew. Case in point – I had a meeting with my advisor here recently in which she, in her gentle manner, remarked that one of my biggest handicaps (in French, en France, in life) is that I hate to inconvenience people. Thus my rabid independence stems less from some overflowing fountain of courage and intrepidity than from a desire to avoid at all costs any instance wherein I might have to ask for help, or impinge upon the time, space, patience of another person. As we say in the South, I don’t like to be beholden, not to anyone. But it’s a problem for me here, because in order to get through the demands of my program, I have to essay into the community and work with people who don’t speak English, and who have to put up with my wretched and sickly French.

I hate that. I hate it more than anything here. I hate it nearly as much as I hate beaurocracy, and given my dealings with such things of late, that’s saying something.

What do I love about Toulouse?

I love a market called Afro Don Ton. They have pisco and tortillas and an absurd number of spices and hot sauce, and banana beer, and fufu, and hair extensions, and key limes, and datura root, and purple potatoes. And a lovely balding man who is always there behind the counter, always in a short-sleeved blue buttondown, always remembers that my name is Avie and who has never told me his. I go several times a week, who can say why, perhaps to smell pimante forte, perhaps to look at spiky horned legumes, perhaps to remind myself that forty-six kinds of hot sauce do indeed exist, and someone is buying them … perhaps to be the sort of person who is comforted by a place like Afro Don Ton. From time to time, the lovely man whose name I think I will never know, because he’s never told me, because I don’t know how to ask, because it doesn’t really matter, gives me a banana beer. Gratuit. And I take it home and drink it, the same day, and it tastes like beer, and it tastes like bananas, and it doesn’t matter at all that it’s warm.

You already know that I love the glaces at Cornet d’Amour. Ugh – have discovered a new favorite flavor – excuse me, parfum. The honey-and-pine-nut. It’s absurd. This is a disaster of epic proportions. I may exit France having become someone who likes ice cream. What will the neighbors say?

I love the Argentine girls at my favorite empanada shop, who laugh when I try to speak French and laugh when I try to speak Spanish, who play fantastic music and make absurdly delightful empanadas. One is tall and slim, with café crème pale skin and hair, always in long stovepipe black pants and an apron that looks like a starched tablecloth tucked into her waistband. She makes the empanadas, and she doesn’t really speak French. The other is shorter, darker, speaks patient French and rapid Spanish. She takes the orders, runs the cash register, and fiddles with the dial on the radio. Wears crazy tight jeans with random frayed and patched bits. Has a tiny braid of hair near her right ear. Rolls her own cigarettes. Like anywhere else in France, half the workday involves chatting with the people who wander in. At this place, there are faded Argentine glories who come in for huge sacks of empanadas in long coats, uncomfortable-looking shoes with large ornamental buckles (like Pilgrims), scarves, dyed hair combed like lacquered candy floss. Delivery guys with big plastic trays who interrupt whoever’s talking. Men in black jeans and leather jackets.

I love the availability of wonderful cards and stationary. (In passing: a librarie, en France, is a bookstore, while a library as we think of it is a bibliotheque, but a bibliotheque only has books; anything else comes from the mediatheque, which is a separate entity.) I discovered the mediatheque recently. Here’s another time when one traverses the globe to learn what one already knew: I love libraries. This one reminds me of all the ones I love back home. In Boulder, in Memphis, the library is the same: painfully modern architecture and so forth. The funny thing here is that, of the books they have in English, they’re nearly all fantastic books. In the same manner as the English language section at the Librarie Privat (my favorite bookstore, and the place where I spend too many hours pretending that it’s raining too heavily to go back home), the selection includes many of the books you really ought to read and precious few that you really oughtn’t. Also, they all come from Britain.


I love the girl at the vendor at the corner where we all buy lunch, inaptly and obscurely referred to as the pizza cart – obscure because there’s no suggestion, even, of pizza there, only salads and sandwiches on baguettes and yogurt and crepes and apple tart every day. She’s heavyset, rare in France, with blonde hair pulled severely back from her face and in a blue apron with stripes, and she makes your food precisely when you order it, slicing the eggs and tomatoes for your sandwich right in front of you. She never smiles, until she finishes her methodical and unhurried architecture, hands you your food and its accoutrements, never forgetting your little knife and fork, your spoon if you got yogurt, your single napkin (because more than one of anything is unheard of in France, double-bagging groceries is a totally foreign concept, but that’s a whole other posting), and slips your change into your palm with Voila and a beaming grin. Every day.

I love the way you can buy a drinkable bottle of wine for less than a euro. Really, it’s far cheaper than soda. And a decent bottle costs you around five euros.

I love seeing people at museums, gazing at paintings with little dogs tucked under their arms.

I love the Toulouse-Lautrec museum in Albi. I love his little pencil and ink sketches, his lithographs.

Oooh. How have I failed to share with you the changes I have wrought in my host family? D’abord, I have introduced them to hot sauce. I suppose it’s a condition of the French palate; perhaps the food is so fresh and so perfect in itself that they don’t require spices with which to mask any unsavoury flavours. Alors. I require them. And coming to France, I discovered that I didn’t wish to live without spices. So (at Afro Don Ton, of course) I bought Mexican hot sauce and chipotle sauce and cayenne and cumin, and set them on the table, and there was evening, and there was morning, and now everyone in my host family has to saturate their food with extra sauce – that it’s from Mexico is my own private joke, and yes, I do chuckle to myself often. Maybe it’s politesse or maybe they really like the stuff, but either way it’s fun for me.

I think, perhaps, that I’m always going to want the thing that shouldn’t be wherever I am. The immigrant, the import, the bizarre. I don’t know if it’s a fascination with the unobtainable, a desire to appropriate the mantle of the exotic, the continual reinforcement of the grass on the other side of the desert.

I also think that I’m never going to be happy, unless I relinquish whatever it is that I keep looking for. Thanks, Dorothy. Not sure if I can, though, to be fair.

The less I seek my source for some definitive / the closer I am to fine.

All that shit I cared about back home is still here; I’m still dragging all that worry and self-doubt around. It seems a chronic malaise. It’s drowned and forgotten sometimes, by adventure, by anguish, by work, by books, by opium dreams. But it’s easily exhumed. Yes, I question everything, and most of all I question and second-guess myself. Am I doing it all well enough? I’m old enough to know better. When will I be tired enough, far enough away, working hard enough to forget to ask? Ay, me, Juliet says. It’s when you’re tired and far from home that it means the most. If I am ambivalent then I have not yet chosen, and if I have not chosen then I have not settled. There’s no challenge more difficult for me than contentment. It is, I think, a peculiar sort of depravity, of cowardice. It makes me tired.

When you’re three days down the highway, / and you’re lookin’ like I feel, / and it takes a lot to keep it goin’ / and it takes a lot to keep it real, / take some time for yourself / and learn to yield. – indigo girls

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction.

My best friend's birthday is today. Oddly enough, we are often apart on our respective birthdays; only rarely have we celebrated together. A phone call across the miles, the overheard background murmer of other people's fetes, the Birthday Song and giggles on voicemail - such are our traditions. This year the miles are slightly more in number.

When she turned twenty-one, she was in school in Massachusetts; I called from my porch swing on a balmy not-quite-autumn evening in Tennessee, one bare foot tucked under my thigh and the other resting on my dog, the hand not holding the phone wrapped around a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. She was in Amherst drinking red wine, freezing in boots and a turtleneck sweater because it was her birthday, and she insisted on wearing a skirt. That's my girl.

Hey, Reethie!
Hey, Boo. If you were here I would ...
I know. Me, too.
I know.

I dislike the Birthday Song, as it happens. It's the same as the disdain for cartoons and chocolat chaud, although it takes on a peculiar venom when situated in a public place, magnified tenfold when sung by waiters. I don't understand why the tune has to be the same in all languages, either. I bet in Micronesia, they have the same damn song, and I don't even know what language they speak there.

(My poor children. No cartoons, no chocolat chaud, no birthday song. This is why they'll always be hypothetical children. During a long van ride on a recent educational excursion, my friends here made up - and loudly sang - a song using the imagined names of my hypothetical children. I suppose that's as good an illustration as any of how tired we get of speaking French.)

The only time I like the Birthday Song, in fact, is when Morgan sings it on my voicemail. She always calls, always sings, no matter where she is, even if she has to sing into the phone in public. Happy BIRTHday, dear Reethie ... I never wonder if it's coming, because it's there, every time. I hear Dear Reethie once a year because she loves me all the other days, too.

Hey, Boo. If you were here I'd bake you un bon gateau. Take you dancing. Buy you a glace at Cornet-sodding-d'Amour.

If I was there I'd take you to the Deli (which you always write as 'the Delhi,' and it always makes me smile, every time), to Boscos, to Le Chardonnay, where we've still never gone together but always talk about. To the Flying Saucer, to Swig, to Do.

I'd buy you a seven-dollar mojito at the Beauty Shop.

I'd make you a chocolate martini.

If we were together we'd eat samosas and bengan bhartha, as spicy as they'd make it, and drink Morgan Pinot.

Late at night we'd sing without shame to the Phish that WE put on the jukebox at Printer's.

We'd sit on the patio and smoke.
Pass a clove between us.
Break into the Eagles.

Watch the sun come up.

If you were here or I was there I would ...
We would ...

You know.

Hey, Boo. I love you, and I'm so glad you're my Dear Morgan every single day of the year, and I'm so glad I've got today to tell you.

Happy Birthday, from France this time. Next year, Jerusalem.

Or maybe just home.

Serendipity me manques.

I miss running into people I know on the street.

I miss places where you can sit and nurse a cup of coffee and a book for hours, even though I don't really do that in the States.

I miss American cups of coffee, in the paper cup with the little cardboard sleeve that you can grip while walking down the street. Espresso gets cold really, really fast.

I miss normal pillows. Wide squashy fluffy ones, that you can wrap your arm around or throw your leg over. Here you choose between two kinds of pillows - those roll things or the little square ones like toss pillows for dorm rooms. Mine is red.

I miss microwbrewed beer. French wine is great, but French beer ... well, French beer is Belgian beer, and I haven't found any yet that I can't get back home. I want a nice dry hoppy Glacial Pale Ale from Boscos on Madison at Cooper. Or Anchor Porter at the Liberty Cafe on Cortland. Or Pearl Street's Colorado Kind.

I miss cooking with my girlfriend. I miss the sound of her laugh. I miss her holding me while we laugh at the dubbed version of Iron Chef and wonder what the fuck they're going to do to make those weird sea urchins taste appetizing.

I don't think I have any idea what I want, these days.

I want to be a doctor. I want to fix people.

I want to never cry again.

I want to admit that I don't think mankind is really naturally good at heart.

I want to have a baby not because the world needs another person but because I deserve the right to be a mother.

I want to never be afraid again that I have said the wrong thing, and that my words are irreparable.

I want to hear Gena's voice on the phone.

I want to read a book because I can't stop.

I want to find the sentence that will make my father pack up the dogs and leave Memphis, because there will never be the time or the place or the people who will appreciate him there. I want the sentence that will tell my father that he is the wisest, kindest, and most brilliant man I've ever known, and that if I ever move a mountain, it will be because he taught me how to lift a shovel.

I want the sentence that will tell my mother that I know how scared she is of being misunderstood, because I share that same fear, passed down from her to me through Irish chromosomes. My mother and I, you see, share the the same tenacity, the same perspicacity, the same balls-to-the-wall, fuck-you-because-you'll-fuck-me-if-I-don't-outsmart-you terror. The same resistance for taking anything from anyone, even if we've earned it. The same relentless willfull energy. Because no matter how far we go or how much we do, neither of us believe that it's been enough.

I want my brother Daniel to call me, just to say hello.

I want to be old enough.

I want to tell Amanda that I'm selfish, and I'm sorry.

I want to tell all the people who think they want to change the world that all they really want is a way to rest easy in their own skins.

I miss the idea of being happy because of finding blackberries on a bush beside the road in France.

I miss having nothing at all to prove.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself. - Albert Einstein

Alors, je pense que this trip will go down in the annals of my (one-day-to-be) illustrious history as All Those Days I Looked At Sheep. (NB: Alternate titles include Un Petit Histoire de la Paysanne, The Autumn of the Cold and Damp, and French People Don't Eat Vegetables.)

So. Les Brebis. Just to explain, brebis are ewes. Lady sheep. There are, I discover, a great many of them en France. Their milk is responsible both for the only genuine Roquefort cheese (which was originally crafted by convicts and orphans) and for the most absurdly delightful confiture ever to grace my tongue. Having it in your mouth is exactly what it would taste like to kiss Mary Magdalene.

There are a a number of things that I do in France that I NEVER do in the United States. Wake up at 5.30 in the morning five days a week to run. Drink diet coke at room temperature. Write compositions in French. Lust after sheep's milk confiture. Read comic books. (Also in French. Calvin and Hobbes, for the most part. Lately I've begun to tackle Agatha Christie, although ca ne marche pas aujourd'hui.) My favorite, by far, though, involves a sinful little street vendor called Cornet d'Amour. I don't care much for cheese or chocolate or the ubiquitous baguettes, but if they have to roll me onto the airplane back to Colorado in January, it will be because of fucking Cornet d'Amour. I don't care for ice cream. I haven't been much for it since the days when I still thought cartoons were funny, and my grandfather bought me those upside-down clown cones at Baskin Robbins, the ones with the faces made out of frosting. At the time, my favorite flavor was mint chocolate chip. But in France, they aren't ice creams. They're glaces. And they aren't flavors. They're parfums. And I could eat the glaces at Cornet-sodding-d'Amour every sodding day. What parfum do I prefer? Let's see ... is it the gingembre, with the cold chunks of crystallized ginger? The citron basilique? The noix de coco avec curry? The chocolat noir noisette? The violette, with real sugared violets? The Italianate straciatella? The the vert menthe? (Uhm, yes. I have tried all of these. Along with the guava, mango, and passion fruit sorbets.) It's a real problem.

I'm already thinking about the French habits I'll have to consciously endeavor NOT to bring back to the United States so that my friends will continue to talk to me. These include peppering my conversation with French phrases, insisting on finishing each meal with a cheese course and an espresso, calling it confiture instead of jam, talking about politics to an exhausting degree. But even my favorite gelato spots in San Francisco can't hold a blowtorch, a flamethrower, let alone a candle, to Cornet d'Amour.

One thing in which the residue of my cohort indulges that I DON'T have to consider is le chocolat chaud. Hot chocolate. Even in France, I just don't care for it. If you know me well enough reading this, you know that I have a perhaps unreasonable contempt for things that I associate with childish tendencies. Maybe it's because I'm five-foot-three in my Danskos. I don't like cartoons; I didn't wear my hair in pigtails even when I had enough hair to do that. I don't eat macaroni and cheese. I loathe lunchboxes and Hello Kitty wallets and temporary tattoos. I don't try to justify these feelings. I accept them, just as I accept the fact that Georgie will be our president until January of 2009, even though I can't wrap my mind around the logic.

Granted, hot chocolate is different in France. It doesn't come powdered and presugared out of a pacet from Nestle. There's no lapin cartoon with long ears and a terrifyingly bucktoothed grin. This is France, kids - they grate fresh chocolate shavings into your cup (over a saucer, toujours) and pour fresh whole milk over them, and if you want it sweetened you have to add your own sugar in, which comes in a cunning little tube or in a cube in a silver dish on the side.

But for whatever obscurely stubborn steak of my own, rooted in some childhood malaise that wants a Berkeley therapist in broomstick skirt and scarves and Ethiopian beads to decouver, I can't enjoy the French hot chocolate. Why, and wherefore, this contrary streak? It's important enough and continuous enough an issue in my daily life to have warranted a place in my stock vocabulary alongside Est-ce que vous comprenez l'anglais? Je ne parle pas francais. Ou est le toilette? Je n'aime pas le chocolat chaud.

The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain. - Thomas Jefferson

France, you will be happy once you are finally cured of individuals.

One evening in Belleville, a seedy-yet-gentrifying neighborhood (a la Cooper-Young, Memphis folks, but inhabited by a much more disparate melange of French, Arab, Vietnamese, Chinese, African) in the Northeast part of Paris, I wandered into a tight and smoky neighborhood bar, following the sound of sitar music. I sat down to listen to the handful of men, six or so, crowded around a table in a corner of the bar and strumming instruments of various descriptions, exchanging them among each other with ease. I was immediately befriended by a tiny Persian woman who kept fanning herself with the hem of her heavy sweater, apologizing in a husky sigh – Fatih. And her friend, Lise, a Parisian lawyer with hair pulled straight back from her face, all in black and emanating the impression that she'd dallied in nonsense perhaps once in her life and never intended to repeat the experience. Both of them - and indeed everyone - chainsmoked with an enthusiasm rivaling that of the girls on the patio at the One More a Memphis, and for no reason that I could pinpoint, they kept buying me Kir mure, a cocktail of white wine and blackberry liquer that nobody drinks in America. Fatih told me all about how she loved America (one of the lies Parisians continually repeat: the other two most prominent are "You are so beautiful," and "No, no - you speak very well French!"), and how she wanted to travel more but couldn't because her adult daughter, who also lives in Paris, was ... and here she would break off, purse her lips, and scramble her delicate fingers beside her temple. Fatih decided that I needed to learn to dance to Arab music, so she pulled me out of my chair tout de suite and made me wiggle my hips and shrug my shoulders ("Laike zhees ... sensual ... oui, oui ... NON. Noht laike zhat." And then she'd grab me and move me like a clunky American doll until I copied her to her satisfaction). Things ended up with fringed scarves being magically produced from behind the bar, a woman appearing like a snag-toothed and aged Salome all in flowing black and taut headscarf who turned out to be a professional dancer, the evidently pregnant barmaid essaying from behind the bar, and Fatih and I dancing with all of them in a circle, palms slapping against each other to the ever-faster whirl of the sitars, guitars, and who knew what else.

On the train to Toulouse from Paris the next day, I succumbed to cabin fever and wandered through the train into the observation car. (NB: difficult to observe much on these high-speed trains. All the herds of cows and sheep and quaint little stone farms huddled against petit French gardens, and picturesque villages tucked into the Bordeaux countryside are things you know are there but can't really see much of besides a green, yellow, and grey blur.) I spent the next few hours locked in conversation with my umpteenth Jaded Parisian, Patric, a man with cropped grey hair, jeans, a black wool sweater, a Robert Redford five-o'clock shadow, and a penchant for referring to America as "your beautiful country," in just the tone you're imagining. He also dubbed George Bush "your esteemed president." He shared with me the growing concern in France about genetically modified food, and how the French fear that American companies are slipping horemone-treated meat; in particular, into the French markets underhandedly. The French take food quite seriously; a tone that becomes understandable in a country that gets two hours for lunch each day, and where dinner often encompasses three.

Kharim, the bike-happy world traveller I mentioned in another post and who reminds me faintly of my friend Kirill, has moved on to ... somewhere else (one is never sure, especially when one is me), but he bequeathed to the little American girl beaucoup de Portuguese music and French slang. (It's true: I speak French like a grammar professor. It's ridiculously unhip. But not uncharacteristic, at least for me.) I'd come home from school to find him slouching in the garden, his lean and rangy legs stretched out and bare toes buried in the grass, cradling his little Brazilian backpacker's guitar like a peculiarly tiny infant, like those sandstone paintings of Kokopelli the flute player. Strumming away and crooning to himself. He'd look up and hail me, Ah, Avie; Salut! fingers still poised over the strings. And he'd pull a chair up next to him and tell me stories about himself, about everything he's certain of, which is everything he thinks. He believes it's wrong to travel to poorer countries unless you're going there deliberately for humanitarian purposes, and even then he thinks you have to consciously try not to be exploitative. He also has a personal rule not to travel anywhere that he can't reach on his bicycle. So he's never seen America; he loves everything Brazilian but won't go there. He made an exception to travel to Vietnam, but he says he never will again, because it didn't feel right.

Trouver d'abord, chercher apres. Find first, search after. - Jean Cocteau

He loved to talk to me about Bob Dylan but admitted that he had no idea what any of the lyrics meant. That's as astonishing as anything I've encountered here, eh?

Je suis tombe du mon velo.

An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike. - Spiro Agnew

Being fair, I have my own and quiet struggles. I spent two weeks in Paris azure at the edges, and there were times when I was downright blue. (Who knew that Paris is such a lonely town ... ?) There was a lot going on inside my head and my heart, and ... well, I perceive the romance of a woebegone American slouching pensive through Paris. Coughing, and in the rain, no less. I think that isolation had been exigent for quite some time. In some small fashion I suppose you might say I went to Paris to be unhappy. And to smile at the mundane inevitability of it all.

It took me weeks to figure out the money, how to use the phone, what to say at the post office. Even the little text boxes that pop up on the computer are in French. Doesn't sound daunting, but it can be. I've gotten cell phone service, bought groceries, ordered many meals, navigated the Paris Metro (that last is actually quite logical - props to the French), had my hair cut twice, bought books and maps, mailed packages, and talked more politics than at any time previous, and all in a debauched version of a language I don't really speak. Don't come to Europe thinking that everyone speaks English. Not at all. (If anything, everyone speaks Italian. I'm convinced they'll conquer the universe and we'll all be wearing Dolce and Gabana and being fastidious about espresso.)

To round out the list, I've also received medical treatment. From a school nurse, who was convinced until persuaded otherwise that I was an exchange student at the high school. Ehhhhhhh. So, on my way to school last Friday morning, as I tried to navigate a particularly ferocius rush of agressive Toulousain traffic without crashing into any of the chic teenagers thronging the pavement outside their school, I hit the curb at the wrong angle and tumbled off my bike. I was rescued immediately by five or six passers-by, who swooped down immediately like angels of mercy with hopelessly French brows furrowed under fabulous haircuts, waving graceful anxious fingers in my face and muttering at me in worried French. Despite my thick-tongued protests, they tucked away my bike whisked me off to the school infirmary, where the baffled nurse in white frock, cap, and kicky red sandals tut-tutted as she salved my wounds and bandaged my torn knee, while I tried to explain that I was a university student and that I didn't have any parents she could call. (Once I finally showed her on my ID card how old I was, she was so charmingly apologetic I couldn't believe - "Desolee! Desolee!" over and over, with her hand over her heart like she'd mistaken me for a Belgian.)

Most importantly, the bike is fine, which is the first thing anyone asks. And I'm alright, as well; on the mend. I sort of tore my face up - left chunks of nose, lip, and chin on the sidewalk, and now that my hair's short I've nothing to hide behind, but a week later I'm looking much less like the Phantom of the Opera. I got the obligatory cyclist scrapes on my left hand, where you reflexively try to catch yourself. I somehow managed to bruise one arm and both knees, though only one was scraped up. But everyone says I look tough. I scratched the lenses of my favorite (and only) sunglasses, and ripped the knee of my favorite jeans, and I'm still wearing both, so coupled with the war wounds, I certainly feel like a badass. :)

Kharim, this half-Algerian, half-French guy (they always tell you that: "Buht mai muhzair, mai muhzair eehz French) who has been staying at our house and who travels the world on his bike, just waved a casual hand when he saw me and said, "Eh. Velo. Eeht 'appens."

Falling, though. It's a funny thing. You know it's coming, always. Like love. You realize its ineludibility at the precise moment that you're utterly powerless to do anything to prevent it.

We're falling all the time, you know? Fall off a bike; fall in love; fall ill; fall from grace. In French, you even "fall pregnant", as though the lady in question strolled out the door to the market one morning, stumbled on a roller skate, and found herself with child.

Really, we're falling every moment. With each step we fall, and catch ourselves with the next. And - usually - we don't even miss a beat.

With an apple I will astonish Paris. - Paul Cezanne

She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good. - Anatole Boyard

And I haven’t even reached Paris yet, have I?? Alack. Wurra wurra.

Well, Reijo and Tuula, my Finnish friends, drove me to Southampton, from whence I caught a train to London Waterloo. I spent a restless night inside the wonder of the International Terminal’s everlasting charms (haunted by geography, of course … ), learning another important traveller’s lesson: one can indeed sleep on the terrazzo floor of a giant train station, empty except for you and the few other hardy souls with heads pillowed on bulging backpacks and nowhere else to go.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. - of course, Ernest Hemingway

Paris. I stumbled bleary-eyed out of the train, blinking into the fluorescent lights of the Gare du Nord. Fumbling with the straps of my pack and trying to pretend there was a way that I could situate it on my hips that wouldn’t be uncomfortable, I emerged from the station into a grey afternoon. So this was Paris. The air was thick like wet cotton batting around the monochrome buildings, imposing facades, wrought iron and too many windows, and the door to the railway station was flanked by two guards with boots laced up their calves, in actual berets that probably didn’t look sissy because they were paired with matching automatic rifles (or whatever that kind of gun is called; I don’t pretend to be up on these things). As I trudged up the wide Boulevard de la Bleh Bluh, the drizzle became actual rain.

Paris is filled with Maghrebin, North African immigrants, and West Africans, Afrique noir, whose presence in Paris – and indeed throughout France, but particularly in Paris – parallels the Mexican dilemma in the US. Enough said. But you find the latter variety of them, in particular, close to any tourist spot. They crowd outside the larger Metro stations piping “Mahl-bro? Mahl-bro?” and I’m still not sure if they’re buying or selling. They want you to pay them: for directions to Sacre Cour, for little braided bracelets that come with a line of patter about how much they love America and how beautiful you are. For letting go of your arm if you pause long enough to let them grab it.

My first week in Paris, I shared a room at a hostel in Montmartre with five other travelers, all students, all English-speaking, a motley assortment of Americans, Australians, Canadians, Brits, and one Vietnamese kid who’d spent the last year in Germany and didn’t understand how the beer in Paris could be so lousy. Of course, I loved Montmartre – how could you not? The view of the city from Sacre Cour is unbelievable, as is the church itself. I went there the morning of my second day, and walked inside with a glut of other tourists as a service was in progress. A wimpled nun who didn’t look all that much older than me, half-hidden by the carved marble pulpit, was singing the Kyrie Eleison in a voice as high and plaintive-sweet as an Irish choirboy. Centuries of incense and devotion hung between the muttered prayers of the devout, and I walked out the door into my first view of la Tour Eiffel. It was quite a moment.

What did I do in Paris? I walked around alone a lot. I think I traversed the entire city with two weeks, a Streetwise map, my favorite Chacos, and a camera. If I can ever get the internet here to run at less than a crawl, I’ll get them onto flickr. Yes, Paris is an unbelievable city. I don’t think you get it, the first time you go. It takes some time, and some sinking in, I think, before all the sounds and strange words and signs and impressions slow down, before you can start seeing the droplets of personality and individual character among the tsunami that is … well, that is one’s first time anywhere. Paris. What a loaded word, right?

I saw the Eiffel Tower from every angle and vantage point, except from above. I visited the Louvre, the Musee Delacroix, the Musee Victor Hugo, the Musee Picasso. I stood at Napoleon’s Tomb, at the graves of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Jim Morrison’s graffitied edifice. In the Place de la Concorde, where blithe little Marie Antoinette was beheaded. I walked up the Champs Elysees watching the Arc du Triomphe grow from the size of a quarter until it towered over my head. I saw Les Halles and the Pompidou Centre, the Sorbonne, Les Deux Magots. I found the Rue du Bac and walked along it towards the Seine, thinking of Enjolras and the students at the barricades, of Javert. I found the Rue Foucault. I took hazy pictures of the stained-glass windows of Ste. Chapelle, and I was quietly stunned by my own and genuine awe each time I saw Notre Dame.

So many gardens. The French like their flowers, like their language, in a riot of color that is combed and tamed in neat beds and ordered paths. Baroque splendor, rigorously controlled. The Jardin des Plantes, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the bourgeois but lovely Parc Monceau. I strolled through the Tuillieries licking a glace de noisette and pretending I was going to meet my lover.

If England is grey then Paris is beige. It’s loaded with history and culture and civility and politesse, with students and tourists and jaded Parisians, who really do wear black and smoke all the time. It can be quite cold in Paris, in August. I immediately got a wretched chest cold that I hung onto until about three days ago. I’d wake up hacking in Montmartre and kept finding myself wishing I was in Spain.

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent. - Roman Polanski

In French, when someone says, “Merci,” the general answer is “De rien.” Nothing at all. In Toulouse, in the South of France, you’ll hear, far more often, “Avec plaisir.” With pleasure. In Paris, they say, “Je vous en prie.” It’s a city of reflexive hubris. A place where people wear sunglasses all the time, and ignore the rain.