LA en vie

Breakfast

This morning as I poured my cereal (I like Post's raisin bran, which I could never eat in Paris), I started to think about the foods you crave when you go for years without them. Pecans, for instance, are almost impossible to come by in France; and the pecan farms cannot ship overseas. Something to do with the douanes. A terrible thing for a Southerner! Half my recipes use pecans. So I used to send huge packages to American friends and relatives coming to visit, and there is still a five-pound bag sitting in my refrigerator back in Paris, a pearl beyond price in the land where the word noix, or nut, also means "walnut"-- as if there is only one true nut. But to me, walnuts at their freshest taste like stale pecans.

Whenever I arrived in the States, I would shock my gourmet friends and snobbish family members by begging to go to coffee-shops, diners, and Popeye's, eating crisp strips of bacon (why can't you get it in France? I have never understood this), "home-cut" donuts, spicy fried chicken, red beans & rice, malted milkshakes, and even (the shame) nachos. After Kentucky Fried Chicken opened up a restaurant at Les Halles, I even wrote a letter to the PDG of Popeye's begging him to open a franchise in Paris too. (Popeye's won the prize for best fried chicken in New Orleans once. That was a coup in what used to be the best-eating city in the U.S.)

Los Angeles, though, is horribly healthy. Since I've been here, I haven't even seen a donut shop. And when you meet for breakfast, people shudder at the idea of a greasy spoon and are likely to suggest an upscale place that has [what are called] croissants.

The skeleton in the back seat

Back in Los Angeles. I looked at the car next to me at the stop light and it gave me quite a turn. There was a skeleton in the back seat and it was staring at me. Looking carefully, I saw that it actually was a teaching skeleton covered with little red markings. The people in the front looked nonchalant. I couldn't get my camera out in time, so this will have to do.

A knife to the tripes at CDG

CDG airport. I am standing in line at the cash register to pay for my magazines when a young man with curly dark hair comes rushing up. He is wearing a tag showing he works at the store.

"Regarde-moi ça!" he says to the cashier. Eyes wide and excited, he holds up a brown paper bag and draws out a long kitchen knife like the one at right.

"The police gave it to me," he says. "They caught him. I ran after him yelling when he stole some wine from the store and he pulled this knife on me! He could have stuck it into my tripes. It makes me shiver! That's the last time I risk confronting a thief like that. I'm not going to die over a few euros!"

How to talk about books you haven't read

Over lunch on the first day of the Salon du Livre, one of my friends, a reader for a French publishing house, gave me this book. (I'm not quite sure how to take this.) "How to talk about the books you haven't read."

What a great subject for a book, especially in France! A country in which actresses and models and criminals and minor politicians discuss literature in their interviews, dinner parties often turn into displays of stratospheric erudition, where essays on philosophy are required to graduate from high school, and where the President is supposed to be smart.

Sometimes I wonder if the American system isn't better. An intellectual in the United States, mocked and discouraged from grade school onwards, is probably a real one. It's true that actors like Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone like to point out that they are Highly Intelligent (even...  members of Mensa), and Woody Allen has based whole movies around proving he is an intellectual. And Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose sold hugely in the United States even though no one, to my certain knowledge, ever actually read it.

But in the U.S., anti-intellectualism is so strong that even bright men like George H.W. Bush feel they have to pretend to be Good Old Boys (bet you didn't know he speaks French), good students get beaten up in public school, and talking in a serious way about any subject is enough to get you on the list of most hated public figures in the country.

So I'm not sure that this book is as necessary in the U.S. as in France. I can't be sure though, since I probably won't read it.

Un tombeur de quinze ans

A couple of my friends came over this morning for coffee. I had bought some pains au chocolat, croissants and a baguette. I probably overdid it because everything looked so good after the mass-produced American stuff; but neither of them touched the food.

"Tiens, Marguerite, your worries are wasting you away!" said Charlotte. Marguerite had lost several kilos since the last time I saw her in January.

"Only tea, light tea, please, Sédu," said Marguerite. "Je suis sur régime until further notice."

"Oui, moi aussi, je dois commencer mon DIET," said Charlotte, plucking her sweater away from her lanky body. "I've gained a couple of kilos."

They both sat there and gossiped about people we knew-- the word "radin" [stingy] came up several times, as it so often does in France-- and then we moved on to our children.

Charlotte's three children are so goodlooking that people turn around in the street to stare at them. Her older son has received several offers from Hollywood agents and from modeling agencies, but that doesn't interest him. Her young daughter Julia is beautiful and headstrong and has been going out with a much older man.

"I didn't say anything," Charlotte said, pinching her lips shut to demonstrate. "Much as I wanted to. What the Germans call 'sitting on your tongue.' And a few nights ago I came home and Julia was in the kitchen dabbing her eyes, which were red and swollen like this" (she made fists in front of her eyes). "She had just broken up with her copain. She began to realize that he just didn't fit with her friends, the difference in age was too great. She wanted to talk, but unfortunately her little brother was there in the room.

"Julia said, 'Right before he left, he told me....[choked voice]  'Sois heureuse'! ["Be happy."] ...So then of course Julia started sobbing again, big gulping sobs. I looked over at her brother and was furious!" said Charlotte. "He was snickering behind her back [il se marrait]."

"I glared at him and said, 'What are you laughing at, when your sister is crying?'

"'Because that's the same thing I always tell them, too!' he said."

The white sky again

I'm back in Paris, and it feels so good, si bon! One of my neighbors kissed me, and another told me she was "folle de joie" to see me home. (I wonder if she wants to talk about the paillassons again....) 

Yes, even the weather. I am one of the no doubt few people who really appreciate cloudy, cool weather. Here is a picture of the sky in Paris today:

The young Afrikaner

When it comes to countries, for me it's "love the one you're with." I've been traveling through England the past few days, in unexpected snowstorms, and it's so beautiful. I visited Wordsworth's Dove Cottage in the Lake District, where to my surprise we were showed around by a young black American girl with the beginnings of a transatlantic accent; and Hadrian's Wall in the company of a Bolshy member of my family, who compares the mountains of Britain unfavorably to Ohio with more rain. I guess the reluctance was understandable as we marched up barren stony hills and cobblestoned streets in the face of driving corn snow. But the British also invented the word "cosy" (we spell it "cozy"). After a long day out walking, you sink into a wing chair in a warm dark-paneled pub, or a slightly shabby wall-papered drawing room with a fire, and feel that your drink is well deserved.

A couple of nights ago I came downstairs to have a whiskey at the bar in my country house hotel and found that the barkeep was the same fresh-faced, slim young Afrikaner who had earlier brought up a supper tray. We got into a conversation about crime in his country.

"In S'th Efrica," he said, "it's getting worse. My parents live in a guarded, gated community outside Johannesburg now, but when I was growing up we didn't." He held up his hand and pointed at a recent scar. "Knife," he said, and told me how he had been robbed of his cell phone while waiting at his school for a ride, just a few months ago. "I looked at my hand and saw the knife sticking right up through it. I couldn't believe it." Unluckily for the robbers, plainclothes police were right around the corner. They stopped and separated the robbers, whose stories of how they came by the phone did not coincide.

"That wasn't the first time I was stabbed," he said. "I almost died the other time. It was a few months earlier. I was taking a short-cut home from school across a veldt near my house, and these two guys came up to me and asked for my phone. I said I didn't have one. So they asked for my backpack. It was a Billabong. I said no, and they stabbed me three times, right here in the side." He pointed at his side, a few inches up from his waist. "I fell down, and they started kicking me in the head. Then they left."

"But that could have killed you!" I said.

"Oh yeah, I thought I was going to die," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. "They tried to kill me. But my stepbrother came by a while later and got me. He saw I was late coming home and was worried about me, so he went out looking for me. He's a big guy, works out, you know. He saw these two guys with my Billabong backpack and recognized it. They didn't see him, so he came up behind them when they weren't expecting it and just beat them up. Then he came and got me."

"Why didn't he call the police?" I said.

"He thought they'd just stolen the backpack. He didn't know they'd stabbed me. He took me to the hospital and I had twenty-five stitches. Right here," he said, pointing. "The thing is, the guys who do this, they were all black guys ('bleck ice'). I have nothing against bleck ice, but after that I got mad. Me and my stepbrother and some friends, about eight of us, we would go out and if we saw a bleck guy alone, we would just beat him up."

"But he was just as innocent as you were!" I said, appalled.

"Yeah, I know," he said, thoughtfully. "That's when I said to myself, 'I've got to get at of this country.'"

Scots and rules in Paris

On Friday I came through the airport at Paris/CDG along with a large number of burly men dressed in bright blue t-shirts, kilts and what my old friend Adrian used to refer to as "shit-kicking boots." This is the uniform of the Scotland supporter. They were arriving for the Scotland vs France rugby tournament.

How good it felt to hear French again! I had told my family that moving to California, after living overseas for so long, was like falling into a warm bath, easy and familiar. But actually, coming back to CDG was familiar too. I helped a Moroccan woman with two small children to another terminal in time to make her connection, was greeted in French by the flight attendants, and sneaked around to the "secret" security gate that only the habitués know about.

There, the man who tells tourists about putting fluids into small ziplocked bags gave me one but accompanied me to the security checkpoint to argue on my behalf that I should not have to throw away my duty-free items from Los Angeles airport. Strictly speaking, they should have been tossed because I had come out of the "sterile area" in order not to miss my flight by waiting in a long line at the connecting desk. But the man argued for me in eloquent fashion and the security people first looked skeptical, then shrugged, then nodded and waved me through, for his sake, I'm sure.

I could hear the voice of the man's American counterpart in my ear: "I don't make the rules, ma'am!"

The four parents

Looking for schools that actually offer foreign languages, A has received numberless forms, website questionnaires, and applications. Having done this in two or three countries already, I have become a bit immune to the obligatory "We work hard, but we also know how to play hard!" motto of each school, the smiling multiethnic faces on the home page/front cover, and the mission statement that "We want to help you become your best self!"

One thing I wasn't prepared for, though, was the section on these forms that asks for parent information. Instead of "Mother," "Father," and occasionally "Guardian," the California forms say "Parent One," "Spouse of Parent One," "Parent Two," "Spouse of Parent Two."

Heather may have four mommies.

Blonde parking

Disappointing to learn that Blonde is actually a store.