incidents and accidents

Not First-Person Material.

Another helping of Salade de cruautés.

And after struggling with it for 36 hours, publishing it and taking it down, then republishing it and taking it down again, I'm just going to leave it here and go to bed. Bonne nuit, les amis.

2.
They have sex.

The pronoun is wrong.

He has sex with her. She has told him no, proud of her unapologetic assertiveness. Why don't you want to? - Because I don't want to. Parce que. It lasts five seconds. Then he pins her against the wall.

He pushes things aside - buttons, folds, bits of skin. The little lips he pokes through, certain they must reach and ache for him behind the dryness. He lifts and positions her limbs, shoves her down - Jesus, you could try a little. He won't leave. A strange thing happens. She steps away from him, her head detaches from her body and vagabonds through the city in the darkness, marvelling at the contrast between the large gold statue illuminated on the hillside and the taste of someone else's tea in a cut on her tongue she didn't remember having. Amazing, that you can fly through a city at 4th-story-window level yet still feel someone else's tongue in your mouth, his teeth, the stern line of his stiff upper lip. Amazing, that your head can venture forth in the darkness while your muscles stay behind making jokes about the British.

Your head, wandering through the dark city alone, has to be careful - the city at night is dangerous. The city at night holds strange pockets of blackness and blankness, where drugged people stare at you and giggle. The homeless man with the 1,5-litre plastic bottle of wine and a voice like a pirate - he asks for money during the day, but at night ... You have to be careful. Your head could get lost - seduced by opium-voiced addicts. Kidnapped by pirates - forget to come home. Harrr.

She asks her head questions, a catechism to avoid focus. Where would you live? In the night. What would that make you? A night person. Faces cycle past her remote consciousness. It should be capitalized. Night. Person. One of the lost, the unaching. Unafraid of the streets after dark, unafraid of the pockets of danger, because who would want to harm you? You are what they fear, they no longer see you crouching in your doorway or gutter, too skinny in your ripped clothes. It is a sad, a horrible transition, when you become invisible in that way, become someone nobody would want to hurt. She pulls on the kite string holding her head to her body, and it sails back through the arrondissements, back through the open kitchen window, back to the shadowy huddle in the corner.

Yeah, yeah, that's it, fuck me, he is saying, and her head wants to laugh. It's a bad mystery novel! The scene where the renegade cop and the earthy amateur get it on, finally, they haven't kept their hands or eyes off each other since the first page of chapter 2 and one of them is always touching the other's collarbone and saying We got some things to figger out, you 'n me. The scene is steamy ; you might dog-ear the page. He lifts his face to her chest and seizes a breast in his teeth. Her arms push and push and have no strength, (it hurts), he could bite a hole in her chest and she has no strength, her heart will leap out like a dog who has chewed through his rope, yip!yip!yip! disappear in a flurry of toenails over the concrete through the side yard, down the street and onto the boulevard (it hurts) and probably get crushed by some unvigilant minivan. Her voice hits him like a club, it surprises both of them, breaks his grip, she curls into herself, into the corner, whispering oh. oh., the syllable going smaller and smaller as if the font had changed, and listens as he stalks into the bathroom : the click of the light, the stream of his piss, the hum of the flush, the click of the light, then silence at the foot of the bed, she can hear him breathing, he has asthma.

Get up and make the tea, he says, after a moment.

She gets up. Wraps herself in a sweatshirt and stumbles to the kitchen. White tile gives a pale reflection of her fingers brushing mugs, fumbling for sugar cubes. Teaspoons. Thin cardboard of the box of teabags. Textures.

The bouilloire is called Bob. It is bright orange with a dark orange-red wattle. She bought it at La boîte aux occas' for 50 francs because it made her happy. Bob makes a little ding! sound when the water has boiled inside.

They drink tea. She holds her fingers over the mug, feels the steam of verveine-menthe enter these patterns of skin, her permanent feature. Just call it verbena, he says, the way he has said just call it a hot-pot. Just call it tired. Stop speaking French.

He leads her to the bed.

She doesn't want to, but it doesn't matter, her head has gone wandering down the quais, it's sitting by the water watching ripples reflect the light, and she lies back. Her head peeks in for an instant, a playful balloon outside the glass, and she feels one arm reach toward the window, but just then he covers her face with one of his hands and turns her away so she is a finger-shaped silhouette looking blindly, obliquely at the wall. She can't see what her head is doing. She sees : wood panels, vertical. No light bounces off them. She breathes through the lines of his palm.

There are millions of places to live in a river, every ripple is a layer of life, every bend and shallow could house a Night Person, if the right person learned to live there. Some of them are bitter, they resent The World for making them lose substance enough to function in it. But some of them are grateful. They offer thanks, by the banks of the rivers of The World, thanks that the night has taken them in, because even the violence anonymity does to you is a kindness if you let it be, if you reach into the water and take on its uncolor as the river ripples past.

Salade de cruautés.

In France, you can order crudités in a restaurant and get a plate of raw vegetables. Anglophones sometimes screw this up - it must not seem natural to order a plate of crudities - and leave off the "d," without which the word changes flavor completely. I've wondered more than once if I was the only one to smirk behind my water glass at the mistake - not a mean smirk, but a sort of tender one, the kind you give when you see someone trip over the raised edge of a sidewalk square, not because it's funny when their arms fly out to the sides like one of those wooden puppets with a string at the bottom, but because you've tripped on the edge of the sidewalk square enough times yourself to smile at it. In recognition or reassurance - See? I'm not the only one who looks like a wooden puppet with a string at the bottom. Recently my landlady, who is française maghrébine, told me a story of her mother's joke about "cruelty salad," and I knew I had company in my smirking. Her laughing eyes met mine, and we lifted glasses of garnet-colored bordeaux to the image of ill-tempered carrots and red cabbage. In that spirit I present to you these small vignettes. They are raw ; chew carefully.

1.
Once last summer, I was sitting at the round table with its leaf-green nappe in the center of my 5th-floor studio, with TG (for This Guy), discussing how much the place where we worked sucked. Adding together the extra hours we'd had to do and not been paid for, the vast difference between what companies paid by the hour for our teaching services and what the actual teachers were paid, the times the scheduling secretary had screwed up our hours and not bothered to tell us about the change in schedule or given us attitude when we brought it to her attention, the times we'd had to buy coffee for clients we weren't allowed to call students and how the 25 centimes for bad machine coffee was just adding insult to injury, because we were paid the smig for teachers and could barely make rent every month. And I said, dude, if I had a carte de séjour for toutes activités I would quit that place in a heartbeat, and go do anything else anywhere else, because even answering phones and dealing with huffy English people stranded by the side of the road was better than dealing with this crap.

And dude, also known as TG, said I have that on my carte de séjour. Do you think the roadside place would hire me?

And without thinking for one single second before speaking, I answered this Yorkshire expat - who had lived in Lyon for the better part of a decade, taught himself the language and managed to survive by giving English lessons - with a mocking noise and an absolute sentence : No, you don't speak French.

My words seemed to change color as they hit the air. I heard them slowly, as if they were things taking shape : they solidified, then fell weightily to the ground. He turned his head to stare at me, mouth a harsh tight line like a drawing. A fly buzzed blearily in through the open kitchen window and back out. I shook my head. Of course TG spoke French. What I meant, I think, was that he spoke badly. Exceedingly badly. Made no effort to pronounce words in a language besides English, made no effort even to move his voice in the cadence of a language besides English. His carelessness with a language I love, well, it offended me. But what I forgot, or rather what I didn't give myself time to think of before my answer shot out into the air, was the vulnerability of the person far from home and native syllables. The way the French are picky about the lilt and rhythm of their language, the national linguistic jealousy about how words are used, the way the pickiest of them can needle every error into you and how the words themselves can feel like traitors if you get them wrong, how a morphemic mistake leaves you asking a friend for a she-goat instead of a lighter, or talking about rough sex when what you meant was jumping. Once, my first year in Lyon, I held a cigarette between two fingers, leaned over to my cutest student during a break in the class, and asked him to turn me on. I laughed about it with the rest of the group. And never made the mistake again. It's not a huge burden of guilt I carry, but I wish I'd remembered peux-tu m'allumer with TG, and been slower to respond, and kinder.

*

more tomorrow ...

The Lock and Key Party.

Are you going? they ask me almost in unison, one baritone voice, one contralto. Then they separate : two octaves. Two voices.

It should be fun, P says, the baritone.

I hesitate. They seem so eager. I don't know, I say.

Every girl has a lock, P explains. And every man, he has a key. You go through the party trying to find the key to make- match, thank you, your lock. When you find it you get a new one. The one with the more locks, he wins.

Or the most keys, M says, the contralto. She winks.

I haven't been invited, I say. It's a lame reason.

I invite you, P says, his voice matter-of-fact, staunch.

And me, M says. I'll forward you the email. I look from one to the other.

You never come out with us, M complains.

Maybe, I say. It's the best I can give them for now, and it's not very good. I wonder if they already know I won't go.

*

The thing is, I used to go to parties. I remember going to dances in high school and college, crazy strobe-lit evenings that made some gleaming bird in my soul want to soar. I remember parties, with my boyfriend and without, Madonna's Immaculate Collection and microwave popcorn and raw razor-edged poetry in hushed conversations until dawn after people had paired off, and that scratchy-throated bleak elated feeling the next morning.

When my husband and I were just friends, back before we were even dating - because he was dating someone else and I was alternating between relishing my independence and pining over him - we used to see each other at parties. Choir parties, mostly, where almost-legal boys with hard abs and nothing to lose held each other up by the ankles over a keg for drinking competitions. Where twenty-year-old soprani tongue-kissed the assistant conductor and danced as though pressed together at the legs with melting Saran Wrap. I was 24 then, and felt old.

We moved to Washington, and there were different parties - formal military affairs at which my husband's attendance was mandatory. These events usually cost 25 or 50 $ per person and included dinner, uncomfortable swaying in distant couples that passed for dancing, and maybe a flashy white piano with a sweaty microphone and a jazz fake-book. One of my saddest memories of our time in Washington - the one where I still feel a twinge of absolute pity, as if for some third person - is of watching my ex "suit up" for one of these dinners in his tuxedo, complete with top hat and tails and a Fred-Astaire cane, and I hinted shamelessly, wildly, pouting in desperate imitation of a pathetic flirt, asking if he was sure he didn't want company for the evening. He tweaked his shiny black bow tie into place. Listen, I don't even want to go to this thing.

So let's go be snobby ivy-league types on Whidbey, I said, hating myself for begging. We can talk about the Werners.*

We can't afford it, he said.

I spent that night sitting on the floor with my back to a badly painted beige wall, in my lumpiest sweats. It seems, now, like an obvious sign, the kind that makes you come screeching to a halt, like Road Runner watching Wyle E. Coyote shoot off the edge of a cliff, and ponder where, cosmically speaking, you have gone wrong. Why didn't I call up Jen or Kirty or Beth, why didn't I make other plans? Because I didn't. Perchè no. Later another officer's wife sent me photos. "We missed you at the formal!" she wrote on a Post-It that she stuck to the back of a picture in which my ex was clearly tipsy, the color in his cheeks as high, his eyes as shining, as I'd ever seen them, leaning one suave arm against a (yes) white piano to serenade someone. I've never been a financial wizard, I grant you that, but I'm pretty sure we still would have made the mortgage that month if we'd written a check for two plates at that glittering officers' table.

*

I remember driving back from a karaoke bar with some girls - a former student, her roommate, a couple friends - and as I dropped them off Janet (the former student) said, You can really sing. You should come out with us more often. I smiled at her from behind the wheel, and it felt like my eyes slid across the darkness of that borrowed car. It's true I don't get a lot of chances to glitter, I said, and she laughed and hugged me, and ran up the walk to her front door.

*

When I moved to France I went to impromptu gatherings in the K-fet', the student building that housed its own little espresso bar and dance floor. I glittered. I sang. I cooked appetizers. I got drunk with French students who didn't know I was ten years older than they, or to whom it didn't matter. I also : chain-smoked Menthol cigarettes for the first time, gave les normaliens a good laugh by knowing the lyrics to Elmer Food Beat (et dans la bouche de Daniela, y'a toujours de la place, TOK TOK, pour les copains qui passent), took photos of a group of lithe French métrosexuel boys - confetti draped over their hair like braids - performing a Charlie's-Angels-esque mawashi-geri, and learned a raunchy toast in French. These evenings occupy a substantial place in my photo albums from that first year, in my heart and memory as well. Plastic cups of juice and vodka. Crumpled bags of crisps from the Super U - saveur moutarde de Dijon. Somebody's mother's homemade crust in a last-minute quiche. Going to bed at 3. A 20-year-old cynic from my conversation class followed me back to my flat after one of these evenings, and ordered me in haltingly beautiful English to kiss him, then was so bitter and dire about my refusal that he actually made me cry. I stopped going to those parties after that. It took too much effort not to see my student, and hurt too much to lie.

*

My life has become quieter. More settled. I don't need the rush of I-owe-you-a-half-pack nicotine, or the splashed Martini rosso with its grimy bit of lemon, or the flash and whir of the mood-setting disco ball, or the hard thump of the bass or the humid undulation of the dance-floor, to enjoy my evenings - most of the time, I prefer the monachal simplicity of my little white apartment with its blue doors, the company of my cat, the background music of a CSI rerun. Agoraphobic? Maybe. Overcautious? Surely. Also cheap. I don't want to pay 30 $ for the privilege of letting a series of random university boys try their keys in my lock. I like not having to put on eyeliner at 20h. I like my privacy. I like cooking for one.

Only sometimes I think about the thrum and pulse of a party, the kind where you wear too much makeup and wake up half-deaf and happy the next day, and it makes me wish there was a key out there, one with all the right ridges and notches and grooves to unlock the place I've gone to.

*The Werners : Herzog and Heisenberg. We actually had, at one point in our marriage, a chortling Cantabridgian moment of confusion over the Werners. It's a freaking miracle our social calendar ever had a single entry.

Brocéliande

How far west we've come, and how the light has changed!
It's paler than I thought, and nothing like you said.

- January 2000

A love story. (still) (continued) (again)

4. Mont-Saint-Michel, January 2000.

She finds a place full of light.

That's not right. It is dark.

She finds a place full of stillness.

That's not right either, not enough.

She finds a place, and walks through the stillness in the darkness there to find a place of light. She carries the strangest feeling in her breast - something vivid and beating, that could be breaking, could be glowing. But most of all is remarkably still. A glowing, breaking quietness too real to be fragile and too fragile to be anything but devastating. Like having a secret she can't share.

She finds the light. Small at first, smaller after. It flickers across the expanse of dark marble before her, red and distant and calling. And she goes.

*

She has left Paris behind, sort of, in the way that people who have lived there briefly leave Paris behind. She has moved back to America. And come back to Paris. And come back to Paris. And come back to Paris. Each time she returns to her homeland she feels lost. It makes her wonder what home means. It has made her wonder if she has one. To the front page of her agenda she has glued a bookmark she bought in the rue Mouffetard : "Je ne suis ni Athénien ni Grec, je suis un citoyen du monde." When she flips through the pages of her calendar year it is the first thing she sees.

You've sat by her elbow in an unexpected nave. You have tagged her shadow on the unforgiving cobbles of a Latin Quarter street. You have watched her kneel places where the stone is worn by centuries of kneeling, by the curious, the penitent, the rebellious, the weeping, the called, the elect. The uncertain, the discouraged, the desperate, the lost. The faithful. And you have, because this is your role as you learn what brings her where she is, you have knelt beside her, with a sigh and a long impatient question - what is she doing?

*

Go to her now. Only remember : you can't reach in and touch her arm. She doesn't know you're there. You can only notice the cobblestones she stumbles over. You can only glimpse the patch of black ice just before her running feet. You can only watch her slip, and flail, wrap herself in crêpe-thin paper and sail out of vision.

What is she doing?

She is sitting in a bathtub. She is crying. She is fumbling with a metal catch. She is writing a note. She is holding the blade like a pen. She is pulling, grunting, pulling, and watching in fascination as her words rise through the water. She is writing in red across her skin. She is sinking back into the steam. She is letting go.

*

She is dreaming. She is a deep-sea diver! She doesn't need a mask, she breathes through her hands. She plunges down through fronds of kelp that reach toward her with waving shoots like fingers. She winds the fingers through her own. It is like playing "here is the church" with the sea. She uses the kelp to pull herself down, down, down through the shifting coral-green forest, and then she is beyond it, an oddly unsettling feeling. The kelp pulls back into itself after her passage ; she has not left a trace. She pulls herself along the ocean floor. Sand and tiny shards of broken shell surround her knuckles as she goes. Where is she going?

To the cave! She sees its mouth, an opening like a yawn, with a gleaming inside. The ocean's diamond teeth. And then she is inside it, she is sitting with her back against a diamond wall, she is weaving patterns with her hand in the water and trying to focus on her hand, on its wrinkles and its scars, and she is blinking because her eyes cannot keep her own skin still in vision. The fingerprint is unique to every person, and what about the palm of the hand? And the way the pores open in the crease between thumb and forefinger? What happens to these traces if they stay in the sea? The cave walls have been eroded by the passage of water and time. If she stays here, will she erode? Will she turn to stone and then, in a thousand thousand years, lose one detail of herself? She hears a conductor stop the choir and say, from a distance only memory can explain, "God is in the details." How much would she have to lose for God to notice? Would one detail be enough?

A thousand thousand years pass and as if on cue, one whorl of a thumbprint disappears. He sinks into the diamond sand at her side. You didn't have to do that, he says, turning his head to look around the cave. She begins to weep.

You forgot me, she says, blindly.

He looks at her, eyes the shape of the underwater world, the color of the wholeness of it all. His voice is quiet and infinitely sad. I didn't.

You walked away, she says, biting her trembling lip. I saw you. You left. I watched you go. I watched you. leave. me. I moved back home and you never came. I haven't seen you since that day with the horrible métro man.

Have you been looking?

Yes! She stops. I have. Sort of.

Then you know I've been there. Sort of. He smiles sadly at her and reaches one hand to touch her maimed finger. As much as you've let me be. Forgive me. I'm here now. Come with me.

Where? she says, feeling - sounding - pouty.

He points to the circle of light a hundred years above them, the place where sky meets water, the place she came in. To the world. She shakes her head.

I don't want to. Don't you get it? I want to leave the world, she says. That's why I came here. I don't have anything to give the world. She waves one hand through the water and watches the trail of silver air it leaves, a wake. I doubt everything. I am unkind. I give up too easily. I'm jealous of everybody. I am nothing but bad thoughts and scars.

So bring those, he says, and takes her hand, and they rise through the door of the cave and the clinging fingers of kelp. He touches her eyes with one hand, and gestures to a hidden room beneath the waving fronds, a dark stone place with a flickering light and one red candle, a place of infinite stillness and peace. She closes her eyes as soon as she sees it, it is too much for her vision. Like listening to the beating heart at the soul of the world, a great love purer than her echoes. Her own heart quails, and her eyes flutter, and she feels the ocean break over her head as she comes up uncertain but gasping for air and wakes in a tub of cold red water in a hotel room in Normandy and looks around herself and does not see him. She is alone, and not alone.

Okay, she whispers, to the night air and the hotel room she'd thought she'd left, and to a mountain on an island and a dark still place she promises to find, and to all of French history and her own paths through it. Okay, she says to her scars - the ancient ones, the shape of a sloped stone street through an ancient city, and the old ones white against her whiteness, and the new one that will bloom where she has left a seam. I'm here.

*

She will come to describe the abbey, later, as the place where she began to understand. Even though she visits it a day later (pale, water-logged, water-weary). She stands on a parapet and looks down and feels the thumbprint push her backward from the ledge. Push her to the nave. Push her to her knees. For the first time she speaks to stone and listens, and the stone responds. On the train back to Paris, she writes a two-line poem. And begins to look for the light, the red light in the midst of stillness in a darkness her soul recognizes, the way a blind man would recognize the shock of blinding fire, if he were granted an instant to see it again, and remember.

Miss Perfect English.

P is the first new person I met, when I moved back here. The first five or six days, I saw him in the corner office, alone. He smiled a shy, small smile when he emerged to get a drink of water or use the toilet, but mostly he seemed to avoid eye contact. One day we stepped into the elevator at the same time, and I said "Hi" in my most direct way, and when he said "Hello-uh, I am P," with a definite Italian lilt to the words, his eyes met mine for maybe the first real time, and I could see he was relieved I'd spoken first. It made me wish I had done so weeks before.

Each day he greets me : "Ehila!"

I have learned how to spell it, where it comes from (Roman etymology), how to use it. A little Italian "hey," but much more musical.

Generally our greetings are brief. We say hello, how are things, finefine, and you, we grin about the students or the news or the Spanish teachers who are always rushing around the hallways. He wishes I would speak to him in English, he tells me jokingly, gently, whenever I fill a space in an Italian sentence with a vocabulary word in French, a word we both know but he resents. (Feeling is high between the French and the Italians, or at least his feeling is.) I fumble for words in any language, apologizing and thanking him for his vocabulary help. "Mi piacciono quei - come si dice? syllabes - sillabe, grazie - mi piacciono queste sillabe." It reminds me - I remind me - of a Brazilian student I had in one of my English classes last year in France, who peppered her deliberate sentences with gratitude. "Thank you, I was going to Rio, not at. I, thank you, took-not-made a trip to Bézières last weekend. It was very sympathe-... thank you, it was nice, yes, nice."

He talks ; I smile. He tells me about the houses in Pisa. About the mouse he found in his room here, and how a friend in Italy told him how to catch it (leave food out every night, until the mouse feels comfortable and develops a routine, then put out a square of cardboard with tree-sap on it to trap the mouse. As proof.), about his sister's tattoo. His words tumble out in rapid-fire Roman Italian - I don't understand everything. I smile and say sì a lot. Sometimes I speak to him in French. On a difficult afternoon that he brightens : Ca va, I tell him. Chaque journée est une belle journée. Tout est grâce. From Bernanos. He looks at me curiously. I never know if he 'gets' the quotations.

*

I think of a long mute train ride through the entire boot of the peninsula, a hot car where one of the passengers hadn't washed in days and another had a cat on a leash, and someone had brought salami and crumbly ecru cheese for a picnic which everyone shared. I was the only American, and all I contributed to the raucous conversation was a plastic bottle of warm sparkling water gone flat and an abashed post-winking-joke "non ho capito," which made them all laugh even harder though I didn't know why. I fell asleep forty-five rocking minutes from Milano, and when I woke up half the passengers had changed and the air outside had too, and the train was lumbering past Pesaro. For about ten minutes the open windows let in a strange dawn sunlight, greyish-gold and full of salt.

Vado a trovare il mio marito, I told a man with no personal barriers, who slid into the seat next to mine so close the thigh-seam of his jeans touched the thigh-seam of mine, hoping he would slide out of it again. Instead, he gave me a pronunciation lesson.

Your "o" is too ... round, he said. It should be more like the short "o" in English. Like, "ahh" with some "o" in it, like "hot."

Marito, I said, thinking "hahhht." He left the train near Fermo (Fermahhh).

*

Il tuo sigfile, he says one morning, a bit hesitantly. È del Libro di Mateo?

Capitolo cinque, seidici, I answer automatically.

It occurs to me later that P is the only person so far to ask about my sigfile. To recognize the Latin, to know or search for it, and quote me chapter and verse. The attention is something generous. Even if it has taken him only 16 seconds on Google, he has investigated the sentence I choose to represent myself. Over the coming months, I will explain the sentence to one friend, and translate it for a couple others, and in the back of my mind I will see P's face as he asks me about it - eyebrows arcing upwards to the center, the tiny satisfied grin that appears for a second before he bites it into the folds of a cheek. The gesture - and the grin - makes me feel grateful; protective.

*

Occasionally I feel I am using him. I get the chance to move my tongue through the calisthenics of a language I've had an affair with since age 11. A language of summer and undulating seaside, a real-life language of my family before I was my family. A language whose impractical music makes me want to soar. Vivo per lei perchè mi da / Pause, note, e libertà. I ask for advice from various friends, practice rolling my Rs. It's not the same with common utterances : quando, spaghetti and vita have a squareness to them, a reductible transparency. Sounds with R or L, a consonant blend with S or F, the vowels A and O - these are the sounds that seduce me, in a language where sedire sounds colder than maybe, or a third-person conjugation of breathe. Forsè, porta, squarci, irragiungibile, sprezzatura - these words set my heart beating just a little bit faster. They are sensual. Full. Liquid and fleshy. Round and rolling. Open and inviting. I love a language in which the verb "row" (as in a boat) rhymes with "tremble." And aside from singing in my shower or along with my MP3s, or speaking with P, I never get to pronounce these things. It affects the way I speak - English words, Watertown, Wonderland, an underground terminus on this coast, or my own full given name, take on a distinct oceanic swell and trill, in his voice, in my voice when I describe the weekend to him.

I realize slowly I have developed a crush - not as much on him as on the way I respond when he speaks to me. It's not entirely quid pro quo : I don't give him enough English in return. Sometimes I provide a half-hearted translation for something that has more poetry without official words. "It is a storm in a glass of water," he says one day, and I hold the phrase like a diamond close to my throat, knowing he will find "tempest in a teapot" just as naïvely charming.

Sometimes I teach him a phrase to use or to avoid. There is a nigger in my class, he says one day, then listens silently, watchfully, his brown eyes darting, while I explain the impossibility of that sentence in 2005 America. I am not shocked - 5 years of hearing the French say similar things has removed the element of shock for me anymore - but embarrassed for him, anxious. Tremo. I realize as I give him words to use that I am flushing - for my country's sensitivity as much as a certain European baldness of expression that doesn't grasp this nuance, and for the chasm between the two mentalities. I struggle to find the right way to express myself. Remo. I imagine him uttering the sentence in a class, in a meeting. He wouldn't, I suppose, but I imagine the scene anyway. And because I don't have enough words in his language I am reduced to French. Fais gaffe, I say. Ca ne se dit pas. It doesn't say itself. Not here. Not now. I don't have words for perchè. Parce que, I tell him. He will have to trust me. He does.

*

We stand, one afternoon, in the doorway to the hallway of our building. I hold a take-out bowl of soup and a plastic spoon. (Zuppa, cucchiaino.) A colleague pokes her head in and says she is going to Au Bon Pain - in her San Juan accent, it is Uh Bone Panne - and would we like anything? P reaches for his wallet and requests a smoked turkey club : he has memorized the name and the price.

W stops. Say it again? she asks, managing to look both smug and puzzled.

A Smoked Turkey Club, P says, eyebrows furrowing.

I love your accent, W says. One lip curls up in a conspiratorial smirk. She imitates. Smeohk-tuh Teur-key Clob-be. It's beautiful. She writes down his sandwich order and leaves, smiling behind her.

P turns to me. Non ho bene pronunciato?

Sì. It's true you have a beautiful accent, I say. It is the most adventurous I have been with him in 5 months.

But he doesn't notice, he is annoyed to a point where his eyes glint under the yellowish fluorescent light overhead. They are lighter brown, and brighter, than usual.

How long you lived in France? he asks me, abruptly, in English.

A 'little year' in Paris, I tell him. Then four years in Lyon.

When did people stop making fun of your accent?

I look at him closely while he stares at his knuckles. When I'm sure, after a long minute, that he won't meet my eyes, I look at my own hands. They never did, I say. I feel his eyes on my face as I speak, and am careful to keep looking down. I'd say I stopped paying attention, but that never happened, either. You just get used to it. You decide it doesn't bother you. Of course, it still does.

But your French is perfect, he blurts out. I shake my head.

The longer I lived there, the more I realized how much I was missing. The little nuances.

I hate the nuances, he says. I have the vocabolario, but the articulation - and then, Miss Perfect English makes a joke of my accent.

Your English is fine, I say firmly. He doesn't look convinced. It's good. And Miss Perfect English has an accent too, I tell him. For the first time during the conversation, he smiles, and I can see how much each muscle twitch of it costs him.

Oceano

Forse là in America
I venti del Pacifico
Scoprono le sue immensità

Le mie mani stringono
Sogni lontanissimi
E il mio pensiero corre da te

Remo, tremo, sento
Profondi, oscuri abissi

È per l'amore che ti do
È per l'amore che non sai
Che mi fai naufragare

È per l'amore che ho per te
che mi fa superare
mille tempeste

Grazie a Lisa per il testo della canzone sua ...

Another Reason I Love CSI.

Grissom : "Okay, Doc, tell me something I don't know."

Doc : "Well, in fourth grade I dropped out of karate because a kid half my size made me cry."

Taking Dooce's Example To Heart, I Promised Myself I Would Never Blog About My Work, Even On The Shittiest Day, So Here Instead Is What I Sang On Entering My Apartment Today And Changing My Clothes :

Sing Jubilation !
Celebration !
Liberation !
For from panty-hose I am free,
From horrible constricting
waist-cinching
skin-biting
breath-hindering
toe-curling
control-top
TORTURE-INSTRUMENT-OF-THE-WESTERN-WORLD
soon-to-be-attacked-with-sharp-scissors-and-cut-up-into-tiny-nylon-snowflakes-and-flushed
worst-garment-ever
panty-hose
I am FREEEEEEE !
Sing Ju-bi-laaaaaaaaaaa-tiiiii-ooooooonnnnnnnn !

Roughly to the tune of the original "Star Trek" theme song.

(No, just kidding. It actually had a lot of minor thirds, and ended on a really high note, which I held, because for the first time in 12 hours my ribcage had enough room to sustain my breath.)

A Donne Deal?

Death Down, says headline.

I tell you, France has the coolest news. Naturally it makes me think of poetry ...

DEATH be not proud,

... though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Old words. Old wounds.

I'm in the process of cleaning my apartment, a desperate last-ditch effort before my lunch guest tomorrow because I won't have time to clean after Mass and it's just blind optimism to think I'll do it in the early morning. And as I was putting some French bank statements into the "important France papers" folder I found, behind the bank file, a slim leather book. It's a journal-holder, a book-cover in elegant tooled leather. I remember buying it at the Notre-Dame des Sans-Abri Saturday thrift store for 1 euro, shortly after the transition to the euro. I remember slipping this slim notebook into its arms like a dark embrace. It was my notebook the spring of 2002, the spring everything started to fall apart.

I'm reading through the pages carefully. I look at the dates of the few times I wrote in it : 13 avril 2002, 18 juin, 26 juin, 2 july, 3 july, 6 july, 31 july, 2 août, 14 août, 14 Sept. Certain phrases catch me from the various, very sporadic, entries. I'm making plans I don't believe in. A month later : It is day 2. There's a lot of Las Vegas to get through yet. A break of a few weeks. Being hospitalized is like traveling. After a few times you stop feeling the enormity and just go where they tell you to go. Few of them seem to realize that, for you, the plane has always already just crashed. Another pause, during which the only entries are cryptic one-line scrawls with place-names (Terreaux, Part-Dieu). Then : who hath held the wind in his fists? I've closed myself around a cyclone, hardening smaller and smaller until all the air was gone. There was nowhere to go but broken. So I broke. That's the last entry for 2002. There are two for 2003, one in May about Johnny Depp and a pregnancy test. One in June about anger, stopping my meds, wondering how to deal with solitude. It ends as always I am asking for courage.

Hidden between two totally conflicting entries about my ex, there's a poem. It's a page of relief from the rest, though it reflects much of the delerium and despair. I haven't seen it since June 2002. It's transcribed here with no editing.

Traduction

How did I walk here day upon
day bleeding poetry like a bottle bleeds
condensation, each bead
breaking surface, changing hue, beaking
limpid, desperate gasps in this open air?

How have I ten thousand thousand times
walked through these wooden-carving doors
without seeing the window
up, on the left; I had to pass
under it each time, each blessing step
to find the nave, the belly of this grace.

And now it seems I cannot speak -
a soul under unseen glass,
troubled rivers and songs of wheat,
mis-intending and praying for the rain to just
stop.

Today I cut my skin off -
inch by inch, because I will never be France-thin
or walk gracefully in pointed heels or
have no light accent when I ask for directions -
my tongue is parsley, traitor
to my heart and too full to tame the Lionness's flavor.

The stone is deaf, but warm and supple
and inside I am enough -
safe for an hour, kneeling,
feeling the Savior's wings breaking
all the air around my wrought heart -

not a loss but the careful shadow
of birds who just flew over my head.

If you didn't live in France last year, you probably didn't hear the best song of 2004.

Late in the summer I went to a friend's wedding in Mâcon, with a reception at the groom's family château (a picture of which features prominently on the cover of the Rhône-Alpes regional telephone directory). The evening was long and fun, and possibly the best part involved (finally) stepping out of my sandals and dancing like a crazy person with another friend's 9-year-old daughter when the DJ played this song. We jumped and spun and clasped hands and spun some more and raised our arms over our heads and sang along, even though we didn't know the words. She did a cute thing with one hand on her hip and then twirled around to the other side of me, and I did a thing where I tapped my toe in her direction and she twirled back, and at the end of the song we both fell giggling to the bench behind us.

It's called "Dragostea dibn tei" which translates, roughly, as "(Under the) Linden Trees With You." It starts with a faint a cappella arpeggio set against a sustained echoey backdrop. Then, after a lilting round of mai-ai-HIII, mai-ai-HUUU, et cetera, the volume comes up, the techno-beat background music comes into the foreground, and the song takes off.

It's an 80s-worthy story of love over the phone lines, performed by the Romanian boy-band O-Zone. (Romania, by the way, is easily as exotic as A-ha's Norway, but hasn't produced quite as many Top-40 hits.) "Hello, Hi," the first singer intones, "I'm a knight." (The word haiduc has apparently caused some confusion this side of the Danube : it is alternately translated as "knight" and "outlaw" on various sites. Then the second singer jumps in for the second half of the verse and croons "Hello, hello, it's me, Picasso./ I sent you a beep [i.e., a texto on a cell phone], and I'm a hero,/ but you should know I don't want anything from you."

(Yeah, it makes about as much sense as most of the 80s top-40 hits, only 2 decades later. I blame Ceaucescu.)

After Picasso comes the chorus. Vrei sa pleci dar nu-ma, nu-ma-iei, nu-ma nu-ma iei, nu-ma nu-ma nu-ma iei. ("You want to leave but you can't take me with you, can't take can't take me, can't take can't take can't take me with you.") And then comes the poetry. Chipul tau si dragostea dibn tei,/ Mi amintesc de ochii tai. "I think of you while under the linden (or chamomile, depending on the translation) tree, and I am reminded of your eyes." This is the Really Cool Part of the song, the part where if you don't leap up and start dancing on the nearest table, you should go directly to a doctor about your FUN-DEPRIVATION levels. Because your condition is serious. Take a hint from this guy.

After the chorus we get another detour through the singers. Te sun, sa-ti spun, ce simt acum./ Alo, iubirea mea, sunt eu, fericeria. "I call you to tell you how I feel, Hello, my love, it's me, your happiness." Just tell me you don't get a kick out of saying "iubirea mea" (you-bir-uh mya).

Then it's time for jumping up and dancing again. And that's the beauty of this song - you get both delightful if slightly archaic poetry, and the chance to rock out like a 9-year-old.

As I was leaving France I made sure to put "Dragostea dibn tei" on my mp3 player. It became, in a way, a farewell anthem, involving bittersweet translation that still makes me smile when I hear it now. You want to leave, but you can't take me with you. It was something like that.

Here's another link featuring the song, and a video that mimics the actual video, which does feature human beings. This one uses Legos.

In cinere et cilicio ...

I love the liturgy for this day, the readings from the book of Joel and the passage from Matthew with its emphasis on joy and the importance of making a space to spend time alone with God.

The day began with an unfortunate missed bus, which meant a subsequent missed Mass at the other end of the bus line. But if there's one thing Ash Wednesday offers in abundance, aside from - well - ash, it's Masses. And so, after a false beginning I only allowed to be frustrating for the time it took a replacement bus to trundle up to the curb at Union Square, the day began with a 2,5-mile run and a couple hours concentrating hard on random paperwork in my office. Paperwork which was quite delightfully interrupted by a phone call from the delightfully sleuthful Dan, who read my little rant and decided to have himself some phonofun. So, yay, Dan. (And by the way? You sound EXACTLY like one of my students, and that's why it took me a few seconds to get my mind around your name. I kept thinking, Why is Joseph calling me and what is this about a pen? And then of course it all made sense.)

The Mass I went to, at noon, featured a solo cantor, a woman (is there a grammatically feminine form of "cantor"? cantress? cantrix? that just sounds dirty), full organ, and a mostly full church. (For comparison, the noon Mass usually harbors a hodgepodge bunch of Cantabridgian intellectuals and spiritual seekers. You could count the habitués du midi on two hands, if you counted twice.) The priest said some rather perturbing things about ritual symbolism and Transsubstantiation, and I tried to sing along with great fervor as the congregation launched into something that sounded roughly like "Audi, benigne Conditor" - if "Audi, benigne Conditor" had been written by a 20th-century minimalist with a pretty-good grasp of modal progression, instead of a 6th-century pope who created the genre. It was musically interesting, but I miss the Gregorian. Plus, "Audi, benigne Conditor" shouldn't really feature in the Mass until the first Sunday of Lent. Gregorian avant-la-lettre?

Call me a snob, but something in me resists being blessed, or crossed, or given communion, by a member of the usual Cantabridgian intellectual hodgepodge. Likewise, I don't take the Communion wafer in my hands and pop it like a Tic-Tac. These are hands with fingers deemed too oily to handle the manuscripts in Houghton Library without powdered gloves. Fingers that don't touch Corpus Christi definitely don't touch Corpus Christi. Usually in weekday Masses, I make my way patiently to the bottom step where Communion is given, bend a knee in reverence, say my "Amen" and take the Host on my tongue. The behavior gets some looks, including from the priest on occasion, and I hope Jesus will forgive me for noticing them when I should be concentrating on Him instead. Today, I wove my way through the aisles to find the line that led to the priest's bowl of ashes, and was rewarded for my weaving by what I think is safe to call THE WORLD'S DARKEST ASH CROSS. (Don't make me say that three times fast.) I wore it proudly through the rest of the day, or bore it penitently, and had a couple moments of conversation that gleam like little poems against the mild sunshine of the afternoon :

(on the bus)
- "Why you have that on your forehead?" (a heavily accented question from the young man in the seat in front of me, accompanied with a dramatic and very descriptive gesture.)
- "Because it's Ash Wednesday."
Thus ensued a halting explanation ("es el miercoles de ...") in which I realized I have lived long enough in France that when trying to find a Spanish word for "ashes" I will more easily say "sas, cuando hay una cigaretta ..." than anything involving fuego.

(in the hallway, upon noticing, in a fleeting-yet-instinctive Sneetches kind of way, another forehead crossed with black)
- A two-syllabled "Hey." (We appraise each other for a few moments, each smiling a little bit wryly.)
- "I like your ... outfit," she says.
I love my Monday student.

(outside the Health Center, just before 6 pm)
- "Is that ... omigod. Is it ASH WEDNESDAY TODAY?" In panicked tones from a girl in a red cardigan which I instantly covet. She covers the mouthpiece of her cell phone and asks me again.
- "Yes," I say, blandly, inclining my head in lieu of a nod and thus approaching my GIGANTIC RECORD-BREAKING ASH CROSS to her for confirmation.
- "Omigod. Did you hear that? It's Ash Wednesday today. I have to get off the phone! [a pause] Because! I have to go to Church!"

My work here is done.

(Or, perhaps more accurately, just beginning. Je ne le sais. Dieu le sait.)

Que cherches-tu au dehors, ô belle âme, puisque tu possèdes en toi-même tes richesses, ta jouissance, ton rassasiement et ton royaume, c'est-à-dire le Bien Aimé auquel tu aspires et que tu poursuis ?... La seule difficulté c'est que, tout en résidant en toi, il y demeure caché...

Parisii : a Photographic, Partial, and Totally Subjective Journey.

tous les trains vont à paris

in case of affluence, do not use strap-ons

paris 6e

and what about the truth?

st sulpice front

la lutte de jacob avec l'ange

vitrail Eglise St-Germain-des-Près

Evêque nommé de Pétrée

Phonophobia.

It started some time ago, possibly as early as 1991, and I don't remember why, but ... I started disliking the phone. "Disliking" is not a strong enough word. I started bloody LOATHING AND DREADING the thing and the way it took over my evenings and the panicky way it made me feel when it started to ring. My reaction went something like this : it would start small, like a whisper, the phone is ringing. Brrrring. And then get bigger, in my mind : The Phone Is Ringing. Brrrrring Brrrrring. And then devour all consciousness in the entire universe : THE PHONE IS RINGING ANSWER IT OR OHMYGOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE A SLOW AND HORRIBLE DEATH AND SPEND ETERNITY SURROUNDED BY SHRILL CLANGING BELLS THAT WON'T STOP. I would answer, out of breath and weeping, and if you phoned me during college, and put me through that, I sincerely hope there's a hard benchseat in Hell with your ass's name already on it. Preferably made of human bone. Yours.

(Well. In Purgatory. Don't want to overdo it, after all.)

I can't tell you why, but that's how it felt. And I grew up in a house where, when the phone rang, people fought over it. Fought to be the first to respond to its Bakelite call. We clawed, elbowed, shouted, ran skidding through the rooms, and to this day I will swear that until you've seen my seven-year-old brother tear around the corner to the kitchen extension like a roller-coaster car just barely holding onto its track, the discrete parts of his body completely divorced from any logic of how a human body should move, well, you haven't lived. It's that simple. (And whose call was he waiting for, anyway? I mean, hello, seven-year-old brother, some of us had crucial LIFE QUESTIONS on the line, like whether Lisa's dad was going to let her drive us to that club in L.A., and your He-Man-figurine emergency required immediate telephonic attention? What-EV-ah.) The rushing struggles occasionally ended in bloodshed - or, at the very least, profound and sparking resentment bordering on hatred.

I fought along with the best of them. Yep. (My sister is still missing an eye.) But while I was in college that all changed. When I moved into my own first apartment, the studio that was all mine alone with no roommates, do you know what my first purchase was? It wasn't, for example, DISHES or a bed, or even a shower curtain (I didn't get one of those until well into the winter). Nope : An answering machine. Because that way, you see, I could screen my calls. I could let the phone ring without cowering under that mantle of guilt and dread that kept me barely propped up in the corner, holding my breath (because you may not realize this, but when you are home and you don't pick up? The caller on the other end CAN HEAR YOU BREATHING) and fighting the shivers of doom that ran inevitably up and down my vertebrae.

I brought the whole phobia thing up with my godmother once, about eighteen months into my life in France. I'd never really tried talking about it before, aside from the occasional foray into total self-mockery, and when my bonne marraine said she knew what it was like, my jaw dropped. She suggested I say a little prayer on the first ring, so God would bless the caller and free me from my irrational fear. I tried that once. It took too long and I had to duck-and-cover under my dining-room table, but the idea is still nice.

I'm better now, though shades of phonophobia still haunt me. But - jubilate omnes terrae ! - we now live in a highly technological age, and I have a highly technological cell phone that displays the identity and number of every. single. caller. (In France I frequently had to do the whole holding-my-breath routine when my mobile phone rang, because sometimes other mobile numbers are blocked. Eventually I developed a standard equation - Identité refusée = appel refusé - and never veered from that path.) Despite my VAST improvements in succumbing to conquering phonophobia, I still don't answer all the time. I'm not even gonna lie to you and say it's because "the phone was on vibrate" or "it was at the bottom of my bag and I didn't hear it." Hell no, if I don't answer, it really is because I just don't want to talk to you.

My current outgoing message says something like (in English, then in French) "Hi, this is my mobile phone, I'm otherwise occupied, please leave a message," but it would be more honest if I recorded the following : "I'm either busy with something more important than you, or having an antisocial day. Leave a message if you want, but I'm not making any promises. P.S., you suck."

If you call me and get this message, appropriate behavior includes giggling, leaving a gentle message in which your dulcet tones reassure me that I don't have to return your call right away, or (ideally) sending me an email instead. These are examples of the kind of behavior that will make me consider the potential of changing your no-answer status at some point in the future. (Like, perhaps five years from now. You can't be too hasty about these decisions.) UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you then sleuth out my office number. That's just below the belt. By all means, do an Internet search for my home landline if you really have nothing better to do, but be warned : I never answer it. Only telemarketers call me there.

A Few Little Things.

1. People who are loud and drunk in public really bother me. I have to tell you more about the last night in Paris, and the rest of the time in France, but for the moment my thoughts are solidly New English. Well, okay. Liquidly New English. A trio got on the bus Thursday afternoon as I did, and they were boisterous and smelled sweet and fetid the way people do when exuding alcohol through their pores, and the longer I sat near them the more tense I felt myself becoming. And I remembered a time years ago when a friend phoned late one night, and he was drunk, and it freaked me out. He was cities away, then, but I felt vulnerable, and the feeling came back this afternoon with the trio that was only inches away. And I did something I rarely let myself do (because I am a polite, ladylike creature who trembles at the merest thought of causing offense to my fellow Mass Bay Transit Authority passengers) : I got up and moved to a different seat. I heard, above the music in my headphones, the trio reacting to my move, heard them say a lot of things about "fucking" and then when I automatically turned my head in their general direction, heard one of them shout "what are you looking at bitch?" It was on the tip of my tongue to respond "nothing much" as caustically as possible, but having been, myself, on the receiving end of that barb I decided to turn around instead. Because I don't want to turn a drunk woman into "nothing much," even if I will likely never see her again, even if she won't remember me in two hours' time.

2. It started me thinking about the porousness of identity during drunkenness. How people change, how secret parts of themselves come to the surface. When drunk, I am a slut. I will flirt with anyone and say anything and make preposterous suggestions and wake up the next day and have to cringe as each one of them comes back and I hear the echoes of my own words. (Did I wink at that PREGNANT WOMAN?!) And the cursing. Sober, I make a concerted effort to measure every syllable of my spoken language. I keep my voice down, I don't use four-letter words unless supremely annoyed and/or alone. (Actually, these days, if I forget myself and do curse, I tend to curse in French, and even the very VERY worst things I can say are those I overheard from my priests, so they're still pretty clean. No, I won't quote them here for you.) Drunk, I turn English four-letter words into acrobats and make them my bitches. They dance through my language like colored threads woven into a braid. Sailors and auto mechanics get out of my way. Everything sounds so angry, and the anger is so fluid. And that's the thing about the drunk persona - it's all so much closer to the surface. "FUCK" while drunk comes more easily, and carries more venom. There's no editing or filtering process for it, so it just slips out and stings. That's part of why I don't like being around drunk people in public. (Or in private, unless I am one of them and there's a whole lotta happy going on.)

3. Quite à propos of nothing, let me tell you : I am not grossed out by public toilets (that scene in Trainspotting is my lifetime exception. I literally had to leave the room to vomit when I saw that). So, no problem peeing, even in the SNCF car, even in the Turkish toilet at Montparnasse cemetery. On the other hand, other people's teeth totally skeeve me out. As does the smell and taste of toothpaste. Go figure.

4. I realized something in France during this visit, in the way you suddenly have words for a thing you've felt for a long time but haven't been able to put words to. I guess that makes it a non-realization, more like a verbalization. I didn't have the words for the thing before, and don't have the words to name the thing now, so I have to rely on your forebearance and whatever ability I might have to describe it. Here's the thing : I'm happy. It came to me as I climbed into the RER to Paris-Gare du Nord to get to the métro to trudge my suitcases down the street in the 6e where I was staying, on virtually no sleep and able to smell myself after travelling all night to get there. I smiled and took a picture of the royal-blue sign in the CDG-1 RER station, the one that says "Tous les trains vont à Paris." It seemed so perfect. Of course all trains go to Paris. Where else would they go? And not just CDG airport trains, but I mean ALL trains, all of them.

And I found myself thinking about my life in Paris, the one I keep trying to describe because it meant such specific things even if all I really did (besides read 19th-century court reports about thieves in the city) was walk around and visit churches and find cafés. The life when my life truly began to change, in ways I didn't understand then and couldn't predict. And I thought about how long ago that all felt, and all that has come in between, and how wrenching it was to leave Paris when I left it and how blessed and conflicted I felt about moving back to France when I first had the opportunity to go to Lyon, and then how once I got there I knew the very first day it was where I was meant to be, and I write that sentence hearing it, meaning it, as Where I Was Meant To Be. How I set up an email address I never ever used, but that made me happy just to have : choeurdelyon, playing on the homonym "choeur" (choir, like a group of singers, and choir like the central part of a church) and "coeur" (heart) and the history (Richard the Lionhearted, "Coeur de Lion") and how I had become Lyon-hearted. How everything fell apart but just as it had to, and then how it all came back together, again just as it had to, and how sad and blessed I was to get the job I have now, and leave France again, how blessed to have the opportunity to leave France with my heart full of love and memories and joy and things I would miss so hard I can still feel their sharp edges against my rib cage now. I stood there grinning at that sign about all the trains, and then I got on one of them, and sure enough it went to Paris, and I knew with a certainty I have only ever felt once before, upon arriving in my church in Lyon - I knew I was home. Even if it meant I couldn't live there for a while yet, or couldn't live there all the time, I knew. And so I didn't grieve, leaving, this time. I shed my little tear - thank God, otherwise I'd worry I was taking it for granted - but I close my eyes and there it all is before me, the cobbled streets and leaning gold-and-pink stone walls, the rooftops and the bakeries every 200 feet, the rivers and the rhythm of the language and the life, and I know it's all living on here in my heart, from the towers of Saint Sulpice to the Gold Virgin on the hillside of Lyon, to the curl of Rhône in Avignon to the filament of Saône in Neuville, dotted with swans. Looking back over the years I lived there, I don't feel mournful or out of place or like I've made a horrible mistake. I am not proud about all the mistakes I made while living there, but I am trying to learn to be kinder to them. And it seems, from this distance, that my life there was one long benediction. That the hand of God touched and turned my face away from sorrow and brought me into joy, and I can't tell you how much I hate that that sounds like a Hallmark card, but there is no better way to describe it, when I think of all that happened and all I have been given despite all the stupid, selfish, greedy, blind and cruel things I've done - I don't know what else to call it, but a blessing. A grace. A gift. A light, to let shine into the hearts of men (lucéat lux vestra coram hominibus). And that's just exactly what I'm trying to do. More on that soon.

5. Next week Lent starts, and it is perhaps a symbol of how preoccupied I've become with food since being back in the States that all I can think of regarding this liturgical concept (besides the fact that even if I don't know where or at what time I'll get the cruciform ash rubbed into my forehead, I'm definitely glad to be in a place where I can't be written up at work for wearing it during the day) is - ONLY ONE MEAL PER DAY QUELLE HORREUR. I would cry out along the lines of "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" but, well, that's sort of blasphemous and defies the point besides. But I'm thinking of the other things I'll be giving up for Lent. And trying to decide the best way to make these little renunciations. Is it in giving up chocolate for 40 days? TV? Alcohol? Salt? Porn? It seems there should be a bigger sense of sacrifice, more than just giving up tequila but replacing it with vodka. The whole point is to replace the thing renounced with God, not some temporal pleasure. Or is it about adapting some new behavior, adding something instead of taking it away? So here's my little survey for you all, as we make our résolutions de Carême : What have you given up for Lent? What does the renunciation bring you? What will you give up this year?

6. P.S. I am totally kidding about giving up porn. There's no way I could go 40 days without THAT.

Things I have learned in France.

1995 : L'heure de la sieste est sacrée. Especially in the south, which is also called "le midi" (bewilderingly, "noon"), and where entire cities shut down for 3 hours every day.

1997 : Do not talk back to groups of youthful miscreants on the métro. Also : cash is referred to commonly as "des sous," even 150 years after the actual currency of the "sou" was removed from circulation. Politely, paying in cash is "en liquide" or "en espèces." Nope, still can't explain it.

1999 : How to make the perfect lentil salad. (Recipe to follow soon.) Also, strawberries and mint? A combination best described as "beauteous". How to open a bank account en France.

2000 : Every meal must be accompanied by bread. You're making vegetables? Don't forget the bread. Fish with rice? Must have bread. Pasta with a kamut-and-spelt sauce, nachos, corn and potatoes as a side dish, and polenta for dessert? And you forgot the bread? What are you, American? Cherchez pas à comprendre. Also, God is on the Mont-Saint-Michel.

2001 : Simpler is better, and four tattoos is not enough. God is in Lyon. How to sing Gregorian chant. That I have a soul. What "devoir d'état" means in daily life. What priests wear underneath the soutane. How to tirer les rois between Epiphany and La Chandeleur. That February is le mois des crèpes, which usually, unfortunately, tends to conflict with le Carême. How to set up : water, electricity, telephone, and tax accounts in another country. That nothing quite compares to a galette Bressane.

2002 : That there is no agreement between the American and the French DMVs, unless you live in Kentucky. That the franc is a much more endearing currency than the euro. How to cook a perfect roast chicken. How to make an endive salad. That the perfect jacket potato is baked with a crust of gros sel on the potato skin, and has a brie-and-leek filling. That I will inevitably forget the bread. How to say goodbye to being married. How to live through two months in the locked ward of the hospital. That God is in the hospital. How to leave the hospital. That God is also outside. How to cook vegetables for every meal of the day, and that cheese is good for breakfast. The meaning of "blog."

2003 : How validating it is to have earned the degree you've been working toward for 11 years. How to cook a rice salad. How to make the perfect flourless chocolate cake. How to say "headgasket" en français. That nothing compares to having your sister come 10000 km for a visit.

2004 : That CSI is called Les Experts en France. How to accept being given compliments, forgiveness, and food. That the Buffy : Tueuse des Vampires musical episode rocks, even dubbed into French. How to run for more than fifteen gasping minutes at a time. That it is a very good thing Will and Grace is not exported. How to convert cups to metric to make a cheescake à la française. That Lactacyd is a crucial element of adult female life. That I've learned too much to summarize in snippets. How to leave France. That every day is a perfect day - which can always be improved with the addition of bread.

2005 : God is everywhere, always. Also, coming back is coming home to the soul. How to cook the perfect poireaux (leeks). That the voice does not forget how to sing Gregorian. That the soul does not forget the place of its birth.

Grrrrr.

Dear online poker, texas holdem, online pharmacy, and etc.,

Please stop spamming my site with bogus pings and trackbacks and crap. Your links never work and I do not endorse your activities. Furthermore, I am tired of LOSING TIME OUT OF MY LIFE to delete you through 6 months of my archives. Henceforth please cease and desist. If you continue, my next letter will not be even this friendly. Be warned.

Last Night In Paris.

So ... there's a lot more photographic evidence of my trip to France, and much of it far more interesting and, you know, aesthetically and artistically worthwhile than this snapshot, but I have to post it first. Why? The reasons are threefold. (1) Before leaving Paris, I bought a religieuse from an all-night pâtisserie on the rue Saint André des Arts and found a bottle of water WITH MY NAME ON IT. (2) Just in case you didn't get that, THE BOTTLE OF WATER HAS MY NAME ON IT. Like, as the brand. Do you have your own brand name of water? Yeah, that's what I thought. And, (3) I carried the bottle as precious cargo back from France in my backpack, brought it to work, refilled it from our cooler, drank from it all day and well into the evening and left the bottle in my office yesterday, and the night cleaning crew took it away. This morning, it is gone. The bottle of Hépar is still here, the bottle of Déjà Blue (I know, those clever punsters) is still here, the bottle of Evian is still here, but the bottle of Romy is gone. They came into my office during the night, and TOOK A BOTTLE OF WATER WITH MY OWN NAME ON IT off my desk and THREW IT AWAY.

I feel bereft. Thank God I took this photo, or I wouldn't have any proof of my own aqueous existence.

Media Puppet.

Ok, ok, I know the State of the Union thing is important and all, but mostly I'm just bummed that it's supplanted West Wing.

(What, I leave America for 10 days and all the cool programming is replaced by ubiquitous speeches? Dude. I feel like the panicked child in a Jeff Foxworthy stand-up sketch : "OHMYGOD! IT'S THE PRESIDENT! HE'S ON EVERY CHANNEL!")