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Friday, March 8, 2013A belated Happy New YearI have been on hiatus from my blog since last fall, in order to complete a manuscript. During that time, both the Jewish and the Gregorian New Year happened. So here is a New Year’s story, with a few important facts you should bear in mind as you read:
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Friday, November 9, 2012The knife sharpenerOnce a year, when the weather gets cold, a small man of indeterminate age knocks at our door. He is not a prepossessing person. His black watch cap is too small, his weathered blue parka is too large, he has fewer teeth than nature intended, and he is clutching a handful of knives, poorly concealed in a plastic bag. “Need anything sharpened?” he asks. The first year he came I only gave him two little Opinels, in case he decided not to come back. But he did, and now I wait for him, and I hand him all the knives and scissors I can find, and he spirits them off for ten or fifteen minutes, and when he brings them back they are sharper than when they were new. His name is Jean-Baptiste, and he likes to travel. Not for the scenery, because one village is just like another, but for the people. He likes to talk to people. Alba is just like any other place, for example, but it stands out in his head because the people here have a sort of a cultivated way of talking. I ask if he enjoys that, and he says no, it is tiresome.  Sharpening knives is what he does, but poetry is what he is. He likes poetry because it is beautiful, direct, and natural: it just comes to him, just like that, an inexplicable gift. He doesn’t write it down – doesn’t know how to write – but once the poetry is in his head it stays there, and he carries it with him. I ask him what it’s like to be a Gypsy in France today, since Gypsies are in the news all the time over here; French policy and public sentiment have been particularly angry and inhospitable to them in the past few years. I ask if things have gotten harder, if he encounters any distrust or hostility, and he is very tolerant of my question and its boring lack of imagination. Lightly, he says that there are all kinds of Gypsy, then finishes his coffee, stands up, and leaves me with a battery of sharp knives and a poem about a rose.
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Our future kitchen Our future living room
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Thursday, September 6, 2012In other newsExotic, art-nouveau-inspired decorations are starting to sprout in our house, and Julien has completed the brick wall in our future living room. The flashing and waterproofing on the terrace are complete, and Julien just laid the tiles (you can see one of them on the far left) that will go under the big bay window. The end may still be a ways away, but it is in sight!!
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Vogues are a traditional event in our corner of southeastern France, and their two names indicate their two purposes: fête votive because they celebrate a village’s patron saint (votive from the verb vouer, to promise, to vow, to devote, to consecrate), and vogue because they are organized for the benefit of a village’s youth (a vogue describes the forward motion of a boat, made through the coordinated effort of multiple rowers). Long ago, vogues helped raise pocket money for the young men departing for their military service; now they’re a kind of going-away ritual for the kids who graduated high school earlier in the year. Each year’s crop of eighteen-year-olds raises money by going door-to-door selling pogne, a sweet, eggy bread flavored with orange flower water, and then, during the vogue, by selling drinks at the buvette. For that one weekend, Alba is transformed into a glittering array of frivolities, and though adults and children frequent the vogue, too, it truly belongs to the teenagers. It’s their last interlude of giddy freedom before the rentrée and adulthood begin. During the day, a vogue offers various ways to demonstrate strength and skill, ranging from bumper cars and petanque competitions to donkey races and tractor pulls. After 9pm, you’ll notice that it’s difficult to move your limbs at a normal pace, because the air is laden with a mixture of fry grease and sexual tension. The official drink of the vogue is marquisette, a mixture of white wine, rum or vodka, carbonated lemonade, and chopped up citrus fruit. As the night wears on and you drink more and more of it, someone is sure to remind you that the vats of marquisette are mixed by foot, and someone else is sure to tell you a story of an unsavory thing that took place in the marquisette vats the year of their vogue. Each village’s vogue takes place on a different date in the summer, and Alba’s is the last of the season in our region. Even though it’s a festival of departure, in many ways it is really a celebration of eternal return: no matter how many years you are away from home, when you come back again, the fête votive will be the same. The same families of carnies return every year with the same stands and the same rides. On the carousels, children grab at the same pompoms their parents grabbed at a generation ago. When the disco balls come out at night, the songs, with few exceptions – I Told the Witch Doctor is now played in a dance remix – are the same as they always were, too. |
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Alba’s vogue is one of the region’s more sedate ones, but it is still a raucous, unruly event: it lasts into the wee hours of the morning, and when day breaks the village is full of stink and debris. Flowerpots get broken, trash gets strewn, people urinate in unseemly places. Half the village flees the weekend the vogue comes to town, and last year the town council voted to move the whole thing to an unpaved parking lot outside the village. But though you might be able to displace it or flee from it, the vogue in Alba isn’t a phenomenon you can escape. Love it or hate it, behind the brash music and the flashy lights and the cloying sweetness of the marquisette, the vogue in Alba is the ultimate symbol of the rentrée, the ever-recurring return: the grapes will ripen and be picked, the last of the blackberries will harden on their canes, the figs will soften and fall to the ground, and children will head to school on Monday with memories of merry-go-rounds whirling in their heads. And this year’s crop of eighteen-year-olds will start rowing toward adulthood knowing that wherever the vogue’s forward motion takes them, there will always be another rentrée, and another vogue. For them this was the year everything was different, and next year it will be exactly the same.
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Thursday, August 23, 2012Sad words: faire son deuilAugust 21 was the seventh anniversary of the passing of my stepfather, Robert Moog, who was what the French would call "mon papa de coeur" (my "heart-father"). This is in memory of him.
Grateful thanks to Daniel Stolle for permission to use his illustrations. |
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Nevertheless, it’s a verbal phrase I’m quite attached to, because I find it so expressive. It seems much truer to life than its English equivalent. In English you are “grieving,” or “in mourning.” Outside certain religious traditions, it is a nebulous state with no beginning our end. “Faire son deuil,” on the other hand, uses the active verb faire, “to do,” and the possessive “son:” it is yours to do, and no one can tell you how or where or when. It is your grief, not anyone else’s. In my synaesthetic head the word deuil is the color of violets and cream and egg yolks, opaque, mottled like a bruise, and more or less cubical. Doing your grief is a real puzzle, exponentially harder than the melted Rubik’s cube I see when I say the word.
The week after we came home was the fête votive (more on that next week), and though I didn’t much feel like partying, Julien and I went out for a late-night stroll around the village to take in the flashing lights and have a drink with friends. We stood around the plane trees by the buvette (which is what the French call anything outdoors that sells things to drink), and I tried to enjoy myself. I watched the crowd and felt oppressed by the hard sides and sharp corners and ugly complexities of my new deuil, angry that no one else could even see it. And then a childhood friend of Julien’s leaned over to me. Under cover of many drinks and a particularly loud disco song, he said, “I know what you’ve been going through. We’re all thinking of you.” And that right there is one of the great advantages living in a village where everyone knows you. People actually can see your funky Rubik’s cube of grief. They know you’re working on it. That this feels comforting may seem counter-intuitive, given how intensely private grief is, and given that one of its hardest corners is how exposed and vulnerable it can make you feel.
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Thursday, August 9, 2012A rare word: conjurerYou probably know the joke about the Jewish Robinson Crusoe who, showing his rescuers around the island, points to the two synagogues he has built. Alba doesn’t have any synagogues, and attendance at its little church has been dropping steadily since the mid-nineteenth century. Signs of the sacred are few and far between in our village, but if you’re looking for succor, I recommend the bar where everyone goes. Since my own adventure with the oven I have seen conjuring help burns from chemicals, radiation, scalding, sunshine, and chemotherapy. And even if your skin is unscathed, a cold drink on that shady terrace at the end of a hot August day is enough to soothe even the most scorched of spirits.
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Grapes grow everywhere here.
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Thursday, August 2, 2012Sour grapesIn early August the grapes hide from the harsh sun |
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Thursday, July 26, 2012Le CacophoniumAlba may not have an ATM or a dentist, and cell phone reception here is spotty, but for all time we will be able to boast that we were one of the first villages in France ever to be visited by the Cacophonium.
When it’s your turn to ride, you take your pick: you can climb into an old cello that has been rebuilt into a sort of a swan, sit tight in the body of a bass drum that’s gripped in the pincers of a tambourine-playing crab, straddle a harp in the shape of a whale, or take a ride on a steed made of old wind instruments. Once everyone has clambered on, Céline begins to pedal, for Le Cacophonium is not just any merry-go-round made of recycled musical instruments and shaded by a big black café umbrella: it’s bicycle-powered by its inventor, a slender lady in a polka-dot dress and a top hat.
It was then she had the idea of the Cacophonium.
Upon seeing it for the first time, one man smiled and said, “If that’s what happens to my old bugle when I die, that’s fine with me.” Going around and around and around, says Céline, is the basis for all childhood magic, and she loves to see the wonder on children’s faces when they first lay eyes on her invention. Once they’ve climbed aboard, she begins pedaling and extends an old trumpet to her passengers; the children drop their zinc-plated washers into the mouth of the trumpet as they whiz by. The next time around she hands out musical instruments for them to play as they move, in addition to the noises they can make by pulling levers and pushing pedals on the carousel animals.
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The Cacophonium (or "Le Cacophonium," as it is called in French) was invented by a lady named Céline, requires four square meters of floor space, and seats a half dozen children under the age of six. A turn costs €1.50, in exchange for which you get a zinc-plated 2” washer to slide on and off your fingers, slip into your pocket, or twirl around your thumb while you wait.
As a child, Céline dreamed of being a clown. That was before she had children, back when she liked to sit quietly in the morning with a cup of tea and honey.
As her idea evolved, she thought of a tuba (official name, "euphonium") and of the merry chaos of noise her invention would make, and settled on "cacophonium" - perhaps someday every orchestra in the land will include a child-and-bicycle-powered cacophonium in its ranks.
Originally, Céline had wanted to play saxophone while she pedaled, but between collecting tokens, dangling a velveteen fish on a fishing rod for some lucky child to catch, and squirting cool water on her passengers, she realized she didn’t have enough hands for the sax. Eventually, she’d like to have the carousel make music as she pedals, but for now she’s content to watch children watching the world fly by. If you’re the right age at the right time, you can catch a ride on the Cacophonium this fall at the Féstival de la Basse Cour in Nîmes or the Art’Pantin Marionette Festival in Vergèze. Images courtesy of the gracious lady herself, and Le Cacophonium/La Compagne du Bastringue. |
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Thursday, July 19, 2012Some thoughts on math, or why I'll never be an efficient waitressMy time in France has included two stints as a waitress, once in Paris, and once in Alba. In both places, the owners were my dear friends, and in both places, they teased me mercilessly about how slow I was at doing the checks, and how often I made mistakes. They were right, and I was terrible, but I would like to take this opportunity to say that my problem was not mathematical, it was synesthetical. People accept as a general truth that a nice thing about numbers is their universality. As a general rule, there's little difference in my head between French and English: But hell if I can do math. As long as I live, I will never be able get my head around the idea that Right there is the real reason I am self-employed: I can take all the time I need to make sure that cinquante-six and fifty-six really are the same thing. As you can see from the calculations pictured above, I'm still dubious.
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Perhaps the French are comfortable with the sublime because they know it lives just a step away from the ridiculous (indeed, it was Napoleon himself who discovered the pair’s official headquarters, in an undisclosed location on the outskirts of Moscow). Here in Alba, we devote an entire week each summer to mixing the two, as you can see from the photograph to your left, which was taken from our kitchen window.
Just the other day, Julien surprised a Dutchman wandering around the lower floor of our house and snapping pictures. Luckily, the man knew just what to say when Julien asked what he was doing.
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Thursday, July 12, 2012French vocabulary no. 5: SUBLIMEThe French language is fond of things sublime in a way that English never is. Maybe it is the influence of the Protestant ethic on our collective unconscious, but in English, we tend to keep a damper on our enthusiasm for things “of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.” If the adjective is kept in the shadows, the verb is nearly nonexistent: these days, chemists are the only English-speakers who get to sublime things, and unless you’re in psychoanalysis you probably don’t have much opportunity to sublimate, either. Whereas the French are always looking for ways to sublimer – everything from their fingernails to their pool parties.
During the Alba circus festival, the streets are garlanded with red ribbons, and our hamlet is transformed, quite literally, into a theater. My husband has shut down the worksite in honor of the festivities; otherwise, it would be overrun with tourists, too.
“Excusez-moi!” the man exclaimed, “c’est SU-BLIME.” |
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Thursday, July 5, 2012Slippery words: goûter, doudou, and piqueMy husband, as I mentioned in an earlier post, once expressed his theory that language would eventually be boiled down to a single, highly expressive syllable, which he predicted would be bah. These are things you think about when you live in a bilingual household. Hard as you try, the one language begins to make incursions into the other; compression and spillage are inevitable. Naturally, when our daughter was born I wondered how she would adapt to the separation and the spillage of bilingualism, how she’d deal with the cultural, the versatile, and the irreplaceable. Would she discover peekytoe crabs and think they are named that because their toes can pinch you? Would she be traumatized to discover that doudou, when you pronounce it with an American accent, becomes smelly and distasteful? |
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Friday, March 23, 2012An indispensable writing toolI love marbles. They are pleasant to hold and they make a good noise when you rattle them around. They look like they are made of pure color, compressed and contained beneath a tiny, shiny surface. They are totally unassuming in their beauty, modest infant moons, perfect little planets. When you find one on the sidewalk it is as if you have stumbled upon a pocket-sized replica of the world, or the residue of a magic spell. And - if you have synaesthesia - they are ideal for arranging your thoughts. |
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Friday, February 24, 2012Steadfast friends: the tonneau killer and the pince-monseigneurThe Trappou is only one of many interesting characters in our new house. To the Left, for example, is our pince-monseigneur. He weighs about thirty-five pounds Pince-monseigneur means "pinch-my-master" and was originally used to designate a cat's claw of the type burglars used to force locks, but our pincher is very well-behaved and far too busy clipping metal for reinforced concrete structures and helping frazzled translators let off steam to engage in any kind of criminal activity. Julien picked him up at the dump, and while at first glance he seems like a ferocious and desperate receptacle, he is actually a very humble, very generous, very self-deprecating rain barrel. The Tonneau family has a long and storied past: there are the illustrious wine containers, the shelters for merchants and public writers, the horse-drawn conveyances, and some distant cousins in professional swimming (the little flip you do to change directions when you get to the end of a lap is a Tonneau) but they have fallen on hard times, so we try to be discreet with Tonneau Killer (TK or Tony for short) about his past. In addition to acting as our doorman, TK keeps an eye on our rockpile, helps Julien wash his tools, and trades fashion advice with the Trappou. And if ever the pince-monseigneur gets any ideas, TK will be on hand to talk him out of it. |
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Friday, February 17, 2012The suspense is overAll this week, you've been thinking, That is normal. and it lives under our house. Probably, you had decided that That is not the case. Our Trappou's full name is "La Rue du Trappou." In 19th century Lyon, the word "trabouler" meant So maybe our Trappou was attempting to give itself Then again, the French adjective "trappu" |
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Monday, February 13, 2012All manner of wild beastsThe French language is fond of many things. Among them: technical-sounding terms Run-of-the-mill illnesses are a good example of this. In English, my silence last week was due to In French, I was afflicted with a gastro-entérite and a rhinopharyngite; or, for short, I went to bed with a gastro and a rhino. Either way, I'm in fine fettle now and almost ready to tell you about an exciting creature called
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Friday, February 3, 2012Tricks of the tradeMy grandfather was a translator and interpreter, too. He worked for the United Nations and the International War Crimes Tribunal (in this picture you can see him at the Nuremberg trials; he's the third interpreter from the left). He used to be the most punctilious person I knew. He penciled corrections into the margins of his books Now, he suffers from senile dementia, |
A few months ago, my mother cleaned out his apartment and gave me some of those dictionaries he used to drive me crazy with, They looked ugly, and I planned to remove them. Every time I see those flaps, I am moved in a dozen different ways. My grandfather may seem lost to me when I sit with him in the nursing home, but even now, he's got a few tricks left up his sleeve. No matter how far gone the people you love may seem, there's usually something left to learn from them if you look.
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Friday, January 27, 2012Faux ami no. 3: Scotch and ScotchIf you look up “tape” in a bilingual dictionary it will tell you that the French say “ruban adhésif,” but if you ever find yourself in a situation like the one below, it’s good to know that’s not the word they use in real life. Harry shrugged again. “Not really.” I crept out of the kitchen and up to the window in the front room and peeked out. There were, as Harry had promised, two men in blackface leaning against the rampart walls below the house. The green streetlight cast eerie shadows over their faces, and their pale, knobby knees peeped out from knee-length black tunics tied at the waist with a piece of rope, which gleamed a little when the men moved. The steak knives, tied to their rope belts with string, were smudged with red. I sidled over to the terrace wall and looked down. They waved. “Want some wine?” I asked. “Not with the kids,” said Droopy Spear. “Ask them when their Birth of a Nation reenactment is,” Matt said. “A scavenger hunt in costume?” I asked, not sure how to broach the whole blackface issue. “Ask them since when it’s okay to wear blackface,” said Matt. “Is the princess with you?”
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Friday, January 20, 2012French vocabulary no. 4: the booniesIn English you’d say Alba was in the boonies. In French you might say it was paumé. Paumé comes from the word for "palm" Paumé is not the only way we have of saying we live in the boonies. |
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French has lots of words for little villages like ours, perhaps because there are so many of them. And from there we come to whole collection of made-up places that sound far off when you roll them off your tongue: going to Perpète-les-Oies or Pétaouchnok means going to a place that is inconveniently far from everything. |
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Once, my husband and I stopped to buy a postcard in the tiny village of Which goes to show that like everything else,
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Friday, January 13, 2012It's cold enough to crack a stoneThat's what they say when it's very cold here (geler à pierre fendre). It is cold, this half of the house is built. Someday soon, it will be the living room. Since you can't get a car down our street, Other good French expressions involving rocks are "sad as a stone" and "bald as a stone,"
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Thursday, January 5, 2012What do you see in 583?The photo to the left shows you the colors that appear in my head when I think about the number 583. Nabokov called it "colored hearing." This is how I would explain it: When I hear a sound, I see a color. My synaesthesia is particularly strong when it comes to words. To spell the word "house" I do not think "h-o-u-s-e," I see, "fir green-transparent-pale gray-yellow-pale orange," and write that down. |
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I therefore find certain words totally intolerable, and others irrationally pleasing. The word "chalumeau" (French for blowtorch) makes me quite giddy, the way you might react to tasting an ethereal bonbon (see illustration). The word "stagflation," on the other hand, evokes in me the same nausea you might feel when scraping something putrid off the bottom of your shoe (I will spare you an illustration). I can barely stand to look at it on the page. I only realized synaesthesia was a "condition" after stumbling on an article about it in a magazine - before that I thought that everyone's brains worked that way. To be honest, I still have trouble believing that they don't. So you tell me: does your brain work like mine? What does the number 583 evoke to you?
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Thursday, December 8, 2011A hole in the universeAt the age of eight, My mother, Pleased with this small victory, I quietly ate around my abandoned pepper bits, then And then something happened. One of my red bell pepper bits began to move. In the blink of an eye, It would be understating things A great wind had blown through my life. I felt a little excited. If bell pepper bits could walk, I looked up to see if anyone else had noticed My disappointment was leavened by the arrival of chocolate cake. But I have always treasured that moment,
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Friday, December 2, 2011Pictures in words, needles in haystacks, and the price of a suntanIf you have ever done archival research, you know that it can be a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack. I would even argue that haystacks (or bales) are easier than archives: Most of the people who generated all that paper disappeared without ever suspecting that the things And thank goodness they never suspected: the most unsuspecting of their pen scratches are the unexpected pinpricks that keep you awake as you work, winking reminders that the past isn't always a blur, that boredom has ever been the same and that no matter how dusty and dry the task, we all enjoy a bit of whimsy. This doodle was drawn by a list-maker in Tunisia at the turn of the last century. And speaking of mysterious words (see my last post), his list is full of them: apparently, 1 suntan, 1 khodfu, and 1 chasuch will set you back 3,360 francs. I'm sure such glittering treasures are worth the money, but the legs on that officer are really priceless.
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Tuesday, November 22, 2011All that glittersWhen I was a child, I thought a "chester of doors" was a complex and wonderful construction that promised to open the way to a million new worlds. I can still feel that magical possibility when I write those words, even though it's been years since I figured out that a chest of drawers was merely where my socks and undershirts lived. And I still love the mysterious glamor of a word or phrase whose meaning is completely obscure to you, whether it is because you have misheard it, have no idea of the context, or simply don't know. When your job is words, these moments become rarer and rarer, though technical terms do afford a certain pleasure: how lovely, the moments I spent imagining that "pléochroïque" was the era of rainbow-colored dinosaurs, rather than a crystallographic term. Charming, the few seconds I dreamed of "calandreuses," which in my mind ought to mean ladies who make calendars. (They're actually a kind of leather embossing press.) That is why I am so grateful to the fashion world. Just one fashion event can give you enough of these mysterious phrases to last a lifetime. My favorite of them all, the one I carry with me happy in the knowledge that it will never be elucidated, is one I picked up at a Lanvin runway show I attended last year. I was working for an agency whose job it was to transcribe and translate post-show interviews, which are so esoteric they require an eyewitness to make any sense of them at all. Seeing a runway show in real life is kind of like seeing the Tour de France in real life: an immense amount of hype and chaos for something that is over in a flash. After the show, it was my job to push through the crowd to listen to the press conference. As I was pushing I saw two men who looked like they'd been dressed by André 3000 from Outkast. For all I know, they may have been André 3000 from Outkast. In any case, as I pushed, I heard one of them say to the other, "Yeah, I need to get some more, though. It's like all my diamonds are falling out." I have turned this phrase over in my mind a million times, and it never looses its sheen. What must it feel like when all one's diamonds fall out? Sometimes I think it must be a chilly, shivery sensation, not entirely unpleasant. Other times I imagine it's painful, like those awful dreams where your teeth get wobbly and you can't keep them in your mouth. And what could you get more of that would keep them in place? How many diamonds do you need to have before you casually can say the words "all my diamonds"? Three? Seventeen? How big do they need to be? Oh, the possibilities are endless. |
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Thursday, November 10, 2011Listen-if-it’s-rainingRain has been a major preoccupation this week in Alba: we’ve had nearly a foot of it. Il pleut: it’s come down hard – in buckets, you’d say in both English and French. It’s been pouring, as we say – or raining spouts, as they say. (Il pleut des trombes) The French find it amusing that we English speakers complain it’s raining cats and dogs; I hope you find it amusing that here in France it rains ropes (des cordes), and, if things get really bad, it comes down like a cow pisses (comme vache qui pisse). Over the past week we’ve had it in ropes and buckets and cats and cows. In a village full of farmers and broken down old houses, you feel torn between happy for the crops and sad for all the cooped-up stonemasons, and of course irritated you left your laundry out on the line. But then on Friday morning we woke up and began to feel nervous. We live right next to the River Escoutay, which, on most days is barely more than a cheerful trickle. But early Friday morning there was a lull in the rain, and we realized the roaring we heard was the Escoutay. It rose and rose. On Saturday night, my husband filled up sand bags for my mother-in-law, who lives on the ground floor and didn’t sleep much listening out for the river to stop roaring and begin to clank, which is how you know it has rolled all its rocks right up into to the back yard and is about to flood your kitchen. Luckily, the river subsided, and the rain died back down to a drizzle (which the French describe in diminutives of il pleut, as if we were saying “it’s rain-ish-ing” – il pleuvine, il pleuviote, il pleuvasse). Lying in bed with the sound of those drops falling and falling on our skylights has made me realize how much country living is full of listening for rain; it has made me nostalgic for a French expression that died away as we and our language have drained out of the countryside and flooded into cities, with their clothes dryers and indoor jobs. The expression is ecoute-s’il-pleut (listen-if-it’s-raining). It was what people would call a river like the Escoutay that runs slow and lazy until it roars up into your back yard, or a mill that didn’t work too well in the dry seasons. By extension, it was used to describe the a kind of lazy person who sat around waiting for a stroke of luck, or who was too busy listening for the rain to get out and get anything done. Or someone like me, who’s waiting for the sun to come so she can get those wet clothes in off the line.
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Thursday, November 3, 2011French vocabulary nos. 2 and 3: faux ami and quid pro quo
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Thursday, October 27, 2011The Densest Object in the WorldToday it is time for a cautionary tale about a little detail that might trip you up as you toggle between numbers in French and English. Once upon a time, shortly after I moved to France for good to live with the man I would later marry, the postman delivered a little blue envelope to our house. It contained a blue, handwritten square of paper with the following information on it: I arrived: March 31, 2005 at 11:30pm There was no signature. It was some kind of party invitation, but who would have a party on a Sunday morning? And who would couch the invitation as a riddle? I had never heard of anything that dense. Was it an asteroid? Surely I would have heard of an asteroid landing near our village. It would have made a big hole, too. Besides, only quarks and stuff are dense like that. You can’t even see them. This is ridiculous, I thought. No one is going to come to their party. I tossed the invitation on the table and forgot about it until my husband came home. “Any mail?” he asked. “Just this stupid riddle,” I said, handing him the blue piece of paper. As I passed it to him, I noticed there was something on the back of it. It was a picture of a newborn baby, whose birth his parents and grandparents were very happy to announce. “Ah, Fred had his baby,” Julien said, tossing the birth announcement back on the table. “I guess we should buy them a present. What do you mean, riddle?” And that is why you should never forget that the French use commas where Americans use decimal points, and vice versa.
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Tuesday, October 18, 2011The world's most powerful wordMy husband and I used to have an ongoing argument about the merits of French versus the merits of English. “Come on,” I would tell him. “English is so much more descriptive. The language of Shakespeare. There’s so much more you can say.” “That’s because Shakespeare went around inventing words,” he’d scoff. “But that’s exactly my point,” I’d counter. “Look how many more words English has than French.” He pooh-poohed this. “Toothbrush, flatiron, hamstring, fairytale - it’s just because you count compound words. That’s cheating.” “Serendipity, retch, doodle,” I parried. “Or how about silly? Your language doesn’t have a word for silly, for God’s sake.” “But that doesn’t stop us from being silly. Or describing it. We’re simply more efficient. We do more with less. Eventually, we’ll have reduced the whole of French down to a single, extremely expressive syllable. Like bah.” My husband may actually be right about this, but he’s got the wrong syllable. If I had to bet on French boiling down to one syllable I’d bet on doux, which, might be the most versatile word I know. This one little word can mean: sweet Imagine a language in which your baby’s hair, your lover’s gaze, the weather this afternoon, the pace at which you’re getting things done, the way you woke up, the breakfast you ate, the volume of the radio, your cat’s nap, and a million other things can all be described with a single word. Double it into two syllables – doudou – and it becomes your child’s security blanket, a nickname for your lover, a way to describe a cuddly person. Roll it over your tongue a few times and it fancies up into douillet, adding coziness and luxuriance to the mix. Doux is so shy and unassuming, and yet so powerful. If the meek shall inherit the earth and language is slowly distilling itself down into a single super-syllable, let this be the one.
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Friday, October 14, 2011Never a dull moment
While looking around for a good translation for the French verb "deciller" (which, literally, means "to make someone regain his lucidity") I learned that "ciller" means "to sew shut the eyelids of a bird of prey for training purposes." (The little guy to your right does not approve.)
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Monday, October 10, 2011French vocabulary no. 1: La Recup'
Récuperer is the verb with which you regain possession, use, or enjoyment of something spent, lost, left, lent, or entrusted to someone else. Like its English colleague, recuperate, it comes from the Latin: re – back – and capere – take. It comes to the rescue, gives you time off to compensate for hours worked overtime, neutralizes potentially opposed ideas, and heals the sick and injured. Most of all, it gives new life to objects that would otherwise go in the trash. The French language has subjected this verb to its own treatment and made it into a noun to describe and categorize both the things you have recovered, reclaimed, or rescued: la récup’. La récup’ is a also a pastime, a calling, a matter of pride. This makes Alba’s dump quite the hotspot. The village employs someone whose official job it is to make sure you toss your trash in the right place. Unofficially – but much more importantly in the eyes of the village – she keeps an eye out for anything that can be récupéré. If you are a real regular, you can place orders with her, and she will keep an eye out for the things you need. Going to the dump is an event in and of itself, and quite often you come back with as much stuff as you went to throw away. Even businesses in Alba participate in la récup’. When I waitressed at La Petite Chaumière, La Roche’s only restaurant, people recuperated dry bread for their horses; we kept all our wine corks for someone who made cork insulation, and we saved all our bottle caps for reasons I have yet to understand. The butcher will set aside the plastic buckets he orders olives and mayonnaise in if you are looking for free containers, and Charlie, who raises goats and sells their cheese at the market, will save the whey to wash your face in if you ask him. I recently phoned Marco, our grocer, to ask if he had any fresh cilantro, and he exclaimed, “You should have called five minutes ago! I just threw it out. You want me to fish it out of the garbage for you?” “Sure,” I said. “Si tu penses que je peux la récuperer – if you think I can rescue any of it.” “It’s on the top,” he assured me. “I’ll be right there.” Transposed into English, an epicerie would be spicery - a place that sells spices. Epiceries have existed since the middle ages, when they actually sold only spices. They evolved into dry-goods stores in the 19th century, and now an epicerie is a small grocery store. In the city, an epicerie is like a bodega, a place you go when you forgot something at the real grocery store, but in a village, it’s all you’ve got. Alba has two of them. They both have actual titles, but everyone refers to them as the epicerie d’en bas and the epicerie d’en haut, the grocery store down there and the grocery store up there. The grocery store down there has a dull, oversanitized feel to it, and though the owners are nice, almost no one goes there unless the grocery store up there is closed. The grocery store up there is a tiny cavern crammed with just about everything you could possibly ever need, from cotton balls and kitty litter to organic hair conditioner, locally grown heirloom tomatoes, even fresh cilantro. It is cool, dimly lit, and twice as long as it is wide. The checkout counter is beside the door, and there is nearly always a traffic jam in front of it. To get in you have to jostle past tourists picking out postcards, children gazing longingly at the toy shelf, and grandmas at the register waiting for Marco or Béatrice, the owners, to loosen a jar lid for them or count out their change. When I arrived Marco was issuing instructions to a customer on how to fry the tiny spring artichokes he had in from a farmer in the Vaucluse. The line was backed up all the way to the produce bins. I caught his eye and he handed me a bundle of damp paper towel. “I sorted it out for you and rinsed it off,” he said with a wink. “Good as new.” When I got home I heard a jingling from our neighbor’s terrace, which forms a bridge over the street between her house and ours. “Yoo-hoo,” she called down. “You want a toy for your baby?” She shook a large yellow and red ball with a bell trapped inside of it, and it jingled again. “Sure,” I said, and she tossed it down to me. I fingered a place where the plastic had broken in just the right shape for Estelle to put in her mouth and cut herself. “It came with the cathouse,” she told me. “Wash it before you use it.” By Alba standards, at least compared to some, I am not a real recuperator. I freely admit that I threw our neighbor’s broken cat toy out. Our friend Silvann, on the other hand, is a pro. When Julien and I bought our house (you talk about something that needs recuperating), he took Julien to the dump to celebrate. They returned with two sinks for our house, one for the kitchen and one to recycle into a vessel sink for the bathroom. Silvann had collected an array of items, including some chairs for his garden, a wall-mounted sculpture of cherubim playing around a fountain, and a metal funerary urn. “Who would throw out a funerary urn?” I wondered. “Well, once you scatter the ashes, what are you going to do, keep it on top of your television?” Silvann pointed out. “What are you going to do with it?” “I’ll find a use for it,” he said, with a dreamy look. That afternoon, we all went to the trou de Saint Jean to go swimming. A trou is a hole; in the Ardèche there is no need to specify it is a swimming hole. The path to the river was lined with blackberry cane spilling down the hillside in treacherous curtains and prickly tufts of dark purplish green, brimming with ripe fruit. On the way back from our swim we were all hungry, and straggled out along the path to eat the berries, the adults holding up the children so they could reach the fat and juicy ones higher up. I don’t know whether it was too many blackberries, or the hot sun and the cold water, or way Françoise and Silvann’s van swayed and clattered on the mountain, but suddenly, out of the lazy August afternoon silence, Jaëlle, their seven-year-old daughter, called out that she was going to be sick. We all scrambled for a receptacle, or even a towel, and just like that, la récup came to the rescue, and Silvann found a use for his funerary urn. Photos: this may look like a pile of rubble, but it is full of stones that we sorted out for Julien to use when he added height to the streetside facade. (Can you see where the new part of the wall begins?)
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Tuesday, September 6, 2011it poured this weekend, the figs have all burst from the humidity, and I'm hunting around for just the right story to tell...
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Monday, July 18, 2011When in RomeA little over a thousand years ago, the Romans chased Alba's inhabitants off of their little hill and across the River Escoutay. They built an outpost of their empire on the plain below the village, which became a thriving city, with a forum, luxurious homes, a temple, baths, and a 3,000-seat theater.
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Friday, July 15, 2011Big topYes, that is a circus tent in our back yard.
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Thursday, July 14, 2011Happy Bastille DayHere in France we call it La Fête Nationale, or just July 14.
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