My son asked me to play catch with him the other night. I was utterly charmed. All that peanut butter I'd been applying to keep him glued to his American roots – you are what you eat, right? – is really paying off. I thought.
So I cheerfully headed towards the storeroom where we keep the expensive leather baseball mitts I'd imported in my suitcase a few summers ago.
"No Mama, we can play here inside. Look I moved the chairs."
"Honey, don't be a cuckoo head. You can't play catch inside."
"Sure we can Mama! We might hurt ourselves if we play outside," responded my son, slightly smugly, suddenly, and surprisingly, the very model of prudent and responsible comportment.
In March, I interviewed the Franco-American Miss France – the first Miss France with dual nationality – for expat monthly The Connexion. My contract stipulates that I can't reprint the original here but I invite you to check it out on The Connexion's site.
I think my original read better…they chopped it up a bit for space. That's why the Web is either a superior medium or the final frontier of the intellectually self-indulgent, take your pick.
Postscript on this story: I didn't get to include as much of my interview with Brenda Mortaud, Chloé Mortaud's mother, as I would have liked…again, with the space problem.
This may be my last post for a while, maybe the last one in your lifetime, actually, if this job I'm chasing comes through.
On the other hand, maybe you've already read my Great American Novel that I wrote before you were born or my classic memoir based on my professional experiences as a time-traveler.
We'll have to see. It's an exciting opportunity though, so wish me luck.
This is an unofficial warning to all potential American travelers to metropolitan France of a new ruse used by continental pickpockets in their pursuit of fat, traveling American wallets: a false display of enthusiasm for the new American president followed by a phony congratulatory hug. Followed by the real disappearance of said wallet.
Francey Pants is trying a new format today: a short story. It doesn't really go with anything else on this site, but I'm posting it here because it's my blog and I can. In fact, I've been sitting on several of these for a while now, but I've been afraid to post them. I've been afraid to do anything with them at all. So, if you have fair-minded critiques, that's great and you should feel free to append them here as comments – I welcome your opinions – but do it in the knowledge that it was hard for me to publish this. I don't know why. Actually, that's a lie: I do know why. But I'm not going to say it.
