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.
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.
IT'S AN EXPAT THINGWhat happened to Francey Pants the past two weeks?
Nothing and everything. The usual.
Heretofore, I've avoided posting unless I had a real, semi-researched article with a legitimate point at the end, a nugget of information that might be helpful to another person living on the planet, or, hopefully, in France.
Of course, sometimes the point is in the middle. Or, often, it's at the beginning and then I appear to forget about it until, gotcha!, I bring it all full-circle, baby. Then there are the times I only think I've made a point, but the point is: I prefer to have a point.
But that, in a nutshell, has become my problem. I've been wandering around – and posting here today, just as an illustration – pointless.
I just hate when that happens.
This pointlessness is often referred to by another name: job-hunting. This is what job-hunting in France has taught me so far. It ain't much. It takes a lot of your time and it's a bit confusing.
But I have figured out the source of my confusion, which is a start. I thought I was befuddled because "It's a great, big world. With lots of places to run to." But it turns out I have been lost because "It's a small world, after all."
You may continue reading, safe in the knowledge that I am not about to conclude that Life is a Disneyland Ride instead of a Tom Petty Song.
That may very well be true, of course – I wouldn't argue with you if you wanted to say that – but it's not my conclusion.
IT'S AN EXPAT THING I often refer to Americans in France as “immigrants” rather than expatriates; legally speaking, we have more in common with new arrivals from Morocco than from the UK.
Newly arrived Americans, even those married to French people, are, like all non-Europeans, subject to France's increasingly rigid and time-consuming immigration laws; those who got here before 2005 have it easy compared to those arriving now.
For example, Americans and other immigrants must now sign the contrat d’accueil and prove their competence in French. (I have a friend who recently took this test. First question on the oral: demonstrate your ability to buy cheese in a store. Apparently camembert is essential vocabulary to survive in France.)
The analogy occurred to me again recently reading a story about a couple from Kyrgyzstan struggling to take root in France. The story talked about how they too have had to learn food vocabulary and the code de la route, just like me and my friends did.
But the story ended with the wife declaring proudly that France is their country now and that they would never go back. And that was where I stopped identifying. I'm tempted to go back right now to live the Obama years.
IT'S AN EXPAT THING I've been doing a lot of serious reading about intercultural communications lately. "Serious" in the sense of using vocabulary that's hard for me to incorporate into casual conversation: ethnocentric v. ethnorelative, deductive stereotypes v. inductive stereotypes, stuff like the "Perry Scheme of Cognitive and Ethical Development".
"Serious" too in the sense that I'm taking it all very seriously; in fact, I have developed an ambition of becoming a professional intercultural communications consultant.
Which, it turns out, may mean teaching people to not behave like myself.
Because all of my newfound knowledge – and perhaps my dream of a spanking-new career – went out the window within five minutes of stepping foot in Charles de Gaulle airport.
Here I have been cultivating a view of myself as highly ethnorelative, well into the fifth "adaptation" stage of the Development Model of Intercultural Sensitivity.
But five minutes of breathing air in Roissy revealed me as a screaming banshee of an ethnocentric, a walking guidebook of inductive stereotypes with the vocabulary of a drunken sailor (albeit in two languages.)
IT'S AN EXPAT THING It's a New Year: time to get it together. And I mean right now, this very second.
I wrote myself a to-do list earlier this week. At the top of the list: Write a thank-you email to Polly.
I had met with her in early December and she'd given me career advice. Also tea. Also her stories. Also her precious time.
Also a long reading list…she took research quite seriously. "You just must read this one. It's an absolute essential!" she'd exclaimed.
I'd put off sending the thank-you note because I wanted to have read something on the list and shown her that I'd done my homework. I wanted to play the good student.
But her time was too precious to keep spending it on this world. She died on December 26 in Vienna – in a country she'd just told me she'd never liked but with her children she adored – of what must have been a galloping pneumonia. I learned of it yesterday. At 81, she was in great form the first week of December: funny, generous, full of plans for selling more copies of her book.
I never sent my thank-you note.
But she'd told me nice things about Francey Pants. So I'll write it here.
IT'S AN EXPAT THING I have done the math and I may well be the whitest person I know, having a scored a whopping 88 out of 117 on the Full List of Stuff White People Like.
Here I am going on and on about being an expat when all along all I am is a white person who lives in a foreign country. And so are you.
Recognize yourself in the Top 10? #10 Wes Anderson Movies #9 Making you feel bad about not going outside #8 Barack Obama #7 Diversity #6 Organic Food #5 Farmer’s Markets #4 Assists #3 Film Festivals #2 Religions their parents don’t belong to #1 Coffee
But expats, it turns out, may even be Whiter than White People Who Stay Home; in fact, if I knew the guy who did this list, I would recommend Living in France for the list.
I can't tell how I feel about the fact that my children are quick replacing my French mother-in-law as my personal Expat Spirit Guides, my own picture windows into French culture. Part of me is grateful for their insight and fodder for this blog and part of me thinks: how did these two short French people get into my house and why am I doing their laundry?
Just this week, for example, I cooked a meal they actually enjoyed. This in itself is an event worth noting. But they were extremely laudatory about this meal, effusive in their praise, my cup runneth over with culinary compliments.
In my Francey Pants "inaugural address", I described the French using the expression "world-class pickers of nits". I did not then know that these words had the power of prophecy.
Two weeks later, "nit-picking" has now joined the list of expressions I will never be able to use again without flinching. Also, I won't be looking through anything with a fine-tooth comb any time soon, possibly ever again.
You get to an age where you think you've done the rounds of common medical afflictions, where you think you've faced the fact that your own body is destined to repeatedly fail and repel you.
But France has expanded my horizons in so many ways, including learning the vocabulary for discussing Athlete's foot with my pharmacist while a long line of people waits behind me pretending not to listen to the foreigner trying to explain that she has Athlete's foot and not a vaginal yeast infection.
(The word mycose is used in both scenarios. And in France, thanks to the carte vitale, God bless it, there's always a line in the pharmacy no matter how long you lurk outside trying to time it to curtail eavesdropping opportunities.)
And yet, nothing prepared me for the arrival of the poux (pronounced as in Winne the…)
