Road Trip

Road Trips. How I love them.

I still don't have a licence, but I totally and completely buy into the dream of the American open road. Manifest Destiny! Capital F Freedom! I used to be surprised at the sameness of the views from the highways- long wide stretches, plains and hills, shades of green and gold and brown, occasional livestock...- but when you spend hours, really hours, looking out the windows you realize that it's not a sameness, but a slow creeping change. It's the middle. The in-between. Not quite all-the-way change, but a range of shades. I think that this is what makes it different from driving for hours on end in France or Spain or England or Germany. Eventually, in Europe, you hit a border. Here, our interstate misses the distinction that different countries can lend. I mean, when you cross the border into Switzerland, you know it. There are places you have to stop and talk to people in official-looking hats and suddenly all the houses look different. On US highways, difference is couched in similarity. Maybe what I like isn't the idea of discovering a new world, but some secret inside expanse of an existing one. One with rest stops.

Granziella's

I love rest stops. I love the weird non-space you find in the square-mile indoors of Granziella's and the freeway-side taco stands. I love the people at rest stops who linger because they want to be where they're going but they really want an excuse to stand and roam freely through olive bars and plastic-molded picnic tables and surprise regional specialties. 

I got the opportunity to go North with the band I've been singing with. Hernandez Hideaway took two cars for its six members, and we headed from El Cerrito to Eugene early morningish after a Tuesday night rehearsal. Hit the road around 9 and rolled at least a good 20 minutes before stopping for gas. It was, of course, only the beginning.

One thing I dig about road trips is that the non-space gets filled by all this frivolous and sometimes sneakily important stuff. You get to consume things you wouldn't touch otherwise. It's like everywhere you stop is that island Pinnochio goes to where everything is deliciously sinful and you know you have to leave before you get too drawn in. Our violin player bought at least two bags of  Pork Skins. A liter of Huckleberry milkshake did it for our bassist, whose temple-bodied organic farmer hands gripped that styrofoam monolith so smoothly, so lovingly. Fritos and Original flavor Corn Nuts for our trombonist. Egg-cheese-sausage biscuits for our saxophonist and accordionist. I don't remember where we were when I saw the Pop Tarts Ice Cream Sandwich. Washington? I only regret that it was breakfast time. Taste America.

We hit the Dairy Queen, Subway, a roadside taco stand, a diner with a picture of Not The Biggest Dog but Close on the register and an EAT sign out on the road, and a decent handful of truckstops equipped with showers and car-maintenance aisles and, inexplicably, display cases of blown-glass collectibles. These were not the highlights of the trip. Of course. We made a fire in the dark in Oregon and drank beer and roasted marshmallows. We dipped our wiggling toes in the river and our naked bodies in the boiled-egg smelling hot springs. We greeted people in Portland and Seattle and a lovely spot called Gig Harbor and played music in bars and danced and celebrated a wedding and ran amuck in new venues and with old friends. That was great, lovely, the REAL point of the trip. But for me, it was during those shared moments in the cars and booths and gas pumps that I felt like we were growing together. Girl talk in the gear-stuffed but so much more comfy 4x4. Conversations in the front seat of the sedan about family and music and choices and directions and bug corpses on the windshield. Pillow organization in the backseat, the naming and slow consuming of Mister Cabbagehead, who rode all the way up but only  part of the way back down.

Mister Cabbagehead. In memoriam.

And all that bonding between important moments gets stored like so much LSD in the fat cells generously provided by the wonderfully nutritionless stuff we put in our bellies. She may forget the conversation about surprise adulthood and life changes, but it will live on in the 5 pounds she gained on the six day trip. Just like you can build memory into muscle, I think road trips whip up a special kind of padding that shapes the way you see things, or at least the way you will hold yourself for a little while. Like some physical memory. A souvenir. I wonder if, when we burn off these calories, we'll tap into the same feeling of scenery flying by and similarity morphing into difference while the faces and profiles of our companions stay the same. 

Le temps qui passe.

The first time I came to France as a cognizant being I was fourteen, fresh out of my first year in high school, not at all ready for the jet lag that awaited me.

Nice. Promenade des Anglais.

I flew alone, from San Francisco to Nice. My uncle Michel picked me up, all rosy cheeks, bisous and curly brown hair, he looked enough like my father to put me at ease. Michel whisked me from the airport in a tiny white sedan to the apartment Mamie shared with Raymond. Here things get fuzzy. I know she had been preparing a big Mediterranean meal, with pissaladière and tomates mozzarella and salade niçoise and probably those fried zucchini flowers I haven’t found done right anywhere else. But all I remember now is silhouettes from her 5^th floor balcony, the cascading view from high up on the hill, on the city and way out there the water. There were all kinds of relatives there. I have an idea now who they were, but at the time I was reeling from nine hours in a plane and uninterrupted fast Niçois French, and it didn’t take long for me to check out malgré moi.

Beyond that, and this I was totally unprepared for, there I was fourteen and suddenly in a strange place with people who I didn’t know but was supposed to have this undeniable tie to. We weren’t close to my father’s family. He wasn’t close to them either, as far as I knew. My brother and I had gone to French school and could talk to the Dufforts once or twice a year when they called, and one of my uncles had visited years before with his two kids and my grandmother, but aside from that my associations were all big yellow AirMail packages and vague photos I couldn’t really identify.

That day I crashed fast, and I crashed hard. I started speaking nonsense that wasn’t just linked to the language or the speed of native family-slang, I was talking jet fuel fumes. My speech leveled out, but that’s more or less how the narrative continued inside my head, during the month I spent as an adolescent playing at Prodigal Daughter.

For me, that month was a big deal. I met everyone, including Mémé, my ailing great-grandmother. I spent a week with my uncle Jean François and my older cousins Stephan and Fabien. They were so cool. Fabien brought me to little get-togethers with his friends and I tried to show them how hip I was, smoking hash out of bongs they made themselves from orange soda bottles, doing dishes because I thought that was what a French Girl would do. Being too cool for things and overjoyed at watching movies like La Femme Nikita and Les Bronzés with them, convinced that our matching toes were simultaneous-wiggling to some kind of genetic program. I spent another week with my uncle Michel and his wife Marie in her crazy Italian family compound between Nice and Cannes. He had his two kids, Vanessa and Maxime, the youngest in the family, so proud and shy and confused by my funny accent. The trip was confusing and wonderful, and I realize now it was a major turning point. A coming of age. A realization of this whole other life. Of this whole other world.

It would be the only time I would ever meet Mémé. The only time I would ever spend time with Michel, who passed away not too many years later from lung cancer and left a wound in the family that would never really heal. I lived in France for almost nine years, but the value of that initial trip never hit me as hard as it did on this last one. My first trip back since returning to San Francisco. There are a lot of other things to talk about, but first I want to talk a little bit about the south, about family and time and everything.

This time back, I planned my trip around Vanessa’s wedding. That knock-kneed girl all grown up.

Tat. Nice.

The day before the ceremony, JF and Mireille (his partner) and I went to visit Tat, Mamie’s sister, in Nice. Tat’s place smelled like Mamie’s. Her stairway smelled like Roquebillière, the mountain village they grew up in, and her furniture and knick knacks were of that same old, heavy, curling varnished style loved by those over 60, especially those coming from the countryside into the Big City. She looked like Mamie, a younger version, less Oh Mais, more Ah Bon, but still. She is her sister, after all. And we stole her away from her husband Francis, who wanted to save his energy for the wedding, and JF brought us all to a sumptuous rooftop on the water, with a view of the Negresco and the Mediterannean and the red-clay rooftops stretching up and away. Afterwards, we walked through the old town and I was floored by nostalgia. Floored by the sameness of it, from all those visits over all those years I'd spent living in Paris. Floored even by the tourist trap pizza terraces and the ice cream stands and the throngs of overdressed, glittering and brightly colored visitors in flip flops. Floored by the parallels of place and the divergence of context.

Grasse. Cathedral.

The next day, Vanessa was gorgeous. She wore this crazy dress I can’t imagine anyone else pulling off- with a see-through bodice and huge flurry princess skirt. She had little cousins dressed in white pulling her train on her way into the cathedral in Grasse. Maxime walked her in, so proud and adult in a beautiful tailored suit and rockabilly bouffante.

menu.

The party was amazing, the food was insane, but when it came time for the slideshow, memories of their childhood and the people who were no longer here, I was hit by this wave of unexpected emotion. Seeing pictures of Michel holding his daughter, seeing pictures of Mamie with her grandkids, realizing just how much 21-year-old Maxime resembled his dad, in personality and physique, thinking of my father and this double-separation, it took the wind out of me. I had to go outside. A woman approached me out by the hydrangea.

-Are you OK?

- Yeah. I’m just a little emotional. The pictures reminded me of a lot of things.

- Oh, I understand. They often have that effect.

And she touched my arm and left me alone. I guess that that moment, that private, hyper-sensitive moment, was somehow universal. Recognizeable even to a stranger.

 all grown up.

And, that moment, that crystalline bit of time and taking stock, I was totally unprepared for it. There I was, thirty-two and suddenly in this place I knew all too well, surrounded by people I had come to know and love, seeing their lives in relief. My cousins Fabien and Stéphan and now their wives and gorgeous kids, laughing in the background in formalwear. JF and Mireille quietly holding hands at the table. Vanessa and now Ludovic and Marie and Maxime, hugging and being loud and Italian and smiling that same smile I had seen a thousand times on them, on my father, on myself.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was probably aided a bit to tears by the open bar. But it’s rare to be overcome by a moment and what it represents, to see so much of life in one event. Rare for me at least.

So now I sit in a café in San Francisco, typing and re-writing. I’ve received the emails from family urging me to not lose touch. And I’ve gone through the conversations with dear friends that seemed so similar and yet so suddenly urgent. And I’ve passed that first landmark moment, of returning to a France that is no longer home, and then returning to a Californian home that seems so much more feasible than it did through a veil of empty uncertainty a year ago. And you know what? I feel ok. In some ways, cultivating multi-culturalism is a choice to house one’s heart in more than one place, and the benefits for me far outweigh the costs.

Run SF, Run

I thought I couldn't run the most well-known footrace in San Francisco because I had a softball game double-header. Turns out it wouldn't have made a difference, even the god-I-love-them nutters who jog Bay to Breakers get up at running time to hit the streets. But I didn't realize this until the night before, over mac and cheese and broccoli and sardines with my buddy Hanna. So I sat this one out, but the two of us made plans to set out early for coffee and looky-loo.

When I woke up at 8, I could already hear the cheers and the music from my open window. The race and follow-up frivolity goes by not so far from my spot on the southern side of Golden Gate Park's panhandle. That is, it turns out a half mile is not so far when it comes to this particular event.

Hanna and I got in touch and I went to get a coffee and wait for her on the corner of Divisadero and Fell. It was a gorgeous gorgeous day. I had put on sunscreen and my team jersey, planning to walk to the fields in time for my game. When I got there, I immediately regretted not rocking the more deliciously garish colors the B2B deserves.

In the twenty minutes I was on my own waiting for my friend, I got to watch the amazing people of my newly rediscovered hometown go by in droves. There were unicorns, toga groups, three sets of homemade MarioCart characters, pokemon, a gaggle of bright yellow chicks, and the usual hot girls wearing hot girl costumes. There was a band of Mormons with bike helmets who greeted each other excitedly in the street, blue-painted tighty whitey wearing guys with the white hats of smurfs (plus one in a yellow smurfette wig), and a group of at least twenty ghostbusters. There were more naked men than I had seen in all of my almost nine years in Paris. There were people dressed as Legos. There was an Italian guy from behind me who taunted the police officers as they stopped people and poured out glass containers into the gutter. "Wow, your job must be incredibly difficult today." 

I struck up a conversation with him and a girl standing next to me. Italian guy eventually wandered off, but she and I continued to muse over what Bay to Breakers is all about. "You must have done this a hundred times, being from the area and all." "No, actually, I've been away for a while in France." "France?? Why would you ever come back?" I looked at her blankly and then gestured to the parade of ridiculous, wonderful people in front of us. It was easily the most satisfying answer I have ever been able to give to that question.

Hanna showed up and we walked up the route a bit to find some shade. We set down our stuff across from a makeshift garage DJ playing house and soul. We danced. She was done up a bit in tie-dyed leggings and running shorts. Again, I was jealous. We shouted out to all our favorite costumes:

- Tie-dye power!

- Yeah opera hats!

- Woohoo Mariachis!

- Right on guy in suit and rollerblades, way to commit!

- Bacon! Yeah! I don't even eat bacon and I love you!

- Marry me Michael Phelps! Nice swimmies!

- Pac Man!

- Juicing cyclists and their nurses!

- Jamaican bobsled team!

- Ostriches!

- Super buffed out dude with girl in fat suit!

- Another Jamaican bobsled team!

etc.

It was wonderful. We were there for about an hour and I then I had to go. My walking route to the field was about the same as the race route, so I got to see more chaos on the way. Including Alamo Square, with all the Full House colorful victorians and hundreds of merry makers. And hundreds going by. 

Next year I will get it together and run the race. There is something so appealing about doing something both athletic and ridiculous. Something encouraging silliness and community. Something so San Francisco. 

And frankly, I was impressed at the level of contained mischief. I had talked with a couple of very coppy looking cops a few days before. The two of them were drinking snob coffee in a hipster cafe and we chatted about the upcoming event. They said they were cracking down this year, but "Honestly, what are you gonna do? Aside from clearing away people who are too drunk to walk. Besides, we're at the bottom of the pay scale. It's just not worth it to keep people from having fun."

Turns out they did a good job. When I got back to Lyon St at the end of the day, no one was passed out in the front lawn. In fact, it didn't even smell like pee.

Reflection hebdomadaire

I was feeling kind of down the other day. 

"Meh, I said, stuff is kind of sucky and not going as I want. Maybe I should have stayed in France where the wine is cheap."

But then I started thinking about my week.

corn memorial

There was a half marathon in Humboldt where I reached a personal goal of mine and got to spend time cooking and eating and playing badminton and catch and innappropriately mocking a corn memorial with some super special people.

There was a pub quiz in which a our team was almost triumphant and they gave us free drinks just for being awesome.

panda and mr perfect

There was a baseball game where I got to cheer and sing my heart out and dance around in excellent company, reminded that winning is almost never everything, and group singing works best with 2000 people and a jumbotron.

There was an evening spent watching friends get riled up over a basketball game and heading home absurdly thrilled at being reunited with night-riding thanks to the discounted purchase of bike lights.

even the pre-show projections were rad.

There was some work, including two days of teaching hilarious fifth graders a variety of things, such as how to appropriately goalie-throw for maximum effect during dodgeball (or balle-aux-prisonniers depending on your linguistic preference), how to reconfigure fraction word problems so they don't seem so intimidating, and how to use Powerpoint.

There were amazing seats to a super nutty, scenically and theatrically creative ballet rendition of Cinderella that juiced me up for another run at writing for performance and allowed me to watch my mom and her boyfriend giggle.

There were a couple of glasses of lovely wine in a lovely secret garden backyard in lovely Hayes Valley, where the light filtered through the leaves in that way it has and we could still hear the sounds of the city just over the wall.

Funky Door Yoga on Waller 

There was the beginning of a Bikram Yoga series that kicked my butt and various other muscles and left me clamoring for more.

There was the best burrito I have ever tasted. Really.

There was Karaoke in the Chinese mall in El Cerrito, followed by a surprisingly satisfying hangout in the parking lot of a Mill Valley 7-11 that allowed me to deliciously relive my youth over orange flavored soda and Coke Zero.

mom's day hydrangea

There was Mother's day, and another ballgame with blue skies and garlic fries and a win this time, and the wonderful gift of being with family on one of those family holidays that you wouldn't travel across the country or the ocean for, one of those days that manifests its own importance by simple declaration, one of those days that in a string of days is a memory of time spent physically with people I love and haven't been able to passively be with for so long.

So, thanks California. Thanks for that. I feel better already.

A Brief Affair

We both knew it couldn’t last.

It had been a while since I tried my hand at a June/December romance. He was graying a bit, becoming squinty around the eyes. But so handsome, and worldly in that charming way of a gentleman who had lived.

People noticed us in the street. In the park, by the fountain and the cello player in front of the Academy of Sciences. Women would say hello. Men would recognize him, ask heartily who I was, pat him on the back. It was a little off-putting, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was happy.

He was wary at first, I think the ringing in his ears and his failing voice were beginning to make him question his virility. When a gentleman friend came to dinner with us, he puffed up. Defensive. Aggressive. Suspicious. Obstinate and demanding the next day, as I cleaned the dishes and he shuffled around underfoot.

He went through my belongings when I was out too long. I would come home to the insides of my purse disturbed. On rare occasions, my things lay in pieces all along the hallway and into the room we shared. Ripped paper. Torn plastic. Mangled tubes of cocoa butter. What was he looking for? What did he find? Funny how the mind forgets and this particular memory fades.

Strange to think now of how we played house, how we slipped into the lives of people long intimate. The Inner Sunset provided a comfortable blanket of fog that cocooned us safely inside of our own story. A place I never frequented before meeting him. A place worlds away from the hippies and pit bulls of the Haight or the pigeons and hipsters of the Mission. Here he became imprinted on me. The deep pools of his brown eyes. The soft way in which he called to me. The bridge of his nose against the curve of my calf.

We walked together every day. Many times a day. At first it was just a little, around the block, to work up an appetite and a reason to go back home and feel warm again. But our strolls soon grew longer. We went into Golden Gate Park, visiting the baseball diamond and looking in at the botanical gardens. I was training for a race at the time, and was used to speeding through in washes of greens and blues and browns. But he insisted on stopping, to smell the grass and the flowers and who knows what magical things awaiting just off the pathway. He tugged at me. Taught me to take my time. To smell and taste.

We both had someone else. His was in Hawaii on what we had begun to think of as an unending vacation. She had introduced us, before taking flight. “So nice to see you two becoming friends,” she would later write, from some mysterious beach so many miles away as we sat on the deck, gazing sleepily at each other in the glow of the afternoon. Mine, of course, was across the bridge, having her own adventures in the decks and gardens and wide goose down beds of Mill Valley.

In the end, when our time was up, there were no long goodbyes, no drawn-out gazes. I went out as if I would return and he padded off into the yard, to do whatever it is the older set does when they are left to their thoughts. I don’t see him anymore, except for that one time I ran hurriedly through the house, feeling I’d missed something, when his eyes followed me passively as I rushed in and out of those few rooms, checking water and food dishes, certain I was leaving something behind.

I still think of him. I think of how warm he was and how his breath barely disturbed his ribcage as he slept, on his side. I’ve dreamt of him. I’ve dreamt of running on the beach and falling together in the sand. I wonder if he dreams of me sometimes, his feet grabbing at somnolent earth the way he did when his body would forget that separation between dream and reality. Dreaming of running. Calling, barking hoarsely in the night. The same way his name lingers on my lips in the morning when I think today would be a good day for a long walk. Two syllables: Cody. Cody who would never be mine but would always have a piece of me. 

Café

This is how acclaimed linguist Ray Jackendoff makes his morning coffee:

 This is how I make mine:

'nuf said.



First image from Jackendoff's article "Parallels and Nonparallels between Language and Music" in Music Perception. Vol 26, Issue 3, PP 195-204. 2009. 
Really, this is a representation of how a robot would make coffee, used to illustrate a more relevant connection between the structures of robotics (and I assume job-coding in general) and language than between the structures of music and language.

Second image resulting from my own text passed through online word-cloud creator Tagul. What a difference a visual representation makes, eh?

Ganache

The car was warm and the cake was heavy. Really, really heavy. Well, maybe it wasn’t the cake itself, the unmatched layers covered with beginning-to-drip ganache, maybe it was the two and a half inch butcher block we had somehow decided to carry it on. In any case, it was heavy, and my duty was to balance our creation (well, mostly Kate’s creation, but she was busy at the wheel) all the way to Monterey. And I was killing it.

We were going to Dre’s wedding, at the Naval Post Graduate School where she worked and had met her sweetie. The drive was two hours long, down the freeway and the coast past Santa Cruz, our university stomping grounds. It was a winding road, and I balanced the cake on the plane of my lap, working the centrifugal force by stacking left and right, keeping my side of the conversation going and the wedding cake intact.

the gown.

Probably, the cake would have survived regardless of my MarioCart-inspired acrobatics, but I wanted to feel that I had contributed just that much more. The week preceding, Kate and I had traveled down to see Dre and Peter, for his going-away party (in a UHaul full of DJ equipment, positioned open, facing the dolphins and seals and sunset of the bay). We had ended up in a pink champagne and Ben & Jerry’s fueled girls’ night arranging of Dre’s bridal costume, a gorgeously appropriate layering of classic lace and bright orange embroidery. Kate had volunteered our presence for the Big Little Day, and then her cake concocting for this last-minute affair.

Like other weddings of my international friends, this one had been pushed forward by the requirements of Green Cards and cross-continental travel. Peter is Swiss-Austrian, and the two of them would be Europe bound soon enough. The ceremony itself would be aptly silly. Complementing the bride’s orange gown, the groom would wear a lipstick kiss in all his wedding photos and, after the outdoor naval-base ceremony involving dancing and bubbles and singing along to Home Is Where You Are, we would all have to stop and freeze for the playing of TAPS.

It had been unexpected, this wedding. For me anyway. I had found out about the engagement some months before by phone outside in San Francisco’s financial district.

“I have something to tell you,” Dre had said, on speaker in her car during commute hours.

“What?”

“I’m getting married.”

“WHAT?”

“I’m GETTING MARRIED.”

“Hold on, I can’t hear you…”

“Ok, is that better?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah I think so.”

“I’m getting married.”

“WHAT?”

And so on.

marzipan  and construction paper.

But really, it’s that time. Kate had gotten married a year or two earlier, in a wedding filled with tiered cakes and mason jars, with forage-inspired floral displays and a mountain lodge retreat on the side of Mt Tamalpais, where the fog and wind whipped at all of us but my friend the bride looked so serene. There had been quite a few others. Mostly out-of-the-ordinary, non-religious, and with unmatched bridesmaids. The most traditional looking was secretly an open marriage, and the least- involving second and third takes, sheep, two bands and a jam session, a campfire, and a double teepee- has proven one of the strongest and longest so far.

So I suppose I am starting to evaluate things I had never considered. Maybe that’s why I would act a little weird once we arrived in Monterey. Maybe because of the couplings all around. Maybe because of her impending escape to the very place I had just left. Maybe because I was tired from drinking too much wine the night before while the Kitchenaid threatened to fling batter all over Kate’s linoleum, maybe because of uncertainty in the face of the surprising inevitability of Time Marching On.

Meanwhile though, I was working so hard to hold this now-intact velvety chocolate cake aloft, to prove my support for one of my closest friends’ great big decision, for everything that had happened before and would happen after. To prove my capacity for tackling a task at hand. So, every turn, I paid attention. I looked ahead. I anticipated motion and kept it all level. So that this cake would arrive and be beautiful and delicious and worthy of all the things I and we wanted for her. Worthy of her. And through the hilly expanse of agricultural Northern Califonia, flanked by cows and sheep and what would be artichokes, with my other best girl at my side and my stomach aching from laughter and travel, with a mind full of silly memories and the pushed-back feeling that things were changing regardless of me, with an extra towel just in case the ganache slipped, and a cup of coffee wedged in the door of the City Car Share rental: I had to feel like I was killing it. 

Pion

Pion- 1. (nm) pawn, piece, checker. 2. (nm/nf) person paid to supervise schoolchildren.

I have been working for a few months now as a substitute teacher in the French primary school I frequented when I was a kid. Originally, I applied to teach at the high school level, but my services were more useful, it seemed, with the little ones.

I interviewed with the director, a tall, imposing, well put-together man with impeccably cut white hair, wire-rimmed spectacles, and the occasional ascot. During my interview, I emphasized that I had years of experience teaching adults and university students English, and that ESL and History and French and Theater and Music and that kind of stuff would be fine, but I just wasn’t sure about Math and Science… He looked at me, raised an eyebrow, leaned in closer and said: “You realize this is a Primary School. You should be able to handle it.”

Well. He was wrong.

My first few 7AM calls brought me in to teach second grade, but, as I had surmised, I was somewhat useless at demonstrating the basic concepts of arithmetic to children. It seems that a ukulele and strong leaning towards play acting does not an improvised math teacher make, and I am suspicious that my fallbacks in this department have lessened the gigs lording over classrooms of the truly tiny. It may also have something to do with my inadvertent destruction of an expensive piece of equipment, a certain overhead-projected interactive computer screen that looked uncannily like the whiteboard next to it, but I digress. 

Now I am mostly called in to do Yard Duty. I am, as the French say, a pion.

In the book series Le Petit Nicolas, there is a famous pion. He is an imposing guy, brilliantly rendered by Sempé and Goscinny. He is always harrumphing around, googly-eyed, being pranked and generally inducing hilarity. I think of him often.

In reality, there are six to eight of us on the playground at any given time. We are not supposed to fraternize, lest we neglect out task of keeping the children safe. So, when the need for adult interaction becomes unbearable, we have to chat whilst stealing sideways glances at windows, exits, and each other. There is talk amongst the Surveillants (that’s what they call us- the Surveyors) that there is a spy among us, reporting back to the director at all time, but no one is sure. When he occasionally appears, we scatter, we kowtow, we say "Oui Monsieur".

Anyway, being a pion is kind of awesome. Basically my job is to hand out balls and jump ropes, clean up scrapes (but not remove splinters, this counts as surgery apparently and I am not qualified), and tell children not to tattle on each other.

“Noah called me a Lady Gagaface.”

“Well… Are you a Lady Gagaface?”

“No!”

“There you go. Problem solved.”

Because the school goes from nursery to 5^th grade, there is also the odd pre-adolescent murmur. Some of these are highly dramatic and require meetings with teachers and parents where I must recount embarrassingly inaccurate anatomical misconceptions, but more often than not the most challenging part of the job is maintaining a straight face when talking to a 4^th grade boy about the inappropriate aspects of the term “Little Jigglers”, explaining to a 2^nd grader why they should ask their parents about why a vagina is and yet isn’t “like an inside-out penis”, and generally discouraging the playing of “butt-tag”.

I am sadly not sure how much longer I can take it, however. I do love the kiddies. They are alternately adorable (saying-the-darndest-things, enveloping my legs with brazen hugs, language-leaping through to bilingualism), and maddening (playing who-can-hit-the-highest-pitch-screech, insisting they don’t need to go and then sobbing as their pants get wet, constantly stealing each other’s shoes). But I’m afraid of the side effects. Yes, I almost scolded a loudly arguing adult couple in front of Whole Foods yesterday. Yes, I nearly confiscated a tube of lipstick from a teenager in the street this morning. But what if it goes further? What if, against so many years of Higher Education and Literature and Music, I am reduced to bitterly harrumphing like a Goscinny character? What if my lines go two-dimensional and all I can do is rip exciting things out of children’s hands “Because I said so”? I shudder to think that once you go pion, you never go back.

On the plus side though, my paper airplanes are getting WAY better.

Epicurean Regression

oooh... stock image

After six months of re-American life, I started to feel the hankering for French things again. I had been staying away from them: not looking at pictures of Paris (more difficult to avoid than one might think), not interacting too much with the people I left behind, avoiding bakeries. But about a month ago I found myself ordering a (disappointing) croissant in a cafe. Selecting brie instead of pepper jack. Reverting to "pardon" when I bumped into people by mistake. It seemed I was ready to confront the France that I missed in a more direct, need I say visceral, way.

It began at Christmas, when a friend flew back a box of macarons. Those little delicate cookie creations, vibrant colored crackling puffs sandwiching fragrant creams and jellies in flavors like Vanilla Olive Oil, Hazelnut Cocoa Bean, Moroccan Mandarin, Rose and Lavender... I ate them almost exclusively at night. In bed. Guiltily cheating on my homeland and its Oreos.

I began having cravings for French food. Some of these were satisfied by the family friend with whom I'm staying, a woman who has learned from three decades of marriage to a Frenchman how to simply, matter-of-factly concoct the perfect tarte aux pommes, to make pate à choux rise just so, and to flavor everything with cream and butter. She also makes killer chocolate chip cookies, but I digress. Regardless of Priscilla's kitchen prowess, what I really wanted was escargot.

My date and I got dolled up on a Wednesday and headed to the inner Richmond for a night of inner richness (ha ha ha). He was excited. Ordered a town car. He had never had snails before and was raring to go. He was not disappointed. 

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It is difficult to mess up escargot. The traditional recipe exists essentially as an excuse to consume butter perfumed with garlic and parsley, but oh, it is so so good. Especially helped out with a glass or two of Sancerre. We had oysters too, with red wine vinegar mignonette, and then I had bouillabaisse and there were digestifs and a complimentary apple tart (not as good as Priscilla's)... I was in heaven. I was in fake Paris. I knew it was fake because a female French customer told us we looked fabulous.

But that wasn't enough. I needed more invertebrates. For my birthday Kate took me up the coast to Tomales Bay, where we sat in the freezing cold sunshine (ah, Northern California winters) and I learned to shuck, shuck, shuck my little heart out. My dear friend knew just what to do. She brought champagne, a spread of cheeses, lemons, and a beautiful baguette. I thought of my uncle Jean François and the mountains of oysters we put away during the holidays in Toulouse, of my first bivalve off the coast of Brittany, of my father and his skilled wielding of the blunt, heavy-handled knife. Kate and I ate ours raw, of course, all 36 of them. I looked at the families around us, many foolishly barbecuing their little gems of the sea, and scoffed.

Then the next day I reviewed the places on Yelp, had a burrito,  and everything went back to normal.

Can You Handel It?

Georgie Handel himself

Christmas time has come and gone. New year's day as well. Now, a time to reflect, to ponder, to look forward with the wisdom of another year. A time to ask such burning questions as: Why could I not find a Sing-Along Messiah in San Francisco??

For the last decade or so, I have been able to belt out yearly Hallelujah choruses and ridiculous melisma, sometimes accompanied by baroque orchestras, sometimes by solo organ. I have been able to socially breeze across voices in a hodgepodge of choir-members and weekend singers, singing alto with my lower-voiced buddies, soprano I with the high pipers, outside of the restrictions of "rehearsal" and "assigned parts". More often than not this happened in the American Cathedral on George V, led by a spirited choir director expertly hiding fear of losing the reigns of the packed and weighty-voiced house. 

As I was on the board of the Paris Choral Society, I was charged with getting the word out, and I always depended on touting the grand tradition of a Handel's Messiah Sing-Along to a susceptible French audience. But it appears I was full of lies. Did I make it up? Is singing the Messiah alongside a trained choir not a thing we do in the States?

PCS Sing-Along in action

I was certain that some opportunity to whip out my well-worn sheet music would come along. But no. Oh, there were plenty of Messiahs out there, but I couldn't find a single one that would encourage the audience to join in. Perhaps I was not sufficiently observant, but I was nonetheless outraged. I didn't want to LISTEN. I wanted to EMOTE VOCALLY. I took to singing it from beginning to end as I walked through the city. I put it on at every opportunity, hoping to spark a flash-mob. 

But it didn't happen. I was reduced to attempting to get my family humming on Christmas Eve, to no avail. I suppose America is not quite what my rose-colored memory retained.

Although, since this is a choral-oriented post, one thing San Francisco HAS offered in that realm was a FABULOUS semi-amateur choir rendition of Orff's Carmina Burana (of car commercial and pop canon fame). I attended because a friend was singing, and was delighted. The singing was nice, the orchestra too, but the best part was the showmanship. During O Fortuna (the big one A-AAh A-AAh, A-AAh A-AAh, A-AAh-a-aah- AAh. AAh. AAh), the singers held tiny LED flashlights to their faces as if telling ghost stories. During the Tavern movement (basically about men drinking in the tavern and how great it is), the choir shined the same lights through what looked like owl masks at the audience. Fabulous. Oh, and the soloists had three costume changes each. Including the tenor, who made all his onstage during his one dying-swan aria. 

When we performed Carmina Burana in Paris, I remember having to wear flowers in my hair, but that was it (well, it's possible the male choristers sported potato sacks, but maybe I made that up). Our crowning glory was found in the flurry of young modern dancers in colorful leotards that came in and out of the aisles during instrumental movements. The San Francisco Choral Society? Same dancers. From the Champs Elysées to Davies Hall, semi-pro choral scene brings kitsch and swooping drama. Wonderful, comforting consistency. My heart is a little warmer for it. 

Hallelujah.