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.
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| 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 5th 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
