c'est trop bien!

 

The Pipotame (aka, Progeny) really made great strides with his French this summer. He loved his French summer camp, though I didn't hear the kids speaking French very often. But one day he came out of his classroom gurgling, 'rrrrruh rrrrruh rrrrrruh' with a perfectly French 'rrr' sound, and I knew we had it made.

Three weeks in Corsica/Paris with his older sister sealed the deal. By week two, he was running around exclaiming, 'oh, c'est trop bien!' (oh, that's too great!) whenever something worthy of childish delight occurred. He ran with the village summer kids and was accepted. He tried to communicate with them in French, and absorbed any corrections we made to his grammar without a blink, but he rarely made the same mistake more than twice. Pretty great for a three year old.

The French have a pretty strict view of how children should behave by a certain age. When he was 1.75 (that's one and three-quarters years old, for you traditionalist writers out there), we were in Paris for Christmas. Nico and I had severe upper respiratory infections (can you say, walking pneumonia, mama? I thought you could. At least the Boo was just snotty), so we went to the doctor's. Nico didn't want to see her, and was clingy and a bit loud about the whole thing. So she proceeded to read me the riot act about how he was 'too spoiled' and I needed to cut the apron strings right then. When she finally wound down, I protested that he wasn't even two yet. She looked at the forms we'd filled out, and hemmed a bit. She retracted her statement and allowed as how his behaviour was perfectly acceptable, but that by three, I should make sure he's grown out of it.

Oh please.

But at least she looked momentarily embarrassed about it.

So folks would raise their eyebrows at some of his antics. My inlaws and husband were less than sympathetic to his tantrums in the first week. I tried to explain to them: he just left his American grandparents, we had a long flight over and missed our plane to Corsica (very upsetting for the Boo, who wanted his papa), and now he's jetlagged and thrown into a culture where he must speak a language he has never used for communicating, in a completely new place, with a whole new set of rules and tons of people to deal with. He's a little overwhelmed!! Cut him some slack.

The inhabitants of the village stopped raising their eyebrows once they found out he was only three. See, my guy is big, and composed, and coordinated, for his age. His great-grandmother H. thought he was four or five. Most folks do.

He started pretending to talk on his toy telephone. In French. He talks in his sleep. In a mixture of French and English. When he doesn't know a word in French, he says the English one with an over the top French accent.

But the best was the elevator. At his mami's apartment in Paris, the elevator is this antique, glass and wood closet with double doors and a little green fold down seat. And every time we went out, I asked him to do what the little black button said to do: appelle l'ascenseur. And every time I said that, Nico did what I asked. His little boy voice would pipe up and call out, 'Ascenseur!! Ou tu es?'

Because I'd asked him to call the elevator. 

Humans amaze me

 


I recently had reason to ask for help from a community of women I once knew in DC. The response was overwhelming. Generous beyond all hope. Encouraging and uplifting beyond all reckonning. Everything I needed was offered, without strings, without admonition, without judgement.

All I want to do is be able to return the favor some day.

We leave Paris tomorrow to go back to Sharjah. The boo starts school at l'ecole francaise. He's speaking a mixture of French and English in his sleep now. He has lost his little American accents and gargles the french rrrrr in the back of his throat like a native. I've eaten my fill of crepes and french baguettes, dined with the scintillating Tour Eiffel in my sights, and had some of the most difficult conversations of my entire life in the entirely benign and charming atmosphere of the quintessential Parisian Cafe. I have taken my amino acids religiously, and have knelt at the altar of calm and serenity in stressful times. My heart is clear, my head is full of possibilities, and I'm dreaming of Thanksgiving already.

Thank you. Thank you. 

Summer in Paris

 

An extraordinary delight, the Jardin de Tuileries is a great place to stop after stuffing your head full of all things ancient and artsy at the Louvre. One final, near perfect day in Paris en famille, I took the kids to the Louvre to see the mummies (cats and crocodiles and sheep, o my!) and the sarcophages. We toured the whole of the Egyptian exhibits, then stopped for un sandwiche au jambon et fromage, un petit gauffre nature (that's plain old waffle with a bit of sugar ifyou know what I mean) for each of the petits; a juice for them, a cafe au lait for me, and a balcony view of all those tourists secretly searching for the Rosetta Stone to unlock all the myserious allegations of The Davinci Code. Then off to the Jardin for some car zooming and some bungee trampoline jumping... a magical flight through the air, a perfect cone of mango gelatto, an exhausted wander back up to the metro.

The Louvre was my son's first experience with a museum where he didn't know what was going on. Usually, we go see dinosaurs, or mammals, or space ships and planets. He didn't know what to make of all that Egyptian stuff. Time for another trip to the bookstore, methinks.

Would that there were more days like these. I don't want to have to become an expert on some other sort of life. 

goodbye Tomino

 

Well loved and dreamed, the village is behind us now, a postcard from Paris under rainy skies.

I am liking Paris again.

The Louvre is amazing as always. 

corsica

 

the best thing about the village is that the children run free. No cars. Few bumps and bruises at the end of the day. Even a three year old can go where his heart takes him.

He's not my baby any more. I'm so proud to be his mama. 

broad brush strokes of a place loved

The ascent to Tomino is not for the faint of heart – or of stomach. Viscious switch-backs fold the road upon itself in a zigzag reaching ever higher towards the summit. The terrain is unforgiving, and unforgivingly beautiful, and your eyes are drawn ever to the view that lurches and swoops beyond the windows. Everywhere you look the ground is terraced with low, rambling walls of shale climbing the hillsides, shaded by groves of old, twisted olive trees or abundantly draped with grape vines. There is no bright green to greet the eye with gladness; a fine powder of thin soil covers the rocks, brushes the leaves, dulls what the sun would polish to a high shine.

The village: piled willy nilly on top of one another, tiny villas wedged into every available space, stacked on the hillside like a pile of suitcases waiting to be filled. The sunlight leaves no doubt as to shadow and light, edges slashed clean and clear, no hazy middle ground.

Children scattering before you, intent on their sun and stone games, running wild through avenues so close that two outstretched arms brush the villas on either side, dancing through the inscrutable politics of childhood played out on the streets of summertime.

Everyone complains about le mistral, a force of nature recently descended upon the mountainside, fury whipping the Mediterranean into a whitecapped frenzy, the flowering laurels bending to the ground, a flaxen-haired gamine playing with her tati’s pashmina, arms raised, exhilaration in a makeshift sail on the wind, flying along the ground that feet barely touch. The habituants of Tomino trade easy stories back and forth about these mighty winds that come and go in a matter of days, but leave an indelible imprint on the old timers’ memories. They complain about le mistral in the same even-mannered tone with which they lamented the heat the wind had vanquished: weather bashing as the village sport.

tomino. cap corse. starving eyes and wild heart to drink them in.