DREAMING IN FRENCH . . .

This is the fourth of four "feuilletons" that I wrote for The Milton Times.  (This one appeared on August 15th.)

Usually, my wife and I believe that we’re being spied on by the cartoonist who draws the syndicated comic strip “Arlo and Janis.”  Everything from Janis’s multitasking on her cellphone to Arlo’s approval of his wife’s sleepwear and his attentiveness to his cat seems to have been lifted straight from our domestic life.  Some days we wonder whether the strip has pirated our identities or whether we are actually stealing from the cartoonist’s script.

This past March and April, though, we were sure that the creator of another syndicated comic strip, “Stone Soup,” had her spy cam trained on us.

In fact, that spy cam followed us to Paris where, just like the couple in that strip, Joan and Wally, we were looking for a brief release from our wonderfully ordinary suburban life.  We wanted to step out of the comfortably familiar and slip into something more . . . romantic.  But also something more adventurous.  With the college tuitions for our three daughters pretty much behind us, we were ready to embark on the midlife version of their study abroad programs in a foreign language in a foreign land.  By some lucky alignment of the planets, we were able to put on hold our life in Milton and environs and live for two full months like Parisians.

My wife’s life as a Parisian involved taking French language classes every morning.  Mine involved the all-American fantasy of trying to imitate Ernest Hemingway, who described looking out over the roofs of Paris and thinking: “All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”  Bon chance!

Living like Parisians also meant that we bought oven-hot baguettes (as often as three times a day) at our neighborhood boulangerie, we shopped for farm-fresh produce and newly-butchered meat at our local twice-weekly outdoor market, we sat in cafés sipping espressos and watching all the beautiful people go by, and we enjoyed dining and red-wining no earlier than 8 o’clock each evening—very civilized.

But in some ways our life was as touristy as Joan and Wally’s.  We visited museums and churches.  We took long walks along the Seine.  Time even slowed down the way it does in a comic strip.  (The characters in “Stone Soup” have aged only two years in the two decades that the strip has existed.)  After all, we had no pressing responsibilities.  I thought about buying a clarinet and learning to play “La Vie en Rose” for coins on the Metro.  Some days our Parisian life seemed no more “real” than those comic strip characters who appeared to be imitating us step by step.

But what made it “real” was the adventure—well, the challenge—of getting through every day in a language in which neither of us was fluent.  Rising to that challenge made us feel more vital and more energetic than we had for years.  We actually felt younger.  Whether reading street signs or ordering “Le Carnivore” in a crêperie, we had to be constantly alert, engaged, tuned in.  Very early in our stay, my wife managed to explain to a cordonnier that she needed a boot heel repaired.  Eventually—bizarre!—we began to dream in French.

But even the best dreams end with a wakeup call, and despite our total immersion in our adopted city, we knew after two months that we were still strangers in a strange land.  We were foreigners.  We had funny accents, limited vocabulary, and mangled grammar.  Most days we were humbled by our linguistic inadequacy.

But we were never humiliated, and one lasting souvenir—the French word for memory—we brought home with us relates to our attempt to realize the American dream of assimilation and acceptance while living in Paris.  Parisians are legendary for their abruptness, their rudeness, their indifference.  We found them patient, good-humored, and friendly, the way everyone should be to strangers and foreigners in their midst.  They helped us to live our dream.