Wandering in French

[I wrote this the other day.]

I woke up hating French. The poor night’s sleep had something to do with it. But it was mostly the line from a song we sang in church yesterday morning ringing in my head incessantly.

“Comme un soufflé fragile…”

Why would we be singing about soufflés in church, I wondered. I know the French love their food, but how could that really make for a compelling spiritual metaphor? I cooked my first soufflé last week—with bleu cheese—and the experience taught me enough to know that they are in fact a bit fragile, but seriously.

Looked it up in the dictionary, at 7:45 AM mind you. If the song won’t go away might as well learn something from it. Souffle without the accent is a wind or a breeze. OK, but what is a fragile wind and why are we singing about it? I have to go back to the song to figure it out, I guess, don’t remember the other words.

In class Erica and I discovered all that we missed in our absence the day before vacation. We had learned a rule for conjugating verbs in the past tense several weeks back. This morning we learned the exceptions. As is frequently the case, just when you feel comfortable with a concept, you are told that, sorry, you actually only know the half of it.

In the afternoon, my teacher told me I was saying l’aéroport incorrectly. She’d say “Non!” and repeat it. I would say it in what seemed to be (and some classmates agreed) in the same exact way and she’d still say “Non!” and repeat it. Finally I changed something (I’m still not sure what) and she said simply, “Voila,” and I breathed a confused sigh of relief.

Somewhere along the line things turned. I left school and went back to the post office for the second time. I almost chickened out and handled all the matters with the self-service machine. Pathetic, I know, but I finally forced myself to go to the desk. The clerk was a girl who seemed about 10 years younger than me. Am I really old enough to be ten years older than a person employed by the postal service? She smirked at my question as if question was odd or my accent was amusing or the fact that I was an American sending postcards was either cute or laughable. She seemed new at the job, asked for help. I got cool looking Marie Curie stamps. The kind you lick.

It seems an odd thing to get excited about, but I like that this country still uses stamps that must be torn apart carefully and licked. Something tactile, something aesthetic.

I took the long way home through centre ville, dropping the cards in a mailbox next to the brasserie through the slot marked “etranger,” walking past the only remaining column of a church bombed out in WWII, spying on the French men smoking outside the bureau de tabac, weaving my way through the children and their parents who were heading home from school.

French children are mostly the same as kids everywhere else, but just different enough in a way that makes them a curious, intriguing species.

Somewhere in that walk I started smiling, liking this place where I can currently be found, reciting a few new French words under my breath without really knowing it, and still kind of singing that one line over and over again about fragile soufflés.