Not so much about France today.

Today, dear readers, I am going to reveal to you that our home in America is in Washington, D.C. When we moved to Washington from California, years ago, we were excited about living near all the national monuments and museums. With time, we began to consider our home conveniently located for protest marches. We were there for the Million Moms; we were there for the marches against the war in Iraq; we were there for the March for Women's Lives. E and G are old hands at marches. They know where all the best museum bathrooms are on the National Mall.

We haven't raised our girls in the church, or in a synagogue. We have tried to teach our daughters to respect the dignity and value of human life, and to believe in love and hope, and to be kind and compassionate and thoughtful. I told my driving instructor, 'Arry, recently that, instead of bringing the girls up in a church, we have brought them up in the Gospel of Bruce Springsteen. (He liked that.) One time E and I were walking along in front of the White House, in one of the war protests in the winter of 2003, and she was singing Springsteen's song, Into the Fire. (She was eight.) She stopped singing mid-chorus, looked up at me and said: Strength, faith, hope, love. Mama, why doesn't Mr. Bush believe in those things?

He just sees the world differently, I said. At least, I hope that's what I said.

Last night C used some perhaps not wholly above board software that he got from a friend to fool our computer into thinking that it was sitting in the United States and thus able to pick up the signal for HBO's broadcast of the Obama Inaugural Concert. We had been raquetting--snowshoeing--up in the mountains in the morning. We came home and built a fire in the fireplace. C connected the computer to the television set, fiddled around a bit, and, miracle of miracles, there was the Lincoln Memorial.

We sat in our French salon for the next two hours and watched and listened. So much hope and goodwill. Living abroad, it's not obvious to me how to show my girls what a moment this is for our country. Were we in the States now, we could have taken them to the Mall yesterday, could take them tomorrow, and show them the thousands of other grateful, joyful people. We could be volunteering today for Dr. King day, instead of just taking a bag of outgrown but still good clothes to the local semi-equivalent of Goodwill. (I know it's not much, but it's a nod toward community service.) Here, though, few of their English and French classmates are even aware of the inauguration, and their teachers don't have much to say about it. Our friends are French and English: they are happy about the change in administration, but it's not their country.

How do we show our girls that this is different from the other times, and that we've not seen the like of this before? This Land is Your Land is one of the songs they learned as babies. It's a car song in our family, as it probably is in many. In our family it comes with a conversation about Woody Guthrie, and the Great Depression, and folk music, and how you sing to protest and to mobilize and to try to change the world, and sometimes it works but often it doesn't. The girls know the scratchy, fading Woody Guthrie version, and the hoarse, minor key Springsteen version, and, this fall, I started slipping the Pete Seeger version, all earnestness and singing along, onto the iPod. Because it's more than a car song; it's a song about what we aspire to mean when we say we're American. It's a song about "the country we carry in our hearts."

The Lincoln Memorial is the first memorial we took the girls to when we moved to Washington, and the one we've visited most often. We used to go and talk about slavery, about the Civil War, about Dr. King, and about strength, faith, hope and love. And so last night, when Mr. Obama spoke, standing on those steps where we've stood and talked about our country, that would have been enough. I think the solemnity and power of it would have sparked a connection. But then the set changed, and there was music, and not just any music. This Land is Your Land, with two of the singers and thinkers and activists who've helped us get our girls this far. And the country we have carried in our hearts all this time seems closer.

Got wine?

So the other day I was trolling the Internet, continuing my Serious and Highly Intellectual cultural history research on the Obamas (when are they getting the puppy? what's she going to wear Tuesday night?), and I came across a photograph of Obama, the Current Occupant, Clinton, Carter, and the first Bush at lunch. The Current Occupant sat at the head of the table (it's still his house, after all), with Obama on his right and Clinton on his left. Carter sat beside Obama, and the first Bush beside Clinton. The photograph (I've looked all over the NYT website and can't find it again, so you'll have to take my word for it) was taken from the foot of the table, looking towards the C. O. The presidents seem to be midway through their main course.

Here's what caught my eye: next to his plate, Carter had a glass of water and a glass of iced tea. Across the table, the first Bush had a glass of water and a tall glass of milk.

Milk and iced tea.

The photo's angle was such that I couldn't see what the others were drinking. (Believe me, I tried.)

But imagine, if you will, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac sitting down to lunch together at the Elysée. (I know they don't like each other, but I'll bet it's happened.) Are they going to be drinking tea and milk?

I don't think so, mon ami. If Sarkozy tried to serve Chirac a nice soothing glass of cold milk (good for the bones, and you know, Jacques, at your age, you can't be too careful), the insult and breach of decorum would be all over the toile mondiale in about three minutes. Non, merci, a light white with the fish course, please, and then a tasty red with the meat. Perhaps a different red with the cheese, and then we'll finish with a sauternes over dessert.

Were the American presidents actually having wine with lunch, but set up the photo with prop glasses so as not to offend the teetotallers among us? Or did these five adult men of broad exposure to the world sit down to lunch and not have a glass of wine? (I know the C. O. is a recovering alcoholic; a nice glass of Badoit for him, maybe.) And what does it say about me that I find the first option more reasonable than the second?

French people cook with milk, they put milk on cereal (when they eat it, which is not that often), but they don't drink a lot of milk. Even schoolkids don't drink milk at lunch: the girls and their classmates drink water at lunch, and the teachers, in their dining room next door, drink water and (of course) wine. (So that's how they get through the days teaching French middle school.) Wine is what adults drink, every verre, every glass, another link in the chain of civilization.

Americans don't have a long history with wine, but they do have a long history with cattle. (Try growing chardonnay grapes in North Dakota. There's a reason they graze cattle there.) And a long history with some of the more dour Protestant sects, which, as L said recently, were Where Fun Went to Die. Meanwhile, back in the Old World, standards have not always been all that the local sanitation inspectors in their hairnets might like. For several thousand years, drinking anything that wasn't fermented, milk included, could kill you. So there are a whole host of cultural reasons that could explain why Carter and the first Bush were drinking tea and milk, and as many reasons that that could seem bizarre to someone outside of America.

Our third day visiting my family last month, my daughter G asked me why no one was drinking any wine. I must have looked puzzled, because she elaborated. We've had three meals out, and no one has had any wine. Where's the wine?

She was right. My family is one generation away from a bedrock belief that demon liquor is the first step to eternal damnation, and although wine might show up quietly on the table at smaller family gatherings, we haven't gotten there yet with the Christmas luncheon. And many restaurants in my hometown don't have a liquor license, for much the same reason: old laws made by men who were certain that the road to hell was paved with empty Boone's Farm bottles, and equally confident that only Yankees would take a drink in front of a lady.

Whereas, of course, G's experience here is that everywhere we go, there's wine. You wouldn't think of inviting guests over and not opening a bottle of wine. On the rare occasions when we go out to dinner, C and I always order a pichet of the house wine (it's cheaper than bottled water); nearly every night at home, we have wine with dinner. Every local fête has wine for sale with lunch. Village events--concerts, parades, even the 5k run last June--all end with a pot d'amitié, red or rosé, and a snack of pissaladière or tapenade on toast. You don't have to stand in one line to get an i.d. bracelet and then in another line to get your little glass of wine. It's offert, free, go get it. It's a way for the village to reaffirm its identity, its community, its history. We are French; we drink wine.

As opposed to: We are American, we worry about our health and have family issues with substance abuse.

I told the hiking ladies about this photo the other day. We were walking around one of the local caps, with the mountains on our right and the sea on our left, a cloudless blue sky overhead. It was the 70th birthday of one of the ladies, and so, comme normale, we were having champagne with our picnic lunch. They laughed at the idea of the presidents' club having tea and milk with lunch. Then they all shook their heads--the American cousins, what can you say?--and opened another bottle of champagne.

Birthday boy

Today is the third birthday of mon filleul ainé, which translates literally as my elder godson but accurately as one of the two boys who is almost mine. Why hasn't our language come up with a word for this? G is the son of my dear friend. To refer to him, though, as my friend's son misses the intimacy of our relationship. He is, quite simply, one of my own, a part of my family and my heart. When he saw me last month for the first time since August, he was in his grandpa's arms. And he reached for me.

I had to put him down after a minute, though, because he's one of the tallest and strongest and biggest and squirmiest three year olds you'll ever come across. G runs a life full tilt. He's spent the balance of his short life in France, and that has meant that we've been lucky to have lots of time together. So here, in honor of his birthday, are my favorite G in France stories.

When G and his mother visited us at La Bastiole for the first time, we mothers went with him down to the piscine. (Every new house in our région is required by law to have a pool; the water is handy for the pompiers in the event of forest fires.) We set G to wander around on the deck, and his mum and I sat at the corner of the pool and dangled our feet in the water while we talked. G walked up and down and around and around, and we cautioned him to stay away from the water's edge. He walked around singing his tuneless toddler song and we talked some more. Then he walked by us and fell in the water. Right between us. We both plunged our hands in, grabbed a body part, and fished him out. Then we laughed: two of us, fully grown, responsible, respectable, and one waterlogged 20 month old.

A few months later, he visited us again with his mother, this time for a week. It was the nadir of his life thus far. He was on the edge of language and profoundly frustrated at not being able to communicate the subtleties of his needs: so he did a fair amount of yelling. That he was sick--one of those full-on snotty colds that only small children get--made matters worse. His mother and I spent the week trying to find something to make him happy, or, if not happy (we gave that up pretty fast), at least not screaming miserable. One morning towards the end of the week we took him to the park. The setting for this park is beautiful: it's between a country lane and a stream, with an old mill on one side and a thousand year old church on the other. Birds were singing, the stream was burbling, and G stood in the middle of the playground, in the shadow of the pirate ship playset, howling, Mommy, No! at the top of his small but powerful lungs. We tried to console him--hugs, the slide, the climbing bars, applesauce for snack, more hugs--and, when he was inconsolable, we retreated to our bench and ate the applesauce ourselves.

A few months, again, and the language has come along and allayed some of his frustration. I am visiting in Paris, and when I come in the door of his apartment, G attaches himself to my leg. We read stories together. He introduces me to his stuffed animals and to his matchbox cars, and I give him his bath and put him to bed. When I think he has fallen asleep and get up to leave his room, he stirs, and says, from that place next door to sleep, Stay with me. I do.

Another visit to the south, and our families have gone for a walk. G and one of my girls fall behind the rest of us. When we turn to look back at them, G has found a walking stick twice as tall as he is, and my daughter is walking beside him, slowing her steps to match his and trying, with partial success, to avoid getting hit by the stick.

And then it is our last visit with G's family in Paris, before they return Stateside. It is our girls' birthday. We have a family birthday dinner all together, and G gets to stay up late. We've finished the meal and the beautiful cake, and C is teaching G how to make scarey faces. C drops his jaw down, rolls up his eyes, sticks out his tongue, and raises his arms over his head. G is suspicious until C returns to normal. Then he laughs. C makes the face again, and G copies him. They waggle their heads at each other, making lurid monster sounds, until G laughs so hard that he falls over.

One more visit to our house, and then they will be gone. G is sitting on his father's shoulders and we are in the lane behind our house. I pick blackberries and give them to him and he fills his mouth, his tongue and lips purple, tshirt, cheeks, father's head--a riot of blackberry juice.

And so, happy birthday, my boy. Bon anniversaire. I can hardly wait to see what you will do next.

Shalom, Obama

I stopped by our bakery the day we came home from our trip. M. le boulanger came out from behind the counter to wish me bonne année et bonne santé with a kiss on both cheeks. Vous avez passé des bonnes fêtes aux Etats-Unis? he asked. Vous les avez célébré avec Obama?

But of course, I said. We went to Hawaii and celebrated with him there.

Gilbert--I'll tell you his name; we've been on first-name basis for a while now, which is not a minor accomplishment--inclined his head conspiratorially. You know, I've changed my mind about Obama.

Gilbert was the only français we knew who had supported McCain. I had extrapolated from that--and from a few conversations about immigration--support for all sorts of political stances, none of them similar to my own. But that's the beauty of a foreign language and culture: we could agree on fresh bread and pastries and leave politics out of it.

He pointed out the window of the shop, towards the newspaper stand. Prominently displayed was a copy of the current Tribune Juive, the monthly magazine of the Jewish community in France. Its headline, under a flattering photo of the president-elect, was Shalom Obama. The baker nodded in that direction.

I bought that magazine, and I read the article. He turned back to me. I'm Jewish, you see.

Really? I was genuinely surprised. The Jewish population of France is small, the Jewish population in our region, microscopic. C is Jewish, too.

You never told me, he said. Now we have to shake hands. You must tell C that although I liked him before, now I like him even better. He came out from behind the counter and shook my hand before continuing: I read the article about Obama, and did you know that most of his advisers are Jewish? In fact, I think that his mind is almost a Jewish mind. He thinks like a Jew.

All I could come up with was: Vous croyez? Do you think so?

Mais si. Bien sûr. So now I am supporting him, with you. Nous sommes tous démocrats. We are all democrats.

And so it came to pass that Gilbert, the only Frenchman we know who would have voted for McCain if he could have, changed his mind. Shalom, Obama, indeed.

Road Food

Colette, C's French teacher and our friend, lives in a village up in the mountains, the last village on my mental map before the mountains edge out everything except ski resorts. She is cheerful and practical and sensible, and one evening a few weeks ago (this is the story she told C), she was driving home and saw, along the roadside, a rabbit that had been hit by a car. She pulled off the road, got out of the car, and went to check the rabbit. It was dead but still warm. So she picked it up and took it home for dinner. Her American husband was, she related in a tone that was fond but a little puzzled, distressed to learn that he was enjoying--in a wine sauce, with raisins and onions--what we in the States call roadkill. Colette confided that the lapin had been a little tough, which she attributes to her having been in such a hurry to make dinner that she didn't hang the carcass in her larder to age.

This is not the first roadkill for dinner story we've heard; in fact, it's the third. There was Violette, whose car collided with a sanglier, which she then put in the trunk and later packaged up for the freezer. Wild boar stew, sausages, and steaks all winter long. And there was Marcelle, the main course of whose Christmas dinner last year was built around venison from a deer that her father had found, likewise, newly dead by the road.

We are told that it is illegal in France to pick up and take home a dead animal that you yourself have hit with a car. (Violette is a fugitive from the law.) It is difficult to resist speculating on how that law came to be required, exactly. Were French people waiting until dusk every day, and then getting behind the wheel and going out to aim at animals as they crossed the road? Were people hitting deer and wild boars and rabbits and, it's France, god knows what else, on purpose? You have to admit that it's easier than going hunting, doesn't require reflective clothing or artillery, and can be done while listening to Johnny Hallyday on the radio. Of course, it's easy to get around the law if you are a two-car family: the first car finds dinner, the second car brings it home.

We dined out on these stories while we were Stateside and our friends and family had reactions that ranged from Aren't the French wonderful wistfulness to But that rabbit could have been diseased! They might all have contracted rabies from eating it! disdain. It was universally inconceivable, regardless of where our audience fell on the reaction spectrum, to have scooped up a rabbit from the side of the road and eaten it for supper.

Then we came home to France and told Colette about the banana pudding that my aunt made for Christmas dinner. She's been making it for decades; here's a recipe similar to the one I think she uses. You will note that the recipe calls for boxed vanilla pudding mix, whipped topping (which advertised itself, last time I checked, as non-dairy), and vanilla wafers. The wafers she uses are called Nilla because they don't actually contain any vanilla, and advertising them as such would be like calling the whipped topping cream. Colette laughed long and hard at the notion of eating such a concoction, and that was even before we mentioned the Velveeta that also figured in a few of our American meals. Is it cheese? she asked. Well, it is, and it isn't. It comes closer to being cheese than whipped topping comes to being cream, but not by much. At all.

It's a conversation about cultural differences. How processed do you need your food to be? How far removed from nature, red in tooth and claw (and fender), and how far removed from the chemistry lab? We've not been offered a dinner of freshly hit meat, and I'm not sure what our response would be if we were; it would probably have a lot to do with whether there was adequate red wine on offer. As for the banana pudding and Velveeta, I have to say, first, that I had always loved both. Okay, not loved. Enjoyed ambivalently once or twice a year may be closer to the truth. Loved eating the food that my family had made for me, loved feeling cared for. Wished, though, once I was grown, that my family loved to make something else, something that had less of a plastic after-taste.

I think part of our relationship with France is rooted there, in that wish that our families--disclaimer: whom we love and would never trade in--were more like the families in Madeleine L'Engle's books, where the parents are both Nobel prize winning physicists who read poetry aloud at the dinner table and teach the children to sing in four-part harmony while they're spending summers hiking in the Andes. And that our country concerned itself less with figuring out how to manufacture a cheese that had a shelf life of a century (and giving it a handgun to fend off any other cheeses), and more with protecting small things, like the local farmers who might make a little extra money making their own cheese and selling their own cows' cream. Or with making sure that people don't just go out and aim their cars at wild animals as an easy way of getting dinner.

If, however, you've got a friend to drive behind you, remember to hang the lapin for a few days before you cook it. It'll be more tender that way.

Shepherd redux

We saw the shepherd again today. It had been a frenetic morning at La Bastiole. Jules is having a stone wall built at the bottom of the garden, and there are trucks and backhoes and piles of sand and cement mixers in the parking, and men to go with all that, men who start arriving for the day at 7.30. Which is when Alice starts sounding the alarm. Then at 8.00 Jules phoned C to discuss with him some of the more arcane points of Paying For Everything in Cash, and, before we really knew what was what, he was at the back door with a list of reasons that the bank should hand over wads of cash to C to pay our--now what would we be paying in cash? and why would Jules interest himself in it? I'll leave that to your imagination. On his heels came Marcelle, our French tutor, ready for her weekly hour and a half with E and G, and alarmingly awake and bright-eyed. Alice barked throughout.

So I finished my tea, checked online to make sure that the clock was at 13 days, and then left the house with the dogs. We walked up the path to the chemin du Moulin and towards the village. Wendy found all the olives that were still semi-whole on the ground, dipping her head to scoop them up in her mouth, and Alice sniffed every tuft of grass. There was quite a bit of snow on the Pic de Courmettes. The wind was blowing, and the clouds were coming down quickly: the mountain was disappearing as we walked.

About halfway along the lane, a man stepped out from between two olive trees and began walking along several yards in front of us. He was shorter than I am by half a head, and had legs much longer than his torso. He looked mismatched, like a child had put two different dolls together. He walked with a wooden stick that reached his shoulder, and wore dark green wellington boots, dark green pants, and several bulky pullovers. No hat or gloves. It took him several paces before he heard us coming behind him--Wendy and Alice's collars jingle a little--because he was singing. Not loudly, but not under his breath, either; not humming. Singing something that I could tell had a tune, although that wasn't what he was singing, exactly. It sounded like the baritone line of a chorale: hum hum hum, a bar to meet the melody, hum hum hum, a little more melody.

When he heard us coming, during a lull in his melody, he turned around and wished me good day, but did not lose his place in the chorale. For whatever reason--and my city self wonders at it--my Crazy Person hackles did not go up. I didn't recognize him, as I do many of the people I meet on our walks, but he seemed so perfectly at ease that I just accepted that he belonged there.

And then I saw the sheep below us, on the upper terrace where the lane bends to go up to the village. They were grazing around the olive trees, butting each other along, doing their sheep thing. When we reached the bend in the lane, the singer turned down a little path towards the herd. He glanced back at me before he did, nodded and even seemed to bow, formally, a little. Then the melody line came back to his part, and he went off singing towards his flock.

In France

When I started graduate school, I heard lots of stories about a fellow Williams alum who had started his history doctorate a few years before I did. Apparently he had arrived on the West Coast and promptly and continually compared everything and everyone to his undergrad experience. At Williams, he would say, professors invited their students over for dinner with their families. At Williams, he would say, the shopkeepers on Spring Street knew the students by name. At Williams, he would say, every season was beautiful and there was never any traffic. At Stanford, my fellow graduate students didn't think a whole lot of my fellow Eph's attachment to our college. After all, Stanford was not without its charms.

We're back from two weeks with our families in the States. I think we saw nearly everyone we meant to see; certainly we saw everyone we had time to see, in the time that we had. We celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah and New Year's with family, extended family, and friends. We ate and talked and walked and then ate some more. Most people we saw we hadn't seen in nearly two years. They asked us about our life here; we said it was a good life. And that was generally the end of the conversation. At least, it felt like that to us. Maybe to everyone else it sounded like we were going on endlessly, obnoxiously, about the baguettes and the views and the sangliers and the weather: In France, we eat fresh bread every day. In France, there are no strip malls. In France, almost all our food is locally grown--but to us, it felt like we said, we're happy there, and then the conversation moved on.

And really, there's no reason it shouldn't have. It would have been boring at best, and boorish at worst, to bless every one with a lecture on Being an American and Living In France in 2007-08, or, France and America: Similarities and Differences. (After all, that's what La Bastiole is for.) What was disconcerting was that our friends and family accepted us back, just as we are, or were, or had been. We stepped back into our American life with barely a ripple, as though we had been away for a few days and not a few years.

That was probably a good thing. The alternative--stepping back in and getting sucked under by the tide, not feeling any connection with the people we care about--certainly holds no appeal. And yet we feel changed by our life here, and uncertain about how we will ever live our life again in America, and whether we want to, and what that means. That feels profound to us. To others on the outside it probably doesn't. The feeling is probably mentioned, and explained, in the penultimate chapter of most books on living abroad. How, though, to go about living through it is something we have to figure out.

Meanwhile, this morning, I look out my kitchen window and think: In France, I look over the olive trees to the sea.