#30: La Rentrée
Last Monday we returned from a two-plus week holiday in France. Next Sunday, we’ll go back again, heading to Paris with our fingers crossed that we can find an apartment and sign a lease within less than a week. Finally, on the 28th, we’ll pack up everything once more and, after five years (well, minus my two-year sojourn in London) leave Amsterdam for good. And just like the tens of thousands of others swarming back into the city in those last dog days of August for la rentrée, this is a homecoming of sorts for me too, except with a twenty year gap since I left.
In reality, I spent barely two years living in Paris–from the end of 1999 to late summer of 2001–yet for me it was a lifetime, definitive in its shaping of who I am, of who I have become. I was just a freshly-turned twenty-one year old when I moved; how absurd it seems that I was able to charm my bosses into this scheme. I had no idea at all what I was doing, and I suspect that they knew it and let me go anyway, with just enough faith in my pluck to believe I’d manage to figure it out. I did, too, mostly. To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, loving Paris was easy, it was the living that was hard. Yet no sooner had I left that I knew I would go back.
Indeed I did go back, taking any chance to visit, celebrating champagne-soaked feasts with friends, returning to old haunts and discovering new ones, as the city and I both pitched ourselves forward year after year. Plus ça change, etc.
On my desk, I keep a photo taken from my fifth floor apartment on the rue Philippe de Girard, and as I write, I’m forever gazing out that hallway window over the thick plait of train tracks below weaving their way into the Gare du Nord; above, 3-D clouds float over the gray puzzle pieces of tiled rooftops, stretching infinitely into an expanse of impossibly blue sky.
Aller/Venir/Partir/Rentrer. To go, to come from, to leave, to come home. This week I was reminded of the nuances of language–its precisions and its ambiguities–reviewing conjugations as I took an online assessment to evaluate my level of French (B2, s’il vous plaît). Even after years of study, even after years of immersion, and despite devout consumption of French culture: news, radio (FIP forever!), film, television (Call My Agent!)…I am still somehow the least articulate fluent French speaker.
I suppose the main problem is actually that I don’t speak French at all. I read it, I write it, I comprehend it. I just can’t seem to manage to get the words in my head to make their way out of my mouth. I mumble, I stammer, I hesitate. I am often misunderstood. I am often embarrassed. I am afraid.
Ah, bah, non, c’est ridicule, ça! (I am, however, very fluent in huffy French expressions of exasperation). Sure, we say, what’s the worst that can happen if you mispronounce something, if you mix up your gender articles. I’s true, there are no language police who’ll render me to some prison where I will be forced to communicate solely in le subjonctif for eternity.
I don’t believe that our fears are completely unfounded, though. I can squint and think back to more than few times when the sting of looking or feeling stupid was particularly acute, when it felt like it wasn’t just my fluency that was assailable, but my intelligence. Some of it comes down to simple pride, and some down to the paralysis of perfectionism that I continue to grapple with, no matter how many self-aware newsletters I write about it. I mean, I don’t think it’s the worst trait to have high expectations of yourself but it is nefariously unproductive most of the time, your standards holding you down more often than lifting you up.
But life is short in a way that’s much more apparent to 42-year-old me than it was to twenty-one-year-old me. If there’s one thing I’ve never been afraid of it’s an opportunity. And I’ve learned that my greatest fear is not, in fact, stumbling over French grammar in an awkward exchange, but rather it’s the idea of wasted potential. We rarely get a chance for a do-over, but in this case, I actually do and goddam if I don’t make the most of it. My pride and perfectionism will therefore be enrolled in a French conversation course five days a week starting in October.
Voilà, ç'est fait.
I might also mention that I’ll be enrolled in another course as well. This Fall, I’ll be joining a program in wine business and management at Le Cordon Bleu. This isn’t as much of a pivot as it seems; I completed a few certificates in wine education on the DL back in NYC. I’m really just skipping ahead a few steps on the roadmap from bagels to Burgundy, making the leap from levain to le vin. But more on that later, I’ve got packing to do. Paris, j’arrive!
Thumbnail image: Henri Matisse, Vue de Collioure aver l'église. 1905