La France

I have had several childhood experiences which I think steered me unconsciously towards living in France. The first was living in Paris for several months in the late seventies during my fathers sabbatical. Although I can't boast the same kind of memory that Nabokov had, I'm certain that at the very least, the croissants, gateaux and pain au chocolat made an indelible imprint on my brain: A bookmark to come back to. There were other bookmarks: the kids who would knock down my sand castles and bury my toys, the vast playground of the UN school that I went to (Somewhat tellingly, I have no memory whatsoever of the inside of the classrooms), the many flights of stairs that we had to climb to get to the apartment and the bright studio in which I would happily paint and draw. As a rule, these memories are hazy and dark, but together they form a content, if a bit confused whole.

Later on, I went to a middle school that had a bit of an identity crisis. Sometimes it was the caring liberal berkeley hippy school with the second grade Poetry class. Other times it was the hyper competitive give-gold-stars-for-memorizing-your-multiplication-tables school. Amd occasionally it was the math-is-grooovey kind of place. As you moved up through the "Levels" (not "Grades"! bite your tongue!) things started getting a little more serious, and I think that the school felt the obligation to at least appear stuffy and focused, even if their approach was to simply hire more teachers with posh english accents. Another thing that started happening around fifth grade,(not sure about this, but it was pretty early) was French classes. We had a troop of French teachers: about one per year, and they ranged the gamut from dour and matronly (Marie) to borderline french prostitute(Crystale). Our classes consisted largely of "Dictation" and memorizing vocabularly, and were remarkable in their lack of effectiveness. Occasionally we would watch the odd Truffaut film. And while I don't remember very much about these classes, other than my friend Andrej Krikovic and I carefully stuffing his yugoslavian fish fillets (never pack fish in your childrens lunch) down through the heating vents, I do remember one moment from one of these movies. The moment, which is actually quite famous, comes from "Small Change" and is when young Gregory falls (or jumps? I dont remember) out of a building, walks away unscathed and exclaims "Gregory go Boum!". For a long time, I actually thought that this movie was called "Gregory go Boum", and it wasnt until reading Paris to the Moon that I found the real title.

and the fish fillets? Well, later that fall when the heating was finally turned on, a putrid fish reek began permeating the building. Andrej and I kept a low profile; we both knew that the heating grate re-filleted fish was sitting in a pile in a bend in the heating duct nearest to the window. Things probably would have gotten worse and worse, if not for the fact that the French classroom was also the Math classroom. And while Crystale was perhaps not the most vigilant teacher, the Math teacher was an entirely different type of beast. Irving Lubliner. My fingers clench just typing his name. He was in retrospect a fantastic teacher, but he was also a fearsome disciplinarian. And, while other teachers might have been satisfied to just deal with the smell, Irving tracked it down like a bloodhound. I'll never forget the day that we were all upstairs in computer class, hunched over our PET computers when Irving burst in through the door. His arm was triumphantly raised, and dripping with the black sludge that had been Andrej's fish and various other less palatable things. "At first", he said, "I couldn't feel anything, but then I got down on the floor, and got my arm into the duct waaaay up to my shoulder, and look what I found". A little bit of sludge dripped onto the floor and I seem to remember a barely perceptable twitch in one of his eyes. It was nice, because earlier in the semester, our english teacher had taught us about "pregnant pauses" (by having the secretary call him a "stupid Irish git"), so we knew what was going on. We were all deadly quiet, and Andrej and I were thankful that no one besides my best friend Keith had seen us jamming the fish into the heating system, because they would have turned us over to Irving in a flash.

hmm. well a post about how I came to france has ended up being about fish sludge. Oh well.

also, no ceuse today b/c I couldnt sleep last night... bleh