Finding me in France

by Bobbi French

  First, tickets to the show: 67 euros times two. Then, train tickets to Paris: 70 euros times two. Then, because there’s no train back until the next morning, a hotel room for a minimum of 150 euros, but at that price the lice-infested sheets would be free. So all totaled, at least 425 euros (not including the requisite pâtisserie raid) to enjoy an hour of witty observations about pizza crust and laundry. Don’t get me wrong, I would have gladly parted with it, but the tickets for the show alone were beyond my budget, and there’s the rub.

  French funemployment is fantastique, it just doesn’t pay very well. It’s great to have the freedom to do nothing but to anyone thinking about giving it a go, be really prepared to do nothing. All kinds of wonderful things go on up in that Paris place: George Michael concerts, candlelight cello performances in historic chapels, operas, author readings at Shakespeare and Company. Oh why do I torture myself? All this is going on and will continue to go on without me until such time as my name appears on a paycheque. I was more than prepared to forego fancy skin creams and expensive restaurants as the tradeoff for this layabout life, but the rest can take a toll sometimes. How I laugh at myself, she of the quest for simplicity and joy. But I can’t have it all, no matter how entitled I think I am.

  Now in no way do I slight my husband’s hard earned salary, which pays for all the necessities, but without a second income any luxurious extras are out, well, apart from a loungy life in France. In theory, I accept this living skinny business, it’s just that my brain and my thighs haven’t fully made peace with it yet. We’ve decided that any extra money found should be saved for travel, one of the main reasons for deciding to settle in this part of France in the first place. We have offers to visit friends in Spain and Vienna and I think experiences like those are worth missing out on smaller things.

  I think the key is ignorance. I’ll stop looking and I’ll never know what I’m missing. And besides, there’s plenty of free entertainment right here. Neil has a guitar, a black leather jacket and mirrored shades, so George Michael, eat your heart out. Plus, I have my first French gynecology appointment today and, unless my French improves dramatically in the next hour, I’ll need Neil to translate, my own Seinfeld episode just waiting to happen. “So, we walked into the gynecologist’s office and yadda yadda yadda, Neil ran screaming from the room and I never saw him again.”

  REAL MEN EAT TARTE

  Not long after we arrived here on our rue, I noticed that a house across the street, previously shuttered up tight, was slowly coming to life. Each day the door opened and out came a serious looking fellow of a difficult to say age with a thick grey mustache and beard and sporting a myriad of tattoos. He wore Moroccan leather sandals with soles that curled up over his toes, the kind you see on movie characters riding Arabian horses through the desert while brandishing giant curved swords. In my head he was mysterious, dangerous even. I had all kinds of wild stories attached to him.

  Despite my intrigue, as usual, timidity trumped curiosity and I never got beyond a sheepish bonjour to him. Then, a few weeks ago, Neil and I were huffing up the hill and there he was, standing in the middle of the street. He offered us a deep and solemn bonjour and said, “Jean-Claude.” Finally, someone in France opened with a name. He paused and looked at us intensely, “Do you like apples?” Well, of course we like apples. Then he raised a large arm and with a toss of his hand directed us to his truck. Next thing I knew we were bouncing up the road with this enigmatic stranger, in my mind the local mafioso who ferries unsuspecting immigrants to a secret dog fight arena. He stopped in front of a large plot of land full of bushes and trees and got out. Curious indeed. I decided to trail behind the men just in case I had to make a break for it.

  The ground was covered with hundreds of apples and the bushes were heavy with blackberries. Suddenly, the formerly stoic Jean-Claude was happily showing us his bounty and then turned to Neil (not to me now, to Neil): “You know these apples make a delicious tarte but don’t use the darker ones, they can be a bit sour.” And with that they were off into a lengthy discussion about baking. Well, I never.

  He offered us the use of his orchard whenever we liked and invited us in for a tour of his office. I was ready for anything, bounty hunter, hired assassin, arms dealer but I settled for the truth: plumber. Then he invited us to join him for an apéritif. We walked through his office into his inner sanctum, a large room that is impossible to accurately capture in words. Let’s just call it a personal museum. Pistols by the dozen, antique rifes from Afghanistan and Switzerland. Ancient knives, daggers and swords. Animal skins, fossilized shark teeth, giant African masks and statues hand carved from huge trunks of ebony wood. Lacquered Asian armoires, jade figurines and heirloom pocket watches. He also had a vast number of military medals and honours including a Cold War peace commendation signed by Donald Rumsfeld. So much for my dark side theory.

  Then he led us down a small fight of stone stairs to a medieval wooden door from which hung a mammoth metal padlock from the 16th century. Behind that door was his true collection, a cave full of wine. A lot of wine. Enough wine to keep a Newfoundland wake swinging for at least 24 hours. He had bottles from as far back as 1915. For us he chose a white wine from 1990, the colour of butterscotch and exquisitely fruity, then an ice-cold champagne, the best I’ve ever tasted. It could have been the tales of his adventures, the beard and all the African rifes (also could have been the wine), but as the hours slipped by in his exotic chamber, I became more and more convinced that he is actually Ernest Hemingway.

  Since then, he has come to our door time and time again with apples and Neil has gone to his door with bowls of hot apple crumble. Next thing you know the two of them will be quilting and going for facials. Last week he returned from his vacation with a treat for us, a jar of dark, aromatic honey from his father-in-law’s farm in Corsica. Yesterday yet another basket of apples appeared on my doorstep. And today he handed us a CD by a popular French folk band, signed personally by one of the musicians, “To Neil and Bobbi, Amitiés.” Now he and his equally charming wife, Jacqueline, are making ready for the long drive to their second home in Morocco. They’ll be gone for a month and I miss them already.

  He’s a splendid example of the intriguing people who have come into our French life; wonderfully compelling characters who seem to have magically sprung to life from the pages of a French screenplay. I suspect it will be an adventure just being his neighbour. This morning I saw him climbing aboard his Mercedes SUV, wearing a black leather fedora adorned with a band of crocodile teeth as well as a python vest, red leather pants and cowboy boots. Oh yes, JC and I will get along just fine.

  A MATTER OF LIFE

  AND DEATH

  Obviously doctors see their fair share of death, and as a lowly intern I recall a particularly dismal shift. In the course of about 30 hours, I pronounced six people dead, one of whom was an elderly nun. Her fellow sisters were gathered in prayer outside her room when I brought them the news. They smiled, thanked me and went back to their prayers while I dashed off to my next encounter with the grim reaper. I never had much time in those days to stop and ponder the meaning of life or death, it was just part of the busy routine. But now that I am finally living my life to the fullest, I have time to think about life, death and everything in between. And today, as I stumbled upon a small cemetery, I thought about a lot of things.

  It was so quiet and peaceful, much like the reaction of those nuns. I suppose in their minds their sister was off to her eternal resting place, that “better place,” which I’m sure they imagined as heaven with St. Peter and a father, son and holy spirit. Now I’m more of a set-me-on-fire-and-scatter-me-to-the-wind kind of gal, but maybe this wouldn’t be a bad place to spend eternity.

  I was surprised to find that each grave, regardless of age, was immaculately kept. Some had shiny marble stones, polished brass nameplates and lately pots of fresh fowers, while others had nothing to show but time.

  All that’s clear enough to read on this one is
Cher Ange or dear angel, whose angel remains a mystery. I think back to all the people who died in my presence, someone’s parent or child, a sibling, a friend, a lover, and I wonder what became of the departed. Ascension to paradise, dust to dust, descent to the fiery depths, reincarnated accordingly? Who knows? All I know is that no one gets out alive so I’d better get busy.

  I figure I’ll hedge my bets. If to dust I shall return then I’ve got some hell raising to do. If there’s a heaven then I’ve got a Bible to buy and some praying to do. If reincarnation is in my future then I’ve got a lot of work left ahead of me to move up from a future as a sewer rat. Wherever I end up, I hope there’s a cellar full of French wine and a man named Neil holding two glasses and a corkscrew.

  TAKE TWO ASPIRIN

  AND CALL ME IN A YEAR

  I used to tell my patients that nothing in this life is a waste of time as long as we learn from it (people actually paid me for this). From the calendar I see that my 365th day in France is fast approaching and it’s time for this psychiatrist to swallow her own medicine and review the lessons learned from 12 months of wasted time.

  While I’ve spent more than half my life being taught everything from algebra to the neurochemistry of schizophrenia, my year of nothing has probably been the most educational one of my life. First, and by now this should come as no surprise, I’ve learned that I’m not very good with languages. But I have a newfound ability to be optimistic in the face of persistent failure. I also choose to see constant corrections by strangers as kindness, a trait the French people I’ve met have in abundance. I speak and understand far more than when I first arrived, so I’m giving myself a shiny gold star on that one.

  I’ve also discovered that it takes time for an obsessive overachiever to change her ways. I came looking to simplify my life yet within a month of arriving of I was fully entangled in yet another real estate drama. Now, from my perfectly imperfect housette, I see my many renovations for what they really were, an endless striving for perfection. House, career, car, thighs, it doesn’t matter. It was all a silly race with no possible finish line. And while I can’t take full credit for things working out as they did, I am proud of myself for finally accepting (and loving) a home just the way it is. If I can master “leave well enough alone” by the time I leave this world, I’ll be a happy woman.

  So what about happy? After all my years of therapy, both giving and receiving, I’m still not sure what that word actually means. People define happiness as it suits them and far be it for me to advise anyone how to achieve it. Certainly to the casual observer my former life had all the necessary elements for happiness. And in all honesty, I wasn’t unhappy. I just felt out of place in my own life and I needed to find where I belonged. I’m still working on where I fit exactly, but I do know that my happiness has nothing to do with being called Doctor or the salary that goes with it. In fact, despite my recent whining about what I’m missing, going without has been one of my favourite lessons of all. Of course, there are still times when I feel I may actually die without a black wool trench coat, but then I remember something: I have everything I need.

  Long before coming to France I gave some serious thought to leaving medicine in search of a new career. I even hired a consultant to help me understand what my options were. She stumped me with one question: “What would you like to do?” The trouble was I didn’t have the foggiest idea. I realized that apart from reading, what I liked to do most was to go on vacation. I had no designs on becoming a ski instructor in Switzerland but when escaping your life becomes your major motivation, changes must be made. I considered going back to school but I was worn out, and the idea of four more years in classrooms was extremely unappealing. Then along came the opportunity here. Yes, it was still all about houses but at least they were other people’s houses and I thought it was a step in the right direction. As for how that turned out, I’ve learned that no matter how hard I try to control my life, merde happens. On the surface of things it looks like the lesson here is the tried and true (or perhaps very tired and unlikely to be true) “things happen for a reason.” But I see something more.

  If I had to narrow it all down into one piece of wisdom it would be this: sometimes you have to step away from the many things you have to do to find the one thing you want to do. What began as a personal diary and a convenient way to keep friends and family updated has grown into an all out passion. Before starting a blog about my detour to France, all I’d ever written were prescriptions. Over the past year I’ve written something almost every day and while I have to be careful not to apply my Type A ways to it, writing brings me a pleasure I never dreamed possible. For now it doesn’t matter if I’m any good at it, all that matters is that I feel good doing it.

  Some will say that my story is nothing more than a grand exercise in self-absorption, that my year in France was a protracted and somewhat empty sabbatical, and they’d be right. Well, so what? From where I sit my time has been well squandered. I’m still reflecting on my choices (past and future) but I’m not so caught up in my own head to suggest that my way of learning things is practical for everyone. It’s not, and my lessons are my own. But here’s something I’ve always known: everything we need and desire can be found anywhere we choose to look for it. I chose to look in France and found myself. Of course, ditching your life and roaming halfway around the world just to find yourself is simply the method used by a responsible and level-headed psychiatrist. I’m sure there are more daring ways to go about it.

  FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

  When I lived in Canada, I certainly had more friends to see but it seems that I actually see friends more in ma vie française. No wonder, with the old job and everything I had to give to it, I had very little left over for my social scene. Now, time is what I have the most of and I’m lucky to be able to spend it with new friends who offer me a different view of the world and of myself. Not for a moment am I suggesting that my Canadian friends offered me less than mes amis here. There’s simply no measure of the love, laughter, wisdom and bail money that my buddies across the water have given and still give me. We often had a lot in common, our language, lifestyle and experiences. Here, it’s a whole new game.

  Take Geraldine, a woman I met at the country cookout awhile back and happened to run into again at Mademoiselle Elodie’s torture chamber. Geraldine has a rickety knee to match my rickety spine but that’s where the similarities end. She graciously invited us to her home a few miles away to share a meal and get to know each other a little more. She shares her life with Michel, her mari of 42 years, at the end of a country road.

  We pulled up in the dwindling sunshine of the day and took a tour of their vast property, a stone farmhouse surrounded by rolling green hills as far as the eye can see. But never mind the scenery, she could be running her own grocery store from her garden. Every vegetable imaginable is raised by hand and brought to her table. She has fruit trees so laden with peaches, plums, pears and apples that the branches touch the ground. I thought poor Neil, a man who eats whole pies in one sitting, was going to have some sort of fruit fetish episode.

  We went inside their beautiful home, which they themselves restored from top to bottom, and she served us a meal that has reinforced my belief that eating must be considered a religion. She’s raised three children, manages a vacation cottage on her property, speaks French, English, Italian and Spanish, has sailed around the Mediterranean several times and has travelled the world. She has her hair cut in every foreign country she visits just to see how they do it (for the record, she loves her grey hair), and when she visited my house for dinner she brought me, as is the custom in France, these …

  Two things to note here: the very classy, cut-off plastic water bottle we call a vase, and the fact that these flowers are from her garden. So wife, mother, linguist, chef, interior designer, farmer, sailor, world explorer, tourism entrepreneur and, apparently, florist. I’ve only spent two evenings with her so far and god only knows what’ll come out next. If s
he told me she was running Spain from her garage I’d believe her. All this begs one question and one question only: what have I been doing with my time? Granted, she’s got a few years on me, but still. She’s a talented and brilliant woman with fascinating stories. But more importantly, she’s engaging, unassuming and incredibly gracious. She’s an inspiration, and in many ways, represents the sort of woman I’ve always wanted to be.

  A year ago, I never would’ve believed that such a life actually existed.

  Now, seeing it up close, I’m determined to figure out how to make every minute of mine count, to make a life that I can look back on and be well pleased. Okay, maybe not the cooking (I already have a husband) or the four languages (don’t get me started), and as for the sailing, I get seasick just looking at boats. But little by little I’ll find my way. Maybe I’ll start with the raising three kids thing. How hard could it be?

  A LIFE LESS

  EXTRAORDINARY

  It’s the 16th of September and for the better part of my adult life I’ve been waiting for this day. No matter what happens tomorrow, from this day on, I can say I once lived in France for a year. And what a strange and glorious year it’s been. So many times I’ve asked myself what was I thinking. Well, looking back on how it came to be, I do remember two certainties I held before turning my life upside down, and today seems like the perfect time to see just how right or wrong I was.

  The first was that I love my husband. While I was sure of it the day I married him, even more so in the moment of decision to leave everything, what I’m unsure of now is how to describe what I feel for him after this last year together. Here’s a man who arrived in a foreign country and created an entire life from absolutely nothing. He’s done all the talking, officially speaking, a soupçon of irony there, one thinks. He’s opened bank accounts, met with French accountants, researched international tax laws and incorporated his business here … I made a banana bread. He then turned to matters of domestic policy. He secured a residency permit, bought and unbought a house, negotiated a complicated lease, set up utility contracts and is in the process of acquiring state health care for us. All while working full-time and receiving orders for buckets of boeuf bourguignon from some woman who occasionally does a bit of laundry for him.