You know, it's interesting.
Now that we've been there, done that, I guess a vacation home in Meredith, New Hampshire, up the hill from Lake Winnipesaukee, makes emotional sense. Fix my parents' marriage? Why not try.
That vacation home was mom and dad together again, working on something new. It was what they could afford: an un-insulated two-story frame house in a fir-dominated pine grove. The house didn't have a winter season. Once the pipes unfroze, though; once you could turn on the town water safely, you had easy access down the hill to a vast, deep-enough dark-blue lake (though we didn't have a boat) and enough woods to swallow pretty much anything.
Which is what I had right then: pretty much anything. I had never been emptier. I was 14 or 15 or so; I don't recall. I just knew I was on the verge of something better, worse, different; not a compass in sight I could see.
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France was really, really good for Simone and me. It brought her bilingualism back to fully functional (even with the phone company). And I enjoyed the life style, English only. I also enjoyed not understanding a damn thing I heard, including ads. Being in France was monastic for me.
Simone taught me the polite basics. I could say a few phrases so convincingly that people on the street would start a longer conversation with me. I'd yell: "Simone!"
We shopped. Merchants were delighted to have customers, of course. Simone put a good face on our visit to local stores. We got by nicely as the American couple whose husband smiles a lot but, alas, knows no French. Ignoramus = ignorant (masculine, in French). Not so different after all.
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Until 2020 or so. The pandemic sent that trans-Atlantic bridge to the bottom of the ocean. Nobody wanted Americans anymore.
Why? Record-breaking death rates early; later, our unfathomably-low vaccination rates. And they never wanted our "leadership" anyway > our president-du-jour. That was nothing new. US presidential leadership had been pretty much a disappointment since "Ich bin ein Berliner."
When Clinton was impeached for crimes against the national penis, French magazines howled with laughter.
When George W. Bush woke up from his dream of easy sledding to an international terrorism crisis ... two years later bombing the shit out of Iraq based on pretend "intelligence" ... well, yeah: the French opposed that, too. The night the US bombed Baghdad in April 2003, I was at a wine tasting at a farmhouse in France. It could have turned nasty fast, EXCEPT for my beloved Jean-Claude (local mathematics teacher). He intervened. That night in Bandol, as close as I could tell, he told the others to "shut the fuck up. Tom doesn't work for the Pentagon."
And then there was Donald X. Slump, the weirdest aberration ever in American presidential politics (his will be the only presidential library without a single book?) ... and, yeah, the French, our allies for more than 300 years, tapped their fingers. Wondered. Trying to be patient. "Once upon a time, you were the good guys, right? The U.S. did modern democracy. We sent young Lafayette. Then yeah, we cut off royal heads; good optics, those: put an end to this shit.
"But your new democracy pushed through! There were warehouses full of flaws, sure. But the U.S. Civil War confirmed an end to the slavery that built America. And then there were two World Wars; the first beyond U.S. borders, the second mostly beyond. You were the good guys, right?"
"Guys?" Once that easy utterance was presumed to be gender neutral.