Requisite Intent

Requisite Intent is a legal term I learned from a lawyer from New Orleans.  Since then, I’ve had an almost-empty file folder by that title.  Yesterday, I put something in it.

Not Bad, Crawdad . . . Of What's Said and Shibboleths

It was the culminating rhymed bye of a g-chat that began with a pedestrian pleasantry, (“See you later, alligator!) followed with the expected reply (“After a while, crocodile!”) took a detour though the jungle (“See you soon, baboon!”) and landed right where it began: in the bayou.  Not bad, crawdad.

Not that anyone in Louisiana says “Crawdad” as far as I can tell.  And no one says “crayfish” either.   I’d read these assertions in an article called “Cajuns and Crawfish in South Louisiana” by C. Paige Gutierrez that I had photocopied for my class.

-C’est vrai?  I interrogated my French 1002 students. 

-Oui, they affirmed, some a little grudgingly. 

The ethnographic tone of the article at times felt odd to a portion of the class while others nodded in agreement as the author listed the unspoken rules of the crawfish boil, and reflected on how the crawfish, in its bayou-bred, up-from-the-mud tenacity, has become a symbol for Cajuns, themselves

-The way she writes about us . . . I just don’t think she’s from here, one student said.

-Maybe. Maybe not.  Maybe she’s a transplant who decided to stay, I offered. 

Sometimes choosing a place that wasn’t yours at first makes it even more yours in the end.   

“Crawdad” and “crayfish” sound like terms out-of-towners might toss around to try to blend, all the while giving themselves away.  Crawdad, especially, just sounds affectionately familiar.  I probably said it when summering in New Orleans in college, when I learned that I was a Northerner. 

“NORTH Carolina?” my New Orleans friends echoed back to me as if the name, itself, negated the need for argument.  “Did y’all even secede?” 

(Ulysses S.) Granted, we were the next to last to declare southern sovereignty, but still . . . I had never had my own regional identity questioned.  How southern was I?  How southern did I want to be?

“You’re a Yankee, aren’t you?” one student asked another French instructor in our department.

“Uh . . . I’m from Romania.”

“Is that north of I-10?”

Louisiana is bursting with words that puzzle outsiders: Atchafalaya, Natchitoches, muffaletta, boudin, beignet, half the street names in New Orleans.  The word “New Orleans” is a sort of shibboleth, too, often used in the show Treme to distinguish out-of-towners (who pronounce the last syllable in a way that rhymes with “means” or approximate the French pronunciation by separating it into three syllables) from locals (who use a short “i” sound and sometimes rhyme it with a drawly “Dahlins.”)

Crawfish are another in-group/out-group marker.  Within the first few minutes of a crawfish boil, peeling skills reveal who’s where on the continuum.    

I’ve been to two this year.  After the men cook the pot of crawfish, boiled live with spices, andouille sausage, corn, and potatoes, all of the contents of the pot are dumped onto a long table and everyone gathers around to pick at the pile.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1) Heads come off with a clockwise twist. 

2) Peel back the first section of shell, then press on the end of the tail until it pops up. 

3) Slide the meat from the remaining shell and remove the intestinal vein, and voilà!  You have the first 

    fishy fraction of your dinner. 

WARNING: If the tail's poking straight out, don't eat it.  It was dead before boiling.

You should have crawfish!  I exclaimed to the middle-aged British tourists whom my roommate and I met on the levee, a few days ago when the river was predicted to crest.  They had taken an obligatory photo of the swollen Mississippi, but quickly steered our conversation from sandbags to sandlots. 

-Where can we see a baseball game?  You know, like a local team or a school group?

My roommate and I looked at each other and shrugged, a little amused by the urgency in their voices.  It reminded me of the time I was in Ireland and woke up at 6 A.M. to drive to this step-dancing competition for 9-13 year olds.  I was enthralled because it felt like the perfect thing to do when roadtripping through the Irish countryside.  In fact, I couldn’t believe my great fortune.  But as I looked around, I knew the other people in the audience, primarily parents, were beyond bored, eyes aglaze from watching girl after girl bounce and tap through the same routine.

The last time I’d seen a baseball game was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the day after I’d flown back from France in 2008.  I was trying to be open-minded at the time because I loved someone who loved baseball, but between the circus antics of the announcer, the perpetual product placement on the billboards, rows of children eating corndogs and cotton candy, it encapsulated much of what I found uncomfortable about the United States. 

-Was it that bad?

-I squeezed his hand.  Can we please go the Farmers Market now?

-You looked young, so we thought you might know, the tourist said, a little disappointed at our un-Americanness.    

-You really should try the crawfish though.  It’s the season.

Child Dressed as Crawfish, Looking Vaguely Like a Religious Icon

-I don’t eat that, she said. 

I wondered if she was a vegetarian or allergic to shellfish or thought no explanation was necessary since crawfish live in the mud, resemble feisty, fiery insects, and much like artichokes, prompt curiosity about how to get past their prickliness to something edible.

-We heard there was a festival?

 

-Yes, in Breaux Bridge last weekend. 

The Crawfish Festival is held every year in Breaux Bridge, LA, Crawfish capital of the World. 

I’d gone with a friend and her husband.  We ate alligator on a stick, confronted death in a ride called the scrambler while listening to Joan Jett, took Cajun waltz and two-step lessons from a man in his eighties who later tried to sell us a self-produced instructional DVD, watched the defending champion take all in the crawfish races, and got sunburns as we sipped watered-down daiquiris out of coconuts and listened to zydeco . . . bons temps. 

Which, by the way, is another shibboleth.   Good times, bons temps.  (As in Laissez les bons temps rouler.)  My students write about having a bon temps in their French compositions all the time, and I half-heartedly circle it and note that it’s non-standard.  It’s a borrowing from English, transformed into French, and a said signifier that you’re in Louisiana

King Cake and Babies

“If Madame S. ever tries to feed you something, check first to make sure there’s not an infant inside.”  

-a line from Simon’s letter to the following year’s French class after my first year of teaching

The first time I made a King Cake, I used a box mix from New Orleans that my sister sent me with a little post-it exclaiming, “For your class!”  


"Oh GOODY,"  I thought,  until I opened it and realized this was not the three-step, two-ingredient, twenty-minute investment I’d learned to expect from boxed deserts.  

For one thing, it included a little packet of YEAST.  “Where,” I wondered, “is the logic in a product that assumes you lack the time to mix together sugar and flour but that you’d be happy to loiter around the kitchen for three hours while your dough rises twice?”  But Louisiana has its own logic, I’m learning, the first tenet of which is that nothing, not even a box mix of cake, can be rushed. 

So what is a King Cake?  They’re consumed all over Europe in various permutations, but I’ll focus on the Louisiana kind.  A Pelican State King Cake is a donut-shaped pastry, usually filled with cinnamon, cream cheese and fruit, or praline and topped with glaze and glittery sprinkles in the green, gold, and purple shades of Mardi Gras.  King Cakes are historically associated with Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, which falls on January 6^th and is, according to Catholic tradition, the day that the three wise men (or three kings) first saw Jesus.   In Louisiana, you can find them as early as New Year’s and consume them until Lent begins and its time to fast all of that frosting out of your system.

Each cake comes with a shiny gold crown and a miniature plastic baby (said to represent Christ).  Sometimes a string of beads rattles in the box alongside the other favors.  In New Orleans, the baker hides the baby, but in the more choking-hazard conscious city of Baton Rouge, where I live, the baby sits atop the cake, or (when placed by a more irreverent baker) finds himself face-down in glaze.  The person who has the baby in his or her piece of cake claims the crown along with the responsibility for providing the next cake.

Back in North Carolina, circa 2004 . . . After reading the directions, I was beginning to wonder if it would have been easier to make the kind of King Cake I’d had in France, with phyllo dough and frangipane, instead of trying to concoct an O-shaped cinnamon roll with tri-color toppings. 

Luckily, Kathryn helped me.  Kathryn was the seven year-old who adopted me that year.  After school, she’d wait by the window until she saw my red car pull into the low-rent apartments where we both lived.  Then, she’d run out, barefoot in every weather, long red tangled hair flying behind her, shouting “Tahwah, Tahwah!!”  She’d throw her tiny arms around my waist and say as she stared up at me, “What do you want to do today?”  She looked and sounded so much like my own sister had at that age.  

“Do you want to help me make a cake for my class?”  She bobbed her head yes.  “Good.”

I was rifling through the cabinets for a bowl for the dry ingredients, when Kathryn called me out.  Again. 

This sort of thing happened all the time.  I’d be going about my life as a twenty-five-year-old trailed by a very small sidekick when Kathryn would point out my corruptive influence.  The first time it happened was the day I moved in.  After making several trips up the stairs with Kathryn and her friend Rachel cheerily carrying child-sized armfuls of books and CDs, I noticed that I’d made at least one trip up without them. 

“Kathryn?  Rachel?”

I found them standing transfixed before a large Matisse print I’d carried up a few minutes before and propped against the wall: La Joie de Vivre.  It’s a tangerine and cotton candy colored landscape of nudes lounging, sunning themselves, and swirling through what looks like a grown-up game of ring around the rosie.   Other figures play the flute, nap, kiss, and stroll. 

Kathryn sighed gravely, disappointed to learn that she’d be sharing a residence with the kind of pervert who had the gall to display such pornographic material in her home.

“Looks to me like they’re BUTT NAKED!” 

"Yeah," echoed Rachel solemnly, “Just running around in their yard BUTT naked.” 

I didn’t like the puritanical tone of their art assessment but wasn’t sure how to respond knowing they’d probably parrot back to their parents any Our Bodies, Ourselves “no shame in naked” style explanation I might offer.

“Well, they’re probably hot from all that dancing and flute playing.”

“Where ARE they?” questioned Rachel who clearly doubted that such loose-moraled frolicking could take place in any yard she knew of.

I shrugged. “France?”

They both seemed relieved. 

This time, Kathryn was concerned about what she glimpsed in my cabinets.  “Those are wine cups, aren’t they,” Kathryn accused pointing up to the turquoise and lime green plastic goblets on the top shelf.

“Wine GLASSES,” I mentally corrected her, then realized she was exactly right.  Wine glasses were, by definition, made of a material that didn’t bounce when dropped on the kitchen floor.  So, not only was she reproaching me for all the villainy that drinking connoted in a seven-year-old’s mind, but also pointing out that I consumed adult beverages from a container one step up from a sippy cup.

Unwilling to suffer the judgment of a second grader or to lie about whether I did or did not have a bottle of wine befitting the quality of said wine cups in the refrigerator at that very moment, I responded: “Wine’s not the only thing you can put in them.”

“Ohhhh!!!” Kathryn shrieked. 

Maybe the alcohol didn't bother Kathryn.  Maybe it was more that seeing the wine cups called her attention to the fact that we weren’t the same age.  That at some point, perhaps after her bedtime, I led another life in which my non-elementary school friends and I sat around sipping forbidden substances out of wine cups and conversing about mortgages and books above her reading level.

“Can we put chocolate milk in them?” 

“Absolutely.”

“What else!?”

I paused, allowing her to imagine the possibilities.

“Pudding.”

She clapped.

After that, every time Kathryn ate anything at my house, she wanted it out of the wine cups.  And now that she knew about King Cakes, she requested a prize inside.  She’d close her eyes while I hid trinkets and jewelry castoffs in goblets of popcorn or underneath scoops of Neapolitan.

One day, her mother asked me to babysit, while she visited her own mother in the hospital.  “The ICU had limited visiting hours, just half an hour, really” she said, “and this is the only day I can get a ride.”

So, Kathryn and I settled in to watch an animated version of Frosty the Snowman we’d checked out from the library.  “I don’t know if we’ll have time to finish it before your mom gets back.”

“It’s okay,” said Kathryn, “I’ve already seen it a bunch.” 

I woke up with a start and saw the time blinking on the VCR: 1:30 A.M.  Kathryn was asleep on the other couch.  Where the hell was her mom?  She’d left for the hospital before dinnertime.  I checked my phone.  Nothing.  Walked downstairs and tapped tentatively on their apartment door.  No answer.   Searched for a note on my door. 

When I found no sign of communication, I went back inside, locked the door, turned off the TV, and draped a blanket over Kathryn.  Maybe we’d been sleeping when her mom came by.  Still . . . Oh well, nothing more to do now.

The next morning, Kathryn and I made pancakes, walked downtown, and browsed at the library.  I kept thinking, “What if her mom doesn’t come back?”  Uncharacteristically, Kathryn didn’t ask any questions, which made me wonder if something like this had happened before. 

I realized I didn’t even have a phone number for her mother.  Could I adopt Kathryn?  Did she have any other relatives?  I could probably make a bedroom for her in the den.  All of the hard stuff, diapers and toilet training and learning to walk and talk had been taken care of.  Besides, she bypassed most of my past roommates in maturity.

“That your baby?” someone asked as Kathryn pored over the Amelia Bedelia collection in the children’s section. 

“I’m just watching her for her mom.” 

“You two look alike.”

After having a milkshake and hamburger for lunch, we walked back up to the apartments.  Kathryn’s mother waited at the top of the hill.  “Baby!” she screamed.  Kathryn took off running, “Mama, Mama!” 

“I missed you, baby.  Mama got locked out of the house.”  Her eyes never met mine.  “Got locked out of the house and couldn’t get back in till now.”

“Well,” I said, relieved and a little sad, “I think your baby missed you, too.”

Southern Snow

“Here’s what I call snow.”

My grandmother, Tee Tee, is speaking.  We’re on our second glass of Chattanooga Blush, a variety of wine I love as much for its Kool-Aid shade of pink and muscadine magic as for the Biblical chiding on the front of the bottle, which references Ephesians 5:18: “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery.  Instead, be filled with the Spirit.” (NIV)

Well, we're filled with spirits at least . . .

She continues, “You can’t get to work and you can’t get to school, but you CAN get to the mall and the restaurant.  That’s what I call snow.” 

The meteorologists had speculated that our Christmas would be more white than warm, which means that we’ll celebrate any brrr-inducing blanketing of the ground by primarily protecting ourselves from foreign flakes.  A mad rush to the grocery store for hot chocolate.  Some kerosene for the heater.  A snowscape admired first though a pane then up-close for as long as we can endure.  (Before we realize that our boots aren’t designed for trudging through the drifts, that our cotton socks prove too thin for below freezing.)  

The one time I'd been caught off guard by the snow in Chapel Hill in 2003, my boyfriend and I had driven from hardware to grocery store for an hour after a cross-town power outage left us shivering in our little one-bedroom, sure that spooning was no match for temperatures in the teens.  Our search for firewood eventually led us to a man named Leon who took our 20 bucks in exchange for a bundle of wet timber.  We supplemented it with two armfuls of stolen newspapers and spent the next several hours building the most futile of fires, one that left the rug soot-stained and and made us wonder if we were on the verge of carbon monoxide poisoning.  Finally, he said, "Let's just drive to your parents' house, honey.  Neither one of us was made for this sort of battle with the elements."

Usually, southern snow is a ground dusting as light and unlasting as confectioner’s sugar on a waffle.  Northern snow, in my imaginings, might be more like the copious covering on the Louisiana brand of beignets: heaps of powdered piles at first delighted in, then eventually shoveled to the side once they’ve overstayed their usefulness.  Once you’ve had your fill and then some. 

I remember the first time I had beignets in Baton Rouge.  Two friends and I stopped into Coffee Call, a local diner-style beignet joint after an Abita pub crawl.  By the end of our witching-hour snack, I looked as if I’d weathered a bakery blizzard, with snowy sugar on my eyelashes, flecks around my mouth, white spots dotting my top.  Both of them, in black, managed to stay impeccable. 

“But how….?” I began.

“We grew up here.”

What must it feel like to grow up in a place where snow isn’t limited to special occasions, where it’s a chilly given of winter?  I’ve read that director Tim Burton thought of snow as magical because he never saw it in his native California.  One of my favorite movie scenes is his, when Edward Scissorhands carves an ice sculpture as Wynona Ryder’s character swirls beneath it, savoring a snow unknown to her.

This year we had a white Christmas, just like the ones I (didn’t) used to know.

Profound South: Invincible Summer

"Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un été invincible."

-Albert Camus

About a month into my summer stay in Paris, I bought a little purse-sized bottle of Tabasco and began carrying it with me like a fiery flask.  I loved the thought of it tucked into my bag, a potion from home.

Is this the culinary equivalent of packing heat? I wondered.  And if so, what was I armed against?  A spiceless life? 

I pepper my morning smoothies with cayenne, sprinkle Tony’s on my popcorn, shake sauce onto pizza.  Moving to Louisiana has only encouraged this practice.  Two Tabasco bottles sit, side-by-side like salt-and-pepper, on nearly every restaurant table in the state.  There’s classic crimson and a lighter green version for those who like it less hot.  

I purchased my heat at a place called Thanksgiving on rue Saint Paul.  My friend Annie was the first person to tell me about the store.  “It’s one of the places you can buy peanut butter,” she’d said, imparting a piece of information valued among newly-transplanted Americans. 

So, one day I’m walking home and see it: the big glass window painted with a cornucopia, scrolly cursive words announcing underneath: cuisine de la Louisiane.

Inside, I find a section stocked with Zatarain’s Red Beans and Rice, Louisiana Hot Sauce, Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning, just-add-water gumbo in little plastic packages. 

But this cornucopia isn’t all oysters and crawfish.  There are baked beans and marmite for the English, paper packages of maple-leaf cookies for the Canadians.  Peanut butter and marshmallow fluff for the Americans.  Then, tubs of fudgy icing and box mixes for yellow cake for anyone with a cupcake craving.  Prices aside, it’s every Anglophone expatriate’s dream.  So, in a move of (ex)patriotism, I splurged on grits, cornmeal, and hot sauce. 

While I was browsing, “Me and Bobby McGee” came on, and Janis Joplin told me a southern comforting story about kindness.  Even if you had a flat tire, you shouldn’t worry because a trucker would pick you and your boyfriend up and drive you to a city an hour and fifteen minutes away as it rained and the three of you sang, safe and sheltered in the cab.  The first line from the song was the only real association I had with Baton Rouge before moving here.  It was the place where Janis busted flat. 

During my move south, I had busted flat, too, in a U-Haul, in Mississippi, also with a boyfriend, but nobody offered to drive us to New Orleans.  And by then we really could have used a daiquiri.  So, instead of riding all the way to New Orleans as someone strummed her harpoon, we sat in the diner section of the gas station and tried to re-tranquilize my cat.

It about the time that I bought the Tabasco that I began saying I was from Louisiana.  I’m from Tennessee by birth, from North Carolina by virtue of having lived there for most of my life, and from Montpellier simply because I love it more than any place.  But now, in some ways, I am also from Louisiana.     

Hot sauce: wet heat.  A climatic clue you’re in the South. 

In Paris, people kept fanning themselves, bemoaning la chaleur, and I kept thinking, a little indignantly, you call THIS heat?  A sunny little seventy-five and no humidity?  On one of the first nights, I remember sitting in my apartment in jeans and a scarf, sipping tea and feeling desolate that it was late June and in the low 50s.  Fast forward to now: we’re in the home stretch of September and my roommate said yesterday, “It’s starting to cool off.  It might get down to 86 tomorrow.”

Louisiana’s all swamp and sweat, and so am I.

A few nights ago, I watched Steel Magnolias, which was filmed in Nachitoches, LA.  Viewing a movie set in the South has always been uncomfortable for me.  Things that seem natural in real life become affected, put on: the exaggerated accents, the waitresses calling you darlin,’ the languid pace.  It’s all drawl and dawdle that feels false played out on a screen.    

But beyond all the little signals of southerness, the mention of sweet tea, the words like “tacky,” and “grandbaby,” the hell-raising husband at the wedding who shoots firecrackers into the trees to scare off the birds, the Bible-brandishing beautician . . . beyond all the triteness, the tropes, there’s one part that gets me.  One part that feel real.  Southern. 

It’s the mother’s monologue in the cemetery, about her daughter Shelby’s death. (If you remember, she went into a coma after complications from a kidney transplant.)  It begins calmly then builds to rage.  There’s grace and resilience in it, even if M’Lynne believes she’s been done wrong.  I think of Louisiana.  Of Katrina.  Of Deepwater Horizon.  Of the steady strength of rebuilding. 

The cemetery monologue reminds me of another scene from an epic southern film, Gone with the Wind.  Scarlett’s “I’ll never be hungry again,” speech.  Famished, her hair all frizzy, Scarlett claws at the ground for a stray radish, then collapses, chest heaving against the earth.  If you’re from the South, you know the ground matches the sun-smeared sky.  “Red as birth land’s dirt,” to cite a line from a friend’s poem.

As God is my witness.  They’re not going to lick me.  I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again.  No, nor any of my folk.  If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.

Scarlett’s standing.  The score swells.  

Camus wrote, "Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un été invincible."

"In the middle of winter, I discovered in myself an invincible summer.”

He grew up in a sunny place, too.  Algeria.  His story, like Scarlett’s, assumes a certain nostalgia for a way of life that became indefensible.  French Algeria fell like the Confederacy.

In French, the Deep South is called le sud profond.  The Profound South.  The more I live here, the more I realize I am profoundly southern.  The land and I lay claim to one other.  Like Scarlett, called back to her birth land’s dirt, I am also called back to my terre, and carry it with me when I go.

Seeking Édith: Dieu réunit ceux qui s'aiment

“Je veux voir Édith Piaf !” 

She couldn’t have been very old, the little French girl who spoke her wish, but her pouty proclamation could have come from my own mouth.  I also wanted to see Édith Piaf!  Where WAS she? 

I’m in Père Lachaise cemetery, standing beside a French family staring squinty-eyed at a map, near the exit on Avenue Gambetta.  They, like me, have traveled from tomb to tomb for hours à la suite.

Elle est loin, chérie, loin . . .

I could tell that no one in her family especially cared to see Édith, and that she, unlike me, would not be able to return the following day, seeking Édith, dedicating a day to her.

When I taught high school French, we sometimes listened to Édith Piaf in class.  The students all knew “La vie en rose.”  No one knew “L’hymne à l’amour.”  It has become my favorite. 

The first two-thirds of the song is typical love song fare . . . a woman making a lot of foolish, fabulous promises, offering to do things no would ask her to do to prove her love.  She says she’d décrocher la lune (unhook the moon) and aller au bout du monde (go to the ends of the earth) and [se] ferais teindre en blonde (have her hair dyed blond), renierais [sa] patrie et [ses] amis (deny her friends and her country) if her beloved asked her to. 

After this crescendo of hollow promises, a laundry list of lovesick clichés, I always begin to feel vaguely vexed with Édith.  Why are women endlessly offering to change themselves, to deny who they are and what they love to be loved?  What is this Sam-I-Am vision of relationships?  (Would you love me in a box?  Would you love me with a fox?)  I understand it.  I’ve done it, even, but why fall in love with a brunette, then ask her to dye her hair blond?  Who’s the man who could say I love you then make that kind of request?   

But that’s when the song changes. 

Si un jour la vie t'arrache à moi

Si tu meurs, que tu sois loin de moi

Peu m'importe, si tu m'aimes

Car moi je mourrai aussi . . .

Nous aurons pour nous l'éternité

Dans le bleu de toute l'immensité

Dans le ciel, plus de problèmes

Mon amour, crois-tu qu'on s'aime?...

. . . Dieu réunit ceux qui s`aiment!

If one day life snatches you from me

If you die, if you’re far from me

It doesn’t matter, if you love me

Because I’ll die, too . . .

We’ll have for ourselves eternity

In the blue of all immensity

In the sky, no more problems

My love, do you believe that we love each other?

 . . . God reunites those who love each other.

Si tu meurs . . .  She’d written the song in September of 1949, seemingly about the love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan.  Just a month later, when he was taking a plane from Paris to New York to see her, their story ended.  The plane crashed.  Perhaps you remember the scene from the 2007 film about her life, La Môme (La Vie en Rose in English).  “L’Hymne à l’amour” became one of her most famous songs.  How many times had she sung it afterwards?  Confirmed that the “if” had become a “when”?

Love seems to me both defined by its fragility and its foreverness.  A fractional change in circumstances on an arbitrary afternoon can shift the scale from love to unlove, can cement a decision to close the door, lock it, throw the key in the Seine. 

I imagine the heart as a vast locker room, each of the occupied lockers belonging to someone you’ve loved.  Some lockers are almost empty . . . a yearbook picture, a note passed in class, a ticket stub.  Others, full to overflowing.  You open them, and like a slapstick scene from the halls of high school, the contents spill out, an avalanche of almost.  Almost just right.  Almost the one.  Almost enough.  Almost three years.  The day you close it, you have to slam your shoulder against it to get everything to fit inside.  Then, you go to the weight room to work out.  People don’t cry in weight rooms. 

My friend Kim had once compared love to a pillow . . . hard to destroy.  Malleable, yes, but durable.  I agree with that, too.  The lockers are like fireproof safes.   Even when we’ve ceased to rummage through them, forgotten what all they contain, they remain, never really cleared of their contents. 

I also believe that love is unlinear, that we travel in orbits, that we loop back around and cross paths with the people we’re meant to meet and re-meet.   A few weeks ago I bade goodbye to my friend Karen on the Pont des Arts.  She has been in Paris for two years, in France for the past four.  We first met ten years ago in Montpellier.

-I’m afraid that if I leave, I won’t be able to come back.  Or that it will be harder.  

-I know.  I always feel that way, too . . . but look at us. We’ve both come back so many times.  We always come back.  It’s how we are. 

Dieu réunit ceux qui s’aiment. 

The last time I’d left France.  I sobbed, sometimes secretly, sometimes not, for weeks as I slept beside the person I’d come back for. 

-It feels like France is the other man, he’d said once.   

When he and I parted ways, I went back to France.  Sometimes, when I was there and I missed him, I tried imagining he was dead.

-Why? 

-So that I’m not angry with him.

-I didn’t realize you couldn’t be mad at someone who’s dead.

-Maybe you can . . . but you try to remember the good things.  And you try to make peace with the idea that you won’t be hearing from him again.

Strangely, pretending he was dead was a strategy that he’d suggested, once, when I said I didn’t know how to respond to inquiries about him, about us.

-Just tell them I died.  They’ll quit asking.

-Really?

-Yeah.  He demonstrated: Oh him?  Yeah, he died.  Then he looked very sad for a moment, as if he was honoring his own memory, observing a moment of silence.  Then you change the subject. 

Not far from the Cimetière Père Lachaise, in a non-descript building where she once lived, is the Musée Édith Piaf.  Visitors require appointments.  The first full song I hear as I walk in is “L’hymne à l’amour.”

I think of the apartment-turned-museum as a life-sized locker with its memorabilia guarded by a tiny dog named Opium and a man named Bernard.  In an article in English lying on one of the tables, the gardien is interviewed.  He reveals that met the singer as a teenager at the insistence of his parents.

As he looked at her, sitting a blue couch that now resides in the museum, in a bathrobe, mal-peignée, he thought:  This isn’t a great singer.  She isn’t even beautiful.  Then, he said, he heard her sing.  He asked to watch her practice backstage for the next three months. 

Afterwards, I walk back to Père Lachaise, determined that this time I will find Édith Piaf.  When I arrive at her gravestone, looking at the dates of her life, I remember the beginning of a framed letter hanging in the museum, a run-on gush of thoughts on growing older:

Tu sais que j’ai 28 ans aujourd’hui, oui mon vieux.  Vingt-huit ans depuis cinq heures du matin, tu te rends compte, je veillis, c’est embêtant quand on a dépassé 25 ans enfin ils sont parties, n’en parlons plus !

Do you know that I’m twenty-eight years old today, yes old man.  Twenty-eight years old since five o’clock this morning, do you realize, I’m getting older, it’s bothersome when you pass 25.  Well, the years are gone, let’s not talk about it anymore!

Engraved on a plaque by her tombstone, are the final lines from the song.