I miss la langue française. I miss the façades. I miss the falafel.
On Bastille Day, the 14th of Juillet, La Fête Nationale, I am honoring my former colony by indulging in a little nostalgic reminiscing. I go through periods of sorely missing France, where I lived for almost two years before moving to New York. Being an ex-expat is mitigated by the fact that I love my current city, and I feel completely at home here in Brooklyn. Still, there are moments when I am desperate to return to the warm comfort of unpasteurized cheese and unparalleled public transit.
In my current neighborhood, I absorb as much unsentimental Francophilia as possible. This includes attending the annual Smith Street Bastille Day party and pétanque tournament, which is billed as the biggest pétanque tournament in North America as well as the biggest Bastille Day celebration outside of France. It’s a convivial, drunken street fest that more closely resembles an outdoor Irish pub with sand traps than the French national holiday, which, as I recall, was a reserved, idle picnic for the few French who didn’t faire le pont.
Also, I strain my ears whenever I hear French spoken around town, which is quite often in this part of Brooklyn. I find I am quickly forgetting my vocabulary, although a recent visit with some French friends encouraged my dormant linguistic skills. I even used the subjunctive a bit - not to brag, or anything. When I moved to France, I didn’t speak a word of French, and, in case you haven’t heard, Parisians are not very pleasant to people who don’t speak their language. So becoming awkwardly conversational in French was like a well-earned battle scar. I want to show it off here as much as possible, but opportunities for me to actually speak French are few and far between. Mostly I just eavesdrop on Francophones’ conversations and order French wine in restaurants, correctly pronouncing the wine in the way only an obnoxious, nostalgique American ex-expat would.
My ache for France throbs sporadically, though. At its worst, I crave France when I need medical care. In my home country, the land of my birth, my beloved U.S. of A., I am uninsured and constantly straining to see the doctor. In France, they insisted I had quality, affordable health care with doctors and specialists constantly available. It was like a dream.
But then I get up to walk my dog at six thirty in the morning, and I roll out of bed in my pajamas and sneakers and parade around the streets of New York with nary a sideways look, and I remember why life in America ain’t so bad. In France, the one time I made the horrific error of wearing my running shoes with a pair of jeans on my way to the gym, two adolescent French bitches actually laughed at me and remarked to each other that you could always pick out the Americans in Paris.
No place is perfect.
But today I salute la France, land of les baguettes, le TGV, and les Français. And did I mention the falafel?
Image via xavier buaillon's Flickr