France, 1963
January 28th, 2006Save as PDF
The first time I visited France it was so different and exotic. Now it seems no more foreign than Nebraska. (Less so, actually.) Something has been lost forever as the French inexorably become assimilated into the rest of the world, a process they despise even as they participate in it.
France, 1963
The secret, c’est complexe:
Imperiously accomplished coilings and uncoilings.
A dog under the table to pick up the scraps
but the meal is so good there are no scraps.
Police who stop your car on the road at night
and say “Vos papiers.”
Harsh stone houses pushing up against the Route Nationale.
One small gray café.
A man with coffee and a cigarette sitting in front of it.
A certain way of smoking.
An extinct aroma —
Gitanes, Gauloises — greeting you
at the Gare du Nord.
Chic girls who look through you.
In every village square, death memorialized.
No, celebrated.
The pieds-noirs throwing a Molotov cocktail
into the pharmacy next to your hotel.
Boulevards shining in the rain.
Yellow headlights.
Traction avant.
The kindness of unkind-looking people.
The hardness of beautiful people.
You are not French
but France feels like your home:
its unyielding regulations,
its maternal capriciousness
and the guilty way it makes you feel
when you’re not there.
You return years later but by then
France has let her secret go for good.
January 29th, 2006 at 6:54 am
Hi John,
I can perfectly relate to your poem “France, 1963″. When I was five and a half years old, my family moved from Hyde Park, NY, to a small town twenty miles outside of Paris. We ended up living there for two and a half years from 1963 till 1965, exactly the time period you are referring to (although I did not notice the chic girls who looked through me).
When we arrived, our transport boxes had USA written all over it. This was during the time when Charles de Gaulle, and therefore most of the French, had a strong dislike of Americans. You can imagine that we were not well received. Also, my first days in school without a clue of the French language can be a very sobering experience, but once you master those difficulties you’re strengthened for the rest of your life, ha, ha!
Nevertheless, my family and I learned to love the France which you describe so well in your poem. It can still be found, in old black & white movies, or today travelling on a bicycle or on foot, in places you’d otherwise never find any reason to go to…
Merci pour la mémoire!
Ron
November 12th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
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