Class One...and How I Got Here
I first set foot in Paris the summer after I turned 16. I was traveling with a choir on one of those whirlwind bus trips that take hordes of teens across some limited piece of the continent. Paris was the second stop of the trip, following London.
I, along with three girls that I knew at least a bit before the trip, missed the bus (this will surprise no one in my family or close friend group, though in retrospect I'm a little surprised I was this scattered away from home). Rather than catching a taxi to the next place the bus was supposed to stop, which would have been highly unusual for four girls from Kansas, we simply pulled out a map and walked. It was a long walk but we made it right as the evening's concert was ending - so that was good. (This piece is a little surprising to me in hindsight. I'm a little shocked I had a map or a schedule, so I'm guessing I can thank a traveling companion for these handy items.)
Also, yes, to anyone who might wonder, in the 1990s, I missed a bus in a foreign country, followed directions based on a paper map, and not a single adult connected to the trip or me knew where I was for an hour or two. As I recall, nobody panicked (well, maybe my parents would have panicked if they'd known) and everything was fine. I'm not even confident the adults on the trip knew we were gone, though perhaps they noticed when it came time to line up for the performance and we were absent. Maybe. It's equally possible they didn't know we were gone and only found out because we relayed our afternoon adventure to them later. Life was less structured. We rolled with it.
The next time I made it to Paris was about 20 years ago, Ed and I biked across the Loire Valley. And, more recently, Ed and I took our children there to meet our French au pair after enjoying a holiday in London (our children's first international trip).
Every time I have been in Paris, I have been struck by the absolute gorgeousness of the city and I feel deeply that some very odd circumstance in the universe landed me in Topeka, Kansas instead of Paris, France. It's fine. I've lived a perfectly wonderful life, made better by the amazing people who I've crossed paths with along the way. And of course, I cannot imagine being anyone besides my parents' daughter and my sister's sister, so it wasn't a BIG mistake by the universe. Still...when you know there's been some odd break in the time-space continuum, it seems appropriate to try and fix it.
Which brings me to class one.
About a month ago, after talking about it for at least a year, I finally opened the continuing education catalog for my county and enrolled in a weekly French class. This is actually my second or third go at learning the language, depending on how you count my 300+ day Duolingo streak.
The first time I tried to learn French, it was in preparation for the bike trip I just mentioned. Both Ed and I enrolled in a semester of French at the local community college. But, unbeknownst to me, Ed had a fairly decent command of basic French, stored away since elementary school. For him, the class served as a nice brush-up. The whole thing was a bit humiliating for me.
Each week of class, Monsieur Dobrin would ask us a simple question and we would open class the following week by answering it. My answers tended to be along the lines of "I go to work last week. It is cold." Monsieur Dobrin would ask me a follow-up question and instead of answering it, I would stare blankly hoping some distraction would save me. And for the record, I was trying! I just found the class difficult.
Ed's answers, on the other hand, would be more along the lines of "I enjoyed riding my bicycle across the County both for pleasure and as daily transportation for work." He responded to Monsieur Dobrin's questions, and it's quite possible they were both questioning why Ed was going to France with me.
I will share two moments from that trip.
- My first memory happened while biking through a farmer's field. Bike paths in France run through fields and you can safely bike alongside farmers operating large machinery. Many of the farms are vineyards, and it's a perfectly reasonable thing to stop and share a glass of wine with the farmer. At one such stop, Ed and the farmer started chatting - and Ed told a joke! I cannot remember what the joke was (and I most certainly did not understand anything they said), but I thought then it was terribly impressive, a position I stand by today.
- Less impressive was checking into a small hotel toward the end of our trip. Ed needed to sign a paper and despite having repeated "Avez-vous un stylo?" many times during our French class the preceding semester, we both drew an absolute blank on how to request a pen. Win some. Lose some.
Mostly, I relied on Ed's French for that trip, utilizing phrases such as "Je parle anglais" which was an efficient way to solicit an English tour of whatever we were touring and "excusez-moi", attempting to cover whatever gauche thing I had just, likely unintentionally, done. Still, that trip will likely always rank among my favorites.
Now, I have enrolled in a class because I plan to right whatever wrong happened when I found myself somewhere other than Paris. I am planning to go live there for a year and Ed is a terribly good sport and willing to go along. But I do not want to rely on his French this time around.
There are five students in my class. The first is a woman who took French many years ago who is interested in brushing up on the language because she loves the way it sounds. Her accent is incredible. There are two people who are planning to celebrate their honeymoon in France in a month and figured a four week crash course in French that meets once a week would position them to enjoy the trip more. The fourth person is a woman who took French last semester and wanted to make sure she kept speaking a little French in the summer so she wouldn't lose what she'd learn. And there's me - right in the middle of the others as far as French skills go.
During the first night, we learned to conjugate two verbs:
être (to be)
je (I)
suis
nous (we)
sommes
tu (you, inf)
es
vous (you, formal)
êtes
il/elle/on (he/she one)
est
ils/elles (they)
sont
avoir (to have)
je (I)
‘ai
nous (we)
avons
tu (you, inf)
as
vous (you, formal)
avez
il/elle/on (he/she one)
a
ils/elles (they)
ont
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