On the other hand, Thanksgiving in Paris was a dead ringer for Thanksgiving at home, save for the much-missed butternut squash, and the fact that everything tasted better. I don’t know whom we have to thank—I fear it may be Hallmark—but Parisian butchers have come a long way since the first time I ordered a “grosse dinde” in November, nearly 20 years ago. “Oh, is it for your American rite?” asked the butcher, with a squint of the eye generally reserved for Jewish-Masonic conspiracies. Now those grosses dindes come with a side order of miniature American flags. In New York we are Pilgrims, but in Paris we are Americans.
We had one great advantage over Franklin: We spoke French. Franklin rarely acknowledged that minor handicap, although he did refer to contracts that had been signed in his first year, when misapprehension was the order of the day. Even a bilingual family came in for its share of surprises, however. There was the hockey coach who chain-smoked on the ice. (There were also the unforgiving stares to be endured in the métro when traveling with an eight-year-old in full hockey equipment, especially as that child was a girl.) School recess may well have taken place in the magnificent Parc Monceau, but one did not a) set foot on the grass, b) throw a ball, c) throw anything resembling a ball. In turn, the flying scarves, the chestnuts, the bottle caps were confiscated. The school week is cleverly configured to keep mothers from working (home for lunch; half-day Wednesday; four-hour birthday parties). The academic calendar is configured to keep teachers from having to work more than three weeks straight.
Some of the frustrations were maddeningly familiar. The problem is less one of language than of the sterling example set—and the expectations harbored—by North American efficiency. It is almost impossible to shake the Anglo-Saxon concern that you are holding up the line, a qualm that does not exist in France, where it is one’s privilege and responsibility to do so. Quite simply, ours is a service economy. France’s is not. A café waiter is meant to do his job, but that job is most decidedly not to guarantee the satisfaction of his customer. Rather it is the customer’s job to admire the professionalism of the waiter, the expertise with which he can flick a baguette crumb into oblivion, his unerring capacity to make change. Stocking the larder is a full-time job, more so even than in Franklin’s day, when the fruit seller and the pâtissier and the laitier delivered their goods to the door. (Judging from his household accounts, Franklin had a hearty and prescient taste for apple pie.) Early on the ten-year-old delivered up the paradox of Parisian life: In that city, one accomplishes precisely half of what one sets out that morning to accomplish. Which means that if one heads out with only one thing to do, one has a problem.
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