A Bientot!

The wife and I are heading to France today. We will be gone for a month and will spend that time tootling around the nation of liberté, égalité, fraternité, which was revolutionary France’s version of DEI.

It’s a good moment to head overseas, just in time to not see the American inauguration of our own wannabe Bonaparte. Unlike Napoleon, Trump is no military tactician, however, and thankfully his territorial aims appear only to extend as far as Greenland to the east and the Panama Canal to the south. At least so far. Like Napoleon, one can certainly envision Trump trying to promote himself from Burger King to Burger Emperor. Will he, too, end his years in exile? One can hope.

We take the overnight out of New York this evening and land in Paris tomorrow morning. From there, we’ll head down to Bordeaux, where we’ll spend a few days exploring and eating French things like chocolate-dipped snails. Then we head east and south and then north and west. We will have no children or dogs with us and no strong agenda to follow other than comparing the baguettes of various boulangeries. We will wear striped shirts and berets. We will debate existence while smoking terrible cigarettes. We will be rude. We will listen to Serge Gainsbourg and be mad at the Germans. It should be a fine time.

This is what people look like in France.

Martha spent a year living in Paris when she was nineteen and returned nearly fluent in conversation French, so when we travel there, she does most of the talking. In fairness, though, she also does most of the talking when we are in America. It’s a pretty good arrangement because I almost never have anything to say and she never runs out. In France, I will have even less to say because my French consists of little more than telling my dog to sit. Assieds-toi!

Regular readers know that Martha and I spent six months living abroad in 2023. Three months each in Rome and London. Rome, in particular, was an illuminating experience. Not because of anything we particularly saw or did (although it’s impossible to walk down the streets of Rome without stopping every twenty-five feet to exclaim, “Look at that fucking thing!”). Instead, our European sabbatical opened our eyes to a different way to live.

We’d been overseas before, as regular tourists doing regular touristy things. Cramming our days with activities, outings, tastings, doings. This time, though, our approach was different. Three months in a city gives one plenty of time to just be, to live and experience life the way somebody who lives there experiences life. Or at least, get closer than we could as tourists dropping in for a week.

It took us almost no time to recognize that the Italians take life differently than we do here in the States. Their hustle culture is non-existent. One doesn’t hustle in Rome. One dawdles, converses, and sips cappuccino.

Maybe we do the thing we were meant to do that day and maybe we don’t. Who can tell? For somebody maybe waiting in their apartment for the electrician to show it can be maddening. But in terms of living life, it’s glorious. There’s that saying about food: Some people eat to live and some people live to eat. It’s like that, only with everything.

London, though, is too much like America. Or, perhaps, we are too much like them. It’s a big city, and hard. Glass and metal. Porky gentlemen squeezed into tight suits speaking into their mobiles at too loud a volume. Flushed women in power suits paired with sneakers. It’s a city on the move. Too much on the move, for my tastes.

It’s one of those cities where there people talk about capital. As a young Brit, I can imagine dreaming of moving to London the way, as a young American, I dreamed of moving to New York. These are the cities people go to make their fortunes. I am no longer young and no longer quite so desirous of fortunes. These days, I prefer letting my tea grow cold as I sit at the café table and sip and doodle and sip some more.

It's hard, when living in America, to imagine that one does not have to live the way we do. By “this,” I mean the hyper-consumerist dog-eat-dog blasphemy we call a nation. We are Hoarder Nation, a place where the accumulation of goods has replaced the accumulation of wisdom. Knowledge we have a-plenty; wisdom remains elusive. One senses that the cats who wander the streets of Rome hold more than the average American.

Perhaps that’s because we’re still a young country and we act the way young people always do. America is a nation of “more, more, more!” while the Italians are “Amore, amore, amore!” The French probably fall somewhere in between, but leaning towards the Italians. I think I might like to lean more in that direction, too.

So to France we go. It’s a propitious time to go, since the French just took to the streets days ago to celebrate the death of Jean-Marie, founder of the racist political party National Front. The good people of France gathered at the Place de la Republique to drink champagne and wave placards that read “the dirty racist is dead” and “a beautiful day.” The French foreign minister denounced the demonstrations, saying “Nothing, absolutely nothing justifies dancing on a corpse.”

Personally, I have no problem with acknowledging the death of bad people with a little celebratory noise-making. I am saving up party favors for just such an occasion here at home.

Anyway, I’ve got to go pack. We’re going to take our time with our little getaway. Maybe we’ll see some of the great cultural sights or maybe we won’t. That’s not why we’re going. We just want to luxuriate in not here for a few weeks because here promises to be not-great over the next month and into the four years that follow. When I return, I will rejoin my Have I Got News For You cast mates to yell about whatever nonsense our own little corporal has gotten himself up to. Napoleon’s men called him Le Petit Corporal out of affection but little corporals have a way of making big messes, as Europe rediscovered only a hundred or so years after Waterloo. America may learn that lesson in time, too, but I worry that our own wisdom will arrive too late to do us much good.

A bientot.