Saint Maxime, France, 15 July 2015: Musicale

Abby has of course been thrown in the pool fully clothed, because as she explains “that always happens” to her. We are at the home of one of Grandpa David’s oldest and dearest friends, Ghislaine Beer, a former French teacher who has been tutoring me by Skype on Sundays for the last couple of months. Now comes the final exam, both in language and in manners: can we navigate an evening around her pool, nestled into a mountainside overlooking the Gulf of Saint Tropez? We are joined by her daughter Emmanuelle and son-in-law Olivier, who are our age, along with their handsome 19-year-old son Valentine and their fetching 14-year-old daughter, Emmaline. We are speaking, I don’t know, “Franglish?”

The kids, dry again, have gathered around an electric keyboard on an upstairs landing overlooking the living room, which opens out on the pool by means of a vast garage door. They have discovered a language they share: music. Olivier and Emmanuelle met while playing in a rock band. Valentine plays drums, keyboards, guitar, and, this being France, accordion. Emmaline, like Alex, sings and acts. At one point I bring plates into the kitchen and hear Emmanuelle singing to herself. I’m sure I would have paid to see their band.

Down on the patio, the adults talk and sip under a pergola strung with orange trumpet flowers heavy with seed pods. The flicker of citronella candles reflects in the wavelets of the pool. Olivier asks what shows Alex has done and in what roles. The Music Man (Mayor Shinn), Cats (Mungojerrie), High School Musical 2 (Chad Danforth). Olivier gets a brainstorm: does Alex know the song “Stars,” Javer’s theme from Les Miserables? (Apparently Les Miserables is a big deal in France, something about Victor Hugo.) Alex does, yes. And so does Emmaline. Olivier whips out his iPad and produces a Bluetooth (Bleutooth?) speaker. Emmaline and Alex stand by as a karaoke version of “Stars” rolls up the screen with full orchestral accompaniment. The sound they produce can only be described as the Shy Teenager Mumble Choir.

The teens, however, come up with a better idea. They Bluetooth up their phones and out comes “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” from Mulan, first in English, then in French. Yes, they’re up there singing with Donny Osmond, who is too American even for many Americans. Soon they join the adults on the patio with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” the Timon and Pumba version from The Lion King. This time everyone is in full voice, including the parents. Because that always happens. 

Port Grimaud, France, 17 July 2015: Plein air

There is the heat. Air conditioning is not a thing here, at least not the way it is at home. Some restaurants have fans, and the ones that face the yachts in Saint Tropez sport misters that play havoc with your hair every minute or so, but by that point it’s already hopeless anyway, so you’re just grateful for the fleeting evaporation. I can understand why body odor would be a part of many people’s impressions of their trips to France, but honestly we don’t notice. I can’t say whether this is a result of the success of the hygiene industry’s Gallic marketing efforts or simply because we smell as bad as anyone.

The closest thing we find to air conditioning is a cross-breeze. To encounter one requires that doors and windows remain open on both sides of the house, and even then they are capricious things, given to teasing you and then dying out just as you lift your arms to channel the zephyr through your sleeves. Given the choice between closing the shutters and mooning the neighbors after my shower, well, I don’t know these people. After all, this is a place where you can lie face-up on the beach in only a thong, but then you won’t be allowed on the water taxi without a shirt. I’m not sure which rule applies to keeping your towel on after a shower. I just know that I’m too hot to care.

The heat adds a new dynamic to sharing a bed. On the up side, blanket-hogging is pretty much a non-issue. On the down side, snuggling is not welcome when merely resting your hand on your spouse’s hip is enough to leave a five-fingered sweat print.

Sleeping with the windows open is a pretty cool experience for a Southerner who, when home, finds the lack of air conditioning between the kitchen door and the car almost too much to bear. Waves lap, breezes blow, seagulls call. Also, the big yachts start in with their grinding, whining bow-thrusters around 8:00 AM. The super-rich truly are heartless.

There are mosquitos. I may be imagining that their buzz is more nasal than the US variety, but they are no less hungry, enjoying 3-hour multi-course blood meals in the cafes and then, I imagine, lingering on a glass of rosé. By day 7 our kids finally realize that their mosquito repellant cartridges are mounted upside down in their little electrical diffusers. That would explain all the red spots. When I get home the thing that will strike me as the most different turns out to be the dry, canned, cool air filling my house. It blows on my head, but never through my sleeves. 

Port Grimaud, France, 15 July 2015: The Cowboy and the Fish

Breakfast is nearly done when our lanky, graying neighbor peers over the little wall dividing our patios and says, “There is…a problème.” He holds his nose and points at the water. There, between the big inflatable boats, the little dingies, and the antique wooden sailboat, floats a dead fish. Headless, tailless, with bloated intestines splitting its ventral surface, it must be 2 feet long. It smells longer.

A debate ensues: “We have called the capitain to remove it, but he does not come,” says our neighbor.

“He will want quite a tip when he does,” says Grandpa David. “They tried to fire him last year over something or another, but he got a lawyer, and he’s still here. Let me see what I can do.”

Grandpa David ducks into the house and returns with a trowel and a length of nylon string. He follows the fish as it rides the current under a wooden dock, managing to pin it just in time with his trowel. He lifts the tail end and we lasso it with a slip knot. Grandpa David hails from Colorado, but this may be his sole experience with rodeo.

He walks the fish back up the quay like the French men walk their dogs through town, casually. Then he invites Julian to join him in his little blue dingy, pulls the cord on the motor, and continues this casual stroll with his leashed, bloated fish all the way to the mouth of the gulf. What our French neighbor thinks, I cannot say. The capitain, he does not come.

Plage de Pamplonne, 13 July 2015: Rocks

In the States, I would not let my boys clamber over sharp rocks 20 feet above other sharp rocks in the surf. At least not without helmets. And perhaps tethers. But they got out there while the adults were still savoring the last sips of our rosé from sweating bottles propped in plastic bags of ice water, so what could we do? Sip again and watch them put a hand out to the scrubby gravel as they test their footing to take another step up, over to the next cove, to see what might be just out of sight.

Every 10 minutes or so a helicopter buzzes its way towards Saint Tropez. Certainly at least some of these are medical choppers laden with American boys who misjudged the French rocks over the dark blue Mediterranean waves. Or maybe they’re all just full of tourists in a hurry. The boys make it, the youngest well behind. Honestly, they probably don’t sell helmets around here anyway. But if they did, I know they would be more fashionable than ours.

Plage de Pampelonne, France 13 July 2015: Lost in Translation

Lunch on the beach: people are smoking. Most of them. We ask to move tables. Our cover is blown: les Americains. Does Emily understand that the thing she ordered will be a vast plate of shells on a bed of ice with their steamed or raw inhabitants peeking out, asking to be showered in lemon and pulled or scraped from their shells and swallowed mostly whole with rosé while bug-eyed, antenna’d shrimp look on? She does not. There are tears. Plates are moved. The salad, too, is good, and it doesn’t watch you.

Port Grimaud, France, 10 July 2015: Other people's trips

First, let’s just acknowledge that no one else really wants to hear about your vacation. It’s not that they’re rude or uncaring, just that these experiences which have been so intense, so life-transforming for you are based on your complete and total immersion in another place. I remember as a child traveling with my parents and then, later, sitting in the den as my dad loaded a projector with Kodachromes to share with friends after dinner. Encountering a donkey and a herd of goats while stumbling up a scrubby gravel hillside path on a hot, remote island was magical. The slides of that moment? It’s a donkey. And some goats. Do they eat that yucca?

We return from these experiences struck by the way the light glints from the wavelets in a pleasantly blinding way, by the feel of a fresh-baked croissant collapsing between our fingertips, by the smells of diesel exhaust and hot sand and strange flowers and cooking fish mingling in our noses. We see a child who looks somehow different from the children we know and yet whose smile is so…universal. We watch strangers greet each other and gossip in a language we don’t understand. We sleep until the foreign-accented seagulls call us awake. And we pledge, we swear that we will return home transformed, that when we pour our coffee and shower and make our beds and load the car for work next week it will be different. More like them, less like us. And we’re sure that our friends and co-workers will be able to tell. After all, we have been transformed, baptized by showering in someone else’s water. How could this whole experience not be as fascinating to our parents, friends, and neighbors as it was to us?

“How was your vacation?”

“Life-transforming.”

“Right. You have pictures? Oh, what are those, goats?”

I promise: no goats, no donkeys. But still, I know how it is. This blog is just so that when you see us, you can pretend that you can tell how transformed we are. We know: you, too are now different. And we want to hear all about it.