Life should be a Language Study Abroad. For three months I have had all the perks of living with a family while having none of the responsibilities that make all of us so ready to return to Dartmouth by the third week of our winter holiday.
I have a mother here in Lyon, France. She does my laundry -- I do not have to hoard quarters for the washer, and I never go Code Red on underwear. She irons my sheets, my shirts and, I suspect, my jeans as well. She cooks dinner every night and asks in advance if I like to eat what she has planned. My home in the United States is a fend-for-yourself kind of place when it comes to food. I have never had to overcome the confusion of having an
intelligent mother who is always in the kitchen. Once in a while my mother has been known to drift out of a reverie and say: "Do you want me to steam you some vegetables?"
Here, every night, we have what the French call a "Menu Complet." It is made up of an hors d'oeuvre, entree, main dish, salad, cheese, bread and dessert. If I were to go home for lunch between classes, I would partake of the same full repast at noon. My French family is constantly bemoaning the ill health they feel sure I will arrive at as a consequence of eating only a sandwich and some fruit at midday.
To my real mother, cheese and crackers is dinner. If you add on thin slices of tomato and some mayonnaise, presto, you have a three-course meal. The biggest commitment my mother makes to food is during the summer when she spears all the seeds out of the watermelon as she is cutting it up.
The other night, my French host-mother, Jacqueline, actually commented, apologetically, that she was ashamed she had not been changing the plates between courses. "I am sure that your mother always changes the plates," she said, shaking her head forlornly. In fact, chez moi, in New York, the only time we use more than one plate during a meal is if we double the paper plates for a barbecue.
At home on Long Island, when we do eat something that creates dirty dishes, it is my job to wash them. It is a duty that I try to avoid, much to the chagrin of my tuition-payers. Here, if I lift a finger, I am immediately proclaimed "tres gentile": under a shower of praise, I clear the table, help prepare meals, and load the dishwasher without being asked.
"Maman" is never vexed with me. We have never had a conversation about my room that involves the word "pigsty." She has never said, "While you are under my roof ..." to begin a serious lecture. No matter what decision I make, Jacqueline usually says, "Oui, tu as raison." (You are right.)
In the United States, my 17-year-old brother Raymond would declare two more Olympic sports if he could -- putting me in wrestling holds and making me scream, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes not.
I have brothers and sisters here too. Most of them are grown with children of their own. One brother, Olivier, still lives at home. He is a patient, older sibling whom I see very little of. He occasionally invites me to watch movies with him or eat dinners with his friends. He gently corrects my verb tenses. He would never dream of drooling in my ear if I fell asleep on the couch.
At family gatherings, Jacqueline and many children, their spouses and progeny, never tire of discussing a mythic place called New York. It serves no purpose to remind them I am not a city-dweller. They often ask if the Bronx is really as dangerous Harlem. Then they argue it out amongst themselves. Usually Brooklyn enters the conversation at some point, but it is the Bronx that has captured their imaginations. They seem convinced that the Bronx is a kind of purgatory mix of a Neil Simon play and a Spike Lee movie, a place tourists rarely escape from unscathed. I have a seat center stage on a foreign film of misconceptions of my homeland. I don't mind because this is their way of making me the center of attention.
But apart from feasting on all delectables, exploring the Alps on a weekend and Italy on a holiday, being pampered and spoiled, feeling all I survey is like a comfortable cushion apart from this, there are surely more idealized reasons that life should be an LSA. Without working at it, so long as I listen and speak, I am guaranteed to learn something every day. Life and learning have become synonyms, and day-to-day experiences are adventures in erudition. All this and fresh baguettes and Lyonnaise chocolate?
Utopia. The question is not, "Why should life be an LSA." The question is, "Pourquoi pas?" Why not.
