You know summer’s getting serious when a holiday weekend is upon us. I started my holiday early this year with my very first trip overseas, to Paris. My recession-strained dollars were bolstered by a teaching salary – this was a working trip, all very grown-up. On the plane, I officiously counted and re-counted my students and reviewed the syllabus. When a second adorably tiny bottle of red wine was offered to me, I refused, soooo maturely, my life as a grown up unfurling as smoothly as the vapor behind our Air France plane.
And then we landed.
People often talk about being “reborn” while abroad. When I tumbled out of the airplane chute into the bright lights and incomprehensible signage of the Charles de Gaulle airport, whose swinging Jetsonian architecture sings of 1966, the year the airport and I were both born, I wasn’t so much born again … as turned back into a baby.
I was blinking and sleepily bewildered, and the suavity I’d long-imagined for myself in Paris was truly only imaginary. Fine-boned Parisian women in filmy impressionist scarves and severe spiked pumps glided by me like elegant ghosts while I, bandy-legged, stumbled over the mottled cobblestones of the medieval Marais district like a rogue toddler. I even fell down once, hard enough to break the skin on my knees and shame myself before lovely strangers— hard enough to remember kids cry for a reason.
Actually, I fell hard for all of Paris, and not just on my kneecaps. I floated on the perfume of fresh baguettes and moody espresso and tea-cup roses and the tang of grown-ups who use strange soaps and colognes with unpronounceable names. Like a toddler in love with every sensation, I teared up at the brooding stained glass of 14th century churches, giggled at self-important pigeons and cheeky street mimes, and shamelessly envied children for their sleek sailboats at the Luxembourg Gardens, and a wobbly-legged doggie pull-toy dragged by a pre-schooler straining for his grandfather’s hand.
And like a toddler, I found I had to relearn just about everything, from how to count (a hitchhiker’s thumb is one, and then the index finger ... ) to how to cross a street, since in Paris deadly scooters and even bicycles, mostly ridden by those same elegantly-scarved women, can cream you from any direction, regardless of the traffic lights.
I even had to learn to eat again. The French hold forks in their left hands, tines down, improbably stacking food on the slippery tine backs with a knife in their right. I tried this surgical method with an aesthetically spare plate of café nachos I shared with a homesick student, since the grownups at the teetering nearby sidewalk tables were nacho-ing with knife and fork, but I felt like an adolescent T-rex, darting my head toward my awkwardly held fork, trying to capture a mouthful before it droobled back onto my plate.
Loss of cultural fluency is scary - like a lot of childhood, frankly, filled with unknowns—but it also means every small success is a hand-clapping delight. Every cramped Parisian bathroom was a mystery, but finding the disguised button or lever that flushed each teensy toilet was a triumph. Yes! I loved to see my Metro ticket sucked in and out of the turnstile, like a schoolkid’s teasing tongue. And every successful conversation in my gallumphing high school French made me bounce on my toes, including my most sophisticated exchange with the front desk clerk at the 18th century hostel, when I announced in stilted French, on behalf of my upset students, “Pardon me, Madame, but the young ladies in room 15 have no electricity – they made a tiny explosion from their very big machines for hair!”
My toddler’s language-skills allowed me to drift and bobble along in conversational currents, latching onto the nouns I recognized, but releasing myself from the responsibility of verbs that would mean I had to DO things. During my time in Paris, I wobbled on this high wire, wanting to blend in, yet getting a childish charge out of everyday miracles like hot-pink pamplemousse sorbet.
Of course, the plane ride home was a time machine, rocketing me back to grown-up work and worries, but I’m hanging onto the self that says still says “Yea!” when it’s ice-cream time. I can still summon the prickles on my neck when I saw the Eiffel Tower sparkle against the velvet blue Parisian night. And when I light my much smaller sparkler this holiday weekend, I’ll be reminded that no matter our ages, if we want it bad enough, we can hold all that giddy joy right in our own hands.