The French Hurry-Up, 1963

This is one in a series of posts I’ve written for a friend explaining ways in which my life has seemed orchestrated rather than the strict result of my own decisions. Even my biggest seeming mistakes have produced enormous benefits in terms of furthering my education and the scope of my writing. This is the latest of those posts, shared here because there’s no one living who can be hurt by its content becoming generally available. It’s more personal than IPR posts usually are. But I’m in a Shane mood at the moment and I don’t care. It’s a mood that recurs now and again. It passes and I go back to work. But that’s why this post is being shared here, today. One point to remember. The audio narratives here were not scripted. They were extemporaneous recordings made on my iPad over a number of years, not expressly for this post.

C’est L’amour

That’s the Piaf I fixated on when I was forming my first thoughts on romantic love. I knew of her before we ever went to France, because my Dad was spending so much time overseas working on chemical engineering projects in first England and Northern Ireland and then France. He’d go for a month or six weeks at a time, and we’d spend a lot of time missing him. By the time France had become more or less where he seemed to be, with what seemed like brief visits home, we had acquired four or five albums of French music, voices from that exotic place where Daddy was. There was a charming singer named Patachou, who could make you feel sunny inside her voice. There was an album called, beguilingly, Passport to Paris, filled with accordion music, which in America is joke material, and in a French context is entrancing and glamorous. You’ve no idea what the Left Bank is, other than colorful and crowded with artists in berets, but the accordion walks you through the streets in your imagination, drinking it all in.

And then there was Piaf. We had two of her albums, which we — I, actually — played as often as Susie and my mother would let me. Her songs are all about love lost, tragic, affairs made harshly beautiful by her harshly beautiful voice. 

But the Dadless times weren’t all about mooning. My mother saw an opportunity and she seized it. On weekends and vacations, she’d bundle us into her Ford convertible and hit the road to places we should see and learn from. How we explored the Hagley Museum in Delaware, the Wyeth Museum in Pennsylvania, as well as Fort Mott in nearby Pennsville, NJ, and then more swashbucklingly for a young mother with two small children, roadtrips to Washington, DC, AND Williamsburg, Virginia. 

In DC, we stayed in a hotel for a long weekend, one room with two trundle beds, and she swept us through the National Gallery, the National Cathedral, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, Ford Theater, and the cherry blossomed banks of the Potomac. In Williamsburg, we stayed in a one room house in the historic district with Aunt Jacquie, the ex-wife of our neighbor Uncle Herb Mills. More trundle beds and we hit all the notable sites, including the Governor’s Mansion (all those guns in the foyer!), the period-costumed inns, the House of Burgesses, historical houses that were open to the public, and the quadrangle of the College of William and Mary. Great stuff.

What probably none of us realized was that my mother was just warming up. By then, she had an inkling she didn’t share with us that we might be moving to France for a time. I was nine, in fifth grade, and my sister was 10 1/2, in sixth grade. We had some advance notice as I recall, that a move had been decided by the DuPont Company, for a year in Paris in connection with a joint venture between DuPont and a French firm to build a major new chemical plant. We would be going to a French school and so we needed French lessons beyond what we were getting in school. We all read the book Dad gave us by Art Buchwald, “How Much is that in Dollars?” For my sister and me, separate weekly sessions with Madame Zandler, a blonde native of France in nearby Bridgeton. Susie got along fine with her. I found her as frustrating to work with as my dad, whose attempts at improving my math skills always ended in only marginal success. I was too focused on responding as he expected instead of listening and understanding what he was saying. Same with Madame. But as the time ran out, we went through the multi-week ordeal of getting vaccinated against typhoid and beriberi or whatever, and we had a farewell party at the Hine pool with our friends from school and their parents. There were even gifts for the two of us. Boppa gave me my birthday present early because I’d be in France when I turned 10. I conned my mother into letting me use part of the $10 for a Mattel snub-nosed .38 with a shoulder holster (The Man from U.N.C.L.E!). I showed it to Boppa and he wisely suggested I leave it with him while I was in France, so as not to give the French any wrong ideas about Americans. I said goodbye to my gun and our house in Greenwich, which had been rented out for a year to a family in the Hine orbit.

And so we were off. I have an audio record of our French adventure, posted in bits and pieces at YouTube over the years. This first one has already been included in one of my Blessèd Failure posts linked above, but the emphasis now is not on the iconic ship but the arrival in France and some of the whirlwind touring of Paris led by my mother during Dad’s workdays. That accounts for about two thirds of this clip if you want to skip past the QE1 part.

Not the QE2. The real one.

She ran us ragged when we were in acquiring-French-culture mode. At first, she was hurrying because when school started in the fall, there wouldn’t be time for so much exploration. Both my sister and I would be struggling to keep up with our classmates because we were going to a French, not an American school. So she had an agenda to see to before then.

Home life in Paris with bennies

The hurry-up incentive increased dramatically pretty early in our stay. The joint venture with the French Company was falling apart. They simply couldn’t accept American ways and my Dad was told to expect a return to the states in the fall.  Our parents didn’t tell us right away, but we figured it out soon enough. Why was it necessary to make a weekend family visit to London with no notice? We jumped on a plane on a Friday afternoon and flew to Heathrow, took a cab to the hotel, and began the high-speed tour almost immediately. Two straight days of walking, walking, walking, riding in taxis and the Underground, walking, walking, and I saw block after block of uncleared rubble from the Blitz 20 years before, which was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. The rubble was on the way to the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Piccadilly Circus, our quaint hotel with the tall toilet tank, and on Sunday we went to church at Westminster Abbey, then beheld the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, and the worst hamburger of my life at a franchise called Wimpy’s before hopping on the plane again and flying home to Paris.

I guess London was to have been saved for a more leisurely trip later, but we were coming to an unscheduled end of our time in Paris, my sister and I learned soon after that hectic tour. The time we had left would be used for another more enjoyable tour of the South of France before boarding a ship for another first class voyage to our real home.

And I left out the stupefying majesty of Mont St. Michel… my bad.

Where Jesus goes when he needs some quiet time with the tides.

Time was beginning to be an issue. If we did any more sightseeing we might miss our boat home. Which is why we hurriedly messed with maps and wound up leaving the Riviera city of Nice without stopping and launching ourselves onto a famous ‘scenic’ route called the Grande Corniche. Life changing.

We made it. We survived. All you can say about it.

And then there was a blissful 24 hours or so in the rare jewel of the Riviera called Menton.

See Below the Fold for an interesting sidebar to this story.

Reluctantly, we packed our bags back in the car and raced to Genoa where the Leonardo Da Vinci was waiting to take us back to New York after ten luxurious days in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

Except that it wasn’t going to be that simple. First I had to have my face-to-face meeting with Nietzsche’s abyss. We stared at each other and all my fears went away.

It was now mid-September, 1963. We were back just in time for school.

Summary of the French Adventure

I suppose you could consider it a longish White Privilege vacation. Not how it seemed to my sister and me. We had been living life at a dead run since long before we left for France. We had really made the deep mental adjustment to the prospect of living in a foreign land. We had been made to understand the opportunity and open ourselves to the wonder of one of the world’s greatest, most beautiful, and most conflicted cultures. Our parents were determined that we received that benefit from the experience, even if their educational intentions had to be squeezed into a rushed year of two months duration. They knew far better than we did that time flies and unless you seize the day, things fall apart before you get around to them.

Why the Hurry-Up

What our parents had no way of knowing was that in hindsight, the French hurry-up might very well come to resemble an intervention in our life schedules by some loftier agency. As we were settling uneasily into our rented house in Roadstown (our own house was still rented to friendlies we didn’t wish to discommode), we had no way of knowing that a countdown clock was ticking down to a zero hour when everything would change forever. My sister and I were back in school, resuming friendships and ordinary school subjects, and Thanksgiving was looming happily on the horizon when one afternoon we poured out of school to get our buses when I saw our Studebaker Hawk parked in the grass beside the school driveway. My mother had come to pick us up. This was incredibly unusual. 

When we were safely inside the car, she told us the President had been shot. On the ride back to the house we heard that he had been pronounced dead in Dallas, Texas. My father didn’t much care for network news coverage even then, and it looked like we were going to have a grim evening switching the news on and off. Thing was, I was supposed to be visiting a school friend on a sleepover. He was a catcher in Little League and was teaching me how to pitch since I wasn’t on a team myself. He also had a go-kart. More fun than bad news on TV. My mother convinced my dad to let me go.

It was just one more coincidence. We had come in thirsty from playing and saw Peter’s mother and dad watching the news in the living room. It looked interesting. They were moving the suspect they’d caught. We’d get to see him. Then this:

It changes you to see history happen live like this. 

Maybe you don’t realize at first, but it changes you.

What should have been twelve months of coming of age experience had had to be crammed into just two months so we’d be back in the United States for the assassination that did more to change American history than any since Lincoln. And apparently I had to be planted in front of the TV in a Kennedy-loving household to see the live murder of Lee Harvey Oswald that threw a shadow over the whole federal government for the next half century. Mrs. Shoemaker was still dabbing at tears we hadn’t shed. She was more right than she knew. Why I had to be precisely there on that day.

Or not, of course. But if I hadn’t been there, or in a lot of other specific situations to come, I wouldn’t have embarked on the mission laid out quite clearly below. Am I allowed to see meaning in that set of circumstances? I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m allowed to or not by the keepers of the random universe. I do see meaning in it. One of the things that’s very different about me and my life as a writer.

Click the pic to make the text legible.

________________________

Below the Fold

One of the things about getting older. You seem to be forgetting things. Names that won’t quite touch the tip of your tongue. Chronologies of memory that might be contradicted by the documented record. Like the continual discovery that looking at an early movie by a star you like shows you someone much younger looking than your so-called memory shows you in snippets. Frustrating, infuriating. But I have discovered an upside in our technological age. When I forget a name or a date, I now have the means of rediscovering what’s lost through a process of association. I know what movies they were in. I can look up the cast on IMDB’s movie site. Easy fix with a bonus. You wind up finding out more about them than you ever knew. Read their bios, discover titles you never saw, something to look for. All pluses. I’ve even developed a convenient theory that the scope of my Internet foraging has not damaged my memory but reorganized it for the sake of efficiency. In the process of doing what I do I encounter not dozens but hundreds of names, too many to keep on memory speed dial. Instead, the auto-dial now connects to the most reliable sources for filling in blanks and continuing life’s never-ending education challenge.

Why I did some fact checking about some of memories in this post. For example, there’s a continuity error in my Grande Corniche audio file. There’s no way the trip from Nice to Menton could have taken nine-and-a-half hours. Childhood exaggeration carried forward into dotage? Possibly. But I think not. 

There’s another possibility here.

Menton is just to the west of the Italian map shown. 

It has its own famous and dangerous coastal road.

Quite possibly the Menton experience was an idyllic timeout in the protracted ordeal of driving on ancient Roman roads all the way from Nice to Genoa. I have wondered why the time between Menton and Genoa has seemed to be, well, absent from my recollection. Maybe it’s all been folded in under the umbrella ‘Corniche’ header. I don’t know. What I do know is that dealing with haziness of this sort caused me to look up the name Edith Sanski on the Internet for the first time. When that went nowhere, I searched for Piaf lookalikes and soundalikes in French music history. I kept getting sent to just one name. Plenty of persuasive photos and one iconic drawing from the time she got her big break.

Of course I already knew of her. She was a big star and only recently deceased. When I saw her she was already an established headliner and album bestseller in France abroad. The Littlest Sparrow. And in her youthful photos she certainly did resemble the singer of my memory. But there’s no way that my Edith Sanski could have been Mireille Mathieu. No way. Could it have been?

She’d have been 17 in 1963. A girl. But I was 10. When they’re wearing women’s clothes and makeup, they’d have looked grown up to me. The name though. Except that it sounds like a stage name. Edith for Piaf and Sanski as a reference? ‘Sans’ meaning ‘without’, uh, actually being Piaf? And if she was that young, then maybe she had to use an uncheckable name to get hired in a place where liquor is sold.

Straining at straws probably. But I looked her up on Wiki. Here’s the relevant quote:

Click pic to blow it up to legible size.

She was hanging out in Avignon during this exact interval of time. It was close to Menton. We’d just been there.

See?

So I went looking for a video of her performing at this early stage of her career. I knew what I was looking for. That little singer with the big Piaf voice that had sent chills through me 63 years in 1963. What do you think?

From a talent competition in 1966

No, I’m not going to claim that Edith Sanski was Mireille Mathieu. Just that she might have been. It accounts for my reaction as a kid seeing a major talent in person for the first time. (Unless you count Sally Starr, whom my mother took me to see when the other kids were going to ‘Old Yeller’. I chose wisely; they all had nightmares.) What I will remind everyone of, though, is that on the day I sold The Boomer Bible in  New York City I looked out the window of the taxi on my way back to the hotel and saw Isaac Asimov, father of sci-fi AI, standing on the curb a mere two feet from the cab window. That’s a fact, Jack. No, our eyes did not meet portentously for a moment. It was just a coincidence. Call it a thumb in the ribs to me. Long long way to go yet.

One of my three favorite Piaf songs. Compare if you like… kind of eerie.