31 July 2019

Fifty years ago this summer, men walked on the moon. Fifty years ago this month, a category 5 hurricane, one of only three ever to make landfall in the United States and the second largest in US history, struck Louisiana. It’s name? Camille. Hurricane Camille. According to one meteorological website: “The storm ranks as the 2nd most intense hurricane to strike the continental US….” and “The actual maximum sustained winds are not known, as the hurricane destroyed all the wind-recording instruments in the landfall area.”

Perhaps I have exaggerated his affect on us. I have not exaggerated his effect on me. I don’t know why it was such an amazing bond, but it was. I still look for him in the little room at the end of the hall, I still wait for him to come down in the morning. I still think of fun things to do or fun things to tell him or try out.

It is fun showing a child the world. It is so life-giving and fun. Their innocence is like fresh air and I like breathing it in. For this reason I enjoy my job as a children’s storyteller at the Library: It is not the stories that I tell them, but the ones they tell me. And I so I loved those days with our own three, those early years before we were part of the world. When we were whole. The first five years with little ones, as a translator of all that was good in life. This foreign exchange was like a license to live like that again.

Nowadays the people here have no time for your stories or for your show-and-tell, they are already busy with their own lives and happy for that $20, see ya later mom. Many days I feel that same sick desperation I did the day Camille left and my mind started running through the things we had not yet done, not yet known, not yet seen, and that I suddenly realized were important. No mom wants to launch an under-packed child. So the desperation has intensified as it is quite clear, quite clear, we are out of time. I am aware that in this little package I had a captive audience, someone who needed me to make sense of the world like a much younger child might, who exuded mirth and extended me trust, even if he did have earbuds in much of the time.

When you bring a stranger into your home, into your life, there is an extra effort to make good on the day. Everybody feels it. Everyone rallies. It’s unspoken, but you feel a lightening of the air and a heightened awareness of the moment. Like now you are common ground that a person shouldn’t talk to another/treat another/carry on that way. Moments take on the sense of mini-lives, and the way you do and say things matter. Truly. They take the extra care, the extra time, and it’s almost, though you haven’t really changed anything or done it differently (OK, I don’t normally frequent amusement parks), you come to exist again. One of the loveliest trips you can take without ever leaving home. Voyage to the land of kindness.

One week ago, Camille left. And one year ago today, on July 31, the girls and I boarded on a plane for France, which was the beginning of that coming alive. Bringing this story full circle. It was designed as a graduation trip for Ellie, glowing student of French 6, and a gift for her 18th birthday. She and I have always shared a little Francophilia anyway. In the case of her mamma, however, that love was more like an obsession, and but for the presence of gray hair and absence of teeth would have been barely distinguishable from the “Michelin Jenny” of the 1980s. My friends laughingly called me that because I was never without the green tour guide making sure we didn’t miss anything. Ellie and Sophie were alternately amused, annoyed, alarmed. I wanted to show them a little of the traveling life, and of the “student of the world status” I once enjoyed. I don’t know if I achieved that but certainly they got to see a side of me that hadn’t existed in their lifetime.

In many way, I have been travelling there in my heart’s eye ever since. The French term for homesick is avoir mal au pays — to “have hurt of the country,” or to “have hurt for the country.” Interestingly, the term doesn’t specify which country, the one you came from or the one you love.  Hardly denotes sickness at all, but a longing. I have felt that longing so many times in my life, when the distance was filled by an ocean, for real, and when it was just a hallway or a room. Life takes you places, oui? I guess I am mal au pays for the land of their childhood, when life was simple. Or simple-r.

I started a travelogue on July 31, 2018. That was the start of this blog.  “Packing Light” is a metaphor for all we weren’t carting over there so as to have room for souvenirs. Didn’t realize at the time how deep in I would get, or that the end of the story wasn’t the end of that trip. I did not know we could, or would go deeper in, deep as the dark warm water off the dock of a summer lake. I can see them out there on the shimmering sea, leaping and diving off the dock, following each other’s lead, jamming to that his portable speaker, watching for the next silly stunt or move. What else do you do? You swim out to them–It’s a life magnet. When I get there Camille is intent on trying to figure out how deep this lake is, and has discovered that if you pull yourself backward, headfirst down the ladder into the darker murk, you can get pretty close. He comes up spluttering and smiling: “Is so deep! Eye cannot touch!”

Oh, really? I can. Comeer, boy. At the airport I try not to make eye contact, all business. I can tell we’re both a little gun-shy on this going away thing. He is strangely silent and focused on his travels, and I am bracing myself and wishing not to cry. Will is by my side, tall and straight. Young as he is, I get the sense he would catch me if I fall. He has gone from alpha boy to companion to friend to brother to this travelling boy, and from enamored to jealous to pissed to deeply attached. It’s been quite a journey. “Camille. You be well. You get home safe.”

It began with baggage, and it will end there too, for on his return flight, Camille’s bags were again delayed two days. Two days those poor plush pythons wallowed at JFK airport! The dad wrote to tell me that they were expected. He said “so good” and “is no big problem” in English, and I have to chuckle. I take as a sign that we all travel free, and that he travels home lighter than he arrived, little bird. “We will keep your coordinates, ” continues the Father’s message to me,  days after Camille is home, lighting on the wrong word for “contact information.” That’s okay. Contacts are what you use for a business transaction.  Coordinates are what you keep so you can find your way back.

I think I can be done now. My souvenirs are solidly with me. Anyone reading these last three weeks will be like, enough already. Geeze, lady, sleeves are for arms. Not hearts. What do you do for a day job? I told you what I do. I sub at the high school and the middle school, I keep the company of this “next” generation and I perform stunts to get them to learn stuff, which is what you have to do these days. The other half the week I read stories to three year olds and sing nursery rhymes. In in evenings I chase ghosts around the house trying to fix them a snack, pester them for chores or see that they have a lunch packed for the long day ahead.

There are striking parallels and amusing panoramas, I tell you what, subbing for a class seventeen-year-olds and then reading stories to the earlier versions of the same. It’s about a mile between my two posts, and sometimes I feel I’m travelling back in a time machine. At the library I want to leap out and swat the cell phones from their mother’s hands and put preachy, prophetical warnings on all the tot computer bays. I come from a land where something dear has been lost in translation. Doesn’t anyone else know? Can’t they see it? When I sub in the French class I always start by having them put their phones away. Who needs Google translate when God gave you a brain? I don’t say that part aloud. But I do say pretend you are pitching them in the Seine, just to see alarm register. If you can arouse alarm from the electronically drugged, then you are doing well. And then I test for verbs. A life should contain a lot of verbs. And a speaker of French should know how to conjugate them correctly. How about the passe simple? The simple past: I loved, you loved, he loved…

Grammar. No one really teaches grammar anymore, not in any language, so it’s a wonder anyone can understand anything anymore, whether she is coming or going. Me? I think I shall be going.