LETTERS FROM HOME: TALK, TALK, TALK ABOUT PRESIDENTIAL AFFAIRS AND APRICOTS

Oct. 8, 1998

Dear Pat,

We don't talk the way French people do.

I don't mean that we speak different languages. I mean that our lives don't seem to be an extended conversation the way French people's are.

Parisians sitting side-by-side at tiny tables in the cafes gave the world the term tete-a-tete. America gave the world stools in diners where you stare at yourself in the mirror.

We were wary of the French reputation for unfriendliness, especially toward Americans, but from the start of our stay in Paris found the stereotype to be untrue. Standing in line at Charles de Gaulle Airport to get some French francs, I hesitantly put my high school French to its first use to ask the woman in front of me if she spoke English. She smiled and did. She advised watching out for pickpockets in the Metro and helped me operate the automated teller.

Having read that French people value the art of conversation as much as they do other kinds of art, I asked her opinion of "this Clinton business." She shook her head as if mystified and said the French would never investigate their leader's personal life.

This instant Francophile senses the French guard their personal lives well. There is no Jerry Springer show in France. The most popular programs offer serious discussions of cinema and politics, always with an audience there to listen.

One day, after walking through Montmartre, the district where Moliere and Toulouse-Lautrec hung out, we happened upon a movie house showing a film called "Lautrec." Paris is the kind of city where things like that can happen.

It's rude to ask a Frenchman what he does for a living because that is the very thing that differentiates the classes in the society. Thus, if someone's going to be rude to you it's likely to be a person who feels the weight of being at the bottom.

At La Grande Epicere de Paris -- literally Paris' big grocery store -- I asked a saleswoman behind the bakery counter for a delicacy labeled flan avec apricots. Obviously, my pronunciation of the fruit was incorrect. She shook her head and gave me a puzzled look. After a few more attempts met with more head shakes, a word from French class popped into my panicky head and out of my mouth.

Haricots. An instant too late I remembered it's the word for beans.

She made a "poof" sound and started to give me a section of plain flan. Playing the Ugly American, I insistently pointed to the flan avec apricots. Sometimes, sign language works best.

She made a face, said something that made her co-workers laugh and took my francs without the traditional au revoir.

The exchange made DC angry but I think we were just participants in a little French game, one that resulted in conversation.

We witnessed another conversation between a woman and a pedestrian who had kicked her car. She got out screaming words we couldn't comprehend but we understood her sign language, too.

While I'm being so touristy, here's another French difference: The street cleaners in lime green uniforms open spigots built into the road that allow small rivulets of the Seine to flow down the city streets to wash away the debris each day. It's very quaint but there isn't much trash to gather. You don't see Parisians walking down the sidewalk with soft drinks. I could not find a waste basket in Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Seeing so many people in conversation was the most telling difference about France to me. We didn't know what they were discussing, partly because they spoke French and we hardly did, and partly because voices are always kept low and intimate.

In one cafe we sat beside a young couple who punctuated every other sentence with a kiss. In another, two white-haired fellows looked as if they could have been plotting World War III or their next novels or perhaps just where they'd meet later for another express and Coca.

But everything seems more meaningful when you don't know what people are saying.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.