Mythical like the yeti

Oct. 9, 2008

Dear Julie,

European visitors have been staying with our friends/next-door neighbors Frank and Robyn. Frank's mother, Grethe, is here from Copenhagen, Denmark, for six weeks, and their friend Emmanuelle just returned to her home in Paris after a shorter stay. Robyn travels abroad often in her job, and Frank spends about half of each year in Copenhagen. Our neighbors are cosmopolitan Cape Girardeans.

Frank's mother speaks little English, and the pastry is the only Danish DC and I are familiar with. We say "hello" and smile whenever we see Grethe gardening or taking a walk and hope she doesn't miss Copenhagen too much.

Emmanuelle runs the international literature division for a Parisian paperback publisher. Her father is Belgian and her mother French, but during part of her childhood her parents taught at UC-Berkeley. Her English is impeccable. She is versed in the Montana writers, the collection of scribes whose work is informed by Big Sky. I know the writing of a few in that category like Richard Ford and Peter Matthiessen.

Matthiessen's book "The Snow Leopard" is dear to me. It describes mystical encounters with that elusive and endangered beast during a 250-mile trek to the Crystal Mountain at the border of Nepal and Tibet. The author sees something else in the deep snows that may or may not be a yeti.

No matter how small the world gets, to those of us living in a small city in the middle of America foreigners sometimes can seem like yetis, their existence completely unlike our own. They don't root for the Cardinals, and they might use a different name for God. They can seem almost mythical, like the yeti.

Emmanuelle is sophisticated and smart but as real as her half-hour daily bicycle commute through Parisian traffic. In Paris she takes Robyn to secret restaurants that resemble caverns beneath the city. Robyn and Frank treated Emmanuelle to Sunday night at Port Cape with Bruce Zimmerman and the Water Street Band and alfresco dining at Mollie's. Both seemed to please her.

She knows far more about American literature than any of our friends know. She is the first person who has been able to discuss Japanese writers with our friend Don, who spent two Army years stationed in Japan, where his mission apparently was to read Japanese books.

Like people in French movies, she and Robyn spent hours dissecting the world and its motives. Emmanuelle cares deeply about the American presidential election. She says the French dislike John McCain because he still hopes to press the war in Iraq. She is surprised and dismayed to be told that in some American camps European disapproval is a badge of honor.

Emmanuelle loves America's physical and emotional openness. It's curious to her, though, to hear American parents say "I love you" to their children and for American children to say "I love you" back, curious to hear friends say these words to friends. To Europeans, that love is shown but not verbalized, she says. And yet to a lover of words this saying what you feel appeals to her.

Emmanuelle told friends in Paris she would be canoeing on the Mississippi River but understandably accepted a float down the Current River instead. Back in Paris she still plans to tell her friends of drifting in the wake of Huck and Jim. Fiction is her game.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.