Island
Living 42: The French Connection
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
As I described
in my last column, a car accident on Tompkins Avenue
in Rosebank put me in St. Vincent's Hospital here
on Staten Island over the last Fourth of July weekend.
That was my
first experience with being hospitalized, but my
second experience with a hospital named after St.
Vincent dePaul. The first took place around 1948
or so, when I was about five years old, and my family
lived on West 11th St. in Greenwich Village, right
across the street from another St. Vincent's Hospital.
In those days my parents gave me an occasional sourball
candy as a special treat, and they kept a glass
jar of these out of my reach on the top shelf of
an upstairs closet.
One night I
decided unilaterally that I deserved a reward and,
laboriously, using a wooden chair and the drawers
of a closet, clambered up after that candy. I got
my hands on it, then slipped and fell, breaking
the jar and, in the ensuing scramble, embedding
a shard of the glass in my foot. I bled sufficiently
that my mother decided to take me over to the emergency
room. While we waited to see a doctor to have the
splinter removed, my mother asked the nun on duty
if we could have a few wooden tongue depressors
for me to play with, to take my mind off my pain.
"No," the sister grimly replied. "He
has to learn to suffer."
I don't recall
this event, but my mother (who never forgot it until
she succumbed to Alzheimer's and forgot everything,
including my name) recounted this tale often enough
that it became part of the lore of my past. So it
pleased me -- and I'm pleased to confirm -- that
I received excellent treatment and compassionate
care at the St. Vincent's here, good enough (aside
from the hospital food) to balance out any previous
less than loving attention at any other institution
under the watchful eye of the patron saint of hospitals
and lost articles.
St. Vincent
dePaul was born in 1581 near Ranquine, Gascony near
Dax -- now known as Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Landes
-- in southwest France; and, coincidentally, just
a few years after that mishap with the sourballs,
my family moved to that part of France. I was seven
when we arrived, not yet nine when we left, but
it proved a formative time of my life. Not only
did I engage with and find myself comfortable in
a very different culture but, because my parents
placed me in a school where only French was spoken,
I learned another language by what's now called
the "immersion system," recommended by
most language teachers. And I did so at exactly
the stage of development that linguists and child
psychologists have concluded is ideal for a child
to acquire a second tongue.
As a result,
I became fully bilingual and, when we came back
to the States, took French classes up through high
school and even got involved in after-school French-language
activities through the Alliance Française
in Manhattan. Though I let my French lapse thereafter
and didn't use it much again until my forties, I've
since recovered it -- to the extent that I can listen
to French radio, read just about anything non-technical
in French, converse at length with French tourists
on the Staten Island Ferry, and speak fluently enough
that Parisians -- who are extreme language snobs
-- will actually encourage me to speak French in
conversation with them.
We spent most
of our time in France living in a small town on
the Côte d'Azur called Vallauris-Golfe-Juan,
now mostly famous for a ceramics studio that Picasso
-- who maintained a residence there -- used for
his work in that medium. We didn't meet the co-inventor
of Cubism, but we soaked up the Mediterranean climate
and culture, and those eighteen months shaped me
indelibly, although in ways that I am just beginning
to investigate and find hard to pinpoint.
There's a professional
event in the area -- a photo festival in Arles,
just a few hours' train ride away --- that I've
attended half a dozen times since 1981. Each time
I'd tell myself that I should go back to Vallauris-Golfe-Juan
to look around. But this year I'd made a date with
a friend of mine who planned to come to the festival
by car and promised to drive me over. So, aside
from recuperation, that, too, was on my mind when
I signed myself out of the hospital in order to
fly to France.
My friend never
showed (she sent regrets), but I'd scheduled in
an extra day after the festivities ended for this
side trip, so I got up at dawn on Monday, July 10,
hopped a train, and headed off. The morning was
hot and bright, all gold and blue, and I spent the
ride reminiscing and looking out the windows --
from which I saw, to my delight, many houses painted
the exact shades of buttercup yellow and deep brick
red that I'd chosen for my house on Van Duzer Street,
which was being painted by the peerless Wally Van
Pelt (of Wally's Painting, 718-273-9288) in my absence.
Aside from the
beach, the only things I remembered clearly about
Vallauris-Golfe-Juan were the grade school I'd attended,
the street leading up to our house, and the house
and grounds themselves. I had no idea whether any
of them still existed. So, when I got out of the
train station, I headed immediately for the town
square and the mayor's office, where a helpful secretary
told me that indeed the school still stood, just
a few blocks away, and I'd find the street I'd lived
on just a little further on. She wasn't sure about
the house, though.
I went first
to the school. It hadn't changed much, except to
shrink in the way that everything from childhood
seems to do over the years. The scenes from fables
by La Fontaine that I recalled still decorated the
façade, much faded but still readable. Kids
in a summer day-care program played in the yard,
divided in my time (circa 1951) into separate boys'
and girls' sections, now open for coed use. I stood
by the gate for awhile, watching, then beckoned
to a junior teacher who, without much arm-twisting,
let me in to look around. I couldn't get into the
classrooms -- they were locked for the summer, and
shuttered against the heat -- but I got a few peeks,
and caught a faint whiff of what it must have felt
like to me to walk those stairs and balconies and
sit in those spaces, speaking in a new language
that was somehow becoming my own. (Point of pride:
I actually received an award as "first student"
in my grade one semester; I still keep the certificate
on my wall, along with the report card that describes
me as "bavard" -- one who talks too much
in class.)
After getting
the name and contact information of someone who
might be able to track down my records from the
school, I set off again, this time looking for the
Chemin de la Gabelle -- the "street
of the salt tax." And there it was, just a
block away. I turned uphill and started to climb.
It was narrower than I recalled, of course, barely
wide enough for two automobiles to pass each other.
By now it was one o'clock, with the sun beating
down. The climb proved hard; I still couldn't fully
expand my chest, bruised in the car crash, and I
carried enough weight in my pockets and fanny pack
-- some bottled water, a bit of lunch, a notebook
and a digital camera -- that I began to tire. And
to ache a bit. And to despair. With every twist
and turn of the road I expected to come to the house,
which I knew I'd recognize. But each bend brought
some other residence instead. Fate, perhaps, intended
this to remain dependent entirely on memory.
(To be
continued.)
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Copyright 2000 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
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