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French Politeness Scale

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Posted: November 12, 2015 at 8:42 am

 

“It’s pretty here, Billy, but the French are so rude,” said my sister Cathy, as we sat on le Verdun’s terrasse, side by side, facing out. Cathy had come for a week visit from Canada.

“C’mon Cath, that’s only a stereotype you’ve heard,” I said. “You’ve been in France three days, so you can’t really judge. Not all Canadians are polite and not all French are rude; it just seems that way.” The waiter placed an espresso in front of me, a café crème in front of Cathy, and a water carafe and glasses in between. That covered the entire surface of the bistro table.

“You know they’re rude, Billy. You love France so much you don’t want to admit it.”

“Well, I have a different way of looking at it after being here so long. Most French people adhere to the French Politeness Scale.”

“You’re making that up,” said Cathy. “There isn’t a scale.”

“I did make it up, but it works,” I said, lifting the tiny cup to my lips. “Listen. The first level of social interaction on the scale is ‘Between Friends and Acquaintances.’ In France, if someone is a friend, they are a friend for life. They will welcome you into their home, ensure you have a drink and something to eat, never rush you, really listen, and never let you leave until you are satisfied with how the third bottle of wine paired with the cheese course.”

“I thought you didn’t have many French friends here.” Cathy knew that was a sore point, twisting the knife. She sipped her coffee and burned her lip. Karma.

“Not many, because they don’t want to invest time in someone who’s leaving soon. Friendships here are long-lasting. But I have some. Anyway, relationships between acquaintances are also pleasant and polite. The first time you meet someone, the proper greeting is ‘Enchanté.’ ”

“I’ve heard that. What does it mean?”

“It means ‘I am enchanted to meet you.’ ”

“That seems a bit much,” said Cathy. “Do you tell guys you are enchanted to meet them? Like those guys over there?” She nodded her head in the direction of two men in flowing scarves and pointy boots who emerged from Passage Agard. Wait a minute…I was wearing a flowing scarf and pointy boots.

“Yes, I would. It’s the manly thing to do,” I said. “And polite. Actually, everything between friends or acquaintances is very polite, very pleasant. There’s a lot of kissing too. If you go to a party, and there are 30 people there, that’s an automatic 60 cheek kisses. Girls and guys.”

“You aren’t serious.” Cathy leaned forward and held each side of the round table. “No one would kiss every person in the room.”

“It’s different in the Luberon, which is north of here. There, it’s three kisses for each person, so that’s 90 kisses.”

“I’m not doing that.” Cathy took a long drag on her cigarette and tapped ashes into the well-worn ashtray on the next table.

“I do it. I had to learn the proper way, too. When you’re planting your cheek kisses, you always start by kissing the kissee’s left cheek, touching the kissee with the left side of your face. If you don’t do this, the other person doesn’t know what you’re doing, and there’s jerky, confused head-bobbing. It can result in the worst faux pas, a kiss right on the lips. This is bad if I’m kissing the kids’ principal, or my friend’s 15-year-old daughter. Or a guy. If you’re not gay, that one is not much fun.”

“You didn’t kiss a guy on the lips,” said Cathy, laughing.

“Hey, it was an accident. It felt weird. Don’t tell mum.”

“Maybe I will. Is that the end of the first level?”

“I call the second level of the scale ‘Overly Polite But I Don’t Really Give A Shit.’ It’s used in clothing stores and cafés. A salesman doesn’t try to be your friend, like in Canada. He’ll say ‘Bonjour, comment est-ce que je peux vous aider?’ That means, ‘Hello, how may I assist you?’ And if he wants to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you,’ you’ll get the overly polite ‘Je vous en prie.’ ”

“Which is…….?”

“Literally, it means ‘I pray of you.’ If you say thank you, you’ll hear, ‘Non, c’est moi qui devrais vous remercier,’ which is  ‘Oh no, it is me who should be thanking you for gracing me with your presence.’ Something like that.”

“That sounds civilized,” said Cathy.

“It sounds that way, but it isn’t. They’re overly-polite French phrases, repeated unthinkingly. They mean nothing. They hide indifference, bordering on contempt, just below the surface. Obviously, no one likes these jobs, but unlike in Canada, they’re something to be endured, not something you’d work harder to get out of. In France, a job is a job, a means to put in enough years to qualify for a pension, supplied by the socialist government. There is no incentive to be better at your job than the next guy, the tip is included in the price, so why make an effort? There is an inverse relationship between the degree of politeness used by a French waiter or salesperson and the amount they care for your comfort or satisfaction.”

“Okay, what’s the third level?” Cathy lit another cigarette, her third since we sat down. She was trying to fit in.

“ ‘Everyone Else Can Go To Hell.’ If you don’t fit in the first two categories, you’re in ‘Everyone Else Can Go To Hell.’ This is a crowded country, and if you want to survive, you have to concentrate on your own happiness, and the happiness of your family and friends. You can’t worry about everyone else. So if a person isn’t a friend, or an acquaintance, or someone you’ve met in a café, restaurant or store, you’re allowed to be as rude and selfish as you want. That’s why when you drive a car, it’s like an enormous video game of The Fast and the Furious. It’s why there aren’t any lift lines at the ski hills; it’s a big pushing blob of people, all standing on each others’ skis. It’s why the teenagers lie on the sidewalk in front of the high school and throw their triangle sandwich containers everywhere. It’s the reason there’s dog shit all over the streets and garbage in the ditches.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“Are you kidding? I love it here. I even love the chaos. I don’t have to love everything here to love it in general. The ‘Between Friends and Acquaintances’ level of the scale can make up for a lot. And there’s an upside to the overall rudeness toward strangers. When the French do something rude, I can swear at them, or make snide remarks right in their faces. I do it in English so they won’t understand. You don’t know how enjoyable that is.”

“Oh, I see how you’d be excellent at that, Billy,” said Cathy. “Wait, is that guy over there drinking wine? At 10:00 o’clock in the morning?”

In Vancouver I would never drink at 10:00 a.m. “Oh, we’re definitely doing that,” I said, raising my index finger in the direction of the passing waiter.

Bucket List

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Posted: November 5, 2015 at 9:12 am

 

Word got around Devon’s soccer pitch, and one day a soccer mom friend touched my arm while I watched my son practice. I knew who it was before I turned to face her, always Chanel No. 5. She looked concerned and said she thought I had a fatal disease, and was moving to France to check it off of my bucket list, before I kicked the object of such list. She didn’t understand my explanation.

“Why are you really doing this, Bill?” asked Janice. She was my occasional sushi companion and shit-shooter, but that day she looked like my grievance counsellor.

“What do you mean?”

“This is a big deal. Your whole family moving to France. Aren’t you worried about your job?” Janice tucked her dyed-blonde hair behind her ears to indicate she was prepared for a serious discussion.

“I am worried about my job,“ I said. “But you know I don’t like it.”

“I didn’t know that. You fooled me, and I’ve known you five years. What do you mean, you don’t like it? Nobody likes everything about their job. That’s why it’s a job.”

“No, I don’t like anything about it. Except the time I’m not doing it.”

“Ouch.” An errant ball from practice struck Janice on the shin, not hard enough for someone to say “ouch,” and she punted it back to the pitch. “So why is France going to make anything better, except get you a long vacation?”

“It’ll give me the chance to put everything on pause for a while, to think everything over. I don’t have time to do that now. I have to slow everything down before my life speeds by without a stop – that’s how I feel now.”

“You know your life doesn’t look too bad to me,” said Janice. “I don’t see how you could hate it so much.”

“I know it sounds like I’m complaining. I know I’m lucky. Why do you think I stuck with it for so long?”

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to find over there,” she said.

What was I expecting to find over there? I stared, unfocused, past the mini-Messis bouncing between their drills, past the pudgy middle-agers jogging the track, past the parking lot crammed with minivans and Suburbans. Something. Something different from this. At least a different me. At least a me with a plan.

Meet the Author

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Posted: October 15, 2015 at 7:09 am

 

I brimmed with confidence, 25 pages of heartfelt memoir burning a hole in my laptop. I felt like a writer, and Carol and I were about to see another writer, award-winning literary superstar “Famous Author,” speak in the only English bookstore in Aix-en-Provence. He was in nearby Marseille at a writing conference and finally accepted the bookstore manager’s latest invitation. I read all of Famous Author’s books and felt I knew him because Carol went to school with him in Toronto. I always joked Famous Author was Carol’s high school boyfriend, but in truth he was the outcast loner with a mohawk in the leather jacket. Barely acquaintances. We walked into a packed house at Book In Bar, mostly older ex-patriots and English-speaking tourists in Rockport shoes. In the largest of Book In Bar’s three small rooms, bookcases covered every wall, floor to ceiling, surrounding a desk set up for Famous Author. About 30 standing people crowded behind 30 mismatched wooden chairs facing Famous Author’s pulpit. I spied my French conversation partner Céline sitting in the second row, her hands defiantly saving the only two empty chairs for us. This detail assured me that except for Céline, everyone in the room was English – there was no “saving” seats In French culture. Céline saving seats? My pupil was becoming more English while I struggled to become French. But a seat was a seat, so Carol and I elbowed our way over.
“Céline, what are you doing?” I said as we sat on either side of her. “Where did you learn that?”
“I can’t believe it worked. You English people are so polite!” said Céline, leaning over to kiss us each in turn.
“I’m so happy you came to this, Céline. I’ve been wanting to tell you I took your advice, and I…..” The bookstore manager stood before the crowd and asked for quiet.
“I would like to welcome our special guest,” said the manager. She outlined Famous Author’s string of literary accomplishments, including winning Canada’s most prestigious prize for fiction for his last published book. He was nominated for this and that, had won that and this, taught creative writing at two universities, had all the literary chops I lacked. In her introduction, the manager didn’t mention Famous Author was also very handsome, but the swooning ladies in the front row could attest to that.
I had seen many authors speak in bookstores, and Famous Author was more engaging and open than most. Listening to him, I thought what I always thought from the bookstore audience: I could do a talk like this. I want to do a talk like this. I would just love to do a talk like this.
As I dreamt of a beautiful future where I was a published author and strangers and lonely women came to musty bookstores to hear my bon mots, Famous Author started talking about his book in progress.
“So I was coming off the surprising success of my last novel and I spent about two years writing my latest. Wow, I worked harder on this book than anything else I had written before. Which was weird because the outside pressure was kind of off; I knew it would get published. That’s a luxury. Anyway, I thought it was in good shape when I gave the manuscript to my editor, the guy at the publishing company who edited the last one. He had it for a long time, weeks, but I thought it was just because he was incredibly busy. But I was devastated when he met me in a restaurant to tell me the structure of the whole book was wrong. And it was in the wrong voice. It should have been told from a different character’s perspective. He basically trashed the whole thing.”
Those in the audience stared in surprise, some in shock. I could only listen in complete dejection.
“I couldn’t just tweak it here and there,” said Famous Author. “What was needed was just too massive and complicated. So I started the whole thing over, and I’m almost finished the rewrite. I think it’s much better now. I guess we’ll see.”
At that moment I stopped listening. What I’d heard was enough to launch me on another downward spiral of depression. Famous Author had his degrees and experience and awards and accolades, and I received my creative writing degree from the University of YouTube. If this “auteur” could screw up so badly, what chance did I have of writing something coherent? It was hopeless. I clutched and unclutched my fists and fought the impulse to run from the room.
Céline leaned over and in a whisper close to my ear said, “What’s wrong, dear Bill? Are you okay?” I ignored her, staring straight ahead, unseeing.
Carol reached across Céline’s lap and found my hand to give it a sympathetic squeeze. The warmth of her touch calmed me slightly. She didn’t have to ask me what the problem was. She knew that my confidence, like Elvis, had left the building.

Can You Spell Catharsis?

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Posted: October 2, 2015 at 7:35 am

 

Details of the arrangements made to move from a big house crammed with stuff to France are mostly boring and rarely funny. But for simplifying our lives, it was cathartic. Every item in our house fit into one of five piles. Pile one was what we could carry in backpacks to Aix-en-Provence. Not two pairs of jeans, but one pair of jeans. Not 10 t-shirts, but three. Not every Apple device we owned. Pile two held possessions we could not live without for one year, and were shipped to Provence. They had to be essential, and also cool enough for France; mostly clothes with such international cachet we would be mistaken for Europeans. In theory. Pile three was stored in Vancouver, items we still wanted, but were too personal, precious or sentimental for our house renters to touch or see. My favourite coffee mug. High school yearbooks. Three hundred vinyl record albums.  The fourth pile wasn’t technically a pile, but everything we left in our house, such as furniture and dishes and our second-best corkscrew. Our renters needed the fourth pile to live. Anything not fitting in the first four piles warranted pile five. This was garbage, and it was the biggest pile. Several trips to the dump and the Salvation Army later, I wondered why I was keeping garbage in my house. I was never going to fix that broken chair in the basement. Why was I saving that old fax machine? Did I need my old electric drill, the one with the broken chuck and the hopelessly twisted cord? The five-pile program required ruthlessness and a strong sense of letting go. It was the kind of process which picked up steam over time – with practice, we became increasingly inclined to throw our possessions into pile five. And the more we put into pile five, the better we felt.

Once the junk was gone, our personal items were in storage, and our cool French-like clothes were shipped, we were left in our large house, still our house, for one more day. All we had were backpacks in what suddenly felt like a cavernous, empty space. There were no personal photos, my bookcases were half empty, my office looked antiseptic and cold. The enormous nude painting I made of Carol 20 years ago, while I went through my celebrated Blue Period, was in storage. The wall looked naked without Carol’s nakedness. I didn’t feel like myself walking around my tidy house, without my personal belongings on display. How could I be me if I wasn’t surrounded by my important possessions?

The feeling of disconnectedness intensified the next day, the day of our flight to France. Wandering around our house, I walked through the looking glass, into a skewed reflection of my comfortable environment. It looked like my house, but it seemed like someone else was already living there. I was unsettled by the layer of non-reality covering every surface inside my almost-house. While we waited for our neighbor Jake to drive us to the airport, I made a frantic tour of the house. A sheen of sweat collected on my forehead. Everything was perfect and ready for our renters. I walked out the door for the last time in a year, and the feeling of finality was overwhelming. I was excited, but also afraid. And vulnerable…..it seemed that all I owned was on my back, all I had to face the world, exposed.

“Did you lock the front door, Billy?” said Carol in jest, as Jake backed the car out of the driveway.

“Of course I did. Well, I’m sure I did. Stop the car, Jake, I’d better go check,” I said.

Reaching the porch, I saw that not only had I forgotten to lock the door, but in my discombobulatedness, I had left it wide open. It’s a good thing I went back, as we were going to be overseas for a year.