Never, Darling

Getting Known

I’ve been trying to finish this essay for the better part of two weeks.

June has not been cooperating.

Part of it is the heat. Part of it is paperwork.

Part of it is the World Cup, despite my current policy of boycotting most things American. Friends remain exempt.

Mostly, though, it’s been the social calendar. June has become that strange pre-holiday month where everyone seems determined to see everyone else before disappearing for part of the summer. Looking at the calendar recently, I realized how many of those people now occupy permanent places in my life.

Every few days I’d sit down intending to write about one thing and end up doing something else instead.

[ed note: This started as an essay about paperwork and residency renewals. Somewhere along the way it became an essay about something else entirely.

—K ]

A friend I hadn’t seen in ten years came to visit.

My wife & I have lived in a lot of places in the last 10 years.

It was his first trip to France. He spent some time in Paris, as most first-time visitors do, but to my surprise he made a point of coming out to our little corner of Loire-Atlantique.

There are more obvious choices in the guidebooks. There are lists of things you’re supposed to see or discover & take the same pictures that everyone else has. Not his plan.

Instead, he came here, to our tiny section of a small town outside of a mid-sized city in western France.

Ten years is long enough for whole lives to happen. Jobs, moves, marriages, divorces, remarriages, new countries, even. You sit down for a drink and some of the conversation is catching up and most of it just picks up from where you left it, or not. Things we didn’t know about each others’ lives got explained as needed, but it was easy. We just kind of picked up where we left off.

So we walked.

We wandered around town and the little paths that wind through, ones you’ll miss if you don’t know where they are. We sat by the river. We stopped for coffee. We lingered over meals. We talked about old friends and dead projects and all the things that seemed important a decade ago. And because he was seeing everything for the first time, I found myself seeing it again too.

He loved it.

The trails. The river. The bakery. The small town stuff that is occasionally frustrating.

The pace. A bar I hardly think about anymore. The way people seemed to know one another. You could spend an afternoon doing very little and it was okay.

It’s good to see your life with someone else’s eyes sometimes.

A few years ago I might’ve made the same observations.

Not because those things had become less interesting. They become ordinary. And for him, they were new and that helped make them new for us again.

So there are friends like that.

He didn’t say it, but we had the idea that he just wanted to get a sense of our lives here. He really liked the supermarket, which we do too, but who wants to cross an ocean for that? But also the vineyards nearby, the castles dotted about, the vistas we rarely go by and the ones we see on out way to get bread.

He liked the scenery, the country, but he talked to us about how we moved through it.

We walked without looking at a GPS. We knew where to see local animals, the good bakeries, the hidden sites tucked away behind ordinary roads. People stopped to say hello. Other people waved, the ever-present bonjour and the like.

A few bent rules for us in small ways. A place stayed open a little longer so we could have another round. Favors appeared before we asked for them.

Some of these people knew us well.

Some barely knew us at all.

None of it seemed remarkable to me.

It seemed remarkable to him.

“You’re known here,” he said.

Then, after thinking about it for a second:

“You did it.”

When I lived in New York, I didn’t spend much time writing about New York.

The stories were about students, musicians, restaurants, strange jobs, odd characters, local history, and whatever happened to catch my attention that week. New York was simply where those things happened.

The city itself was a setting.

Somewhere along the way, France became one too.

That sounds less romantic than it is.

For years France was the subject. The puzzle. The experiment. The thing I was trying to understand. Every interaction felt like material. Every bureaucratic encounter became a story. Every misunderstanding seemed worthy of examination.

Then life moved into the foreground.

I don’t know exactly when that happened.

Two years ago almost everyone I knew seemed to be leaving.

There was a stretch where goodbye dinners appeared with alarming frequency. Someone’s visa situation changed. Someone got a job in another city, another country. Another was going “home.”. Someone decided life abroad wasn’t for them. Someone else followed a relationship to another city. The cast kept changing.

I’ve long had a theory that every place has an Island of Misfit Toys. People looking to meet people or a bit out of place where they are.

I have long been one of those.

The first people you meet after a major move are often not the most deeply rooted people in town. They’re rebuilding, experimenting, escaping, recovering, wandering, reinventing themselves (maybe), or trying something that made perfect sense to them and nobody else.

They’re moving. They’re unsettled.

Which made sense because I was too.

Anybody who sells their life, leaves a country, learns another language, and starts over in middle age is probably not captain or even the cheerleader of Team Normal.

The misfit toys saved the day.

Many of those friendships became real and lasting friendships. Some remain among the most important relationships in my life. But many of us were connected by a shared state of transition. We were figuring it out. We were all moving, toward something or away from something.

And then something changed.

I looked around recently and realized that most of the people I care about live here.

That isn’t quite right.

Or at least it isn’t the whole story.

The friend who came to visit is a good example. We hadn’t seen each other in ten years. He flew across an ocean, spent time in Paris, and then made the entirely unnecessary decision to come out to our small town. Within about twenty minutes we were talking as though the gap had never happened.

A lot of the people who mattered before we left still matter.

The difference isn’t that the people I care about all live here now. The difference is that my life does.

The people who text about dinner live here. The people who need favors live here. The people who ask for help moving a table, watering plants, or picking someone up from the train station live here. So do the people whose minor dramas become part of my week whether I volunteered for them or not.

The move succeeded and I somehow missed the moment.

That realization arrived while I was preparing yet another round of French paperwork.

The winning strategy with French administration is often surprisingly simple: give them exactly the thing they asked for and nothing else.

So I assembled documents, wrote explanations, produced forecasts, and once again translated a life into administrative language.

Who are you?

What do you do?

Why is it sustainable?

The paperwork isn’t wrong.

It’s simply incomplete.

France doesn’t know me particularly well, and why would it?

I didn’t go to school here. I wasn’t shaped by decades inside French institutions. I didn’t accumulate all the small bits of paperwork that make us legible to governments. Most of my life happened somewhere else. Entire chapters that feel central to me barely exist in the official version of my story.

There’s something reassuring about that.

It would be strange if an entire life could be transferred as easily as data from one device to another. Buy a new phone, sign into an account, and years of contacts, photos, messages, and habits appear in moments.

It’s certainly easier than entering fifty phone numbers one T9 letter at a time.

But it would also creep me out. I don’t really want the rest of life to work that way..

Administrative stuff and social stuff are different, I hope.

The state knows my documents, at least ones I’ve shared with them.

The life I’ve built here exists apart from that.

It exists in conversations, routines, friendships, obligations, and local knowledge. In knowing which invitations are genuine and which are mostly for show. In recognizing the names, places, and stories that keep resurfacing. In understanding references that would have sailed right past me four years ago.

A tourist doesn’t get much local gossip. A tourist doesn’t have favorite people and ones they quietly avoid. A tourist doesn’t have a mental map populated by allies, villains, eccentrics, bores, or even people they hide from in the grocery store.

That’s life, not expatriation.

And yes, I do have a mental map of my local area, which looks suspiciously like Candy Land.

Someone asked me recently when I thought I would become French.

“Never, darling.”

The answer surprised him more than it surprised me.

To me it seems obvious. I don’t think becoming French has ever really been an idea or an option.

I arrived here with several decades already behind me. Most of the experiences that shaped me happened somewhere else. And I don’t think it would ever happen if I wanted it to. Citizenship, maybe; residency, sure; maybe even indefinite leave to remain, but not French.

France talks a great deal about equality and universalism, but like most countries it also spends a remarkable amount of time sorting people into categories. Regions. Accents. Schools. Families. Locals. Outsiders. Paris. Not Paris. Every nation has its own version, which ironically works much the same all over the world with few exceptions.

But I don’t think that’s what he was asking.

I think he was asking whether this place feels like home.

I suspect I’ll know when it happens, or sometime long after it happens. Some French people will probably know too. It will still feel slightly odd, and incomplete, because that’s how these things happen for me. Most of the important changes in life seem to arrive without an announcement.

In the meantime, the question is a bit less important for me at the moment. I have an ambitious reading schedule for the summer and little else beyond day trips—and the paperwork for the French government.

Still…

This morning I spent twenty minutes listening to two neighbors argue about a dispute that began years before I arrived and will probably continue years after I’m gone.

I knew exactly who they were talking about.