In 2005, I put together enough grant money from various sources to make my first trip to Paris to work in the archives. It was the first time I had ever ventured so far from home without any sort of company or safety net, and as my facility in French has never been that great, I did so in a moderately alien culture with little or no ability to talk my way out of trouble.



I drove to Chicago for that first flight overseas, and walked through security in the international terminal leaving my sobbing 5 year old son in the arms of his father. Max, my boy, only realized at that last minute that he'd be without me for more than a month, and his awareness of that separation robbed him of speech entirely, leaving him only screams and tears. I could hear him all the way down the concourse, and I kept walking anyway. Do we ever get over things like that?



The flight was uneventful, though long and tedious and grainy. Arriving in Paris at the Charles de Gaulle airport, I felt as if I'd been bathing in sand and sweat. I made it through customs, got my bags, and found a taxi without any trouble. The driver, as I was later to learn about all airport taxi drivers in Paris, was from Vietnam. His French was better than mine, though heavily accented. I managed to tell him, "20 bis, Blvd. Arago", my new digs, and he took me there for the outrageous but typical sum of 40 Euros. The closer I got to the center of the city, the more surreal the whole experience felt. I was there, finally, after years of fantasizing. We drove past Notre Dame cathedral, across the Seine, and toward my apartment.



I had only know this address from the map. I knew the street was a secondary artery running roughly east and west, and marked the division between the fifth and thirteenth arrondisement. The fifth, of course, is the center of the famous Latin Quarter, where the Sorbonne can be found. The thirteenth is far less distinguished, but has this quality about it -- it's not a tourist area. I learned that ordinary Parisians live there. The shops and restaurants cater to their tastes and wallets. That means you can buy good bread from four different bakeries within a block in any direction, an open-air market with fresh vegetables and fruit runs six days a week within three blocks from the apartment, and yet metro, bus, and cab services are all close and easy to find. Many of those who live in this area work in the Sorbonne or at the University of Paris, as they are all within walking distance. It is my favorite part of Paris for living, though it's not the most beautiful.



So there I was, after the cab driver left me, on the corner in front of a cafe and tabac, next to the door to my apartment building, and I realized I didn't have the code to enter. My landlady, Lilliane, had given it to me in email, but I hadn't realized what it was so hadn't bothered to write it down. I hadn't gotten a phone card yet, had no access to a phone anyway, and no one to call. I had no idea what to do. I sat on my bags, and tried to think. Not that it did me much good.



Within ten minutes, the shutters of a window two stories up opened and a man yelled down, "Apellez vous Renee?" "Oui" I replied, knowing at least this much French. Lilliane's husband, who taught German history at the University, had been waiting for me with his son. I was renting the son's apartment, and the two men were headed to Venice for the month I was there. They let me in and helped me with luggage. I blessed Lilliane.



Once inside, her husband kindly explained in his marvelous and idiosyncratic English (he tried to explain to me that the cafe owners downstairs were not, um, gentle? I realized he meant "gentile", meaning "nice" in French) where the grocery stores could be found, how to get tickets for the metro and bus, which were the best places for fresh bread, and how to find the open air markets. He gave me keys, and they left. And that was the last contact I had in Paris for a long time.



My first job there was to find an international calling card to talk to my husband. After a shower, I headed in the general direction of the Blvd. St. Germaine, which wasn't that far a walk (if you go in the right direction, which could be a challenge). After walking for what seemed miles, I found a phone store, only to learn that I could get what I wanted at any of the Tabacs I had passed, including the one downstairs from my apartment. So I bought some bread, then headed home. That's when the whole thing came crashing down.



I knew the code for the downstairs door. I had the key. But French doorlocks aren't like those in the States. This wasn't something Lilliane's husband had thought to explain. Why would he?



I put the key in. I turned it. It turned 360 degrees without hitting a tumbler. Not one. I tried again. I pulled it out and tried again. Nothing. At home, if the you're not working the key right, you'll encounter resistance and have to push. In Europe, you get nothing. After several minutes of trying, I felt utterly defeated.



Perhaps it wouldn't have bothered me so much if I hadn't been so tired. But there I was, thousands of miles from family and the familiar, defeated by a door. I had no one to call. I'd been given the address of a cleaning lady I could hire, but she spoke only Portuegese and French, had no phone, and I couldn't remember how to find her. No one to call. No one to turn to.



I have never felt quite that isolated before.



I know I cried, though I was ashamed of it. Ordinarily, I'd call my husband, yell in his direction, and eventually get it figured out. But I would do so with someone to listen, sympathize, maybe even give good advice. But my cell phone was dead in France, and I couldn't call him.



It took me about another ten minutes, but I did eventually get the door opened. (There's a trick to it, of course. You insert, push in further, then push up before turning the key. Or something like that.) I had won my first cultural battle. I called my husband to celebrate.



Those first few hours in France have become the metaphor for all my time there. Cultural blocks existed on really basic levels, but with persistence, I did manage to find a bit of comfort, contentment, perhaps even grace. Is it really so strange that I had to go several thousand miles from home to realize this? I became more the person I was before marriage -- islolated, but self-sufficient and comfortable being so. I felt younger in Paris than I have in many years, and I think this is why; I had the coping mechanisms of a six year old and hadn't been so completely dependent on myself since I was in my twenties. It's a liberation, and incredibly unnerving.



That day didn't end so badly, though. My apartment looked out over a narrow one-way street, and directly across was another apartment building. This one was more modern, a steel and glass eyesore alien to a neighborhood largely built before 1910. However, more modern architecture means you can have amenities, like elevators and air conditioning and balconies.



My first night in Paris, a family across the street had a party. It was multi-generational, as so many things are in Europe (I saw kids everywhere, at all hours, and wondered often when they slept). Through my windows, I heard the conversation, the laughter, the kids squealing. About 20 people filled the balcony, where the buffet table had been spread, and adults stood in small groups balencing cup and plate in awkward manners. On a bench near the edge, an older man sat and tuned up an accustic guitar. They had set torches around the patio, and candles on the table. As I watched, the man with the guitar started to play. Several of the kids, both teens and younger, gathered near. He started to sing, though I can't tell you what. Several kids joined in, along with adults. He played a song, then another adult came out carrying a violin. A flute joined them a little while later. Together, they played and sang for more than an hour, everyone, and suddenly I didn't feel quite so lost.



I couldn't join them, of course. And I was alone still. But I could watch, and listen, and feel somehow like I could connect there. I understood this evening they shared, and just felt rich for having been there.

Tuesday afternoon procrastination

I should be working on a revision of my dissertation material, and I will. But I always find starting back into it is difficult after being forced to set it aside, and writing anything, anything at all, jump-starts the process.



I've been thinking a lot about seminal events in my life -- those experiences which have changed me and helped to shape me. Since they're on my mind so much lately, this is where I'll exercise my demons (and angels).



For no identifiable reason at all, I googled an old friend of mine. She had a unique name, although it wasn't really HER name, and found about a dozen short audio recordings she has made in the last year. Hearing her voice again after 20 years of not having her around... I can't describe it. When I last knew her well, we were both in our mid-20s. Decades of chain smoking, alcohol, and hard living have altered her voice, and it's as smoky and smooth as the bottom of a bottle of bourbon now. In these recordings, she ruminates on her childhood, lost friends, and experiences both minute and momentous. In some ways, I recognize the essential core of my old friend, but we've both changed so much.



We met back in '85. She was 17, I was 21. We had friends in common but, more importantly, a common need -- a place to live. She had been kicked out of her parent's house for drug abuse and had been living on or near the street for a few months. The weather had turned bitter, and curling up in all night laundromats was no longer a reasonable option, given the preponderance of randy bums who claimed those spots. I had been living in a room in a house, but after the managers of the property tried to charge all tenants for a full month's water use at a time when the house had been largely vacant, I decided to stop paying rent. It didn't help that a window in my bedroom had been stuck open for months. Before they could evict me, I looked for somewhere else.



The somewhere else was another rental property, another room in a communal house, a block away from my old home. I couldn't afford the full rent alone, and Simone -- the new roomate -- couldn't afford much of anything. Neither of us had what you'd call a "real" job; I modeled for the art department, she peddled dime joints to high school kids. But there we were.



That December started one hell of a strange journey for me, and one I still try to parse out, from time to time. I've tried to explain my decisions to my husband, other friends, and even to myself, but nothing I've said ever really comes close to explaining who I was, who she was, the nature of our relationship, and the life we led together, for less than a year. It was what it was, but what was is still difficult.



Don't think this will be a confession about buried lesbian desire. Simone and I weren't lovers. We weren't chaste either, and we both had sexual partners, some shared, but we never did experiment with each other in that way. If we had, I would be more able to explain our relationship; it could be categorized and filed away as "post-adolescent sexual experimentation" and that would be the end of it. But sex with Simone was never interesting to me, although I later did dip my toes in that water, but with other women. Simone was, I guess, a kind of pied piper, who came into my life at a time when I was still reeling from a radical departure from my own ideas of who I was and what my goals would be. To the question, "Who are you?", Simone answered, "Who cares? Let's do something." And I did. A lot.



The amazing part is, I still remember a lot of it.



Enough for now.

Me, my goals, my purposes

I am late to blogging, and given the cacophony of blogged voices out there on the internet, a positive symphony of monologers, I don't expect this one will gain any following or receive much attention. It's the way I want it. I suppose this is a semi-public place to air my secrets, a forum to express my thoughts, and an audience might be more counterproductive than useful.

What do I tell my invisible and non-existant audience about myself? I'm not particularly special. I can write, and express myself well, though many people think my written style is formal, distant, stuffy, even stuck up. I've been accused of elitism because I write correct grammar, though doing so has become more of an ingrained habit than an attempt to impress.

I am also, as the title of the blog indicates, an academic. A lifelong academic. Christ, I've been in school forever, constantly training for that long-postponed day when I'll stand before the assembly and receive my hood. I'm not there yet. I work in the least popular, least understood, and for many, the least interesting area of European history -- the Medieval period. That great expanse of 1000 years, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance when, as priests and professors have told me, nothing of any particular interest happened.

Of course, it did. A lot of it. And I study part of it. I work on French 14th century history -- the specifics can wait for another post -- and research means I have to find ways to travel to Paris and work in the archives. I do. I have. It's a perk of working in this field, although money is always an issue.

But as I get older, I look back on my life and wonder how I got here. My 20 year old self would laugh and sneer at the 40 something me, that is if she could focus on me through the haze of alcohol and pot, if not other substances. Nostalgia isn't my thing, but maybe this blog is what I need to go back and think about where I've been so I can see where I want to be.

When I grow up.