FRENCHIE
I wanted to write something really good for you. Something that would wake you or refresh you like the sweet Montreal air refreshed me today. I wanted to write you something long and beautiful, something that would unfold over time, that would bloom in a warm small back room in your mind, where I would unroll my little Persian rug on the dark wood floor and sit there for you, crosslegged, waiting all the time for you for when you needed me.
And I wanted to have some automatic easy audio digitizing tool, an extension on the I-Pod that I will someday own that can instantly
MP3 me singing to you the
chanson I composed this morning on the way through the sweet drifting petals of soft snow to the shopping mall to buy the morning papers. It was a French song, perhaps my first (I don’t recall) called
Je Suis un Petit Garçon Français, and a real ripper, and I came home and sang it to the Killer and she laughed.
But the truth is that I’m terrified of French. Not of French itself, but of a future of living in French at least some of the time. Of living in the halting, quiet and scared me that remains when you take away my ability to talk smoothly. I’m terrified about going out in a world where it’s a struggle to understand and be understood. Like moving to Montreal may be similar to having a part-time stroke.
Friday, February 13, 2004
GEEK COOL LOVE
Killer? She knows her library card number by heart.
Not even in my most lurid schoolboy fantasies did I imagine I’d find a girl like that. I’m taking her to Montreal for a romantic weekend away from it all.
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
PATIENCE, PLEASE
Darlings, it’s not that we don’t care about you. We do. Deeply. And it’s not that we are ensnared in our annual winter funk, no. In fact, the winter funk mysteriously lifted on or around the first of February and we are, right now, smiling softly to ourselves and humming a little tune.
No, it’s not any of those things. It’s just that we’ve been frightfully busy lately. But don’t worry. We’ll be right back.
