November 2008 - Report from Europe

Dear Friends,

I arrived home just in time to vote. And what an election it was. The Europeans are surely whooping collectively this week.

Due to a lack of internet access, I failed to write about my stay with my family in France so I would like say a few words about it.

After a direct flight and taxi ride, I arrived on September 2 in Paris at my niece's apartment in central Paris where she was to wait for me before going to her office for the morning. I used the code to get through the exterior street door only to find myself in a dark corridor. I rang her apartment bell without response. The distant door to the stairwell and elevator was locked. When I tried to open the exterior door where I had entered it was also locked! So there I was trapped in the entryway in darkness. After about 5 minutes of reassuring self talk, I cased the exterior door and figured out how to manually open it. It is one of those large iron 250-year-old doors with an inside lever I hadn't seen. It was too dark to see the button on the wall that must be pushed in order to open the door using the knob. Feeling relieved, I stepped out onto the street leaving my 3 bags in the entry. I walked into the nearby patisserie and forgetting to say "Bonjour Madame, excusez moi, I have a problem" in French the way you're supposed to do if you want to be polite, I made a slightly frantic request for a mobile phone in English from those waiting in line for their morning croissant. A lovely English-speaking French woman gave me her phone and I proceeded to call my niece at all 4 of her available numbers with no response.

Nicole was 33 weeks pregnant with her first child at age 41, and I knew she had been having some contractions the week before. In fact one of my duties in addition to being a tourist was to cook and shop for her as she was on partial bedrest. So I had to wonder whether her absence could be due to an unexpected early birth. Yet I hadn't heard any such news when I had left MSP-SP 10 hours earlier.

As I stood around the entry wondering what to do, a woman came through the door who actually knew Nicole - and as I later found out was her only friend in the building. Natalie took me in and we started calling hospitals to see if Nicole had been admitted (privacy paranoia being less of an issue here than in the US) and had no luck. Just as I was negotiating a nap on her day couch - I'm not shy about where I sleep when I'm tired and need some zzz's - my nephew, Jean-Paul, came through the door to tell me Nicole had gone into labor after my plane took off and had given birth to a 2.6 pound baby girl and they were doing well. While feeding me tea and croissant in Nicole's 6th floor, very nice apartment with a big balcony overlooking the hood, he explained that Nicole's boyfriend Jean was driving up from Bordeaux that very moment and I would not be able to stay in Nicole's place as planned. In fact I needed to grab a few clothes and take the Metro with him to Montmartre where I would stay at my sister Susan's place. Now there was a reason I was staying with Nicole and not Susan ... but I was relieved just to get to a destination as jet lag was beginning to take its toll.

And so for the next two weeks I stayed at my sister's 5 story walkup - no elevator - 50 square meter apartment- which has a divine view of at least 240 degrees of Paris. We could see the Eiffel tower light up on the hour in the evenings, which I personally thought was kind of tacky. The only better place for a view of the city is the church at the very top of the hill, Sacre Coeur/Sacred Heart, which was built in the 1870's by the locals after the Germans had occupied their neighborhood for 4 months. They were certain God had punished them for their shameful ways so they were trying to make it up to Him. I think my sister, who is not a religious person, may have been thinking about propitiating someone or something at various points during my stay.

Now I am 7 years younger than Susan - critical ones perhaps from a generational standpoint. She is not a baby boomer. I am an aging hippie. She is the oldest. I am the baby. You get the picture.

Susan and her husband Jean and two children ages 4 and 6 moved to France in 1974. Jean's mother was there and living in the cultural capitol of the world seemed like just the thing to my then 26 year old sister. She got her master's degree in clinical psychology and began practicing in the hospitals of Paris. Jean joined an architectural firm and Jean-Paul and Nicole grew up to be two very well adjusted as well as gifted adults. Super with the accent on the second syllable as the French do.

When we were growing up in Chicago, Susan often had to take care of my brother and me as my mother was often unwell. My father never bonded normally with my sister as she was born while he was fighting in Europe during World War II. They first met when she was 2. He ultimately disowned her after she left home for Smith College.

My dad was much less ambivalent about my brother and me. Although he was given to anger and occational physical violence, he clearly loved us.

So my sister and I grew up in the same family but like many siblings we were treated differently by our parents. And we have carried that difference through our adult lives and it surely has affected our relationship. As the older sibling, she determined the nature of the relationship and being 7 years my senior and beleagured by responsibilities, she didn't spend much time with me. We shared a room but I don't recall much bedside conversation probably to do with my going to bed hours before she did and having zero interest in boys except for their toy cars and erector sets. When I turned 10 she left for college and I saw her a few times before she moved to France and then only 7 or 8 times in these past 35 years.

So now we were temporary roomies. Her husband, Jean, died last year of cancer so it was just us. In fact his death was one of my reasons for coming. I was there to support her during a hard time and maybe even create new connections between us.

Because she is older, she knows some family stories I don't. I try to unearth new stories when I see her. This time she described the great presents our maternal grandmother always sent her from Nebraska. She died (1953) before I had a memory of her so if she gave me stuff I wouldn't know. Our parents were always broke and didn't know what to buy. I can remember getting a toy iron and ironing board for Chanukah and I was a tomboy who didn't like to even play with dolls much!

She recalled the time she was supposed to be watching me in Chicago on the West Side and how I disappeared. She panicked and ran up to tell my mom who ran down and found me. The time I remember was when my brother and I took off on her in the suburb of Morton Grove where we lived later and walked along Dempster Avenue, a very busy street to railroad tracks where I waited while my brother scrambled down the hill into the woods. The police cruiser found me standing alone and waited until Bruce returned to take us home. I think Susan was probably in more trouble for that one but she didn't remember it. Or maybe we beat my parents home and she never told them.

We remembered living in the one bedroom apartment on the West side. I slept in the living room in a crib. But somehow my mom hired a wonderful African American woman named Cassie to clean the house. We were drinking wine and tsk tsking my mom for her strange priorities in spending limited money. Of course we each took our own analytical take on that.

She spent time at a neighbor's every day who took her in like a daughter. She was an Albanian immigrant who liked to read fashion magazines with my sister who was 7 or 8 at the time. Susan thinks perhaps this woman nurtured her because she didn't have her own daughter. Mom never liked us to have friends over and we reminisced about how throughout childhood we would worm our way into the hearts of adults in other families in order to have more fun and attention.

Through the stories and remembrances we grew in our relationship to each other even though the tensions of sibling rivalry and envy were still just under the surface.