Gare de Lyon, Paris

I am going back to Annonay for the second time in three days. I am going to see Tante Monique, she is in the hospital. Tante is French for aunt, she is my mother’s 85-year-old sister. (One of the effects of my mom’s decision to have children at the non-traditional age of 43 is that many of our relatives are older, much older. The question of mortality – with its attendant non-negotiables of sickness, old age and death – has been more present for my sister and I than many of our friends growing up, friends whose mothers had children in their 20s. But this choice of my mother – to have children “later” – is one that I celebrate, one that I am emulating. Before my mom became a mother, she lived on three continents, participated in United Nations peace-keeping operations in the Middle East, learned different languages by living in their countries, bought fabulous clothes hand-made for her by various designers. All these amazing experiences informed her mothering. Her parenting techniques have always been unique and exceptional. Unfortunately, my sister and I perceived them – with our desperate desires of just fitting-in while growing up in America – as insane and inexplicable. But with the modicum of hard-won objectivity we have gained through our mutual therapies and experiences, we realize now that we would not trade our childhoods for anything).

This journey back to Annonay from Paris is a multi-stepped affair; one that is a sequence of metro-train-bus-taxi, ending with a walk across the bridge of the River Deume. Although exhausting, I appreciate the intricacy of this itinerary since it affords me the opportunity to compose myself. This is the aunt who would organize elaborate, month-long summer road trips, zooming us through France every year. Thanks to her indefatigable, truck-driver instincts, we criss-crossed the roads of France – staying in the smallest hotels in the obscurest villages, stopping at oyster museums and strawberry festivals along the way. As we reminisced in her hospital room, she reminds me that during a visit to the cathedral in Bourges when I was 12, I told her I wanted to get married there. I had totally forgotten, both the cathedral and that I had ever said that. But it is thanks to her profound curiosity and energy for always, always learning that I even have a link to France, that I have an understanding of this part of my genetic inheritance.

One of my favorite links with her is linguistic – (she has always done this for us, but she has stepped up the intensity once I told her of my decision to come live in Paris) – she is always cataloging French idioms and expressions. She meticulously types up lists of French expressions with their etymologies, meanings and translations. She always says, rightfully so, that these are the hardest parts of a language to learn – the obscure phrase which operates with a delicate alchemy of pop culture, history and French collective memory. Understanding them, she tells me, will lend me cultural currency and legitimacy. I have to enter fully into the language, she tells me, not to be content to rest at French’s threshold. Thanks to her lists, I can nod empathetically when someone complains about a hair being in the soup or feet in the plate – or laugh appropriately when someone refers to the worm in the cauliflower. Even this past Sunday, when the doctor came by her hospital room, he mentioned the need to see events à l’optique. In answer to my confused face, she said gently “I will add that to your list, don’t worry.”

During my telephone call to her Sunday night – letting her know that I had arrived safely in Paris – she apologizes for being too weak to type up the latest list she is working on. But she tells me that to view events à l’optique is to remember the relevant, to understand what is most important. It is thanks to her that I am slowly learning to live my life this way.