moonlight and periwinkles

I spent my evening swimming by the light of the full moon. Floating periwinkle blossoms brushed against my skin. It has been much cooler in Florida these past few days, which balances nicely with the subtle electricity that always simmers the night before a departure: Mom and I are driving four hours south to Miami tomorrow morning to process her immigration papers at the French Consulate. We will try to drown out the influence of any nefarious, French bureaucratic dramas by meeting an old friend at our favorite Miami restaurant, The Rusty Pelican, and swimming at South Beach. We are going so that she can renew her carte d’identité, her French identity card, which has to be done in person. Ever since marrying my American father and up until a naturalization process which she attempted to initiate at the start of the second Gulf war (fearing the anti-French sentiment that the freedom fries were heralding), she has vehemently refused to take American citizenship. This vehemence always confused me growing up since her love and appreciation for America has always been absolute: she loves the fact that strangers smile to each other on the street here as opposed to the French personal indifference; she loves knowing that 24-hour grocery stores here are always open instead of needing a lunar calendar to know the working hours of most French stores; she loves the ideal of American customer service whose goal it is to not, in comparison to French customer service, brutalize the customer. These small details of difference between the two countries are high-lighted in her constant cultural comparative analysis. This process is, of course, taken up in reverse whenever we are in France. “In America…” she will begin, whenever some vaguely sociological topic might come up, or not, in the conversation. I am sure that the constancy of the comparisons unconsciously led me, with the subtlety of a foghorn, to study comparative literature. There always had to be something that the current experience was compared against; a mirroring, a doubling, of any situation was always necessary in order to understand and appreciate.

And so in Miami tomorrow, at the French Consulate, she will continue shuttling between a documentary allegiance to a country she left 50 years ago and a lived love for a country that she will not claim for her own. She floats between these two worlds while I try to find direction among the periwinkles.