The Obsession Nobody Else Gets
It started at a junior high BBQ. It’s still going decades later.
My obsession began at a BBQ at the McFaddens’ house.
I can’t recall who all was there because I was staying close to Michelle McFadden. Michelle, who was a ninth grader at our junior high where I was an entry-level seventh grader. Michelle, who walked a few steps in front of me with her Farrah Fawcett hair, wearing San Francisco Riding Gear jeans, and a pristine pair of white leather Nikes with a red swoosh.
I followed her around the yard, in my light purple A-Smile overalls, listening to her chat about the latest drama coming out of the 9th grade class.
At the end of the yard, she flipped around to me and said something I couldn’t understand.
I looked at her with my mouth slightly open.
So she repeated it.
Probably something like, “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Michelle. Comment vous appelez-vous?”
I still didn’t know what she was saying, and to this day I’m not sure if she was showing off her language skills or trying to stop me from following her around, but regardless, I was in awe.
Michelle stood there in front of me with her freckled nose and feathered bangs and kept tossing out those foreign words to me, while I stood there, fiddling with a buckle on my overalls, trying to make sense of what she was saying.
My dad’s whistle broke our awkward exchange, followed up by a “Kids! Dinner’s ready!”
I tagged behind Michelle as we walked up to the house.
With a foot on the first step and her hands on the railings, she looked back at me and inquired, "You're taking French next year, aren't you?"
I looked up at her, widened my eyes slightly, and said, "Oh yeah, yeah, I'm definitely taking French next year." She responded, "Good." We both climbed the stairs up to the deck for dinner.
The next year found me at a new school, in a new state, with all new faces, mourning the loss of my friends I had left behind. The bright spot of the year was that I had enrolled in Madame Miller's 8th grade French class, where, besides teaching us very rudimentary French, she let us listen to French rock and roll.
More French was to be had the following year in a new high school, in another new school district, trying once again to make new friends. I even babysat for my high school French teacher who spoke to me only in French and refused to call me anything but Cooksie, her Frenchified version of my maiden name.
French continued to follow me through every move, every new school, college, and beyond into adulthood. Somehow it became the place of familiarity when everything else was new.
And the thing is, no one really gets it. This obsession of mine to nail down the French language. To crack it. It’s like my Rubik’s cube that I have yet to fully solve.
Not even Dave, the hubs, can fully appreciate it, although he did capitalize on it when he was trying to woo me, and used it as a pickup line when we initially met. “Hey, I hear you're looking to move to France. I can help get you a job there.” And he tossed his business card down on the break room table so I'd have his contact information.
Eighteen years after I fell for his pickup line and married him, I managed to finagle a summer in a tiny village in France for me. Yes, it was for me, and I let my three kids tag along, ages three, eight, and eleven. My parents joined us for the first half and Dave joined us for the second half.
And honestly, no one could fully understand why I had dragged us across the world to swelter in the Loire Valley without air conditioning and to be eaten alive by small black bugs, moucherons piqueurs, but me.
No one could understand that I wanted more than a fleeting day or two using my French with people who actually spoke French. I wanted to live among people speaking French long enough so that maybe I could stop translating every sentence in my head.
Something I didn’t fully comprehend about Dave when I hitched myself to him for life is that the man has a deep, intense passion for sports and the accompanying sports swag.
I mean, I guess there were signs, like when his favorite college football team would lose and he'd be in a funk for two weeks, or when he dressed our middle kiddo, barely one day old, in sports swag for the ride home from the hospital and gave him a stuffed football to hold.
But I didn't think this would last. Obviously, he would grow out of it over the years.
No, it has only intensified.
And what I really wasn’t prepared for was…the cycling. The fact that he rearranges his entire month of July every year to watch all 21 stages of the Tour de France over the course of three weeks.
We don’t go on vacation in July like everyone else. Dave must be in his own home and up every day at 5am to watch the Tour before work. Who else does this?
However, I used that as a selling point for the summer in France. “I’ll go with the kids. My parents will come for a bit and make sure we’re all okay. Then when you show up, we can travel around and watch a few stages of the Tour. Sound good?”
Well, we didn’t end up “traveling around” and catching stages of the Tour, but what we did do was spend a few days in Paris at the end of the Tour. The part where the cyclists ride from the Louvre, up the Champs-Élysées, around the Arc de Triomphe and back again eight times.
I stayed back with “the baby” while Dave and the older two kids set off on a grand adventure early in the morning to find the perfect viewing spot along the Champs-Élysées.
With the three of them wearing matching Tour de France branded shirts and hats, they set off into the crowds. Dave hoisted the kids up on a telephone booth he spotted before climbing up there himself. The three of them sat perched up on that small viewing platform and watched the cyclists go round and round. A clear view over the tops of thousands of people.
Looking back, I didn’t drag my family to France for them. I was doing something I'd wanted to do for years. Yet, that decision ended up giving each of them something too.
Dave still talks about watching the Tour from that telephone booth.
My children became adults who think nothing of hopping on a plane to another country.
And somehow, years later, "the baby" became obsessed with the German language in exactly the same inexplicable way I've always been obsessed with French.
So it continues.
We don’t pursue our passions for our friends and family in hopes that they can fully comprehend the obsession. Or that they’ll somehow give us the okay to go ahead with it. We do it for ourselves.
And yet, the things we pursue because they matter deeply to us often become some of the richest gifts we unknowingly give to the people we love.
So…Good. Begin Again. …with whatever it is that nobody else gets.
Cheers,
Carrie