Conclusion
I have chosen to limit the episodes for this retelling so most of them fit within a single year. That provides a loose framework though I obviously speak of things prior to this calendar year and after it. I have not wanted to follow a chronological line, but rather to move into different regions to keep the widest palette for painting the riches of France. In the case of Marcel, I have conflated parts of 2016 and later episodes that happened in the following year. He was a year older than appears here when undertaking the road to TAN success and his training in le Perche.
I could easily double the episodes. Elizabeth and I lived in France a bit over four years, full time. We travelled widely in the five years prior to our long sojourn in Courances. We have travelled since. French Affaires continues to take excited travelers to France. Its riches, regions, long history and culture cannot be exhausted.
In the Scriptures we hear of being born-again. Because the Holy Spirit does this work, many and varied would be the accounts individuals might give of how that work took hold of them and changed them. The Spirit blows where the Spirit wills. It is like the wind you cannot see but only hear the outskirts of. Yet the destination is the same. Becoming a new creation, at God’s hand, sometimes with our permission and at other times when our wills are depleted and spent, and choosing itself has ceased making much sense.
For all the years and all the special times we spent in France, the single year I write about here is special. Unique. I have thought about why that is so.
I believe it is tied up with things I said in passing about learning a new language. You are asked to become a child again and start over, now with the language you know a help and a hindrance to learning to live in one you don’t. A baby crawls before walking and then stumbles before standing, and in time running and dancing and frolicking. A first year in France retains a very special quality.
Elizabeth of course speaks French well enough for it to approach her “mother tongue.” That does not dampen all the myriad ways she and I had to learn a new language. Church, health care, kennel, maps, currency, food, roofing, hiking trails, hunting, buying food and wine, bakeries, autoroute pay stations, pet stores, hogs snorting in French, bunkers on the beach, arms folded and voices quiet at a verse sung in German, operation escargot and Uber strike, Titre de Séjour renewal, permis de chasse, post office, police and parking. A big iron key opening a small green wooden gate, a world of wonder behind it. Vas-y Marcel.
Dogs are not born again because every day they are a new creation of wonder.
I recall sitting in church and listening to a service conducted in a language Elizabeth could follow and that I had to learn to follow. But in many ways, what was going on penetrated that part of us that seeks to soar and love and forgive and confess and be made new. And I believe this was more so because things were unfamiliar, were cut off from the things we know and take for granted, until we have lost our sense of childhood and awe and fear. Confusion becoming understanding. Prose becoming song.
Le Grand Voyage is how I think of this. When Jacques Brel wrote the lyrics to his famous ballad, Quand on n’a que l’amour, the first stanza speaks of offering to each other a form of sharing unique to love. Elizabeth and I did that. He called it “the day of the grand voyage, that is our grand amour.” It may not feel that way at the time, but it is in sharing the life of a grand voyage that one discovers a grand love. That is why it is important to recall it, as I have sought to do in these pages.
Here we see the conspiracy at work between learning a new language amidst the languages we know, and learning it alongside another, such that we both are born anew.