Raison D’etre

Although, we planned to take delivery of our new Jeanneau 51 in the south of France, I also had my own reasons for wanting to spend a summer in France. Call it nostalgia with a side of longing and purpose.

My first baguette encounter occurred in the late 1970’s. I lived with a French family in a small town just outside Paris for two weeks during the Easter school holiday the year I studied abroad in Germany. The Spring of 1977 evokes memories of men and women on the streets of Paris rushing home to their midday meal with still-warm, baton-shaped loaves tucked under their arms like the daily newspaper. At age 17, I recall being horrified at the sight of direct bread-to-body contact. After a few days, however, Parisian oddities became simply French.

My desire to return to France stemmed in part from my early expat experiences in Paris, but I also chalked it up to midlife.

My children had hit their thirties. My career days were behind me. Call it late onset empty nest syndrome or a crisis of purposefulness, but I yearned for fulfilment the way Kevin craves sailing. Other than doting on a family that no longer needs me, nothing can satisfy my psyche like art, music, and literature—all things the French culture is renowned for.

In contrast to the expectorant sounding German I learned to speak with fluency, I adore the sound of the French language. Even now, every utterance falls on my ears like a swoon-worthy procession of invisible gazelle-like ballerinas at the Paris Opera. Even the most banal French words appear exotic. Nettoyeur de Toilette, for example, sounds like an expensive perfume, not the toilet cleaner it is.

I wanted to immerse myself in the language. Only fluency would suffice because asking a native French speaker to translate his or her thoughts into English is akin to requesting a ballet company to shift from Swan Lake to a square dance. It’s simply not done.

I knew it unlikely I would ever excel at French, but learning the language felt inspiring. It gave me my very own reason d’etre—a renewed sense of purpose.