B-Side

The French Connection

There are things you choose, and there are things that choose you. I didn’t know the difference until I was standing in a parking lot in France at 3 AM, drawing pictures on a foggy bus shelter window, trying to explain myself to two strangers I’d never see again.

But let me back up.

I was in sixth grade in Ohio when they made us pick a language. Spanish or French. The choice wasn’t really a choice — everybody took Spanish. It was practical. It made sense. Years later I’d end up in Los Angeles, then California for good, surrounded by Spanish on every street sign and menu and radio station. The practical kids were right.

I took French anyway.

I couldn’t explain it then, and honestly I still can’t. I just wanted it. The way the sounds sat in your mouth, the way it felt to read it — it felt like something I already knew. I took it all the way through middle school, all the way through high school. Seven years total. And the part I was actually good at? Present tense. The verbs you need to say what’s happening right now, today, in this moment. Conjugating the past was hard. The gendered nouns, the agreements, the layers of grammar — all of it was a struggle. But present tense? That came naturally. I could hold a real conversation as long as we stayed in the now.

I didn’t know then how useful that would turn out to be.

After college I moved to California and started building a life, but France was always there at the edge of things. A restaurant with French linens and heavy knives laid just so. A film. A bottle of wine with a label I’d spend too long reading. Every time something French crossed my path, something in me went quiet and certain, like a compass needle finding north. I couldn’t explain it. I just felt at home in a way I didn’t feel anywhere else.

In 1999 I finally went. And the feeling I’d been chasing in fragments for years — it hit me the moment I landed and didn’t leave for the entire trip. Not Paris-is-beautiful vacation mode. Not romanticizing the lights and the cafés and the idea of it all. Something older. Something that felt less like discovery and more like return. I’ve never had that feeling anywhere else in my life, before or since. It felt, and I know how this sounds, like somewhere I was from.

So I made myself a promise.

I pulled a dollar bill out of my pocket, tore it in half, and tucked one half into a curled section of the guardrail at the Eiffel Tower — protected from wind and weather, invisible unless you knew where to look. The other half went into my wallet. I’d look at it every time I reached for cash. A reminder. A reason to come back and make the dollar whole.

Life has a way of testing promises like that.

In 2001 I went back on a British Airways introductory fare — something ridiculous like $150 each way — because you don’t say no to a fare like that when France is involved. I made it to Paris. I went straight to the Eiffel Tower. I found the guardrail. The dollar was gone. Of course it was. Three years had passed and the world had changed and I was a fool for thinking otherwise.

But here’s the thing: the feeling was still there. Every bit of it. If anything, stronger.

So I let the dollar go. And I kept going back.

The 2004 trip is the one that deserves its own story, or maybe its own film. It started with a tsunami — the Indian Ocean disaster, December 26th — unfolding on USA Today front pages as we landed in London, the death toll climbing each morning. Then Boxing Day, which I’d never heard of, shutting down the city. Then Chunnel tickets three times what they should have been because I’d waited to buy them in person. Then a missed EasyJet flight because post-9/11 security had changed everything about what it meant to be running late. Then a second flight. Then Paris on New Year’s Eve, which was gorgeous and freezing and perfect, right up until we discovered the Metro stops running at 2 AM on New Year’s and we were stranded in the city until dawn.

Then the wrong hotel at the wrong airport. Then a train we rode all the way to the very last stop — somewhere outside Paris, pitch black, a parking lot, no cars, nothing — because nobody had told us to get off.

The gendarmes came by at some point. Asked what we were doing. We explained as best we could and they left, apparently satisfied that we were just confused Americans and not a threat to anyone.

And then, out of the dark, two figures walking toward us.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t nervous. It was 3 AM in a parking lot at the end of a train line in the middle of nowhere. But I had my present-tense French, which is to say I had the only tool that has ever really worked for me in a crisis: the ability to say what is happening right now. And when words failed — when past tense and subjunctive and gendered agreements all collapsed under the weight of exhaustion and cold — I turned to the glass panels of the bus shelter behind us. Fogged up, steamed from the night air, the perfect surface for drawing.

I drew the Eiffel Tower. I drew a train. I made gestures, asked questions with my eyebrows, listened hard. And slowly it came together: they had missed their stop too. They were waiting for the 6 AM train just like us. One of them had a cousin in San Diego.

We stood in that dark parking lot for three hours, two Americans and two Frenchmen, communicating in drawings on glass and broken present-tense French, and it was one of the best conversations I have ever had. The conductors came back with their lunchboxes at dawn, we all boarded together, and the rest of the trip — Marseille, Nice, the south of France — happened the way things happen after you’ve already been through the worst and survived it with strangers who became, briefly, something like friends.

I got back to San Diego. Life went on for a long time. The restaurant, the hotel, the years that pile up when you’re busy building things. A decade passed without getting back to France. Then another half decade. You tell yourself you’ll go when things settle down, when the timing is right, when you have a reason.

In 2016, my parents made their last trip out to see me in the desert. My mother had Alzheimer’s. My father wasn’t far behind. We all knew, in the quiet way families know things, that this was the goodbye trip. My sister had come out too, and one night while our parents slept, she and I stayed up and pulled an Ancestry.com subscription and started digging. We went back past the obvious records, past the family stories we thought we knew, all the way back to the 11th century.

My mother’s family line: Somerset, England.

My father’s family line: a town in France near the German border. Alsace region. A thousand years of history, sitting there in a database, waiting for someone to look.

I sat with that for a long time.

I chose French in sixth grade in Ohio because something in me wanted it and I didn’t know why. I visited Paris and felt more at home than I’d ever felt anywhere. I tucked half a dollar bill into the Eiffel Tower as a promise. I stood in a dark parking lot drawing pictures on glass just to stay connected to a place that had always felt like mine.

And somewhere in the background of all of it, running back a thousand years, was the actual answer.

Not long after that, I divested everything and started over. New chapter, bare essentials. A trip to HomeGoods for a mixing bowl — my first kitchen item, the thing that would eventually become a whole life rebuilt from scratch. And somewhere along the way, as the kitchen grew, I needed a Dutch oven.

Everyone was saying Le Creuset. Beautiful product. I get it. But I kept gravitating toward Staub. Something about the way they looked. The weight of them. The craft. Eventually found one at a price I couldn’t walk away from and committed.

Then I looked them up. Just out of curiosity. Where they were made, who made them, what the story was.

Alsace, France. A small town. A factory outlet you can visit if you make the trip.

It’s my half dollar bill. The thing that will get me back. Not the Eiffel Tower this time — something quieter. A cookware factory in a town my ancestors might have walked through. A reason that makes sense in a way that goes all the way down.

My parents are gone now. They passed in 2019, a few months apart. I told them about the ancestry research, what we found, where their family lines went. It was late in the illness for my mother, and I don’t know how much of it landed. But I told them anyway.

I haven’t been back to France yet. But I will. I know I will because I’ve always known, in the way you know things that live below logic and language.

Some connections don’t need explaining. They just need time.

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