March 27, 2011

• Seventeen

   

  I am at home for the weekend. It was a combination of wanting to escape the roommate drama and really missing my mom. My mom just had foot surgery and is home, couch-bound, for something like six weeks. One week in and she is bored, bored, bored. We've been watching a lot of television. Tonight, after I'd spent the day working on a paper, I sat next to her on the couch just in time to catch the end of some sort of documentary about Celine Dion. 

  I often forget that Celine Dion is Canadian. There was a scene in the documentary where she was in the backseat of a car, speaking French to someone on the telephone. I don't know the specifics when it comes to the differences between the French spoken in Canada and the French spoken in other places in the world, but I know that the French of Canada is different--and regardless of how many of the words I can understand, I can recognize it just by the sound. You can tell. I know this will sound crazy (because why not France-French or why not Spanish or why not classical music or rain on the windows or high heels clicking on a tile floor), but the sound of it--of people speaking Quebecois French--is one of my favourites in the world. (But I like the sound of rain on the windows, too.) 

  In high school, I did a summer French exchange where I went to Quebec for six weeks, got a job, and lived with a host family. I went into the program with about two years of significant French education under my belt and I was so shy. In class, I could rattle off verb tenses like nobody else, but in a room full of French speakers, I was intimidated. 

  That summer was good for so many things. I had spent the last year being pretty miserable--and my response to that (whether I was aware of it or not) was to throw myself into a situation where I had no choice but to toughen up. Through the exchange I was forced, over and over again, to do things that made me uncomfortable--to talk to people I hardly knew in a language I hardly knew, to move in with a family I had never met, to eat the things they cooked for me. I had spent the last year living almost entirely inside my own head, and suddenly I was being confronted, over and over again, not only with people, but with people I could only talk to in a language I only barely knew. I could have used it as an excuse to never talk at all--and there was a part of me that would have been okay with that--but I didn't. Instead, I learned a lot of French. (And ate a lot of cheese, and went on weekend trips to Montreal and rode roller-coasters and drove to Maine and swam in the ocean.) 

  But there were days when I was tired of being so alert, of straining my ears and my mind to try and understand the conversations going on around me. And so I would sit – in the back of a car, by the window of the bus, on my host family’s back patio – and let every rolling r roll right over my head. I would sit and wrap myself in the sound of things I didn’t completely understand, and I would marvel at how I ended up exactly where I was.

  French, to me, will always sound like freedom, like independence. When I hear it, no matter where I am, I remember being seventeen and small and brave, staring out a window at a place I didn’t know and knowing that just by being there I had accomplished something good. Just by being there--whether talking or listening or dreamily watching the St. Georges hills roll by--I had changed my own life. 

   

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  • 2:44 am
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