The fact is, if my father hadn’t royally pissed off his commanding general in the twilight of his career, I would never have discovered—some 40 years later--the surpassing weirdness of the giant orange tabby cat now stretched massively across the expanse of books and file folders next to my computer.
 

I promise that by the end of this entry, you will understand what that means. 

You will also know why there are two shelves’ worth of mysteries near my bed that—I guarantee--no one else in my book-loving, genre-exploring family will ever voluntarily open.  

 
My father, you will need to know, was a gifted infantry officer afflicted with an ungovernable temper.  There was an argument with his equally temperamental and vastly more powerful boss.  When he should have shut up and dealt, he didn’t.  The end result was that he missed promotion and was ordered to take an assignment far removed from his infantry talents.  The next three years were misery for him, and I really don’t think he managed to pull anything positive from the situation.   But in that funny way life has of tossing in one variable that winds up changing everything, at least for someone, those three years of agony for him were a godsend for his daughter.  I was transformed in that time.  I have lived a different life, with different attitudes, interests, and priorities, than I might have otherwise.  And I am deeply grateful for it.

My father’s unwanted assignment took us to Paris, France.  I turned 10 on the sea voyage to Europe, and 13 shortly after we sailed back.  It was the early 1960s.  France was not the sleekly modern, wealthy place it is today; the phone system was spotty, the tap water undrinkable.  Television broadcasts only took place from 6pm to 11pm.  The vast majority of the population did not own toothbrushes.  Men relieved themselves in hideous pissoirs  right there on the pavement; you could plainly see their pant legs and shoes below the metal screen, and hear them at their foul business,  the acid stink of which saturated the air for a full block in every direction.  Metro stations and pedestrian tunnels smelled the same way.  The streets of Paris, even in the most exalted arrondissements,  saw relatively few elegant French women in silk dresses and  perfumed furs—but every street had its poor workers in bright blue jumpsuits, reeking of garlic and harsh cigarettes.  I vividly remember the legions of old widows, garbed in black from head to toe, with frail, stooped bodies and faces ravaged by history.  They were everywhere toiling under unwieldy loads or begging with red, cracked hands.  Sometimes we had to carefully step around one of them sprawled dead drunk on the sidewalk.  France had not yet recovered from World War II, let alone its long failed struggle to keep its colony in Vietnam—the bitter end at Dien Bien Phu had taken place just a few years before, in 1956--and now it was embroiled in war again, against the revolutionaries seeking independence for Algeria.  The president of France was a tall and arrogant military man, General Charles de Gaulle.  Ours was John F. Kennedy, whose sympathetic stance toward the Algerian revolution made Americans extremely unpopular in France.

 
I can remember how shocked I was that French people willingly ate smelly, oozing cheese; that despite the fact they had no dishwashing machines, they seemed set on dirtying as many dishes as possible in the course of a single meal; that meals went on forever, and sometimes the entrée was horsemeat; that waiters went out of their way to make life miserable for their customers, even the French ones, and this was normal.  Hotel rooms had something right there in the middle of the room that looked just like a toilet except for the faucet handles, only it was not a toilet—the real toilet was inconveniently placed in its own room, down the hall--and I could not for the life of me figure out what the heck this ugly non-toilet was good for.  French people drove small, finless, astonishingly ugly cars, like the lightweight “tin can” Deux Chevaux and the pointy, squashed-looking Citroen, and they drove them like maniacs.  Traffic jams were vastly more entertaining than in the United States, because there was always the possibility that one driver would take umbrage at another, and both would jump out and shout insults while shadowboxing, neither of them ever landing a punch.  When French people conversed, it sounded like they were underwater and didn’t realize it. 
 

France was Alien.  France was Other.  At the beginning, when I was 10, I considered it hardship duty.  That first year, when I was in 5^th grade at Garches Elementary, the DoD dependent school, my Girl Scout troop went on a field trip to downtown Paris, where part of the American film about the D-Day invasion, “The Longest Day,” was being filmed in a studio.  We met two of the film’s superstars, Red Buttons and John Wayne.  I remember John Wayne smiling at us like an indulgent grandfather and asking, in his amazingly John Wayne-like voice, “Well, so how do you girls like it, living in France?”  I jumped to respond, desperately wanting his acknowledgment and approval.  “I HATE it!” I yelled, thinking it was the most patriotic thing to say. 

Little did I know that within six months, everything would change.  I decided I really wanted to learn French.  My parents wanted this, too.  I was enrolled in a French school, L’Ecole Internationale, in St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris.  It was a very large (at least in my memory) French public school, but it was also known as SHAPE School because of the large portion (maybe 20%) of military kids from NATO member countries who attended in the days when SHAPE (I know I don’t need to tell you that’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) was located in Paris.  I spent the next two years at that school, for the French equivalents of sixth and seventh grades. 

It was an extremely challenging experience, and picking up the language was the very least of it.  The basic educational format hadn’t changed much in 300 years.  We learned by rote memorization and recitation.  Built into the top right hand corner of every desk was an inkwell with bright purple ink, and we would dip in our pens and copy into our daybooks (cahiers du jour) what the teacher wrote on the board.  Our handwriting had to be the exact reflection of his; no individuality was allowed.  At the end of each day, the teacher collected the books and we were graded on our neatness and mimicry.  Our teacher, Monsieur “D”, a corpulent, perpetually angry man, had black hair combed straight back from his forehead.  His eyes were coldly blue.  He never smiled.  He wore gray pants, a navy cardigan sweater, a shirt and tie, black well polished slip-on shoes with small tassels, and thin, silky looking, unAmerican gray socks.  In every gesture, every word, every penetrating look, he was powerful.  No, that's wrong.  He was immensely powerful.  No.  He was God Incarnate—all gods, from every culture, collapsed into one massive, searingly dangerous presence.  He was possessed of all authority, all rectitude, all knowledge, and, therefore, he was naturally entitled to use any means of punishment he could conceive in order to discipline our unruly, worthless, ignorant selves and bring us into the clear light of Order, Truth, and Unquestioning Obedience.

That’s how it came to be that on my first day in his class I found my head the target of a piece of chalk hurled by Monsieur “D” (even now I hesitate to use his real name here lest he or his dark minions come after me) when I was unable to answer his question.  It was January, and he knew perfectly well that I did not yet know one word of French.  But that was nothing for Monsieur D.  I also saw, on many occasions, how he disciplined others—especially little Eric Gregoire, the only black child in the class, who was small, skinny, quiet, and from Martinique.  Of course, like the other French kids in the class, he spoke French perfectly, but he could never please Monsieur D, who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in yelling at Eric, picking him up by one ear, well off the floor, then throwing him down and dragging him, still by one ear, to the back of the room where the sobbing boy was made to sit under a table until class was dismissed.

Even my rearing under a ruthless Army infantryman with an ungovernable temper and an alcohol addiction did not prepare me for that.

But I survived, and I learned French, and the next year I had the big kid privilege of changing classes, with many subject-specific teachers, only two of whom were hate-filled and dangerous like Monsieur D.  Somehow, along the way, without even realizing it and despite the more distressing aspects of the experience, I internalized something of French culture that changed me forever.   The same kid who felt it her patriotic duty to “hate” France in 5^th grade, had become, by the end of 7^th grade, a kid who felt both American and French, who treasured every moment in France, and who was not at all ready to go back to the States when the time came to do just that.

I always thought I would go back to France to live, because an important part of me needs to do that.  I even tried twice, in my twenties, but could not find a way to work legally.  My life took another path, a good one, but it has never involved living in France.  So I live my life in the U.S., and I try to find ways to feed that part of me that longs for immersion in French culture.  I go to French movies.  I visit French web sites.  That stack of books by my bed is all French novels, mostly mysteries, which transport me like no other reading matter.  When I really want to memory-trip, I pick up one of my 20 or so mysteries by Georges Simenon, because many of them take place in Paris of the early 1960s—the Paris I knew and can picture vividly. 
 

One thing I do not do, ever, is trot out my French in a French restaurant in this country, or in any other public situation.  That seems showy to me, and elitist.  Unfortunately, in the U.S. French still has a strong connotation of snobbish elitism—and I have such a visceral revulsion for elitism that I will go out of my way to avoid validating it, even if that means actively hiding my French when I really shouldn’t, and even if it means missing opportunities to meet and make friends with French people.  It’s a truly painful dilemma for me, but if I haven’t resolved it in all this time, I suppose it’s unlikely I ever will.  Maybe that’s one reason I still long to live in France—that’s the only place I would be free of this dilemma, the only place I could express this hidden part of myself without shame.
 

What, on balance, did I gain from those childhood years in France, besides a taste for French mysteries and an unrequited desire to go back? 

I learned the deliciousness of being an outsider.

I gained a keener sense and appreciation of my own Americanness, even as my perspective became more global.

But most of all, I learned to love the contradiction of belonging/not belonging, of orientation/disorientation.  I like being slightly off balance culturally.   I like the incongruities my childhood years in France bred in me.  I cherish the active curiosity it gave me about other cultures, other ways—and the tolerance that goes hand in hand with that. 

And when on rare occasion I have the chance to walk freely in another culture, and I find I can, at least mentally, ‘disappear’ into it for a while, all senses alert, all channels open…. When, in the course of such a stroll I sense that a decision to go down this bustling side street, or that one, could lead to adventure…. When everything, through the lens of another culture, seems lit up and worth noting, and even the most mundane object takes on an exotic cachet….  Well, it’s at times like these that I feel most alive--and that’s when  I thank my lucky stars for my foreign immersion as a child, and for the profession that sent my father to a place where his daughter could lose herself in another culture and gain a much richer perspective to inform and guide her the rest of her life.

However, I still have that little problem of needing to indulge my French side in secret, which is how I discovered the flipped-out weirdness of my cat.  You see, one morning at the kitchen table, realizing I was alone in the house, I took the opportunity to, as it were, scratch my cultural itch.  As one is wont to do in such circumstances, I decided to whistle the “Marseillaise.”    No sooner had I begun than  I heard a squeal of cat protest from the next room, followed by a heavy thump as our (very large) cat hit the floor.  As I whistled on, the cat jumped up on the table and began pacing back and forth, swishing his tail angrily.  I continued.  Suddenly, with flashing amber eyes, he leaped straight for my face and boxed me on both cheeks with his paws.  I couldn’t believe it.  He’d never done anything like that in his life.

My family didn’t believe me when I told them, so to save my honor, I again launched into whistling the “Marseillaise.”  This time the cat bit me on the elbow. 

Since then I’ve tried whistling other tunes, but the cat doesn’t react.  It’s only the “Marseillaise” that drives him to maim his owner. 
 

This was disconcerting to me for a long while, for two reasons.  First, I know my cat really loves me.  If he only knew why I feel compelled to whistle the “Marseillaise”, he would surely indulge me.  Second—and most importantly—his behavior threatened to undermine a useful theory of mine.  I believe that all cats are French, and all dogs are American.  Their behavior makes that obvious.  So how could a cat possibly hate the “Marseillaise”?  It was unthinkable.

Then it came to me.  Of course!  My cat is not culturally confused at all.  He is as French as they come.  The reason he hates the great rallying song of the Revolution, the most rousing and beautiful of all national anthems around the world, is that, of course…my cat is a monarchist.  

If I ever get to return to France, I plan to pack the cat.  We're heading to Versailles.