A Day in the Life

David sailed off to school this morning in his new brown shoes. He saw the shoes on a walk to Place des Vosges yesterday afternoon.  So giddy was he that I had to relent.  Yes.  You can have your 42^nd pair of brown shoes.  Go.  Now buy.  He spent a good part of the next three hours spraying the shoes with weather protectorant.  Silly boy.  Those shoes will look like he wore them to gym class, drug them behind a mule train, then soaked them in a vat of oil by the end of the day.

We’ve settled into a routine of sorts.  He goes to school each weekday morning and returns around 1:30pm.  I spend my mornings blogging, then studying some French, then take a walk to someplace new and interesting.  Each evening, he pours through homework while I make my pilgramage to the wine store.  We’re going through a bottle of wine each night but they are little bottles and they cost less than $4 each so don’t hate. One day I bought a $12 bottle and I got the lecture.  We can afford to be drunks, just not fancy drunks.

The only thing to distinguish me from the alcoholics on the street each evening is the demi-baguette I’m cradling like a baby in my arms.  I have to order a demi-baguette every day because, among other vices we pick up only while in Paris, we are going through a barn’s worth of bread each day.  A sure way to tell the French from the rest of us is to walk into a boulangerie.  First of all, everyone behind the counter knows each of the locals by name and bread preference.  Secondly, if you ask for “une demi baguette, s’il vous plaît” like you were taught in school they’ll stare at you blankly.  Best to just yell, “DEMI” from the back of the line like you are at an auction house.

We haven’t turned the TV on, not once.  I’m not sure what it says about me that the checkout counter clerk at the grocery store here knows more about the Iowa Caucus results than I do.  David has to wrap himself in the Red, White and Blue (not the Blue, White and Red as is the French way) from time to time since there are no other Americans in his French class. (Poor Anna bailed and signed up for night class—the Parisian equivalent of the Little Bus).  If all they know of Americans is based on the Real Housewives, the Kardashians, and The Donald—how are we to ever bury the Ugly American?

But David and I will keep trying to show our collective good side.  And we do have a good side, most of us from the good ol’ US of A.  I guess I’m an optimist.  Who, but an optimist, brings two pairs of sunglasses to Paris in February?

À bientôt!