Anticipation

In just over a week, school will be out, and if my daughter's anticipation could be captured, bottled, and run through a spectroscope, it would still be a pale version of my own anticipation of our trip to France. Even the continual feeling of holy hell, I have no idea how to say ANYTHING useful does not abate that feeling.

I am not a Francophile, not one of those people who swoons at the thought of France, who refers to it reverentially as La Belle France, but I am looking toward it with great eagerness nonetheless, because it is going to be a substantially novel experience. I have never, never tried to communicate in a foreign language before, and though this will be the gentlest of introductions to that experience, I am eager to see how well I do - how much can I actually say. That I will be cobbling together phrases and syntaxes that ought never to see the light of day together doesn't disturb me. (Well, much.) That I will get to do it at all -- this is pretty phenomenal.

Undoubtedly, the first few times, I will try to do it with training wheels, bringing our French guide with me as I try to buy a croissant, or visit a winery, but with luck those wheels will come off quickly. Relatively quickly. This morning, I even listened to -- didn't understand but one word in fifty, but I listened -- to a French Canadian station on XM radio. And that was a bear, because it turns out that most of what they played was either sports commentary, talk radio, or rock music (one repeated, over and over, je tu parle jamais, which I think means I never talk about you; glad I didn't learn pronunciation from them because jamais kept coming out as jammy). But I did listen.

And soon enough, I'll be doing it for real.