The Ignorant Son

The following was originally hand-written on the 20H34 train to Nantes from Paris on November 2, 2009.


It's exactly 21H00. (Isn't military time a bitch?) I'm on a train back to Nantes after a prolonged weekend with my parents in Paris. A French teenager is listening to "SexyBack" beside me, a mid-twenty-something with an impossibly full bottom lip is reading an English newspaper, and Dan Bejar is crooning about God-knows-what. Five post cards depicting the Eiffel Tower set against photo-shopped skies are stacked before me. An orange Disneyland band camouflages my tiny baby wrist, and page 29 is dog-eared in Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. (Though it may be a tad premature, I'm fairly certain I'm going to like this one.)

Yesterday my father told me that if someone had said to him, "One day you're going to see the Eiffel Tower," he couldn't have believed it. Why should he have? My father didn't go to college. Instead, he aged himself far beyond his years at an alloy plant for twenty years. But seven hours ago he stood staring at the great interwoven beams, the translucent clouds forming a halo around the very top, and I snapped a picture of him and my mother with a disposable camera.

When he was a kid my dad slept in a barn. His parents couldn't afford to feed all four of their children--my father was the oldest--so he was sent to work. I'm twenty-one years old, and I can say with certainty that I've never worked as hard or as long as my father did when he was only a child. He was breaking his back at the same age I was breaking Power Ranger action figures. He was fighting off hypothermia when I was just trying to find ways to avoid bathing. (I was a smelly kid.) But today he had white wine with his duck. It all makes his circumcision comment at the Grecian sculpture exhibit at the Louvre all the more inspirational. It also excuses the bulk of the we-saved-their-asses-in-World-War-II comments.

All things considered, I’m certain that the topic of most discussion among my parents and their coworkers will be the food. My father will reminisce about the soup with muscles my host-mother prepared; my mother will recall fondly the melted-candy-bar-thick hot chocolate we sipped at Les Deux Magots while hundreds of French passers-by attempted to out-power-walk the freezing air. My dad will undoubtedly mention the scarce nature of le petit déjeuner and its inexcusable absence of sausage. My mom will say the coffee sucked, be it with a more sophisticated parlance. She will talk about the wine. He will talk about how we saved their asses in World War II.

They will both mention all the walking.

But besides all of that, I’m not really sure what they’ll take away from our time together in the City of Lights. I don't honestly believe that it was a "dream come true" for either of them simply because I don't think Paris had occupied their thoughts before their baby boy decided to study in France; it was an experience neither of them had foreseen--or desired, truthfully--prior to my study abroad. Maybe that makes it less cinematic, but it makes it a hell of a lot more romanesque.

Regardless of the water cooler banter to come, I know we shared something important. For the first time in my life, I was able to take care of my parents. I read for them, ordered their meals, maneuvered the Paris metro, created the itinerary, and ultimately (and perhaps unfortunately), established myself as an adult. For five days I carried the reigns. Purchasing our train tickets with my own money--money that I earned through actual labor--felt like a kind of graduation from a solely symbolic period of my life. Although that doesn't quite reconcile twenty-one years of dependence, it represents a trend that I can only hope will continue. My parents can't pay for my Kashi forever. I mean, my dad really wants that hot rod.

I stole another glance of the Anglophone. Seriously, you’ve got to see these things. I’m not kidding. Slightly chapped for texture, framed by dark stubble, just begging for Burt’s Bees. Perpetual half-purse, you know? A pair of those matched with an orator’s tenor would prove the existence of God. Somebody get this guy something to chew.