Sharon Harrigan

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David and Goliath, or Monoprix and Giant

chatpuccino


One of the best things about our location in Paris was the store next door. Monoprix is a supermarket. It’s also a microcosm, the contemporary equivalent of old-fashioned general stores in small towns. Flour and butter and eggs and really good merguez sausage and coeur coulant chocolate cakes beckoned from the back. Clothes, books, office supplies, make-up, toiletries and kitchen gear lured people in from the street. If Monoprix didn’t stock something, that meant you didn’t need it. And yet the store wasn’t big.

Not like Giant. That’s my local supermarket here in the States. The physical space is as huge as its name, with aisles wide enough to drive a pick-up through. They sell only food and toiletries.

I have fidelity cards for both stores, so I receive e-mails from Giant and Monoprix, sometimes on the same day. The contrast makes me laugh.

Giant’s e-mail today says “Feed a family of four for $7 or less with budget-friendly recipes. This week is tuna and vegetable stove-top casserole: 1 box Rice-a-Roni Broccoli Au Gratin, 1 cup frozen peas, 1 can tuna. Mix.” Last week’s missive was a three-ingredient recipe for turkey chili.

Monoprix’s newsletter features breakfast made from three sale items: braided brioche, mango preserves, and orange juice. It reads, in French: “Add to your table a few cravings, a hint of indulgence and a lot of balance for breakfast. A slice of brioche will start you off on the right foot.” Bread, jam, and juice cost 9.26 Euros, or almost twice as much as the $7 dinner-for-four from Giant. Coffee costs extra, especially if you get a chatpuccio, or cat cappuchino, like the one Monoprix sent me (pictured above).

Or, for about the same amount as the tuna casserole or turkey chili, you can buy from Monoprix several “men’s beauty” items, the e-mail says. I can’t imagine my supermarket with the big, burly name ever daring to put the words “men” and “beauty” in the same sentence.

Because we had such a small pantry and refrigerator in Paris, I shopped at Monoprix every day. At least that’s how it felt. If I stayed away too long, I’d joke about going through “Monoprix withdrawal.”

We loved that store so much we are even considering naming our not-yet-adopted dog for it. Monop for short. It’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it?

Or do you think we should name our dog Giant? Such a name might be confusing, since he won’t be a big dog. He’s got to be small enough to slip into a handbag. Then we can take him grocery shopping.

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Homesick for Paris?

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Yesterday, my ten-year-old daughter Ella came home from school and said, “I’m homesick for Paris.” We’ve been back in the States for a few months, long enough that I thought she would be settled by now.

For me, our sabbatical year in France sometimes seems like water that’s boiled out of a pot and dispersed in the air. Our life in the spiral-staircased apartment across from the Catacombs has escaped out the door, flown up into the sky, and bonded with a cloud.

But for Ella our year away remains real. “My soul is European.” She left her heart in Paris.

What does it mean to be homesick for a place that’s not your permanent home? Where you weren’t born? Where your family doesn’t live? What does it mean: home?

As a child, I felt homesick for places I hadn’t visited. I longed to live in New York City, even though I’d never set foot there. I saw the city in person for the first time when I moved into my college dorm at Columbia at age eighteen, but I’d seen enough of this iconic place in books and movies and on TV that I felt like the city and I were old friends. I was home.

I felt so at home that leaving New York City several years ago for Virginia felt like leaving my homeland. New York is like its own country, so different from anywhere else in the U.S.

To my surprise, I settled easily in Virginia. Charlottesville isn’t a big city, but it is full of smart people making art. It feels like home. And so did Paris. And so does Charlottesville again. Now that I’ve been uprooted once, I’ve grown more mobile and flexible. Ask me to switch cities or countries and I’ll say: “I need a little time. How about next week?”

Compared to the people Ella went to school with in Paris, I’ve barely moved at all.  Their definition of “home” was a place they’d stayed for at least two years. “The third year is always the best,” they’d say. “Too bad you can’t stay in Paris that long.”

I hope it won’t take three years to recover from homesickness. In the meantime, I’ll whip up Ella some recipes from my French cookbook. Lentils with Toulouse sausage. Ratatouille. Navarin d’agneau. Then a plate of Southern fried chicken, to show we don’t have to choose only one place to love.

Sometimes what we’re most nostalgic for is food. And one definition of “home” is simply this: The place with home cooking.

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Are American Teachers Too Nice?

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My fifth-grade daughter Ella and I shook hands with her pediatrician, then he launched his check-up questions, starting with “How’s school?”

“The teachers are too nice,” Ella said.

He repressed a grin that struggled to creep up. “That’s not usually the complaint I get. Kids say their teachers aren’t nice enough.”

 Ella shrugged.

“Maybe you mean they don’t keep order in the classroom, they let kids act however they want.”

“No,” Ella said. “I mean they keep saying Good Job! even when somebody hasn’t done a good job.”

The doctor looked at me to see whether he was missing the sarcasm in Ella’s deadpan delivery.

I explained that Ella wasn’t reacting to her teachers specifically, but to the American way of praising students.“We just got back from France. Teachers are much stricter there. That’s what she’s used to.”

When Ella first started school in Paris, she was soft, overfed on an American diet of unearned praise. So it was a shock, when she saw that every piece of homework in France is graded on a scale of 20, and nobody—ever—gets a 20. “Only God gets 20,” I’ve heard people say. It is even possible to get a negative grade, since a point is taken off for every spelling error, and it’s not hard to have more than 20 errors in even one French sentence. I heard that children sometimes cried (if not in her class, at least in her school) when their test results came back. Those who didn’t cry in class sometimes did so at bedtime. If you didn’t have a thick skin, you could get beaten down.

Ella didn’t cry. Instead, she worked harder than she ever had in her short school life. The threat of a bad grade, either on paper or (worse) announced to the whole class after an oral exam, motivated her to do her best. To deserve the rare praise when it came. She doesn’t have a fragile ego. If she did, I bet the title of this blog post would be, “French Teachers Are Too Strict.” Without a question mark.

Everyone knows, after Pamela Druckerman’s book, Bringing Up Bebe (called French Children Don’t Throw Food in Britain) that stricter parenting means better behaved kids. I saw Druckerman speak in Paris, where she lives, and she won my heart. I dare you to find anything she says that isn’t common sense. But before I met her, when I’d only read how her critics summarized and sensationalized her work, I was ready to hate her. I don’t think I’m alone in that misperception because a woman in the audience at her talk said, “Isn’t your book just like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? You just want to make all us other mothers, whose children aren’t perfect, look bad?”

Druckerman replied that the Tiger Mother book and hers couldn’t be more different. Tiger mothers are ultra hands-on, spend much more time than the average Anglo or American mother on their kids, drilling them and supervising their violin practice. French mothers are ultra hands-off, teaching their children at a young age that they need to be self-sufficient. “Sois sage, comme une image,” or “Be still as a picture,” is their motto. Sage, though, means much more than still. It means wise, in the sense of smart enough to know you should be well-behaved, savvy enough that you don’t have to be told that it’s for your own good.

When Ella’s pediatrician finished checking her eyes and ears and grilling her about what she eats for breakfast, he pronounced her healthy, despite excessive levels of teacher niceness in her system. I told him that I’d try to even out the balance by being extra, extra strict at home. Now he let himself smile, and even laugh.

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Belly Up!

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And now for a break in our regular Paris programming for a word on women’s vanity. Or, more specifically, my own.

I’ve become obsessed with my belly. I measure it, I squeeze it, I crunch it. This is the definition of navel-gazing, isn’t it? Could I become one of those narcissistic people we all love to hate?

Maybe my monomania is caused by a spate of my friends posing in bikinis on Facebook. Maybe I’m worried about getting old. You would be, too, if you spent as much time as I do, lately, writing about death.

I hate diets. Only once in my life have I lost weight, and that was by accident. When people asked me my trick, I said, “It’s the my-divorce-is-so-stressful my-stomach-is-filled-with-acid-so-I-can’t-possibly-eat-a-thing diet. I recommend you avoid it at all costs.” My boss worried and asked, “Are we literally working you to the bone?” A friend of mine went through a similar involuntary weight drop when her daughter had a health scare. I gained all my weight back, as many women do, during pregnancy.

The one diet I remember going on was the cabbage soup diet. Years ago, all the female editors in my department went on it at the same time. Some of them lost fifteen pounds in two weeks and vowed to repeat the experience every year. I became violently ill the second day and vowed to never go on a diet again. And I haven’t. Until now.

When my aunt told me I don’t need a diet, I lied and said I’m concerned only about my health. When my husband told me he thinks my belly is cute, I dismissed him with a wave of the hand. Then he reminded me that when my belly flattens, so will my chest, and I had to admit he was right.  Some women, I realize, don’t have to choose either no curves or all curves, but I do. Genetics, I guess.

I think I have a solution. I’ll put on my bikini and photograph myself head to ribs now. In a few months, with my belly (and also, I fear, my chest) gone, I’ll snap the other half of the picture, ribs to toes. One neat splice and voila! I’ll post my top and bottom together, and then . . . what? Why would I want to do that?

Or maybe I’ll just have a sandwich. All this talk about slicing and dicing is making me hungry.

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Things I Learned from France (or Didn’t)

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I’ve been back in the U.S. for a few weeks. Does the “Paris effect” last? My friend K., who also just returned, said she felt like the year disappeared, as if it were “all a (very pleasant) dream.”

I told myself, though, that what I had going on with Paris wasn’t just a fling. This was a long-term relationship, even if it turned long-distance. I had experienced (multiple!) epiphanies whose transformative effects would not just disappear like cigarette smoke.

Right? Time for a reality check.

Grooming: Before I left the house in Paris, even if it was just to buy the morning baguette or walk a block to the gym, I put on clean, fitted, nonathletic clothes and shoes, brushed my hair, applied make-up, and sprayed perfume. Every time I walked down the stairs, I glossed and rouged my lips. I wouldn’t have thought of showing my face even to strangers without at least this minimal preparation, no more than I would have stepped out naked.

But here? I tried. When I lived in New York City, I had high standards, too, but there’s something about getting in a car that makes me feel invisible.

I started to slip in California, visiting my in-laws. They live in a beach town, and we all piled into the car in our swimsuits then realized on the way back we needed coffee beans. So we sat at Peet’s in our cover-ups, barely covered up. Not that we were the only ones. Then, the other day my son wanted to make eggs for breakfast and we didn’t have any. I was in the middle of my Pilates work-out, but I said, “Sure, I’ll just zip to CVS” in my yoga pants and sneakers. I don’t put on make-up to meet my daughter’s bus. Maybe you’ll have more sympathy for me if I tell you it arrives at 7:09 in the morning? Who’s going to see me, anyway? One of the other moms comes in the overalls she gardens in. Once she arrived in pajamas.

Food: Cheese comes after dinner, not before. Nothing is more rich, delicious, and decadent than a pungent, almost liquified Camembert, so it makes sense to treat it as dessert. This new (for me) concept I have embraced. No snacks between meals, except for the kids’ after-school gouter: I’m down with that, too.  Meals should be eaten slowly, at a table, like a sacred ritual. Mostly I do that. Except yesterday, when I drove my son to college, we were running so late we stopped at the supermarket to buy sandwiches to eat in the car. (Everything about that last sentence shows my standards have plummeted, I know.) Maybe you can blame my son: I was also with him when I bought a coffee to go. (Why do I love coffee to go so much? Is it pretentious to say it feels Proustian to me?)  And then I invited my friend H. for dinner at the scandalously early hour of 6, asking her not to tell anybody. (But now everybody knows.)

Manners: I was completely charmed by the way people address each other as “Madame” or “Monsieur” in France. I vowed I would translate this custom in Virginia, where it’s just Southern enough to use “Ma’am” and “Sir.” But I can’t do it. “Ma’am” somehow sounds too matronly and The Help-ish. “Sir” makes me feel like I’m in the Army.

I try to be more polite to shopkeepers here, as I was in Paris, always greeting them when I enter or leave and bantering a little. This custom occasionally means that a five-minute transaction takes twenty, as when my butcher gave me a manifesto about liver and the cashier at J.C. Penney took my comment about flip-flops as an invitation to tell me about visiting her cousin in rehab while her flip-flops pinched her toes. But at least, in the U.S. when I nod to these strangers, I really do understand what they’re talking about.

What’s my score? Depends how many points I get for The Cheese Lesson. I think that trumps everything.

No? Then maybe I still need more experience in Paris. Is it time to go back yet?