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November 2000

Island Living 42: The French Connection
by A. D. Coleman

As I described in my last column, a car accident on Tompkins Avenue in Rosebank put me in St. Vincent's Hospital here on Staten Island over the last Fourth of July weekend.

That was my first experience with being hospitalized, but my second experience with a hospital named after St. Vincent dePaul. The first took place around 1948 or so, when I was about five years old, and my family lived on West 11th St. in Greenwich Village, right across the street from another St. Vincent's Hospital. In those days my parents gave me an occasional sourball candy as a special treat, and they kept a glass jar of these out of my reach on the top shelf of an upstairs closet.

One night I decided unilaterally that I deserved a reward and, laboriously, using a wooden chair and the drawers of a closet, clambered up after that candy. I got my hands on it, then slipped and fell, breaking the jar and, in the ensuing scramble, embedding a shard of the glass in my foot. I bled sufficiently that my mother decided to take me over to the emergency room. While we waited to see a doctor to have the splinter removed, my mother asked the nun on duty if we could have a few wooden tongue depressors for me to play with, to take my mind off my pain. "No," the sister grimly replied. "He has to learn to suffer."

I don't recall this event, but my mother (who never forgot it until she succumbed to Alzheimer's and forgot everything, including my name) recounted this tale often enough that it became part of the lore of my past. So it pleased me -- and I'm pleased to confirm -- that I received excellent treatment and compassionate care at the St. Vincent's here, good enough (aside from the hospital food) to balance out any previous less than loving attention at any other institution under the watchful eye of the patron saint of hospitals and lost articles.

St. Vincent dePaul was born in 1581 near Ranquine, Gascony near Dax -- now known as Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Landes -- in southwest France; and, coincidentally, just a few years after that mishap with the sourballs, my family moved to that part of France. I was seven when we arrived, not yet nine when we left, but it proved a formative time of my life. Not only did I engage with and find myself comfortable in a very different culture but, because my parents placed me in a school where only French was spoken, I learned another language by what's now called the "immersion system," recommended by most language teachers. And I did so at exactly the stage of development that linguists and child psychologists have concluded is ideal for a child to acquire a second tongue.

As a result, I became fully bilingual and, when we came back to the States, took French classes up through high school and even got involved in after-school French-language activities through the Alliance Française in Manhattan. Though I let my French lapse thereafter and didn't use it much again until my forties, I've since recovered it -- to the extent that I can listen to French radio, read just about anything non-technical in French, converse at length with French tourists on the Staten Island Ferry, and speak fluently enough that Parisians -- who are extreme language snobs -- will actually encourage me to speak French in conversation with them.

We spent most of our time in France living in a small town on the Côte d'Azur called Vallauris-Golfe-Juan, now mostly famous for a ceramics studio that Picasso -- who maintained a residence there -- used for his work in that medium. We didn't meet the co-inventor of Cubism, but we soaked up the Mediterranean climate and culture, and those eighteen months shaped me indelibly, although in ways that I am just beginning to investigate and find hard to pinpoint.

There's a professional event in the area -- a photo festival in Arles, just a few hours' train ride away --- that I've attended half a dozen times since 1981. Each time I'd tell myself that I should go back to Vallauris-Golfe-Juan to look around. But this year I'd made a date with a friend of mine who planned to come to the festival by car and promised to drive me over. So, aside from recuperation, that, too, was on my mind when I signed myself out of the hospital in order to fly to France.

My friend never showed (she sent regrets), but I'd scheduled in an extra day after the festivities ended for this side trip, so I got up at dawn on Monday, July 10, hopped a train, and headed off. The morning was hot and bright, all gold and blue, and I spent the ride reminiscing and looking out the windows -- from which I saw, to my delight, many houses painted the exact shades of buttercup yellow and deep brick red that I'd chosen for my house on Van Duzer Street, which was being painted by the peerless Wally Van Pelt (of Wally's Painting, 718-273-9288) in my absence.

Aside from the beach, the only things I remembered clearly about Vallauris-Golfe-Juan were the grade school I'd attended, the street leading up to our house, and the house and grounds themselves. I had no idea whether any of them still existed. So, when I got out of the train station, I headed immediately for the town square and the mayor's office, where a helpful secretary told me that indeed the school still stood, just a few blocks away, and I'd find the street I'd lived on just a little further on. She wasn't sure about the house, though.

I went first to the school. It hadn't changed much, except to shrink in the way that everything from childhood seems to do over the years. The scenes from fables by La Fontaine that I recalled still decorated the façade, much faded but still readable. Kids in a summer day-care program played in the yard, divided in my time (circa 1951) into separate boys' and girls' sections, now open for coed use. I stood by the gate for awhile, watching, then beckoned to a junior teacher who, without much arm-twisting, let me in to look around. I couldn't get into the classrooms -- they were locked for the summer, and shuttered against the heat -- but I got a few peeks, and caught a faint whiff of what it must have felt like to me to walk those stairs and balconies and sit in those spaces, speaking in a new language that was somehow becoming my own. (Point of pride: I actually received an award as "first student" in my grade one semester; I still keep the certificate on my wall, along with the report card that describes me as "bavard" -- one who talks too much in class.)

After getting the name and contact information of someone who might be able to track down my records from the school, I set off again, this time looking for the Chemin de la Gabelle -- the "street of the salt tax." And there it was, just a block away. I turned uphill and started to climb. It was narrower than I recalled, of course, barely wide enough for two automobiles to pass each other. By now it was one o'clock, with the sun beating down. The climb proved hard; I still couldn't fully expand my chest, bruised in the car crash, and I carried enough weight in my pockets and fanny pack -- some bottled water, a bit of lunch, a notebook and a digital camera -- that I began to tire. And to ache a bit. And to despair. With every twist and turn of the road I expected to come to the house, which I knew I'd recognize. But each bend brought some other residence instead. Fate, perhaps, intended this to remain dependent entirely on memory.

(To be continued.)

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© Copyright 2000 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World Syndication Services,
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