I’ve only met my maternal grandmother twice in my life. The second time was when we visited them in Maine for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. She died two days later. My grandfather died less than a year after that.
This is the story of the first time I met her. Her name was Leda Boutot Pelletier.
For those of you who know me, I am half French, descended from the mighty Pelletiers and Boutots. A brief search discovers that half of them stayed drunk long enough to wake up late on the wrong side of the river bank after the Treaty of Paris. Being French, they simply did not care all that much about a river between them. Still don’t.
When I was a pup of about ten years old, my grandmother boarded an airplane for the very first time in her life in Bangor, Maine and flew to visit our litter of five halfway around the world in St. Paul, MN. My grandfather chickened out at the last minute and stayed home. It must have been terrifying for her, but she insisted on seeing her grandkids before she died.*
She had lived her entire life in the very small town of Fort Kent, Maine, just a skip across the St. John River. She spoke no English and we spoke no French. My parents were adamant about us assimilating.
To prepare us for our grandmother’s visit, my mom taught us only one phrase in French: Je ne parle pas français
When my grand-mère spoke to us kids, we were supposed to say that. As pretty as the French language was, we ended up making it ugly by saying it like a sing-song-y rhyme that Sesame Street would be proud to own the rights to. It would have embarrassed even the French soccer team.
On the first day of the visit, my dad went to pick up his mother-in-law from the airport while we all waited anxiously at home practicing our “French.” When his car came back, this very short, very round, very stern-looking women in a flowery dress steps out, clasping her beige handbag in front of her.
She spoke. And my sisters and brother froze up. And I piped up, “Je ne parle pas français.”
There was a short silence as this old woman welled up in tears, dropped her handbag and rushed toward me with her arms outstretched. She hugged me tight, her round, ample body enveloping me like a huge down pillow. When she finally let me go, she went and wet-kissed all us kids on the foreheads and cheeks, blurting out a string of non-stop French that I had only heard previously from my mom when one of us kids had done something that warranted a very large wooden spoon made of virgin-growth forest oak and a chase around the house.
I learned later that she was so happy that my mom had finally taught us some French and kept the tradition alive. Apparently the language thing was a big deal between mother and daughter. It was a bigger deal between my mom and dad, but that is another story.
For the next ten days, I heard my mother speak nothing but French.
She seemed happier.
*Never underestimate a stubborn Frenchwoman. They are all stubborn.
This blog post is part of a blog-off series with a group of bloggers from different professions and world views, each exploring a theme from his/her world view. This was about exploring the theme, My Grandmother Always Said… To explore how others handled the theme, check them out below. I will add links as they publish.
Somehow, this brings tears to my eyes.
Beautiful post.
My husband’s brother’s first wife was Quebecoise. (spelling?) She was truly bilingual. She had grown up speaking both languages and could flip between the two while speaking, writing, or reading. Hers, however, was the only generation that had such abilities. Her parents spoke only French and the English had been learned in school. When the next generation went to school, the politics in the area had gone back to “French only” and increased hostility to Anglophiles. You know, being bilingual is a gift; I envy those who have it. I think we should all be required to learn at least two languages while we are young, during the critical period. I’ll never understand why so many kids are not taught a second language until high school; by then it is too late.
I agree that we should all learn at least two languages. I wish my mom had taught us French growing up, but we ended up in a very Catholic, very, very German area of St. Paul and it was quickly apparent to them that raising kids who could speak French was not going to be a good thing. For a lot of other reasons, my dad wanted to put that past behind him quickly. My mom, not so much but maybe that is another post.
We saw how vile the American culture gets when Huntsman spoke a sentence in Mandarin and it was learned that Romney could speak French. It truly puzzles me why we would not want our presidents to be multi-lingual. Most other presidents around the world are and I think that gives them an advantage. Eventually, our guns and money won’t be as powerful and we will have to rely on our wit and brains. But, I digress….
I ended up learning Latin, German and Danish in addition to some very conversational French through high school and college so it all sorta worked out.
My mother’s father was born in Russia of German descent in 1885. Her mother was killed in a car accident while my mother was only 16, but we sometimes visited my grandfather, who lived in Missoula, Montana. We were in Helena then. I remember walking around his house as a small boy. He did speak English with a heavy accent, but he was more comfortable speaking German, and at some point he and my mother would speak to each other. None of the rest of us spoke German, but I remember doing things like examining his Bible and then saying to my siblings in awe, “This is his Bible. It’s in German!”
The Germans knew how to print books. I remember learning German from textbooks that were printed in the old German blackface type. You could feel the depth of history.
A lovely post.
Merci!
A great story; pithy and full of life.
Did you continue in your language studies?
I did not continue with French, but over the course of my life I have studied Danish, German and Latin. I keep loading French into my Rosetta Stone shopping cart, but I think I will never find the time to actually learn it. I may have to move to Paris for that to happen.. Or Montreal…