Introducing Oggi
Photo by Linda Gallop
"The French Are Very Nice"
Friday July 14 2006
Bastille Day. I guess back in New York City Micheline is on her way right now to drink a glass of champagne at the French embassy. John met Micheline when she was an au pair girl in New York. I think his friend was dating a French girl and she brought along Micheline, and John met her, and they have been together ever since. Micheline has very short hair but she had worn a fall on her date and John was attracted to her long hair.
Micheline was actually born on a houseboat on the Seine but her father went to Heaven early in World War 2, and Micheline and her sister and her mother lived in factory district of Paris. I think Micheline’s first job was one of the seamstresses for the couturier house in Paris. She didn’t want to live in France anymore, she could not make up her mind between Switzerland or USA, but she got job as au pair girl here in USA and came to New York City. Where she met John. John is Italian from Brooklyn and grew up in Canarsie. His father was a mechanic and owned a garage, and of course John planned to be a great mechanic too and work in the garage. He has sisters and brothers. He did not get high enough grades to matriculate at Brooklyn College so he had to go to Night School. Altho I think he registered at day school anyway, and went to school there, till they caught up with him and made him go to night school.
I am surprised now, when I look at it, how little I know of each of their backgrounds, I thought I knew it so well. I would take my dog to Tompkins Square Park in the mornings and if John was there with his dog, I’d walk around the park with John; if Micheline was there with the dog, I’d walk around with Micheline. Whatever I learned was from the chit-chats on these walks. I thought I knew so much, but now I see I don’t know anything. I think Micheline wanted a parrot and she wanted a dog and her mother said “when you are grown up and have your own apartment you can have both of them.”
Altho Micheline does not seem emotional she is more emotional than she seems. When she took her dog to East River Park, she got into argument with a German girl there. I don’t know what the argument was about, maybe her dog, but Micheline got mad and upset and at the end she yelled at the girl “you killed my father.” And when Margaret Thatcher came over from England to meet with Reagan, and John said complimentary things about her, “Nancy is so scrawny, you could tell Reagan liked putting his arms around Margaret Thatcher” -- Micheline’s whole comment on it was, “we French have not forgotten what the English did to Jeanne d’Arc.” She was still mad about it.
Mainly I was involved hearing about Micheline’s current life. She was a happy girl. She had her bicycle and went everywhere on her bicycle. She decided to go back to school. You can’t go to college unless you are able to pass a math test, so John set out to teach Micheline math. She had a math block. I never understood what a block was, until I tried to teach Micheline something she wasn’t able to get, as we were walking our dogs. It was something simple and obvious, but her mind froze up and she couldn’t see it. I broke it down into its simplest parts, until the question was practically “what is one plus one?” When Micheline answered “minus one” I knew she had math block and I gave up.
But the girl has persistence, and next thing I knew she was taking college courses. Her first assignment was to write a biography. Her French accent was so thick, there was no way I could figure out the word she was saying was biography. I tried a few times to figure out the word but gave up. So then she continued, “I wrote a biography of the bicycle, did you know the bicycle was invented by the French.” Micheline loved college. Her majors were French, and American Literature.
We had a tiny contretemps once. On our walks she would complain the whole walk, how America is bad and France is better. One day she said “in France if you speak French poorly they will correct you.” “But” she said “here, no one corrects me on my English.” I was surprised that was one of her complaints, here in America we consider it rude to correct someone’s pronunciation, but she made it clear that is what she wanted. So the next time she pronounced a word which was unrecognizable in English, I corrected her pronunciation. And she was furious. I knew it was a rude thing to do. Because of her accent I couldn’t get every word she said in sentence but enough words to understand what she was saying. Most of her mistakes were charming. When the park police were giving us all tickets for dog-off-the-leash, Micheline said “Anne, watch out, they are here, they are all on their talkie-walkies.”
John could not speak a word of French and when Micheline’s sister called from France, since she could not speak English and John could not speak French, they were unable to say one word to each other. One time John’s mother came to visit, and his brother came to protect his mom. John said his brother brought his gun.
Our neighborhood was bad neighborhood then, altho now I hear it is fancy-schmancy. John had bought a building when the neighborhood was an atrocious dangerous slum. He bought the building for idealistic purposes. John is an idealist. He planned to sell the apartments for $200 each, 1/3 to Puerto Ricans, 1/3 to blacks, and 1/3 to whites, which is maybe what he did. Those little apartments are co-ops. He kept two of the tiny apartments for him and Micheline, one above the other. And of course Micheline decorated the apartment as if she lived in Paris, she washed her windows till they were sparkling and put white lace curtains on them. John got nothing but grief from his idealistic adventure. When one of the Puerto Ricans was sent to jail, he told John “if you touch my stuff I’ll kill you when I get out.” He never paid any of the money he was supposed to pay. They did have meetings about things which needed to be bought for building or done to the building, and the meetings were always acrimonious. John is the mildest of all people, I never heard him raise his voice, but he is stubborn. It is from Micheline I learned how stubborn Sicilians are.
I think when I met John he was already going to graduate school at the New School. When he finished he looked for a job. It was the middle of steamy New York City summer during a heat wave, and Micheline said, “it is so silly he is wearing his 3 piece suit.” And sure enough there was John, in woolen jacket, vest, and pants, coming from a job interview. The book on how-to-find-a-job had said "wear a 3 piece suit.”
John eventually landed a job which drove him crazy. His job was the identical experience of being driven crazy by all the fellow cooperators in his building. It was some project funded by the City to help people in the Bronx, but everyone on the job and everyone involved drove each other crazy.
When John couldn’t take it anymore, he switched jobs, to another job which drove him crazy. It was the same kind of deal, but this time for the Orthodox in Brooklyn. The rabbi drove John crazy, ditto the rabbi’s daughter. Obviously that is what John likes, he likes all these ins and outs of people relationships, and being driven crazy. And coming up with ideas of how to manipulate them to do what he wants, just as he does with his fellow cooperators.
John uses manipulation to get what he wants but for good purposes not bad purposes, to carry out his idealist vision for everyone’s best interests. I will say that for John, he always has his eye on the ball, he is single focused in accomplishing whatever good he is determined to accomplish. “Maybe you are the reincarnation of Machiavelli” I told him one day when we were walking our dogs, when he went over with me another strategy he was using so things could be accomplished.
All of this was meat and drink to John but Micheline was the opposite. Her life was completely simple and straight forward. She loved nature, and even tho you’d think Manhattan doesn’t have any nature, Micheline found it wherever she went. When John and Micheline visited us in Tucson she told me how she had seen a dove in Central Park. And when we walked around Tompkins Square Park, I would always hear about the nature she had seen.
Because my neighbor was French, Micheline would come and visit my neighbor and then drop in on me. Micheline and Catherine were not the same. Catherine’s whole life was clothes, perfume, lipstick, and jewelry. Catherine is the one who told me, “all a woman needs to wear, Anne, is lipstick and earrings, that brings sparkle to her face.” So I decided to buy a lipstick. I told Micheline, but Micheline said “why should I wear lipstick, who am I going to kiss!” She scoffed. Micheline wore no make-up and only wore simple clothes, good for riding a bike.
Occasionally Catherine and Micheline would have a fight and then Catherine reported “Micheline won’t speak to me now.” Catherine always explained the fight, as “Micheline is not a ‘de’, she feels inferior to me.” (But do you think that is Micheline?) Catherine’s background was different. She actually grew up in Morocco because her father was assigned to NATO there, and her parents were always attending balls and dinners at the French ambassador’s mansion in Morocco. But I think Catherine and Micheline liked each other even tho they were so different. I have to say based on my two experiences of getting to know French people up close and personal the French are very nice.
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