Marie-Cecile left yesterday after a short, forty-eight hour visit.  She doesn't seem typically French; if there were a House un-French Activities Committee, she'd be called as a witness.  She's 70, has bright orange hair, and never slows down.  The first time I was ever invited to her house for dinner, she plunked me down in the kitchen, rummaged through the refrigerator, found some leftover pumpkin something, reheated it--and that was dinner.  Among her friends, she's known for other, similar quirks.  Her gift-giving is notorious.  One Christmas, she gave me a washcloth.  As it had a ribbon around it, I thought it was an example of inventive packaging, but no, there was nothing inside.  Another time she gave me one of her father's used (but washed) handkerchiefs and a pamphlet for Catholic schoolchildren.  If it's lying by the door on her way out of the house, it's an appropriate gift.

At her most memorable reveillon for the new year, she gave a large party after having gone through her wine cellar and selected every bottle of wine that she thought had turned or was turning.  Every table had four or five bottles that might still be good.  If guests took a sip and spit it out, it wasn't that they were wine experts; it was yet another undrinkable bottle.  Some tables made it through the whole evening without anything to drink.  You gotta love her, though.  She's always good humored and absolutely indefatigable, and it was wonderful to have even this brief visit with her.  She was in the U.S. with her friend Francoise, whose husband, Etienne, died last year.  I had known both of them somewhat years ago in Metz.  Etienne, like me, had metastasized kidney cancer.  He lived only six months after the diagnosis.  I'm not sure whether I found this news discouraging or encouraging.

I first learned French from a very rich half-French, half-Egyptian woman, Mona, who lived in Topeka.  Her family lived all over the world and thought she was crazy for choosing Topeka, but Mona loved coyotes and wolves, and during the three decades that I knew her, she always had three coyotes, five dogs, and a cage of rescued doves.  In Mona's world, there were two ways of doing things: the French way (as interpreted by Mona) and the wrong way.  Americans who learned French, she always insisted, had to refrain from being informal and using 'tu' and instead always use 'vous.'  She drummed this into me.  When I first met Marie-Cecile's three children, all of them immediately used 'tu' with me.  I was older and a professor; Mona would have cringed.  But once I knew Marie-Cecile, I knew that formality wasn't part of the routine. 

(Mona also taught me say, "Voulez-vous fatiguer la salade?"  The first time I used that phrase in Metz, my friends stared at me as if I'd arrived from another century.  And to digress even further, anytime Mona saw a woman in a store who had a slight mustache or stray hairs on her arm, Mona would say to the stranger, "I notice that you have a slight problem.  I know someone who can take care of all that hair."  When the woman would get angry, Mona would blame it on Americans who can't take the truth, unlike the French (or Mona's version of the French) who are honest about such matters.)

It was great to have my two old French friends in Topeka.  It was also exhausting, and the last 24 hours with Marie-Cecile were not the best of times for me.  Luckily, old friends understand these things.