American in Paris

Ok, sorry I haven’t been keeping up very well with my blogs (although some of you out there could be writing more too…after all, I do need words to hang on, don’t I? J)
So this weekend I go to TR’s engagement party. T. and her family have a beautiful three story house just outside of Paris, but close enough to still have a great view of the Tour Eiffel and Sacre Coeur. I drove down with Anne and Cristophe, as well as their children. In between exclamations over cows and digging out of games to amuse the two year old, Anne and I had a lovely conversation about weddings and conversions and various books we’d read. Cristophe commented every now and then too. He doesn’t talk too much. We were running a little late for their baptism (a triple baptism, all friends of theirs, conducted by a priest friend of theirs. I think one of the fathers was the guy I stopped outside the church and who introduced me to Anne and Cristophe in the first place) but luckily, it happens to be in the next town over from TR’s suburb, and she comes and picks me up from a nearby metro stop, after a few phone calls back and forth and lingering over coffee in a nearby bar.
Preparations are in full swing at her house. While everyone is cleaning, straightening, setting up sound systems and flowers etc, we go shopping and put together a hasty tasty lunch. We catch up a little too. G. and T. have been dating I believe as long as I’ve been dating L.E. (that is, Lord Ellidor. Some of you know what I’m talking about and the rest at least know whom.) G. was in Africa for a little while while I was there last time, and we bonded a little talking about how much we missed the significant others (my first and only other trip to France was the first time I’d been away from LE for longer than a week or so since we’d started dating, right before we went to college. It was a very emotional time for Buttercup.) and life resonates with a note hinting at significance when I think she’s getting married just a month after me, like we’ve been living parallel lives or something (except I don’t think I even know ninety people between the ages of 12 and 29 that I could invite to a party. Between me and LE, maybe, but they’d be coming from all over the country. Hopefully they will be coming from all over the country when we invite them to the main event…)

Everyone was so much older than they had been that it seemed like I was visiting completely different people, almost. The 5- 10- and 13- year olds I saw last time are now 11- 16- and 19. The youngest is as much the exhibitionist he ever was, only now instead of showing me his toys and cartoons, he’s explaining to me how his Dad salvaged their disco ball from a big Parisian night club he had a project at (he works with acoustics in buildings) and how the whole family had been making ice for a month to be able to fill the bathtub with it in order to keep the champagne cool. As accommodating as ever, they have lots and lots to do, and the place is all excitement and flurry.

Vocabulaire:
Flare: used mostly with animals, in a figurative sense, intuition
Machine à choc: still don’t know…maybe that’s what made the music so loud?
Boule aux reflets: disco ball