I lost an hour yesterday morning. I’m still looking for it. I don’t know how to describe it to you, having never met it. I arrived at the bus stop, expecting to have it, but when I looked, it was gone. My watch said 11:40, not 10:40, and I still don’t know why or how. I thought at first it must have been set wrong, but the guy next to me agreed with it (after I made him understand it was the hour I wanted, not just the minutes.) If it shows up at home, do you think you could send it this way? Or keep it there if it won’t come back…I’m sure I’ll be able to use it later. Maybe it’s another one that comes back half a year later. Who knows?
The missing hour opened up a strange sort of rabbit hole. I met another American assistant at the meeting I was an hour late for (which wasn’t unusual- it was for French university students and English speaking assistants). We had lunch, and it came out that she had been really bored all this time, not being able to find anything to do. I don’t know if I can help you, I said. I end up doing all the Catholic stuff, and I don’t know if that will interest you. What do you know, she happens to be Catholic. And so bored she doesn’t mind wandering campus with me begging for library work before going to mass and a discussion at the Catholic center there that evening.
After walking around in a big circle looking for the right road, we stumble across the buildings we’re looking for. The first isn’t actually a library. They send me to the main library. The guy at the main library, after making me wait for ten minutes while he attended to other things, told me they had too much to do taking care of their own business to handle new people who weren’t entirely sure of what they were doing (and perhaps speaking imperfect French was implicated as well, but he didn’t say anything outloud about it). He sent me to another, smaller library, assuring me he wasn’t just getting rid of me, that he thought this lady might really be able to help me. Though perhaps he’s warned her, because I haven’t managed to find her in her office yet.
We let it go, I introduce her to Cristophe (he works in a bookstore on campus), and we take a pause-café. I have a hot chocolate and a big slice of chocolate flan. It’s hard to describe flan. Kinda like congealed pudding in a piecrust. The hot chocolate comes with two sugar cubes and I actually use one…it doesn’t come overly sweet. It also comes with a dainty gingerbread biscuit I eat later. The flan is almost black and as rich as cheesecake. My American friend, we’ll cal her Gretchen (her real name is that of Gretchie’s predecessor, Mom) had to help me finish it. We talked for quite awhile. She’s interested in writing to and wants to write a book, but she seems to take the opposite approach to mine. I will spew words as long as I possibly can and prune them down later, whereas even in speech she considers carefully what she wants to say before she says it. She says the people at school make fun of her for this because they think she’s always searching for the French words to say, but she keeps telling them its like this even when she speaks English. She also likes dancing and wants to take African dancing, which I might do with her. She’s also coming to the fair with us today!
She takes me home to her place. She is staying with a French family, who must also be Catholic and a little over-protective, as every activity she wants to get involved she either "doesn’t want to do" according to her French mom, or is in too poor an area for her to consider going there. Her French mom is in the process of getting her info for L’Ecole de la Foi, oddly enough, so I may soon lose my status as sole and only américaine there.
We return to the Christian Student Center (aumonerie chrétienne) for mass and a discussion on Hope. Someone seems to have lost a little two year old boy over the course of mass, as he was wandering all during the chapel the entire time, and I couldn’t figure out who was his mother. Between nearly overturning a large vase in the corner and running around noisily on the bare floor, he seemed quite involved in what was going on. During communion he reached up to the priest for the Host (and got a blessing for his trouble). He also followed right behind the priest, imitating him perfectly, as he bowed to the altar and left the chapel. The boy must have a vocation.
The French have two words for Hope. Espoir is your every-day garden variety of hope, like your hope that it won’t rain today or your hope that you’ll find your lost dog, or even your hope that you’ll get through law school. Espérance, they explained, has a big more of a final connotation to it. It is the hope of the triumph of good over evil, of eternal life, of the fulfillment of God’s promises. It’s also the name of the theological virtue. Père Andre asked us what the English version of the two hopes would be, but I of course only had one word to give him. Apparently it’s the same in German. Interestingly enough, espoir is masculine, and espérance is feminine, although maybe the French don’t read anything into this (although French feminists always seem to be fighting for feminine versions of professions. Like writer, écrivain, is masculine, but many people also use écrivaine, a feminine version, even though the Academie Française refuses to recognize it. I met someone studying Linguistics there…I’ll have to ask him.)
But I found quite an answer to my espoirs there. They’re just renovating their library, and they don’t have any kind of system to organize the books, and the lady in charge of the whole operation wasn’t too set on doing it, so she said I could organize it and set up a check-out system! I’m so excited! The lady I worked with over the summer said she’d give me any help she could (and also said she’d be happy and honored to write me letters of recommendation)