Daughters and Schedules

Dear Pig,

I’m not really happy about your recent schedule changes. I’ve know it was coming, and I should have been better prepared for it. Still, I am disturbed and annoyed by it all.

Of course, schedules were never the same after you were born – all hope abandoned, time folded all funny like Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. Like a Marine, I learned to improvise, adapt, and overcome: feed at 03:17, diaper changes, 04:47 wake-up, sleep, repeat for many years. You didn’t care if I had to go to work, had a life before you, needed to sleep. It didn’t matter: when you were born my heart cracked open, grew 10,000 times, nothing was ever the same, wonderfully.

The first attempt at any schedule, you were almost four, was a once a week day care at Ile Aux Enfants French nursery in Belmont. Looking back, even this very first formation was in French, and it always would be. That wasn’t much, once a week for a full- or half-day. After we left California there was nothing until we moved to France.

Once in Marseille we enrolled you in the ecole maternalle Hotel des Postes. It was a bit disorienting, you were shy in that school in that city that belongs more to the entire Mediterranean than just to France.

Afterwards we had a wonderful four years in La Garde. You worked your way through the grades at ecole Michael Zunino. Get you to school early, home early, no school on Wednesdays. I was not working, which meant we had the most important thing: time together. That was when we started to travel, just you and me. The first was across France, across all of Spain, to Elvas, Portugal to visit Miranda and Krister and Thor. Going there we went the long way around, by way of the Atlantic; the return trip, must faster with along the Mediterranean.

It was wonderful in La Garde, you still have friends from that time, but with you all growing up, we needed a better place for all of us, and that was Montpellier: a good size university town, walkable, bike-able, and tram-able. For a few years I had to spend time in Switzerland – money and all that – but that didn’t stop us: sailing trips with Robert and Jade and Ian, trips to Normandy and Switzerland. And then, grace Covid, I started working from home, for more time together, and more travel: family in Floyd and friends in La Garde

Once you started lycee, three years of early mornings began. Unlike in Finland, where they are wise enough to know it’s healthier for high school students to not start classes before 9:00 AM, the French don’t recognize the sleep needs of teenagers; most days you started at 08.00. I was up at 6:00 AM, making a breakfast that might have been baked beans or oatmeal or bacon and eggs. The morning time was our time together, daughter and dad. Depending on the day, we might put on some music, maybe Kickstand by the Sound Defects, July 23rd by Fila Brazillia, or something from that great Canadian, Neil Young. Sometimes there was no music, just quiet, a rare commodity now. Then you went out the door to catch the tram, changing roles from daughter to student and friend. I went to work, assuming the identity of employee.  

And now, what was I saying, about schedules I am not happy about? Just this.

Tuesday, June 10, was your last day of lycee.

Sunday, June 15 you turned 18.

Wednesday, June 25, was the last of the BAC (like SATs) tests: the subject was NSI (numérique et sciences informatiques) , in which you spoke about trilateration and global positions systems. You nailed it.

Now it’s really and finally all done. Now I won’t have to get up at 6:00 AM anymore. We won’t have that morning time together. Now you’re starting a new schedule, a year of work, then the pre-engineering program at the University of Montpellier.

It’s inevitable, but I don’t have to like it. We can’t do it again, but we did it once.

Love,

Dada

P.S. Unlike in the United States, here in France there is no formal graduation ceremony, and therefore no graduation speaker. So you’re not missing out, here are two of my favorites:

David Foster Wallace’ s This is Water graduation speech at Kenyon College, in 2005, is here. This is one of the best speeches, ever.

Mary Schmich’s Chicago Tribune column (June 1 1997), Advice, like youth, probably wasted on the young, is here. 

A few photos from over the years…