I was already shy enough. <\/p>\n
My father drove from work every day, a 45-minute round trip, to have lunch with me. We ate a Breton restaurant down the street and around the corner from the school. It had sidewalk seating, as most restaurants do in that part of the world, but as it was December we ate inside, a room accessible only by descending a few steps and ducking under a low doorpost. It felt odd to be in some place so relatively dark in the middle of the day. The half-timber framework was exposed, huge beams undergirding the stories above. I had cr\u00e8pes, which I didn’t care for then and to this day still don’t like much. I remember asking him what “oui” meant–I heard the French children around me saying it all the time. He responded with a degree of surprise that it meant “yes.” His encouragement was sparse; during that time in our relationship he was still coming to terms with his role with respect to me, but just having his company for an hour a day made the transition easier.<\/p>\n
When I returned to school after lunch I would repeat the routine that accompanied me for that first week: marveling at the diminutive size of my French classmates (they had mistakenly placed me in first grade instead of second), tracing the worn wood of the desks in the classroom (which still had holes for ink pots), absorbing the language as best I could, impressing my classmates when P.E. rolled around (I could actually dribble a basketball) and clinging to one of the iron pillars supporting the overhang for the entire duration of every recess. I would watch them as they swirled around me, making a token effort to befriend me every once in a while, but mostly ignoring the nonresponsive American. Many of the boys played a makeshift game of soccer on the smooth tiles under the overhang. For a ball, they used an action figure with several limbs missing. I could only watch for a very short time, as I was of the nature that felt sympathy for abused toys, especially those resembling people. I worked my feet around the ledge at the bottom of the post, seeing if I could circle it with only four steps, then three, then two, wrapping almost my whole leg around the post in the attempt. The recess bell would ring and we would line up by twos in order to shuffle back inside for the afternoon lessons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was already shy enough. My father drove from work every day, a 45-minute round trip, to have lunch with me. We ate a Breton restaurant down the street and around the corner from the school. It had sidewalk seating, as most restaurants do in that part of the world, but as it was December […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}