Day 130 and 131

When you're hot, you're hot; and when you're cold, it's Tuesday.

Time is a precious commodity that I seem to be lacking over the past several days.  Buttoning up the last minute details before we move has taken up a fair share of my limited resources.  Monday and Tuesday could  not have been more different from the standpoint of climate.  Monday was a sizzler.  Well into the upper nineties.  My continued battle with an algae filled pool leaves us with little relief.  To add insult to injury, I was forced back into the Jumpy for another lengthy drive East to pick up a garden table my wife had purchased but was unable to fit into the Renault.  She was home this day, so we had a little outing together sans mon fils.  We don't get time alone much these days, so even though it was a sweltering drive, we enjoyed our adventure together.  Back home we finished the usual school pick up routine and quickly realized that the temperature of the house was not going to be suitable for sleeping, so the wife ran to the supercenter for some fans while I stayed at home with the boys filling our t-shirts with sweat.  Her return offered sweet relief and we were finally able to get some shut eye beneath the gaze of our new oscillating beauties.

A front moved in off the ocean, a common occurrence here, which turned Tuesday's thermometer into jacket weather.  The fans were shut off and the windows were opened.  It was a lovely departure from Monday's frying pan and I much more toward my liking.  Unfortunately, the skies were grey which usually has a detrimental effect on my mood.  Perhaps that is the reason for my wife banning me from attending parent teacher conferences.  The truth is probably more toward her knowledge of my proclivity to unpleasant discord at these events.  The eldest received his usual high marks in the substantive categories, which is all I really cared about.  However, at the hippie commune we call the International School, they grade social behavior and the marks there were less than stellar.  He was graded down quite severely for his willingness to co-mingle with students of other nationalities.  I don't know how they make this case since he is the only American student in his section, but once again, I digress.  I know what they meant.  He was not putting forth the effort to get to know the French children.  After reading the comments, my internal temperature exceeded Friday's external temperature and the colorful nature of my dissertation on the failings of this academic institution had my wife a bit concerned that I would be ejected from the building, so we agreed she would go it alone.

There is a bit of a back story to our history with the International School that I won't bore you with, but suffice it to say that I presume the French students DID NOT receive similar low marks for their poor treatment and lack of kinship with my son.  International cooperation, if that is their aim, is a two way street and must be facilitated in some way by the institution itself.  I am going to stop there, because I can already feel the rage building and like Bruce Banner, don't nobody want to see me angry.  When the wife did finally return on Tuesday evening, it was confirmed that my absence was for the best.  She is typically much more gentile than I when she gets agitated.  She maintains professional decorum when I tend to throw civility out the window in favor of full on verbal warfare.  When she got home, she was a bit hot under the collar, so I know I would have "gone round the bend" as they say.  It all matters not in the end, for both our lads will be fully immersed in the French system come the Fall term.  This will be a conversion that will be quite natural for the youngest, but a bit difficult for my first born.  I know the strengths of both of these lads and am certain in the end they will be just fine.  The youngest is already well on his way to being perfectly bilingual and now knows his numbers in French as well as he knows them in English.  He even converts how he counts on his fingers when moving from one language to the next.  His accent?  He has none.  He sounds as French as a native speaker and as American as the rest of his Kansas bred brethren.  It is amazing to watch and is indeed the reason we came.  My wife shared something that had been presented to her, that really made me take a step back.  A colleague commented on the uselessness of learning a dying language.  Why worry with French for it is only spoken by a handful of people globally and is centered around a VERY small country.

My mind, working the way it does, began to trace language back to its origins and I wondered why from the birth place of the world had our languages become so different.  Why didn't language remain universal?  Was it an attempt to set one's self apart from their warring neighbors or was it an attempt to create a social identity that drove people to adapt a different tongue.  More importantly, who comes up with this shit.  Why do all of these languages have to be so damned complicated?  The cave men got along just fine with simple grunts.  Are we so different?  When I am at the dinner table and want more corn, I traditionally have my mouth full and simply grunt and point at the bowl of corn on the table.  It would be impolite after all to speak with my mouth full.  The truth is that, life is much to complicated for grunts and gesturing, so I guess we are stuck with a more complicated form of communication.  I do think, however, that the world would be a much smaller place and it's nations would get along much better if we all spoke the same language.  I would of course vote for English, but that is pretty ethnocentric of me.  Maybe we can come up with something new.  Something we can all agree on.  Since that will never happen, I guess I will continue my efforts with Rosetta Stone and for the most part, keep my fat trap shut.

Since my time is at a premium and I have furniture to disassemble I will leave with this final thought.  I have unwittingly found myself through this crazy experiment we now call our lives and I realize the artistic side of my personality is far more important to me than I had first imagined.  I am torn now, with limited time, between writing and painting.  I dismissed it at first, but having traveled down this path far enough, I find myself transformed from a guy who scratches down his thoughts in a journal to a full blown writer and from a fella who completes the occasional doodle on a notepad to a semi-legitimate artist.  These are skills that seem to come a bit more naturally to me than my selected vocation.  I am certainly not arguing that my 7 years of higher education were a waste of time.  My journey through education, leading ultimately to a Law degree has made me in large part who I am, and I wouldn't trade that for the world.  My brother, recently sent me a book, that I am now a fair way into (surprising in that I have a general distaste for reading, funny I know for a writer, but I think so many years in school has a way of doing that to you) which is an account of a Shepard boy who finds himself on a quest for treasure.  In the beginning of the story you are introduced to a King and the author, through this character, presents a profound theory on life.  We all have a "Personal Legend".  It's that thing we want in the simplest of terms.  It's that dream you had when you were a kid, uncolored by the "realities" of life that seem to inhibit us from chasing what we truly desire.  The King puts it quite simply indeed.  It is the fulfilling of our "Personal Legend" that is the most important thing in our lives.  It is the purpose for our being.  I know think that perhaps this pursuit of the arts is my true purpose, and my wife has been gracious enough to indulge my quest to fulfill my legend.

For now I will continue to write when I can and paint when time allows.  I hope one day to share this story, and perhaps illustrate it's pages in kind.  For now, I will be content with the journey to fulfill my Personal Legend.  Until we speak again.  R.