A Coin, a Deck of Cards, a Book

It was in and about my birthday that the government wrote me to say “it is our honor to inform you that as of [such and such a date] you have been officially French” There is a joke in there if you know how to unearth it, no less funny than that this adopted person should be adopted by her new country round about a date just as uncertainly inscribed on her birth certificate.

We celebrated on the day of Thanksgiving and I made my two-day gumbo recipe.

As with any shower of sorts, I was given gifts. Here I’d like to speak of a few.

Firstly was a school book of history that French children studied in the 19^th century as if by immersion I might absorb a past as my own, immerse myself and share in a sort of collective unconscious of generations of pupils learning by heart their Charlemagne from their Saint Louis from their Napoleon.

Second was a gift of facsimile playing cards from the time of the Revolution. This was a beauty of a choice insofar as pulling up stakes from one home and trying to make another for oneself in a new country is a gamble, certainly. But the gift giver, may he rest in peace, chose even more wisely. For the in the family I left behind me, my adoptive mother was a card player, counter, I should say, professionally even. She quit her day job and would leave me alone at home in Florida while she would take her junkets to Las Vegas when I was a teenager. That was hardly her worst crime, but it was no wonder I wanted to leave this behind me for a future in another country. I had been dealt a bad hand, as they say, and my French friend knew this expression. Now I had all the cards for a winning game.

Finally came something from a woman (may she too rest in peace) whom I called my fairy godmother, that is if fairies pass away at all. Her gift to me was a coin, an antique coin. The very last of those minted under the reign Louix XVI. His image is on the recto and verso the date 1790, the year he and Marie Antoinette and their household were captured fleeing to Varennes and the jig was up. Two to three years of imprisonment later he was beheaded and his queen shortly eafter.

Three ways of handling history, of absorbing it through my fingertips: a coin, cards and a book.

(Two out of three of these lovely souls, are now abiding in their destiny. I miss them. Acutely. Their gifts bear witness to the poetic minds that made such thoughtful, poetic choices.)