French Toast Read Online Free

or two sentences he knows in each of these languages.
    Philippe loves history, in particular the Middle Ages, and historical monuments. He loves to cook and is a hospitable host. He likes to read, play the piano and guitar, and paint in oils. He hates cars and the consumer society. He’s not all that hot for sports (either participating or observing). He likes our cat, and, believe me, not many people do. He likes America and Americans (hey, he married me, didn’t he?). Some people say he looks like former French president Jacques Chirac—an observation he is not so sure he likes.
    Considering that there are Frenchmen who hate history, can’t stand reading, love cars, the consumer society, and sports, and are anti-American, can we say that Philippe is typically French? Let’s just say that he is very French and you’d have a hard time mistaking him for any other nationality. To begin with, he has a typical Parisian expression on his face—that is, Don’t mess with me, baby (which is great, because he scares the daylights out of panhandlers and all those people I have troublefending off due to my big, naïve, ever-present smile). Second, he has a slight tendency to explode, only to calm down just as quickly. Third, he can carry on a conversation concerning just about anything, and fourth, he is very polite in that mysteriously hard-to-define and often inscrutable French way. Finally, like many Frenchmen, he can be France’s best critic. Deep in his heart, though, you know he couldn’t live anywhere else. He’s simply too French.

Getting Here

    When you grow up in a small town in the southwest corner of Iowa, probably the most exotic thing you could possibly think of would be France. That is, of course, if you were of the bent to think of exotic places and people. And I was.
    As a youngster, I loved my family and friends, had no particular yearnings for anything other than what I had. What did I have? A warm, safe, loving environment far from the pressures, stress, and aspirations of city life (we didn’t even know what or where the prestigious eastern colleges were, let alone aspire to go to them). At the same time, I was fully convinced that destiny was going to tap me on the shoulder and
I was going to get out of there
and go a long way away. That I knew.
    I remember standing at the top of the stairs of our beautiful Victorian house and hearing a knock at the door. I was convinced that it was someone who had come for me, someone who knew that I should be somewhere else, someone who would whisk me away to a strange and foreign land. My heart quickened at the thought. It was only the mailman—and he didn’t even have anything for me!
    But I continued to
know
that I would end up somewhere exotic. A banal existence was not for me, child of the cornfields. (Well, not really, although both sides of my family had been in farming forever; my father and one of his brothers were the first to go to “town,” so I didn’t grow up in the country. Still, my grandparents and uncles all farmed the land around us.)
    The special thing that finally happened was that, after the death of my paternal grandmother, my grandfather remarried a woman who was a professor of French at Grinnell College. She was to have a capital influence on my life, telling me all about France, where she had lived for a time, even marrying a Frenchman, whom she eventually divorced. She brought me books about France, taught me French words. With her beautiful white hair and blue eyes and the breath of foreign air she brought with her, she totally won me over. From age eight, I knew I had to go to France, if only to have a look and come right back home.
    After college, when everyone else was headed towardjobs or marriage, I headed straight to France. Actually, I hopped on a boat in San Francisco, jumped off in Acapulco, got back on a freighter in Veracruz and traveled to ports in South America, the