Rainy Day Reading and Paris

This morning it rained for the first time in ages, and after digging out raincoats for the kids and getting them to school, I could focus on the sound of the rain against the car windows. Soothing.

Getting the kids' raincoats was a chore because the raincoats were not waiting patiently in the closet as they should have been. The ones that actually fit must be hiding out in the back of my husband's car because they were nowhere to be found. So we rolled up sleeves on a coat for the baby, we buttoned a snug-fitting coat for the 4-year-old, and we tried not to worry about the 3-quarter-inch sleeves on the 5-year-old's coat. When we were halfway to school, my 5-year-old son said, "Mom, you forgot your raincoat!"  Yes, we don't worry as much about ourselves, do we?

So back to the soothing sound of rain on the windows. All I could think about was rainy day reading. I could put the baby down for his morning nap and curl up on the couch with my book club book. We have book club tonight, and I'm not finished.  Wouldn't a cup of warm coffee and a book be luxurious?

The book I'm reading, Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, has on its cover a woman and child in the perfect raincoat ensembles walking on a rainy Paris street full of statues and trees. The title is dreamy and romantic, too, but so far, the book is not that dreamy and romantic. It's been hard to sink my teeth into, but it does have some really witty parts.

The problem for me is the writer is more of an essayist than a journalist, and I usually tend toward journalism or memoirs for my nonfiction. His observations are almost too profound, where I need accessible.  For example, the chapter on Paris cafes starts with a comparison between cafe popularity and a late nineteenth century mathematical problem. I really want to be sitting at the cafe with him, not delving into a theory.

But when he talks about the lack of help and customer service in Paris, especially compared to the American model, I really cracked up. Having two close friends living in Paris recently, I have heard their stories (amusing to me all these miles and waters away, but highly frustrating to them) about just this situation. Gopnik says that where in America the customer is always right, in Paris, the customer is always wrong.

"So, for instance," Gopnik writes, "if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people ... to come fix it, you will be told first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found...; next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy...; and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that... 'They are sensitive machines; they are ill-suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully,' the store bureaucrat in charge of service says, sighing. 'C'est normal.'" (Gopnik, 80)

Turns out, my Paris friend has a dryer story of her own. Three different people came to her apartment over a two-week period with no answers and no fixed dryer.  They would say, "C'est tres bizarre." Then they would ask her if it ever worked. Uh, yes. That's how she knew it was now broken.  Then they would leave her with a broken dryer and two toddlers racing around.  Finally, her upstairs neighbor who spoke great French called and raised the roof until they came to fix the dryer.

She told a similar situation about when she bought her dining room table. She already owned a chic set of chairs she had had made a couple of years before, and now that she was in Paris, what a perfect place to invest in a table!  She found a wonderful table, measured, went home to compare against the chair measurements, and took her husband back to seal the deal. He happened to bring his own American measuring tape to the store (she had used the store's French measuring tape before), and went back to measure while she paid up front.  She remembers the payment in slow motion: Just after she'd signed on the dotted line, her husband came flying up from the back of the store, saying, "The centimeters are different! It doesn't fit!" The store clerk was no help, at least the one who spoke English.

Her husband said, "Can't you just cancel the transaction?"

"No, No," the clerk said in a thick accent, "Eees not like the States."  She seemed convinced that it was their own fault and they should be punished by having a table that won't fit with the chairs. As they tried to work things out and their voices would start getting louder, the clerk would say, "C'est pas grave" ("It's not a big deal.")  My friend says she hears this all the time, and it's usually when things are a very big deal.

Well, the rain has stopped, and it's overcast. I haven't started reading yet, but at least I did some Rainy Day Writing.  I guess this can be my contribution to book club since I haven't finished the book.