Expectations

If everything goes according to plan, by this time next month we’ll be returning home from France. We’re taking the 15-year-old granddaughter. She’ll turn 16 in Paris. How cool is that?

I’ve never been to France before, or anywhere in Europe. My wife has, though, lots of times. She lived there for over three years in the early 70s, back in her mini skirt hippy days. She almost got married there. Her parents were probably relieved when it didn’t work out and she came back to America to get her PhD. in French.

So, she’ll be blazing the trail, except that I’ll be driving the rental car. “I drove a semi for 20 years,” I say. “I can handle a dinky European car… What side of the road did you say they drive on?”

I’ve been driving her nuts with questions. I’m like that. I’m never content with what is. I have to know what’s over the horizon... “What’s it like there? Is it true that French people look down their noses at everybody who isn’t French. Is it true that French women don’t shave their underarms?”

She rolls her eyes.

“Do they eat French fries?”

“Of course,” she says with an audible sigh, “but they’re not like what you get here at McDonald’s.”

“How are they different?”

“They’re French fries.”

“What else?”

“Well, they’re not into maple syrup on their crêpes and they say that root beer tastes like medicine. They eat their salad after the meal – before the cheese -- and the war hero they most admire was a young girl.”

“Will I have to eat snails?”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“Is it hard to find a bathroom?”

She said: “Impossible n’est pas français.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I believe Napoleon first said it. It means, ‘Impossible is not French.’”

Every morning I wake up with more questions. While she’s scanning the front page of the Denver Post next to her coffee, I’ve got detailed road maps of Europe spread out on the kitchen table, looking for clues. Unlike America, there are no vast stretches of roadless land like the High Plains or Western deserts.

Déjà vu all over again.

It was the same way back in 1976 as I was getting ready to take my first trip “out west.”

I’d never been much west of the Mississippi before. I grew up where the horizon was disguised as trees.

I was working as a newspaper reporter in the St. Louis metropolitan area at the time. I had a couple weeks of vacation coming up. A guy I’d met one late night at an IHOP who became one of my best ever lifelong friends suggested we take a road trip “out west.” He wanted to show it to me. He’d been there many times. During the 60s he’d hitchhiked a lot back and forth between his southern California bohemian surfer life and his mother in St. Louis. He’d met Bob Dylan hitchhiking across Arizona. When I first met him, he was living in the basement of his mother’s house, reading Kerouac and Zen and the Christian mystics.

“Let’s do it!” I said.

For weeks leading up to our day of departure I spent every evening in front of the television in my apartment, smoking and drinking beer, transfixed by the old western movies (many in black and white) that one St. Louis television station played all the time.

I cared little about the plots. It was the background, the scenery, the vastness of grasses and sand, treeless to the horizon. I’d spent my whole life east of the Mississippi in the midst of trees and their shadows. Like a member of the audience in Plato’s cave, I assumed that what I saw was the real world. But I was about to experience something completely different. I couldn’t just wait to see for myself what it would be like. I had to imagine it. I’ve always been like that.

One night my friend stopped by for some smoke and a visit.

I was watching one of the old westerns staring John Wayne and Gabby Hayes.

“Look at those mountain,” I said almost in a daze. “Pretty soon I’m going to be there. Tell me. I gotta know. What’s it really like.”

My friend paused like getting ready to say something he knew for sure.

Finally, he said: “The one thing I know for sure is that no matter what you expect, it will be different.”

And he was right.