France on Fridays: L’Introduction

Les Deux Amis En France

Of Paris, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you.” DeLinda and I set off for France some five years ago now, yet the stories wander into my mind and my conversations like scenes in a favorite movie or lines from a great book.

I had wanted to go to France since I was in high school. Six years of French class had shown me the sights and sounds of a country so very far away, and they rested in my memory for many, many years. As my 40th birthday approached, I felt the need to do something big. Mark the moment in some way that would have weight and meaning and impact. Celebrate it! And so, on a whim in 2004, I called my good friend and traveling companion DeLinda, and we began to talk about the possibilities.

When we met in New Haven in the early nineties, she and I shared a certain ease with one another. Long conversations over lunch-hour breaks turned into a friendship that has weathered close to 20 years of life journeys.

These days, with me in Connecticut and DeLinda in Texas, the friendship is more often noted by short emails and long phone calls. But when we do visit in person, we settle quickly into a comfortable and familiar rhythm.

That we made this grand journey together — a first for both of us — was nothing less than perfect, and will indeed stay with us for the rest of our lives.

Les Deux Amis en France is our story. Will you join us? Come to France on Fridays, beginning here on Friday, October 28.

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Photo: Les Jeunnes Femmes from the Roger-Viollet Collection, 1925.

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