I made it down today into the Cave to get some questions answered. I have been doing translations on the “descriptive” of their various wines. I am to go to Metz this weekend for another salon des vins and am not going to be a waste of space like I was last time in Paris. This time I’m going to be prepared. I will know everything. That is until someone actually asks me something that is totally out of whack or just simply in French.
I run my questions by Apolline who still retains much of her English even though she left London some eight years ago. Honestly, I think she sits in her home and watches Hollywood movies all night long wearing a bunny suit but that’s just me. I bring up the bunny because she was sure I was messing with her when I mentioned the Easter Bunny. Apparently she was sure only the Euros use a rabbit for its Easter festivities. Later she would come to me and say that she looked it up on the Internet and we have the bunny in Texas because of all of the German who settled there. You should have seen her face when I told her no, America, not Texas, the huge country not just the big one. Remember, Texas, bigger than France.
So she gets through my questions and for some reason she has now found comfort with me so she begins to tell me about her time visiting my friend, her cousin. She proceeds to tell me a tale of her hairdresser saying with an impossible accent, “France, do ya’ll have electricity?” She regaled me with other such stories of ignorance and said until she met me she had thought all Americans were stupid. The comment was like being slapped because you’re just too pretty. Thanks, but it kind of hurt. I do an anti-Eric thing and play it nice because I’m working abroad and don’t want to upset the balance because she really is a sweet girl who’s not a girl but a woman of my age. I hope to catch her now before she settles into her forties and into a permanent thought on anything.
I tell her about how things appear here, on the vineyard. How I could view them as bass-ackwards and how many times people have asked me if I carried a gun in Texas and if cowboys roam the streets. Sorry to say folks, no, and no, and the last of the cowboys are in the last states just before Canada. The only thing left in Texas, (man I’m gonna get beat up for this) are the belt buckles, the pressed jeans, and the felt/straw hats. Texas does have its fair share of cowgirls though and I miss you all. Man you can wear jeans!
But as I two-step my way back to my point on ignorance she finally hits me with the last straw. “America just doesn’t know the world because of the media.” I sat there bobbing my head and simply said, “Yep. But we are the news.” She started on her slant that their media has a blend of Euro and America and African and Martian and I could only sit there with my translations slowly bobbing my head. Finally I looked up and gave her what I had. I will paraphrase because my memory is nowhere near fail safe. By the way I was a featured extra in Fail Safe with George Clooney but that’s neither here nor there, oh wait, it was Los Angeles.
“Apolline, first off I watch the news here every night. Three quarters of your so-called balanced news is all on America. Obama, violence, floods, or what star is doing what star. All the entertainment news whether it is music or movies is American. America is huge. Houston, Texas is bigger than the Rhone wine region. Houston is a city, not a state. Do we need more international news? Yes, of course. But what happens over here that truly affects what happens in America? Is the average American’s ignorance on Europe abhorrent, of course? But I give you this, we, you and I, only know what we know and all we can try to be are good to one another. But please don’t take a few small moments in Texas and write off a country that the whole world looks to without ever asking to be looked back at.”
That’s when she turned to me, turning off her blu-tooth earpiece and said, “what?”
Just kidding, wouldn’t that have been a bitch?
BTW, ignorance, the word, means unaware of the facts, not stupid. Spread the word all of you anglophiles that have been pissing me off since I was seven.
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