Me Talk Pretty One Day: List 4

We'd finished discussing Bastille Day, and the teacher had moved on to Easter, which was represented in our textbooks by a black-and-white photograph of a chocolate bell lying upon a bed of palm fronds.

While the others feasted on their chocolate figurines, my brother, sisters, and I had endured epic fasts, folding our bony fingers in prayer and begging for an end to the monotony that was the Holy Trinity Church.

Those who smoked would awaken to find a carton of cigarettes and an assortment of disposable lighters, while the others would receive an equivalent, each according to his or her vice.

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as “to give of yourself your only begotten son."

Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as “to give of yourself your only begotten son."

I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guided me from one place to the next.

The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the countless miracles—my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe.

Avoiding both the past and the future, they embraced the moment with a stoicism common to Buddhists and recently recovered alcoholics.

Crossing Fourteenth Street, an unmedicated psychotic would brandish a toilet brush, his mouth moving wordlessly as, in my head, the young people of France requested a table with a view of the fountain.

Here was Paris, wrongly dubbed for my listening pleasure.

Sitting by the playground in the Luxembourg Gardens, I listened to Lolita, abridged with James Mason and unabridged with Jeremy Irons.

I followed my walking tour to Notre Dame, where, bored with a lecture on the history of the flying buttress, I switched tapes and came to see Paris through the jaundiced eyes of the pocket medical guide.

I followed my walking tour to Notre Dame, where, bored with a lecture on the history of the flying buttress, I switched tapes and came to see Paris through the jaundiced eyes of the pocket medical guide.

With practice I will eventually realize my goal; in the meantime, come to Paris and you will find me, headphones plugged tight in my external audio meatus, walking the quays...

The Hard Kind involves the conjugation of wily verbs and the science of placing them alongside various other words in order to form such sentences as "I go him say good afternoon” and "No, not to him I no go it him say now.”

The speaker carries no pocket dictionary and never suffers the humiliation that inevitably comes with pointing to the menu and ordering the day of the week.

Did he do his work right there in the sanitarium, or did they rent him a little office where he could get away from all the noise?

Asked one ordinary Congo afternoon what she'd done with her day, Hugh's mother answered that she and a fellow member of the Ladies' Club had visited a leper colony on the outskirts of Kinshasa.

Due to his upbringing, Hugh sits through inane movies never realizing that they're often based on inane television shows.

Seeing as I had regularly petitioned my parents for an electric fence, the business with the guards strikes me as the last word in quiet sophistication.

Neither did I get to witness a military coup in which forces sympathetic to the colonel arrived late at night to assassinate my next-door neighbor.

Hugh's family was hobnobbing with chiefs and sultans while I ate hush puppies at the Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City, a beach towel wrapped like a hijab around my head.

Hugh's family was hobnobbing with chiefs and sultans while I ate hush puppies at the Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City, a beach towel wrapped like a hijab around my head.

When asked "What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

In Eugene Maleska crossword terminology, he's braw and pulchritudinous, while Will Shortz, current puzzle editor for The New York Times, might define him as a "wower," the clue being "Turns heads, in a way."

I stopped by his office one afternoon, hoping that maybe he'd lost a few teeth, and there he was, leaning back in his chair and finishing the Friday New York Times puzzle with a ballpoint pen. The capital city of Tuvalu, a long-forgotten Olympic weight lifter, a fifteen-letter word for dervish: "Oh, that," he said. "It's just something I do with my hands while I'm on the phone."

I've never considered myself an across-the-board apologist for the French, but there's a lot to be said for an entire population that never, under any circumstances, talks during the picture.

I moved away from the critic and found myself sitting beside a clairvoyant who loudly predicted the fates of the various characters seen moving their lips up on the screen.

I think of the great city teeming on the other side of that curtain, and then the lights go down, and I love Paris.

One of the drawbacks to living in Paris is that people often refer to you as an expatriate, occasionally shortening the word to an even more irritating "ex-pat.”

There may be bands of turncoats secretly plotting to overthrow their former government, but I certainly haven’t run across them.

You have to talk about something, and money seems to have filled the conversational niche made available when people stopped discussing the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

The segment opened with a genteel docent standing before a Rembrandt painting and addressing a group of unshaven men dressed in ragged clothing.

The segment opened with a genteel docent standing before a Rembrandt painting and addressing a group of unshaven men dressed in ragged clothing.

Interviewed later, one of the men conceded that the painting was nice, saying, "Sure, I liked it okay."

For all our earnest recycling, America is still seen as a terribly wasteful country.

It's a stigma we’ve earned and are trying to overcome with our own unique blend of guilt and hypocrisy.

His embarrassment would have pleased me, but once he recovered, there would be that awkward period that sometimes culminates in a handshake.

Carol held her pocketbook close against her chest and sucked in her breath as Hugh and I stepped out of the car, no longer finicky little boyfriends on their overseas experiment, but rogues, accomplices, halfway to Timbuktu.