Happy Bastille Day! While I am as much French as I am American, I rarely celebrate that fact for no good reason. But today, today my fridge is packed with cheese and coq au vin, Nick is baking baguettes for dinner and we hung out the the old red white and blue (vertical) striped flag. Why the hell not?
My dad Claude, a French Tunisian, is the first to deplore the traits of the Frenchman. Lazy, long vacation takers, snobs, and on and on. He calls Italians nos frères qui rit, our brothers who laugh, in another jab at the somber French. I will admit that living there as a 20 year old American was very, very hard. I wanted desperately to be French, to embody the aloof coolness that I felt all around me. I lived in St-Germain-des-Pres, an impossibly chic neighorhood, bought fancy clothes, and tried to pass myself off as one of them.
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