May 20th, 2012 Comments(0)
In France the month of May starts off sweetly enough, or so it seems. May 1st, the feast day of Saint Joseph the Worker, is an official bank holiday with a vegetal component: lilies of the valley. They’re sold a sprig at a time and proffer good luck, plus that inimitable scent those of us from the southern climes first encountered by proxy. Remember the Mattel Perfume Kiddle?
This year May 1st fell on a Tuesday. If you are not familiar with Gallic mores and manners, this detail might seem insignificant, but the French mind grasps its particular meaning rapidly and gets to work: it is time to start building bridges. A Tuesday, you see, has high “pont” (meaning bridge) potential: build a bridge from Tuesday back to Monday, and from Monday back to Sunday and, ma foi! this gangplanking constructs a four-day weekend! For workers with a nine-to-five job this bit of French engineering allows for leisurely visits to the country home or a few extra days to rest and enjoy time with the family; for parents who are free-lancers, however, it means a forced vacation when what you really need is to plug ahead. The kids are at home for 4 days running and if you try to work in your small Parisian flat, which inevitably you do because you have to move that project along, you’re liable to start beating your breast and gnashing your teeth, or popping open the dinner wine at five. Mayday! Mayday!
But this is not just about May Day, for if it were we could write it off as two lost work days in a thirty-one day month; no, there is more trouble ahead as May is ripe in “pont” possibilites. Let’s move ahead to our next holiday on May 8th marking the Allies defeat over the Nazis and the end of WWII. May 8th, also a bank holiday, lands on a Tuesday this year, raising therefore the existential question: to pont or not to pont? Mercifully my son’s school chose to maintain class on the Monday the 7th. Nevertheless, we had our son at home for two working days right smack in the middle of the week. I accomplished little on the novel front but the laundry got folded.
Now this week we’ve been hit by Ascension, a bank holiday celebrating Jesus’ ascension into Heaven following the Resurrection. This uniquely secular holiday falls, always, on a Thursday. Is your mind ticking now? Because a substantial bridge possibility is beckoning us and it just seems too good to pass up. Since children don’t go to school on Wednesdays in France, one merely needs to erect a cantilever between Thursday and Friday to create a whopping 5-day weekend. Le Week-end, c’est chouette!
OK, by this point I am waving the white flag. I’ve spent the last four and half days mostly indoors doing menial chores, unable to think in clearly constructed sentences let alone write them, while my son joyfully indulges his Star Wars Leggo fantasies for hours on end. He is creating what he calls a “saga” and it spills out of his room into the living room, under my feet in the kitchen, upon the master bed and even in the W.C. where the clones hold the toilet hostage. I’m afraid there’s no use resisting. I give up! Mayday! Mayday!
Perhaps, dear Reader, if this trussing were to stop here, at Ascension weekend, and we could bid the bascule bridge farewell, we’d have some satisfaction in knowing there were two weeks left in the month for catching up. The coast, alas, is not quite so clear, for yet another feast day approaches. Oh my God, look! Are those tongues of fire? Hark! That’ll be the Holy Spirit! Pentecost descends upon us next Monday, yet another secular bank holiday, providing the French with an excellent excuse to protract le week-end.
I am leaving on June 1st for a working retreat at the beguinage of Bruges. It is needed. While some nine-to-fivers find respite in May’s extended vacations, most free-lancers with children require a recovery program by the end of the month. To those of you find May as insufferable as I do: “Courage, mes amis!” Only one more Bridge of Sighs to go before June.
May 13th, 2012 Comments(0)
Are your kid gloves blighted with ring-around-the-wrist from a night of dancing at the Junior League Ball? When you last snuffed a sniffle with a lady-like finger did it leave an unsightly stain on the mitt guard?
My friend, worry not: chauffeur your dirtied hand garments straight to the Glovatorium in Oakland, California. 2300 Market Street.
Not long ago I pulled this strange package out of an old I. Magnin’s hatbox; it contained a pair of white kid gloves with a little fringe design along the wrist. They had belonged to my grandmother Joy and manifestly hadn’t been worn since having undergone the “scientific tanner’s process” at the Glovatorium. When exactly, I wonder, did women give up on gloves? Did gloves get flung like bras and girdles in the sartorial bonfires of the sixties? Should we blame (or thank) the feminists for their extinction?
Kid gloves epitomize the elegance of the pre-casual eras and a small part of me, I’ll admit, laments their demise — or should I call it “martyrdom”? I’ve had the idea to host a literary salon wearing white, opera-length gloves; it seems to me a true hostess does not leave any fingerprints of her labor, and this holds whether she is attending to guests at a cocktail party or introducing authors and ideas. We wear gloves outdoors for protection but indoors we slip them on to dissimulate and it’s this subtle degree of subversive cache-cache that enables a woman to transcend the gravity of her everyday identity. To some extent a woman wearing gloves cannot be known; minus her hands, the stories they give away too easily, she gains an air of mystery. The gloves come off when she sits down to eat– always – but if she has taken full advantage of her three-quarter time, her entourage might well overlook her telling (and hopefully moisturized) hands as they fork the peas. I can’t help but think there’s a corollary to be made between the be-gloved woman and the author: a writer, too, creates her imaginary world with a gloved hand, for if her approach to the Real becomes too direct or unmitigated by the imagination, what is meant to take flight gets flattened and we are left not with the fullness of Mystery but with something that will never even make it to the Ball of Marvels.
The only time I’ve worn gloves was at my wedding and they were three-quarter length. I would love to wear them again, though perhaps they’ve yellowed? I suppose I can always send them to the Glovatorium – still in existence, ma foi – to be treated with their “scientific tanner’s technique.”
May 06th, 2012 Comments(0)
We’re about to head out and vote today for France’s next president, and by the time you, my dear subscribers, receive this posting the results will already be known. Will France choose a socialist president? This seems likely but we won’t know until tonight.
When I came to France in 1989 as a grad student enrolled at the purposely outskirted and ideologically left-winged Université de Paris VIII, Mitterrand’s socialist government had been in power for 8 years. Back then, the presidential mandate lasted 7 years (compared to today’s 5-year mandate) and Mitterrand clocked in two, taking his reign all the way to 1995. Coming from a conservative America still steeped in the dread of the cold war, I discovered a whole new territory of political action and debate, far more open, plural and intellectually lively to what I had known in the U.S. While Parisians shocked me with their lack of civic sense (dog shit smeared sidewalks, line-cutting, pushing without pardon), they nevertheless fiercely believed in carrying the collective “burden” of universal healthcare, a strong public school system that starts at age 3, and a superb state-run crèche system that allows women to continue their careers. I’ll never forget the pie graph (or camembert as they call them here) on my first tax form providing the break-down of how our tax money would be allocated: education was the largest budget! Education!! The priorities of the French could not have been more in contrast to those of my compatriots whose homologous pie would give its biggest piece to the Pentagon. It seemed to me the French generally made less money than their American or British counterparts, but their quality of life proved altogether better: they had five weeks of paid vacation, health care, early retirement, strong labor laws protecting the worker, intellectuals who spoke out in the media, films they considered art and artists they considered valuable. Add to this list the excellent food and drink, the beauty of Paris, the gorgeous coasts, the stupendous Alps and the castle-peppered rural lands in between…
Now, if it had been my destiny to be a banker I most certainly would not have stayed: bigger money can be made elsewhere. But as someone with an investment in literature and education where the returns are notoriously small, I’ve chosen to live in a country that has, for the most part, stuck to its collective commitments so that the disparities between the wealthy and the poor are not as grotesquely apparent as they are in the U.S. and Great Britain. France maintains a safety net the strands of which represent the beliefs and desires of its citizens. Sarkozy in the name of economic liberalism has begun to unravel this net claiming its maintenance too costly. Of course it is expensive, yet it is surely cheaper than sending troops to Afghanistan. Whether or not to maintain the social cushion is ultimately a question of priorities, of deciding together the kind of society we want for ourselves. Let us see how the French will express their priorities today.
April 29th, 2012 Comments(0)
“J’ai voté Marine, mais, bon… maintenant je vais voter Sarko.”
The cashier at Huguet Primeur was just about to ring up our purchases when she shamelessly shouted across the store that she had voted for Marine Le Pen. Her North African colleague scooping up Spanish hot house strawberries didn’t reply. My son and l looked at each other with raised eyebrows.
“She voted Le Pen, Mom,” whispered my son as we left the store.
“She certainly let us know, didn’t she?”
For those of you who haven’t followed the French elections, the Front National, France’s extreme right party, reeled in just under 19% of the votes in the primaries, a substantial gain from the 2007 presidential elections when it garnered 10% of the vote. Once upon a time, if the name Le Pen had popped up on a psychological test of associations, the most likely reply would have been “fascist.” Many Le Pen voters kept their persuasion private, aware of the collective disapproval it would encounter if voiced. As my son and I left the fruit and vegetable store, Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil came to mind: I began to wonder if the extreme right’s xenophobic and ultra nationalistic agenda had actually gained legitimacy; after all, a growing number of French citizens found its Europhobia, anti-Islamic rhetoric, anti-Americanism and France for the French manta normal enough to profess their adherence in such public places as the grocery store. Political analysts are suggesting the Front National vote was largely a vote of protestation, a way of telling politicians on both the left and the right that they’re out of sync with the needs, desires and aspirations of the common Frenchman and Frenchwoman. This may well be the case but I’m afraid such juvenile protestation doesn’t entirely explain the degree to which Le Pen has become a household name, one that is now praised rather than panned by a growing population, particularly of young people. A whopping 18% of French youth from ages 18 to 26 voted for Marine Le Pen, which indeed leaves me to wonder how this can possibly augur well for France’s future.
Fortunately Marine Le Pen is out of the presidential race, which now pits Nicolas Sarkozy (UMP) against Francois Hollande (Socialist). But the legislative elections will follow and Marine has just declared: “Si on arrive à l’Assemblée on va tout casser ! » (If we get to Parliament we’re going to raise hell.) We shall see. I do sometimes wonder what I would do if the Front National actually did come to power. I wonder if I would be denied the French nationality I acquired in 2001. Would my son and husband be denied theirs given my husband’s father is Swiss and his mother born of an Armenian–immigrant family? Could things actually get that bad? Maybe not. I don’t like to make paranoid projections. One of the professors of the program I direct said to me the other day: “I’m just so worried about property prices if Holland gets elected. Already the stock market has plunged.” Has it? I haven’t been paying attention. But it certainly seems paranoid to me to think that the real estate market in Paris will plunge if Holland gets elected. France has a capitalist system, albeit with more checks and controls monitoring it than its unbridled Anglo-Saxon counterparts: Holland’s likely election will not change this fact.
Next Sunday we go back to vote. I am particularly fond of the French voting ritual which strikes me as refreshingly artisanal: no dubious Diebold Election Systems here. The French vote in their public schools. You are first greeted by a volunteer citizen who verifies your I.D. and voting card. On the table in front of her or him are stacks of paper lined up each inscribed with the name of a candidate. You are supposed to take one of each (I couldn’t get myself to pick up Marine Le Pen’s) and are given an envelop by the volunteer citizen. You then venture into a curtained vestibule wherein you put the paper which bears the name of your chosen candidate into the provided envelop. You seal the envelop and leave the curtained booth, dumping the other papers into a waste bin.
My son picked these papers from the special trash bin. Notice how none bears the name François Holland.
Then you get into another line and wait your turn to drop your vote into an urn though before you do so, you must present your ID again and sign a register. They inquire if you are willing to come back at the end and count votes. I have always declined because I am embarrassingly bad at counting and believe those good citizens are better off without my help.
I have to say I’m looking forward to voting again next Sunday. In my neighborhood at least a communal spirit permeates the event and makes democracy feel important and in our hands.
Eight days to go… In the meantime I encourage you to have a look at this delightful animation film project by Étienne Chaillou. Have you ever dreamed of the President? My sister-in-law Elsa has. You can hear her story here:
April 22nd, 2012 Comments(0)
A writer’s path is rarely straightforward, particularly if she is living outside her country, creating a life for herself between two cultures and languages. My friend Lauren Elkin’s first novel Une Année à Venise has just been published in a French translation by Edition Héloise d’Ormesson. Lauren wrote the novel in English, shopped around New York for a publisher but ended up getting the manuscript into the hands of Héloise d’Ormesson, who loved it and made an offer to publish it. So the novel has come out in French first, which is uncommon, and Lauren has every reason to be proud of this distinction. Firstly, it is always a particular honour for an American author to be translated into French (let us remember that Gallimard’s endorsement helped get Faulkner to Sweden for the Nobel); secondly, it marks the beginning of a literary career that promises to be unique, vivacious and polyglot (Lauren is currently writing a novel simultaneously in English and French). The novel, which I’m looking forward to reading, recounts the tale of an American graduate student in Venice who, whilst pursuing her art history research, falls under the charm of the floating city and one of its gondoliers and finds herself involved with a mysterious Croatian woman looking for a hidden synagog.
Lauren earned her PhD last year and has been writing on a number of subjects, mostly literature-related, for publications such as The Guardian, Bookforum and The Daily Beast. She has also been an ardent blogger, which is how I got to know her five years ago when she posted an encouraging word about my novel Remedy. We became fast friends meeting, when our busy schedules permitted, at the Café Panis or the Café Chéri(e) for long talks over coffee.
When Lauren contacted me a few weeks ago with the idea for a book-launch party I readily agreed to host the event at Martha’s Place, the art space I run at Belleville. I’ve been itching to hold literary events there, and celebrating Lauren’s first novel was the perfect way to get started. Friday night a delightful group of artists, editors and emerging writers gathered for a Venice-theme party replete with Spritz and cicchetti.
I’m afraid we did drink quite a lot and I’m still a bit fuzzy today… Here are some pictures of the event:
April 12th, 2012 Comments(5)
Let’s Learn to Lob
Brother Wilfred must have been in his eighties when he coached the tennis team at San Joaquin Memorial High School – this was back in 1982. I don’t remember him ever hitting a ball with us, but he always had his racquet with him and would demonstrate smooth effective strokes, without the constraints of a ball. He’d repeat a stroke five or six times and say: “Now, go and practice this in the privacy of your boudoir.”
(This boudoir seems perfect for practicing – with the ball.)
This particular suggestion only made sense in the larger context of Catholic high school with its concern to curb and sublimate the adolescent sex-drive. I never tried perfecting my forehand and backhand in my bedroom, let alone my serve; might I have missed out?
On the job, Brother Wilfred outfitted himself in short-sleeved shirts and tennis shorts that stopped just above of the knee. In my memory he wore a baseball cap but maybe it was a bucket hat or a visor – peu importe. He had the rounded, turtle back of the elderly and an arthritic limp but his passion kept his spirit young. Strangely, what I remember most clearly about him were his stiff, swollen knees. They reminded me of cabbages yet they seemed as breakable as clay. Age deforms the body in a mysterious act of creation: I watched his wide, round knees with troubled admiration, fearing the day they finally failed him, he would fall harder than most.
A few weeks ago I came upon this typed note from him in a box of old letters.
I don’t remember winning. Nor do I remember losing. He’s absolutely right about the serve though; I never have been able to toss the ball properly. But what’s this about learning to lob? Moreover, why the queenly “Let’s”? It seems to have annoyed Brother Wilfred that I did a lousy lob. I was a fairly decent tennis player but not a good one; I’ve since learned that people who are left eyed and right handed as I am, rarely are. Brother Wilfred perhaps read more into my abilities than he should have; he sat down at his typewriter and plucked out this letter of stern encouragement motivated by a pedagogical belief that it would incite me to improve. It didn’t. At least not in the way he expected.
The lob gives an out-of-position player time to recover and prepare for the next ball. It is a delaying technique that requires precision to be effective: if the ball is not high enough it gets smashed by the opponent; if it’s given too much push it lands out of court, etc. For the tennis audience, the ball projected high in the air creates a moment of breath-holding suspense.
The lob interests me in as much as it shares a strategy with narrative. One of story-telling’s multiple functions is to stave off danger, the most obvious example of this being the conceit of The Arabian Nights. Shahrazad keeps the Sultan from murdering her by stringing him along with her entertaining stories. She was a master of the narrative lob. Yet even when there’s no immediate danger in sight, a story-teller might want to disrupt the neat, narrative arc that takes us from beginning to end and shift the reader’s attention toward “what is” rather than “what’s next?” By keeping us in an expanded present, the storyteller has found a way of mastering Time, which we all know will run out on us one day.
There was fashion in novelistic writing in the 18th century to lob en continu; the foremost of these literary lobbers was Laurence Sterne who deployed his radical method in The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy. Denis Diderot joined in on the other side of the English channel with Jacques le Fataliste et son maître. Both novels digress rather than progress; any advancement the story seems to make is swiftly foiled by a divagation, which is, in turn, rerouted by another aside, ad infinitum. The novels are confounding, outrageous, amusing, relentless works and both rely on lobs that, I suppose, are never allowed to land. For the fun to go on, the ball must stay in the air: defying gravity, after all, is the imagination’s most impressive power.
In writing my novel The Baby of Belleville I wanted to pay tribute to Sterne; admittedly I lobbed far above and beyond what current, literary taste deems safe and decent, but I did allow the ball to land, softly, from time to time. A review of the book mentioned it had “a plot of sorts.” Yes, I provided an intrigue with a bit of Mafia stuff going on; yet I invite my readers to enjoy those connections made in the air, while the lob arcs. I do believe that it’s in this interval that the real story gets told, or at least the one I most want to tell.
I am grateful to Brother Wilfred. He could have simply retired; at his age he certainly deserved the leisure. Instead he coached an unruly group of high school students and took us seriously enough to write us notes evaluating our game. If I tucked away his letter in a safe spot, where it has remained for the past thirty years, it was because I valued it.
Thank you, Brother Wilfred, for learning me the lob.
April 07th, 2012 Comments(2)
Pascal greetings from my tiny garden in Paris. Every Easter it rains here and tomorrow promises the same. The plants need water so I’m not complaining. Disappointing daffodils this year; they absurdly popped up in late January, then were zapped by the February freeze, so that all I have now are the stems — no blooms in 2012. But the coeur de marie (Bleeding hearts in English?) are dangling their little pink earrings on the branches and the tulips are pert and moiré rose. I’ve planted a climber called calystegia flore pleno. The catalog describes it has having a “sumptuous flowering”, but it looks frail to me and not as vigorous as advertised. Does anyone out there have experience with Miss Calystegia? Waiting for Ghislaine de Féligonde to bloom; that’ll probably happen in May. Zéphirine Drouhin and Madame Alfred Carrière have sadly passed away, due to a fungus. Rosemary nearly joined them but showed signs of revival today. Hops growing up the trellis thirstily. Forget-me-nots planted, primroses prettier than last year. What else? An invasion of Jewelweed (wild impatiens) throughout. Have pulled out hundreds and still hundreds remain. I’ve decided to leave them to tease the bees. They are very pretty and perennials. I’m not too fussy.
Of gardening Emily Dickinson writes ” I never sowed a seed unless it was a perennial – and that is why my garden lasts”
I think that’s the key.
Happy Passover and Easter to all!
March 31st, 2012 Comments(2)
Today I bought a broom.
This could almost be the first line of an Emily Dickinson poem, except that Emily never spoke of her purchases. As a recluse, she let her sister Vinnie buy the brooms.
Some might think brooms unworthy of verse because they hang out in dark closets, collect dust balls, bead the brow with sweat when put to use. But I promise you there is poetry in a well-made broom. Like the one I just bought at Quincaillerie Mirus, on the Avenue Jean Jaurès. Its parentage : the Ateliers Gilles Kerchene in Lapalud, a town in the Vaucluse. I did a little genealogical search on the Internet and found that the Ateliers employ handicapped workers. The broom then was confected by a disabled artisan who I can only commend for the trustworthy handiwork; never have I encountered a broom with such an aura. An aura of what, you ask? An aura of solidity, of earth goodness.
I was instantly charmed by the handsome wood handle, the elongated cloche-like stretch of smocked straw, the solid feel of it when gripped in both hands: it has a healthy weight, neither too light nor too heavy. I divined in this broom the ability to keep step to Eddie Palmiere’s mambo or Mozambique, the capacity to rocket toward a waxing moon with me astride. It is an ordinary boom and it is an extraordinary broom. If I had found it thirteen years earlier, my husband and I would have jumped over it at our wedding like Celts. In Emily’s time, perhaps all brooms were as solid, true, witchworthy; today’s facsimiles get churned out in Chinese factories; they’re made of plastic and cheap metal, have telescopic handles and micro-fiber fringes, all of which could cause a girl grief if ever she needed to fly. If ever she craved to prance.
What elation I felt when I left Quincaillerie Mirus with my artisanal broom! As I walked down the boulevard, the spring sun whisked the straw brush to gold, using the secret Rumpelstiltskin recipe, no doubt. I passed a street sweeper in his green attire, leaning against the metro gate, having a smoke. He looked at me, or rather at the broom, and nodded with admiration: “Ca madame, c’est un vrai balai!” (That, Madam, is a real broom!) Coming from a street sweeper who pushed his own eight hours a day over the dog shit splattered sidewalks of Paris, a man who knew the business of brooms like few do, the compliment compounded my pride. Call it a Quixotic moment, but I was certain just then I could fly right over the boulevard, above our building and down into our courtyard garden reciting Emily to the wind, wickedly.
She sweeps with many-colored Brooms –
And leaves the Shreds behind –
Oh Housewife in the Evening West –
Come back, and dust the Pond!
You dropped a Purple Ravelling in –
You dropped an Amber thread –
And now you’ve littered all the East
With Duds of Emerald!
And still, she plies her spotted Brooms,
And still the Aprons fly,
Till Brooms fade softly into stars –
And then I come away –
March 22nd, 2012 Comments(2)
Last October I gave a talk at The American Library in Paris entitled “When You’re Strange”. The talk was followed by a reading from THE BABY OF BELLEVILLE for which I was joined by The Belleville Choir, not a body of singers actually, but a group of daring friends who offered to lift their voices to the polyphonic passages of the novel: two in particular, both of which take place at the Café Chéri(e).
Harriet Lye, founder and editor of a glorious Paris-based literary and arts review called Her Royal Majesty, just published this talk on the HRM blog. She also included an audio of the reading. I particularly recommend the second passage we read in which the moms have a night out on the town and meet P. Diddy, read by the masterful and hilarious Brent Keever. All the choir members did a superb job and I would like to thank each of them: Harriet Lye, Charlotte Delattre, Agnes Brice, Susan Svoboda, Cecile Farkas and Brent Keever. Merci mes chers!
I invite you to go to the page in question and comment (that would be grand) or “like” if you will.
http://www.heroyalmajesty.ca/when-you’re-strange/
You’ll see how lovely the blog is and don’t hesitate to subscribe to Her Royal Majesty!
Bonne semaine à tous et à toutes!
March 18th, 2012 Comments(2)
My son’s second grade reader recounts the adventures of two protagonists, Picouic and Tigrelin, ( a dog and a cat) who gallivant around France and discover various curiosities and sites of cultural importance. A few weeks ago, my son read several chapters on Picouic and Tigrelin’s discovery of Rungis, the massive food market (the world’s largest apparently) seven kilometers outside Paris. The first incarnation of this market appeared in 1110 when it was established in central Paris at Les Halles. In 1969 the market was moved to Rungis in the suburbs, a move that many still regret. It was a bit like giving the city a gastrectomy. Recently I tried to obtain a pass to get into the gigantic, disembodied stomach but the paperwork required was daunting. I gave up. Picouic and Tigrelin managed to get in without passes. Their friend, the farmer who calls his cows “mes chéries,” snuck them in on his truck.
This week we read chapter 37 La Fabrication du Vin or The Making of Wine
A brief translation:
“Picouic and Tigrelin look at each other, delighted. It’s here that they make the most famous wines in the world, Bourgogne! Without making noise they follow the two men to learn more…
How fascinating it is to make wine! The man in overalls, the winemaker, explains to his visitors how to obtain the best crus of red wine.
– We are going to wait until September to harvest when the grapes are well ripened. We will choose the most beautiful grapes. Then we will press them to extract the juice, which we will then let ferment in a tank until it turns into wine. This wine we will put in a barrel to age in the cool of the cellar, for it is much better after several months, even years.”
I think you get the idea…
In France no one blinks an eye at this chapter on wine-making; nor does Picouic and Tigrelin’s reverent attitude, more appropriate to a visit to the Vatican, give the average French parent pause. Most children here have visited a winery by the time they’re seven – my son certainly has seen his share – and drinking wine is such an ordinary and yet holy part of French life that it is only natural for P & T to explore its fabrication.
Try to imagine such a chapter in a British or American second grade reader… The impossibility of Chapter 37 ever crossing the Atlantic speaks profoundly of our cultural differences in attitudes regarding food and pleasure, the material and the spiritual.
I also have a certain suspicion about Chapter 37. At age seven, Catholic children traditionally prepare for First Communion. Part of this preparation involves adjusting to the taste of wine so that the child does not retch or spit at the altar. I remember being administered sips of wine at dinner at that age and loving the tartness. First Communion was a breeze.
What I find suspicious is that this chapter on wine appears precisely in a 2nd grade reader destined for 7 year olds. And I don’t believe this is a coincidence. Nor do I think the connection with Catholic agenda is conscious. It’s like fish on Friday.
