August 23, 2021: The Heart Has Its Reasons -

I’ve been watching Call My Agent, on Netflix. It's a French comedy series about a talent agency in Paris, complete with subtitles, hooray! It has been just my speed, as I’m recuperating from an elective surgery (nothing life-threatening, just deferred maintenance, thanks COVID for making my age mates and me defer maintenance, etc., I complained about this in a recent post already). It’s done now, and Better Late Than Never, right?

I had mildly hoped that I might catch some of the French even without the subtitles, because I took French in junior high, and then our daughter went to a French immersion school for a few years, and … I don’t know, I was just hoping some of the dialogue would enter effortlessly into my brain.  And some did, words or phrases. (D’accord.  J’ai peur.)

Then last night, a whole sentence: Mieux vaut tard que jamais. BETTER LATE THAN NEVER! Just like my deferred maintenance!

And there arose a vision of Mrs. Kimball, with her unlikely red hair. Mrs. Kimball insisted we memorize a proverb a week. Moreover, the proverbs would cumulate – by the end of the second week, we would have memorized two of them. By the end of the term, twelve.  We were expected to rattle them off, in order, at the end of the year.

SO! What was still in my memory box? And how much would be relevant to my recuperation? I dredged up eight proverbs, and two of those seemed apropos:

On n’a rien sans peine. (No pain, no gain.)

Pas à pas on va loin (Step by step, one goes far.)

(Remembering eight out of dozens is pretty lame, but then, I took Chinese for a couple of years, and I can still say Long time, no see.  That’s about it.)

What was great about excavating the memory box for French proverbs was that it was a mental distraction. I love a mental distraction when I am trying not to focus on physical or emotional discomforts. Give me something to think about! Let me (and this is the phrase I use) crawl way up inside my head, meaning: get me away from my body, my heart, my gut.

To that end, I want to thank several of the people who were supporting me while I was loopy with pain meds. One was my friend and former professor, who responded when I suddenly decided I wanted to talk about the “Language, Gender, and Sexuality” (that was the title of a course he taught) implications of undergoing surgery in an aging female body. I was carrying on about a mutual friend of ours who has been unabashed about his male body on social media lately, without shame or self-consciousness, as opposed to how I was feeling shy-to-embarrassed about my own ongoing decrepitude. My professor pal was right there saying Yep, you’re right, it’s a gendered thing!

It was great.

The other intellectual delight came from my dedicated vocab friend, who texted to let me know that “pee” is a euphemism for “piss,” P being the first letter of both, and that “piss” comes from the Latin “pissiare,” which basically is a little bit of onomatopoeia, intended to sound like someone peeing: pissiare.

Apparently, I enjoyed that tidbit so much that I was shouting as I read the text to Rick. When he gently let me know I had the volume up high, I said, “I’m DRUNK!” The nurses didn’t seem to care. I’m sure they’ve seen and heard it all.