22 October 2021

Normandy pictures from June 1997









In yesterday's post I mentioned my friends Jeanine and Henri, who lived in Rouen. Here they are in a photo that I took in June 1997. We were spending the afternoon in Dieppe. I lost touch with them more than 15 years ago, for a variety of reasons. I had known Jeanine and her three children since 1972, way back when I was 23 years old and was working as a teaching assistant in a high school in Rouen for a year. I think I met Henri for the first time in 1989, when I spent a few days resting in Rouen after surviving the big Loma Prieta earthquake in northern California. Henri was born in 1925, and I imagine he has passed away.

My mother came to France four times in her life. The first was in 1982, when I was getting ready to leave France and return to the U.S., not knowing whether I'd ever come back. I did, obviously, but not until 1988. My mother came back to France again in 1997, when I was on sabbatical from my job at Apple and spent a month in Paris and Rouen. That's when I took this photo of her with Jeanine in Dieppe. Ma also came to visit Walt and me in Saint-Aignan in 2004 and again in 2005. She died in 2018. I think Jeanine was just four years younger than Ma, so maybe she's no longer living. June 1997 — nearly 25 years ago, was also when we all spent an emotional afternoon walking around in the American military cemetery on the D-Day beaches near Bayeux.

That year, my mother was traveling with her granddaughter — my 15 year old niece — who will turn 40 in 2002. It's hard to believe how fast time as gone by. Another place we visited in 1997 was the site of the ruins of the old abbey church at Jumièges, which is about half-way between Rouen and Le Havre. My niece took the photos above and below with an old film camera, and I'm glad to have them. I went back to Jumièges with Jeanine, Henri, and CHM in August 1998. Normandy has played a big part in my life ever since I spent that school year working in Rouen in 1972-73. Except for the dreary, rainy Normandy weather, Walt and I might have considered going to live there when we decided to leave California in 2003. We decided to look for a house in the Loire Valley instead, and we found one after a short four-day search.

The two people who have been instrumental in my nearly life-long struggle with the French language are Jeanine and CHM. Jeanine befriended me in 1972. Her son was one of my students at the high school where I was working in Rouen. She and her children had moved to Rouen only a year or two earlier (she was born and grew up in Champagne) and she didn't have a lot of friends in Rouen, which was widely known back then as a very cold, bourgeois city — in other words, not very welcoming to newcomers. Her husband had recently left her for another woman. One of the most generous things Jeanine did for me before I really got to know her was come to my tiny apartment near the train station in Rouen in late November 1972 to bring me a turkey because she had heard that Americans celebrated a  holiday called Thanksgiving and always cooked a turkey on that day. The turkey was scrawny, just barely plucked, and still had its head and feet attached. But it was a turkey, and I cooked it. I don't remember if it was good or not.
 
Another thing Jeanine did for me was teach me a little about French cooking — how to make mayonnaise and vinaigrette, for example, and how to serve and enjoy Normandy cheeses. I wasn't earning enough money to be able to afford meals in restaurants. Jeanine was glad to let me sit in her kitchen while she cooked dinner, answer my questions, and let me help as much as I could. She invited me for dinner at least once a week, including my American friends when they were visiting. Jeanine was easy to talk to and needed friends. My French improved tremendously. By spring we were saying tu and toi to each other rather than vous. It was a good time in my life.

Here we are, Jeanine and me, in a 1997 photo taken by Henri, with the cliffs along the French side of the Channel coast in the background.

15 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Yes, Judy, it's been quite a story. I haven't even talked (recently) about the CHM part of it all.

      Delete

  2. Tfhis post is doubly interesting for me because of what it says and because I know all the actors in it except your niece.
    It takes me back more than twenty years. Jumièges and Saint-Georges de Boscherville. Memories!
    Talking about mayonnaise, it was you, Ken, who told me how to make one. I made my first real mayonnaise at age 72 ! Better late than never, they say.
    I was supposed to post this in the wee hours, but I went to sleep on it !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It was thanks to Jeanine. She was the first French person I ever became friends with. She not only opened the doors of her home to me, but we also did some traveling together, with her two younger children. We went to Reims, for example, for a weekend and I saw the cathedral there for the first time. Jeanine's mother-in-law, her children's grand-mother, lived in a row house literally just steps from the cathedral... looking at the map, I think it might have been on the rue Cardinal de Lorraine. She cooked dinner for us; she served us veal kidneys cooked in a red wine sauce, which was certainly something I had never eaten before. We spent the night at her house. On the return trip to Rouen, Jeanine drove like a Formula One pilote, at some point going 200 kph out on country roads in the dark, on a rounte that took us through through Soissons, Compiègne, Beauvais, and Gournay-en-Bray back to her villa outside Rouen proper, on the heights in Mont-Saint-Aignan. Was that prophetic or what? Jeanine always had food ready for friends and guests. A bowl of boiled potatoes, a jar of cornichons, a cold roasted chicken or some slices of ham, a bowl of her home-made mayonnaise, some good bread and cheese, and a green salad in vinaigrette. She had lived in Besançon for a few years before moving to Rouen, so she always had Normandy cheeses (camembert, livarot, pont-l'évêque, neufchâtel) but also good Franche-Comté cheeses, especially comté. We often did Sunday excursions to Honfleur, Dieppe, Étretat, Lisieux, Deauville etc. But not Le Havre, LOL.

      Delete
    2. Thank you, thank you, Ken for this. Knowing Jeanine makes it more vivid. I’ve always known important she was for your assimilation of French culture and, pourquoi pas, French cooking! I know how you must feel. Please read between the lines. Again, thank you.

      Delete
    3. What I meant was HOW important....

      Delete
  3. I just looked again at this post and it opens the door to so many questions and so many comments. I’ll limit myself to two. First, a question, was the first photo taken with your digital camera? Second a statement, I recall very vividly sitting in Jeanine’s salon with her, you, Henri and probably also Valérie for apéro.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Can I infer from what you said above that Jeannine and Henri felt the same way about le Havre than me?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of course, itwas...as me?

      Delete
    2. No, they didn't feel that way, but Jeanine's daughter did. She was always prickly. She said: Oh, Le Havre. Comme vous êtes américains, vous allez peut-être aimer
      ça !
      She's the one who was so nasty to me when her brother pulled the stunt he pulled. Tu sais de quoi je parle...

      Delete
    3. Jeanine was snobby enough, always dressed in her YSL apparel, but her daughter was disagreeably snobby. Both of her brothers turned out to be dishonest — like their father, who I had the honor to meet a time or two. He was worse than any of the children.

      Delete
    4. I read that you had the horror to meet him...LOL!
      I definitely need new glasses. I hope it could be arranged.

      Delete
    5. He was pretty horrible. We sat down at the dinner table and he started the conversation. "Who killed Kennedy," he asked. I said nobody knew for sure. He said: "Well, I'll tell you who killed him." I stopped listening at that point.

      Delete
    6. He wasn’t very clément!

      Delete
  5. It is a forever joy to be welcomed into a French family setting. I've been traveling to Nashville, Louisville and Cincinnati so I'm catching up now. Jeannine was the class in her family.

    ReplyDelete

What's on your mind? Qu'avez-vous à me dire ?