Yes, Duke University, and beyond

About the last place Walt and I saw before leaving the U.S. to come live in France in 2003 was the Duke University campus. I don't know if Walt had seen it before, but maybe we had driven down there when we lived in Washington DC in the 1980s. Duke, in Durham NC, is where I left from when I left North Carolina. I had been very lucky to be able to do my undergraduate studies there. If I hadn't been awarded a good scholarship by Duke, I probably would have enrolled at the University of North Carolina, I and probably would have spent four happy years there. But that didn't happen. Then, in 2003, there I was leaving the U.S. (maybe for good), and Duke was again my jumping-off point.

    
I really didn't plan to make French my major academic subject at Duke. I had been studying the language for five years (four of those years in high school) when, in my second year at Duke, I decided not to take any more French classes. I had done my duty and had greatly enjoyed the classes in French literature taught by a famous professor named Wallace Fowlie. But I wasn't sure what career I would pursue with a bachelor's degree in French as my only credential.

    
When I think back on it, that first semester of my sophomore year, with no French classes, was one of the most miserable years of my academic career. Second semester, I signed up for a French conversation class. That helped. Then I made the decision to focus on French for my two final years at Duke. And I also signed up to spend a semester in France as part of the Vanderbilt University study abroad program in Aix-en-Provence in 1970, with which Duke had an informal partnership. I was happy again.

    
When I finished my undergraduate studies, I applied to graduate school programs at several big universities in the U.S. middle west — Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. Following the advice of Duke's professor Fowlie, I ended up deciding to enroll at the University of Illinois. I spent five years in the French department at Champaign-Urbana, alternating with six years in France (Rouen and Paris) facilitated the university. In 1982, I left Paris after living there for three years and returned to the U.S. I settled in Washington DC, where CHM hired me as his assistant on the editorial staff of a magazine published in French by the U.S. government. We worked in French, so for me it wasn't very different from living in Paris. I didn't suspect at that point that I would end up living in California for more than 15 years. Or that I would now be wrapping up 20 years of residency in France.