by Carolyn Smyrl

hen the Sister City program between Tyler, Texas and Metz, France, began in 1983, one of its goals was the exchange of professionals between the two cities. That our family would be the first “guinea pig” family from Tyler to make such an exchange was a dream come true for us.

My husband Frank, a professor of history at The University of Texas at Tyler, and I had always dreamed of living for a while in France, influenced, perhaps, by his older brother Edwin who had lived and died there in the 1960s. Our daughter Vivian had been a Rotary exchange student in Aix-en-Provence during her senior year in high school and had participated in one travel-study course to Metz; our son Morgan had happily accompanied us two summers on travel-study courses in French to the lovely city of Metz in Lorraine province. There was no hesitation on our part when we learned of the opportunity for Frank to exchange teaching positions for a year with a professor at the University of Metz. Our entire family immediately began clearing calendars and planning our lives to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime chance to live abroad for the academic year 1985-1986.

I was in the middle of a two-year teaching contract at Robert E. Lee High School, so I asked for a year’s leave of absence. Morgan wrote for information on high school correspondence courses available through Texas Tech University and enrolled in a summer school to take all that he was allowed to take. Vivian hurriedly finished course work for her bachelor’s degree in the summer of 1985. By the time September arrived, we were all set to leave Tyler on our ten-month adventure.

There were several rocky moments in the last few months before we left Tyler. When we had first begun considering the exchange in the summer of 1984, we had agreed with a French professor, Jean-Claude Lejosne, that we would exchange residences and cars, as well as jobs. In the spring of 1985, he called to say that his family was not coming with him and that he could come for only one semester, so the arrangement about housing was off. Indeed, for a few hours it appeared as if the exchange were off entirely. Then, the same day, he phoned again to say that a second French professor could come for the spring term, thereby making the academic exchange again possible.
We were thus faced with the responsibility of finding and paying for our housing and transportation for the year, or opting to forget the whole thing. It was a dilemma for us, but having psyched ourselves to make the exchange, we decided to hold to the course we had set. So, on September 4, 1986, we departed from Dallas/Fort Worth airport, each with a footlocker, a suitcase, and high hopes of finding a suitable place to live when we got to Metz.

After stops in New York and Reykjavik, we landed in Luxembourg, to be greeted by Annie Cointre, the professor of English at the University of Metz who would come to Tyler in the spring to complete the exchange. She drove the Lejosne family station wagon which, by European standards, was large but which would not hold five people with four footlockers and four suitcases. After a few attempts to squeeze all of us into the car, Vivian and I elected to ride the train to Metz. Frank, Morgan and Mlle Cointre went in the car so that they could reach Metz in time to enroll Morgan in the lycée for the fall term. His school term would begin September 9.

The first few days in Metz, we stayed in Hotel Frantel while looking for an affordable apartment. Since we were seeking a furnished apartment, the available choices were limited. We found a small two-bedroom one with a fold-out couch in Sablon, a small quartier of Metz. It had the advantage of being only about fifteen blocks from Morgan’s school, but it was a thirty-minute bus ride through Metz to the university. Before the year was out, we had developed the necessary leg muscles to walk to either the lycée or the university without being “done in.”

The neighborhood where we lived consisted of primarily working class, middle-income families living in apartments similar to ours. We were on the second floor of a six-story building which had a large grocery store on the ground floor. We practiced many of our fledgling shopping skills in the downstairs market, much to the amusement of the neighborhood clientele.

The first mistake that I made was attempting to buy a cart full of groceries at one time. My full shopping cart brought such disbelieving glances from the other shoppers that first day, I began to notice what differences there were in our baskets. Many of them were not using carts at all, but rather packing their own personal market “caddies” directly from the grocer’s shelf. Certainly “caddies” would keep one from buying more than he could carry. When those shoppers reached the check-out stand, they unloaded their bag onto the counter, then reloaded it as the checker rang up each item. Not only did my full shopping cart draw strange looks from other shoppers in the store, but also when I checked out, I also realized that I then had all those groceries to sack and carry up to the apartment by myself. I came to understand why the French make frequent trips to the store and buy for only one meal at a time. Another difference I noted was that many of the shoppers bought only a half a dozen eggs at a time. Whether from lack of storage space or from lack of funds, I never knew. None of the other shoppers had more than one meal’s meat in his basket, and few had more than one or two canned items. Their purchases included items such as cheese, fresh vegetables, beer, wine, and various other items I could not identify without being obviously nosey.

As the first days went by and we settled into the routine of our new life, we found we needed a few items that our furnished apartment did not offer. The list of “essentials” we purchased that first week included a teapot, a brass cooking pot, a frying pan, a cheese grater, two kitchen knives, scissors, a can-opener, a stapler, a sugar bowl, a pepper mill, a hair dryer, a bread board, three blankets, a trivet, a mop, a tablecloth, and a television set. Otherwise, we relied on the items furnished with the apartment and what we had brought from Tyler. As Vivian pointed out, it was a lot like camping out.

In the meantime, our varied abilities with the French language were getting a workout. Of the above list of items, for instance, the only ones that I knew the correct French terms for were the knives, scissors, tablecloth, and television. For the rest of them, since we did not know how to ask for them by name, we had to describe their function to the salesperson helping us or find a department store that would allow us to poke around until we found the desired item. There are not any such department stores in Sablon, so we had to do that kind of shopping in centre ville, the central business district of Metz and bring our purchases home on the bus. The day we bought the TV, we made quite a parade.

The neighborhood grocery in our building continued to be my bête noire. One day I bought a chicken and four pieces of rumpsteak. Other shoppers looked at me as if I were a pig. I got so flustered that when I checked out, I failed to pick up the rumpsteak and sack it. I did not miss it until that night after the store was closed when I started to cook dinner. The next morning, I inquired at the store, and yes, they had found it. The butcher had put it back into the cooler, still packaged. The clerks looked at me as if they could not believe anyone could be careless enough to walk off after paying forty-six francs for steak and leave it behind. I felt like an idiot.

Perhaps that explains what happened the next time I went to the grocery. In my halting French, I asked for a pork roast all in one piece. I did not want it cut into steaks; I wanted it for a roast. “Entier,” I said. The clerk left and got a second woman to help me. “My French really is very bad,” I thought. I repeated my request, gesturing to the small pieces of pork in the counter. They called the butcher and told him what I had asked for.

He beamed, “With or without bones?” he inquired.

“Without,” I replied, relieved that we were communicating, but puzzled about why it took three of them to cut a roast.

The butcher disappeared into the cooler to emerge a few minutes later with an immense leg of pork on his shoulder. As he heaved it onto the chopping block, I thought, “The women called him because they could not carry it.”

He chopped off the shank end of the leg and proceeded to debone the rest of it. When he finished, there was a clod of meat about twenty inches long, twelve inches wide, and ten inches thick. He wrapped it and handed it over the counter to me. “Will that be all?” he asked.

“Oui,” I gasped weakly. I was so relieved that I had enough money with me to pay for it, I almost did not notice the clerks and customers who had gathered to watch.

We ate pork roast three times a day for five days. “My French is really improving,” I told my family, “I can now order a roast that will serve sixty.” “Entier” obviously means “entire,” not “whole,” in French. I was careful for the rest of the time we lived there not to order a “whole” anything else.

 

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