When
my dad was at 19 he served a mission in for the LDS church in the
France-Belgium region of Europe. He learned to speak French and made
some French friends, people who later moved to Utah. They had a few
kids about our age and on occasion we would go and play with them.
What I remember most is that they had a boy a little younger the Matt
and I who was named Pichu. Which we thought was hilarious because we
would always mispronounce his name to make it a joke as in Pee-Shoe,
or in the phrase, 'Pichu, pees in his shoe'. We thought it was pretty
dang funny verging on hilarious and for some reason he thought wasn't
that funny, but we are talking about a boy who comes from a country
that considers Jerry Lewis the end-all of comedy. We always thought
that they were funny with all their French habits, and
French-speaking, and their high toned mother who would get so mad
that she would first start yelling at us in English and then loose
her rhythm in her second tongue way and then pick back up yelling at
us in French. This was really bad for the contrite because it was
just so silly to be yelled at in French that I would have to keep a
smile from creeping up the best I could or she would give me a
un-funny French slap. The problem was that the French phrase for
'quickly' or 'with all due haste' is 'tout
de
suite'
and that to me sounded like 'too sweet'. When I wasn't being yelled
at I was teasing her son and daughters telling them they better clean
up 'too sweet'. It is not a funny joke as you may have noticed but it
was enough to make me giggle when she was yelling at us to stop
fighting 'too sweet', 'too sweet'; poker face. . .giggle. . .slap.
In
regards to the French, generally in the west it is considered okay to
mock their language and their culture, and how they surrender
quickly, and often, but people often times are under the delusion the
French are great lovers, great cooks and are all top-shelf
sommeliers. While there may well be great French lovers, and knowing
wine is 50% snobbery and 50% condescension they probably have that
wrapped up as well, but insofar as great cooking is concerned this
family definitely made up the exception. There's nothing in the
genes and there's nothing the national character I guess because
every time we went to their house they served some nameless glop kind
of casserole. The worst thing they made and which was completely
culinarily unforgivable was rice in a bowl that they would top by
pouring ketchup until it was completely covered and then mix it
loosely down in. Her kids loved it and it was absolutely disgusting
to me, they would do the ketchup thing to Mac-n-Cheese as well, but
being a good American boy I never surrendered and never ate that crap
without a fight.
