Waking Up in Paris by Sonia Choquette

Author:Sonia Choquette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2018-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

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One of the ways we became grounded in Parisian life was that Sabrina cooked dinner for us every night. Going to the markets every morning on rue Cler and on rue Grenelle to buy fresh food for dinner became the central point of our day and an important ritual to help us feel like more than visitors. And with each daily visit to the various shops, we began to get to know and sort of make friends with the shopkeepers.

Or at least some of them. The young man at the greengrocer on rue de Grenelle developed a big crush on Sabrina and within a week he was offering her little gifts of apples and plums and radishes every time she came in. Soon the little gifts became bigger gifts, and she found herself coming home with an extra bag of fruit or vegetables each day. It got to be so much that she began to feel awkward going in there. I told Sabrina to just relax and enjoy the attention. I, for one, appreciated the bounty.

The women who worked at the boulangerie across the street, on the other hand, never seemed to recognize me even though I was there every morning like clockwork. Even so, they were always nice and sang, “Bonjour, Madame” out to me like morning songbirds, so it was a pleasant stop.

The cheese man next door was another situation altogether. He was so gruff and impatient, he was downright scary. The problem was that we couldn’t avoid him—his cheese shop was simply the best in the neighborhood and only three minutes from our front door. Every time we went in, he would first ignore us for a while, then suddenly turn our way and shout, “Dites-moi!” which meant “Tell me,” with an impatient shrug, as if we were holding him up from something urgent. We could never speak up fast enough for him. We wanted to ask about the different cheeses, but when we tried to ask, he brushed us off, so we pointed to whatever looked good and crossed our fingers, hoping we made the right choice. It was a hit-or-miss way to choose cheese, but we mostly had hits.

One day I asked innocently, “What is that cheese?” pointing to something that looked delicious. He immediately snapped back, “It is clearly marked, Madame, on the small sign in front of it. It is fromage de chèvre,” meaning “goat cheese.” He was so unpleasant it occurred to me that maybe he didn’t like Americans. But soon after that, I saw him be equally nasty to a French customer, so I realized he simply didn’t like people, and his treatment of us was nothing to take personally. We started calling him the “Stinky Cheese Man” after that, like the character in one of Sabrina’s and Sonia’s favorite childhood books, quietly laughing under our breath every time we went in there and got ignored or yelled at. He reminded me all over again that customer service is simply not a given thing in the small shops in Paris.

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