Excerpt from MOTHER TONGUE by Karen Stephen
Not until I spotted a knob of granite sticking up from the valley floor like a two-hundred-foot-high thumb hitching a ride, its backside sheared off as if by a giant axe, did it strike me that Corsica, this place where my life had begun, might have a special character of its own.
![A Punta di U Diamante -U Spidali (l'Ospedale) -Corsica [Copy-protected photo by Thierry Tramoni]](https://karenstephen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/rock-knob.jpg)
A Punta di U Diamante -U Spidali (l’Ospedale) -Corsica [Copy-protected photo by Thierry Tramoni]
**** A great read. Originally intended to read during my fifteen minute breaks at work, I soon discovered that, if I wanted to keep my job, I would have to take this book home and read it because it is just so hard to put down...READ MORE
**** Very intriguing, about a place I knew nothing about…READ MORE
**** Once I started, it was impossible to put down…READ MORE
THANKS SO MUCH!
A Symphony of Lonely Hearts
Now is the only time.
Right now I am creating a state of mind,
a joyful moment
to carry me into the next hour,
travel with me though the morning,
thread its way into the afternoon,
trickle down to tomorrow,
and spill over into next month, next year
to color all the days of my life.
I always fantasized that that joyful moment
that turns into a contented hour
and becomes an afternoon of delight
could only come if my hand were held,
my face caressed,
my yearnings satisfied
by a man—a mythic prince.
But my prince is not here right now.
He is not present in this Valentine moment of mine.
He is off smiling that charming, little-boy smile,
the one with the dimples and the heavy-lidded longing,
for someone else.
He is placing a perfect rose on her pillow,
or so I imagine.
I could as easily imagine
that he is asleep at this moment,
or lost in the shadow of a frown.
Perhaps his jaw is clenched in anger,
his lower lip quivering with grief.
Yes…he could be sharing a blissful moment
with the woman he loves.
But they could just as easily be sitting apart,
hearts aching,
in a dark place edged with uncertainty.
Will our paths ever cross again?
Will we need or desire each other if that moment comes?
Silly questions that beg to be left unanswered.
I have only now,
only this Valentine moment of mine.
What shall I do with my moment on this red-letter day?
I will breathe in my solitary pain.
I will breathe in the pain of all those who find themselves alone this day.
I will breathe in the corroding poison of lost dreams—mine, theirs.
I will breathe out a measure of loving kindness,
That soft breath out will soothe me
and flow in endless ripples
to comfort all the solitary souls.
Could a moment in a lover’s embrace,
With its uncertainty, its impermanence,
ever produce such a melody,
such a true and clear harmony,
as the symphony of a thousand lonely hearts
connected by a single breath out?
I enjoyed reading this blog about teaching preschoolers French. My daughter only became fluent in French after living there two years after college; not because I started her with French lessons in kindergarten. But her two little ones, now two and five, have been spoken to at home primarily in French by her and in English by their father. The oldest has attended a French immersion preschool for four years. So both are totally fluent as well and have no American accent, unlike their mother who has a very slight accent. They switch from one language to the other depending upon who they are speaking to and readily translate for those of us in the family who are not bilingual. My daughter is hoping to continue their bilingual education here in the SF Bay area as they move on to elementary school.
This post is part of the Multicultural Kid Blogs Blogging Carnival, hosted this month by Isabelle at Multilingual Education Cafe. This month’s topic is The Multilingual Classroom. Be sure to follow the link to Isabelle’s blog to find the other great posts on this topic, starting March 17!
As some of my dear readers may recall, I made a New Year’s resolution to teach French lessons at my daughter’s preschool. I’m following through and now I’m two months in.
Teaching preschoolers is no easy feat, but trying to teach them in a foreign language – wheh! Way harder than I expected. And I never expected a cake walk. I knew I’d be spending a lot of time outside the classroom brainstorming ideas, prepping, finding and making props, and even test driving ideas on my own kids before taking my lessons to the school. Still – it’s even more than…
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Anticipation was in the air. My granddaughter eagerly awaits the arrival of her guests, hoping against hope that Elsa and Anna will keep their promise made at Disneyland months earlier to come to her 5th birthday party.
The food has been carefully prepared.
Anna’s Frozen Heart Strawberries – White chocolate coated
Kristoff’s Ice Blocks – blue jello jigglers with white cream that rises to the top
Olaf’s Noses
Elsa’s Frozen Castle – Carefully prepared by the birthday girl’s mother and all edible
Grandma Mimi (c’est moi!) is ready to enjoy the festivities.
And who should arrive at precisely 2:30? Why, it’s Elsa and Anna who put on a fabulous show for all the children and their parents. Disneyland characters have nothing on this duo of local high school musical theater stars. Elsa began by helping the children apply Frozen tattoos. Anna supervised the creation of little marshmallow Olafs.
And then the big moment came as the children gathered to listen to the story and the songs from Frozen. Anna began with her story and First Time Forever.
Their story continued and then Elsa sang Let It Go
And for the finale of the party, the children joined in for one last rendition of Let It Go with their idols. A magical day for the birthday girl and all the children and adults. It was the party we never even dreamed about as children.
Selections from the 2014 award year
I’ve just received an unexpected and most delightful invitation to submit my novel MOTHER TONGUE for the annual American Library in Paris Book Award designed for authors of fiction or non-fiction books written originally in English about France or the French-American connection. MOTHER TONGUE follows the journey of a young American child advocate attorney with Corsican roots who flees to Paris after a personal tragedy. Serving as a lingua corsa (native Corsican tongue) translator for Liberation, she finds herself caught up in another case of a missing child and uses her secret knowledge of lingua corsa to infiltrate the Corsican separatist movement to find the child and avert another tragedy. A suspense-filled French-American connection for sure. C’est moi! Wish me luck.
The winner of the Award receives a prize of $5000.00 and she is invited to Paris, with air travel and accommodation at the Library’s expense, for an award ceremony including a public reading. All nominated authors will have their books added to the permanent collection and showcased in a special display for six weeks in the fall of 2015. They will also be invited to the award ceremony and be considered for a public reading.
From their website: The American Library in Paris has attracted and celebrated writers for all of its ninety-four years. The Library was created in part as a memorial to a young American poet, Alan Seeger, who wrote the well-known poem “I have a rendezvous with death” not long before he died in action in France in 1916. One of the Library’s founding trustees was Edith Wharton. Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among many other writers of note, contributed reviews to the Library’s literary magazine, Ex Libris. Stephen Vincent Benet composed John Brown’s Body at the Library. And authors of every generation have worked and spoken at the Library: Ford Madox Ford, Archibald MacLeish, Colette, Henry Miller, André Gide, Anaïs Nin, James Baldwin, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, and Mary McCarthy, to name a few.
Today the Library is the pre-eminent center in Paris for evening talks by prominent authors who write in English. The Library now looks to extend its commitment to outstanding writing by awarding an annual literary prize [of $5000] under the supervision of its Writer’s Council. A generous grant from the Florence Gould Foundation has allowed us to make this idea a reality.
The collection of over 120,000 books at the American Library in Paris
The material in the Library’s collection of over 120,000 items is composed primarily of works by American and other English-language authors, and features significant holdings in American history and civilization, American literature and literary criticism, American artists, and general aspects of American culture and society. The collection is otherwise described as encyclopedic, covering all topics of knowledge.
On car buying and losing weight…part two. This is a cautionary tale. When you sign a lease for the car, pay attention to those mileage limits.
So I’m weighing (no pun intended) my options and I discover that I’m already over the mileage limit on my leased Kia Optima. Sort of snuck up on me like those daily calorie counts. I take off to the Kia dealer to see if I can negotiate. But, no. If I buy elsewhere, I owe the last 6 payments, 20 cents per mile over the limit (already racking up at $540 and on its way to a gut-wrenching $1870 by August) plus a $400 penalty for early termination.
I’m sitting there in a morose mood, waiting for the finance manager to work out what the deal would be if they pay off the leased car for me and I buy a new one from them. Enter stage left…Dante, an amiable low-pressure sort for a car salesman, who asks if I’ve ever considered a Kia Soul. Well, I’ll admit, color freak that I am, I’d had a slight hankering for the boxy little chartreuse green (aptly named Alien II) charmer. I gave a moment’s thought to the Solar Yellow which is almost Corvette-ish but makes the Soul look like a Stingray that got smashed between a brick wall and a semi and morphed into a pudgy yellow cab.
So off we go on a test drive in an Exclaim (!) version with all the bells and whistles and the snazziest 18″ alloy wheels I’ve ever seen. I’m a sucker for wheels…and a few other things in life!
I found the 2.0 L engine was powerful enough but a bit sluggish on the acceleration as the car mags say (okay, I shoulda gotten the Porsche Cayman and attached a trailer for the little ones….but then there’s the arrest and jail time, etc.). The three driving modes took me from cushy comfort to hard-driving sporty, the high end audio system had speakers that glowed different colors and vibrated with the music (and just who is looking at their speakers at the bottom of the side doors while they’re driving…maybe the young have better peripheral vision), and, compared to the Mini I had been salivating over the day before, one can actually put five full-sized adults in the car without first shrink-wrapping them. Also, because it rode a bit higher (reminding me of my long-deceased 1972 Chevy van) and with windows all around, I had the visibility that an old person like me needs in order to avoid making a squishy mess out of pedestrians and splintered relics out of telephone poles. I suddenly realized that I could have semi-sporty, major cute, even that stand-out-in-a-crowd vibe, and have a way out of that onerous lease.
Then the part I dread…the deal. There was $400 off for this and $1000 off for that which sounded fair to me, but I knew I needed to consult my daughter first–the one I had not consulted when I signed that lease. Mom, she muttered with great annoyance and authority, get out of there right now. We need to comparison shop. On my obedient way out the door, the finance guy, in Superbowl warm-up mode, almost tackled me by my ankles and offered another $1000 off, but out the door I went.
Later in the day, my daughter took me to another dealer–who ended up quoting $1800 less on the exact same car (they would bring it up from the first dealership I had visited). But my daughter escorted me out that door as well. She gets on the phone to the first dealership and closes the final deal. If I come back in–by now it was nearing their Sunday 6 pm closing time–I could have it for $2100 less than their morning offer. SOLD AMERICAN…or should I say Korean.
The moral of the story…take along whomever among your family or acquaintances can function as a premier wheeler dealer if you are ever car shopping. And keep your mind open. Your car is out there. I found mine…c’est moi and it matches the lime and pink Fragonard fabric on my couch.
My how he grew! From that scary first week in the ICU at UC Davis to toy trucks to tractors.
From a “new ear” party to riding a bike to playing pirate with Mimi on his 5th birthday
From his first computer to artist to app developer.
From testing out the school playground that Papa designed, to a hug for little brother Sam, to getting his first iPhone.
Most of all, being a loving son, a great grandson, a star student as a freshman in high school, a cross-country runner, and a young man of integrity and faith. What more could a grandmother have? Except of course that there are three other younger ones just like him!
I know that other women get serious about losing weight when they start to salivate over a slinky new dress or want to look gorgeous for an upcoming wedding or be presentable at the beach. But not me. I think about whether I can fit into the car I want to buy. Right now I have a perfectly good KIA Optima which has plenty of room, sort of an automotive version of Not-Your-Daughter’s-Jeans. For those behind the times, NYDJ is the upscale très cher brand sold at Nordstrom’s with enough spandex woven in to bridge the gap between what size you think you are and what size you actually are.
I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that at age twenty-two, I owned a 190SL and could easily slide my then svelte body into its red leather seats and drive from San Diego to Illinois along Route 66 without a care.
Now I’m almost fifty more years down the road of life and I want a sports car again.
So off I went last week to look at a Honda S2000 which stopped production in 2009. It’s like a Miata’s much better-looking older sister with a tiger under the hood. I eyeballed it carefully as the salesman escorted me to the lot. Then I gingerly lifted one leg and squeezed myself into the seat. You know how bucket seats have raised edges–well, those protuberances felt like spikes sticking into my ample derriere, threatening to set off a major bout of sciatica. I extricated myself as gracefully as possible, relieved that the car’s battery was dead–my excuse for not taking a test drive. I’m sure the salesman had a momentary scary thought that he was going to have to bring in a crane.
But back in the showroom was a charcoal gray 2007 Porsche Cayman, with all the dangerous moves and fast-snapping speed of its namesake, the caiman alligator. It appeared roomier and I took the chance. Sliding in comfortably and with the smell of leather in my nostrils, I took to the highway. It sprang to life, although the dark tinted windows all around made me feel like I had just joined the subterranean world of drug lords. 
Price was right but the little upturned faces of my two and four-year-old granddaughters flashed before my eyes. They would want to ride in Mimi’s car but would be denied. How could that ever work!
So today I found a compromise. A brand new 2015 MINI 4-door hardtop. A entirely new model this year for those wanting easier access to the back seat without the clunky appearance of the Countryman. And in my favorite color Volcanic Orange with a black top plus a sunroof, automatic transmission and enough power, especially in Sports Mode, produced by its 2.0 Liter 4-Cylinder Engine with MINI TwinPower Turbo 189 HP engine to make you believe you’ve got your foot on the pedal of a sports car. Would have snapped it up on the spot but my daughter stepped in and brought me back to reality. I had gone in thinking I would take advantage of a real deal–but that was, of course, on the 2014 models. Isn’t it always true that you think you’ll buy the stuff of sale but see the new stuff and succumb? So although they were willing to deal, I need to wait 6 months until my lease is up on the KIA–big bucks to get out of leases early.
And, in the meantime, I can lose a few more pounds so that this smart and sassy little Volcanic Orange MINI will fit Mimi like a glove.
My first contact with Guy Benhamou was in the mid-1990s when he covered the Corsican situation for Libération, known as Libé, the French daily newspaper founded by Jean Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May, 1968. Originally an extreme left newspaper, it underwent a number of shifts during the 1980s and 1990s to take the Social Democrat position. At its peak in 2001, it had a circulation of about 170,000 and was the first French daily to have a website. Mr. Benhamou was kind enough to send me copies of all of his coverage, which I translated from the French, and wished me well in my endeavor to write [at that time a screenplay] about Corsica.
Prior to 2000, Mr. Benhamou conducted extended interviews at the request of Jean Michel Rossi and François Santoni, in which the two very frankly discussed the inside skinny on the paramilitary groups in Corsica and commented on the personal feuds, the corruption, and their own covert negotiations with the French State. By doing so, the two were breaking the island’s ancient code of silence, which they admitted they had punished others for doing so.
It was not surprising that in August 2000, Rossi and his bodyguard died in a hail of automatic fire as they sat outside a bar having their morning coffee. A chief rival was suspected but only imprisoned on other charges. Santoni realized he was living on borrowed time (having survived an assassination attempt in 1995) and became even more vocal, causing great embarrassment to his enemies. He even predicted his own assassination, which indeed did occur on August 17th of 2001 when gunmen invaded a wedding he was attending.
Even as recently at 2012, there were twelve assassinations related to the movement, which is now described by some commentators as being dominated by organized crime.
However, Corsican Nationalism in its purer political and social form is still alive and well on the island. Edmond Simeoni, now in his late 80s, described as the “Father of Nationalism” is one of the movement’s major inspirational voices. The Nationalists call for the political sovereignty of Corsica, partially based on cultural and ethnic differences between the island and the mainland, the promotion of the Corsican language (lingua corsa or in French Corsu) and its compulsory teaching in schools, the limiting of tourist infrastructure and policies promoting tourism, and in its place sustainable economic development, compliance with building permits and coastal law, and the recognition of political prisoner status for members of the Corsican nationalist movement including those who have committed acts amounting to common crimes. It is to these efforts that I dedicate my novel, especially the preservation and use of lingua corsa.
After the publication of Pour solde de tout compte, Guy Benhamou was himself the target of reprisals, a prime example of an attempt to kill the “messenger” that has played out so recently in such a tragic way in Paris at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Guys home was strafed with automatic fire as is seen in this news video and he and his family were put under police protection. He continues as a journalist to this day but focuses on non-political reporting. My character of Pierre Benatar was inspired by Mr. Benhamou but not intended in any way to be a real-life portrayal of this famous and courageous journalist.
Rossi, Jean-Michel and Santoni, François. Entretiens avec [as told to] Guy Benhamou. Pour solde de tout compte, Les nationalistes corse parlent. Paris, Éditions Denoël, 2000.
Dr. Karen Stephen aka Doc Flamingo 