La Rentrée: Enlightenment New Year [by Paul Tracy Danison]

 

We are not alone, we will never be alone, with our memories of our sweet sons and daughters at the Rentrée.

Calculating when France’s New Year – called la Rentrée, “re-entry” – begins and ends is pretty simple. Unlike Chinese New Year, which requires some functional knowledge of “lunisolar” calendars and historic Han migration patterns, you just have to know when most families are back in town after using up most of their accumulated government-mandated, yearly paid-vacation time. That’s around about when the school year starts, the first week of September.

In France, as elsewhere, harvest traditions, cooling temperatures and shortening days, along with the new school year, combine to make the end of summer a special moment. But, in most places, and this despite a clear plea from John Keats, the accent is on bittersweet Goodbye. La Rentrée, though, is a beginning, a renewal, a hopeful Hiiiiii again. The On se retrouve à la rentrée! of the month of June is a Happy Holidays! equivalent, meaning “We’ll pick up again in a New Year!”.

Rituals of reuniting – retrouvailles – go on throughout the month of September. Families – sure, many, of course, are sick of the enforced togetherness of summer holidays but just as many have been scattered to the winds by the obligations of blended families, summer studies and camp and travel. Families, as well as friends and colleagues enjoy the retrouvailles, but also discreetly celebrate putting on the familiar harnesses that retrain and regulate even our most tender relations.

It is good, after all, to get back into the swing of ordinary life. Endlessly invoking the start of school – I am plenty sick of this by the first week of October, let me tell you –  is a way of both underlining new beginnings in a broader sense and emphasizing the importance of individual participation in the workplace and in society as a whole.

At la Rentrée, in politics, as elsewhere in society, spectacular absurdities and failures can be overlooked and, if convenient, even forgotten, and new ones publically planned and executed. On streets and in offices and shops, people are brisk and mostly relaxed, despite endless warnings and reminders about all manner of dangerously loose -ists and -isms. In private life, rare is the face taut with suppressed distaste or anger; the hell that is the Other has not yet had the time to make the ordinary person hysterical.

I am not alone, I think, I shall never be alone, I think, in having golden memories of la Rentrée: of my sweet son, of the touch of his hand, of the sound of his voice, of his little kisses, of our morning strolls to school in the crisp autumn air.

Our step is firm. We together share a leisurely stride, Tobias, you and me, an easy-yet-determined progress fit for a new beginning.

Hearing still sharp from a long, peaceful night, ears attentively cocked for something possible, something new, we sometimes hear the sharp clink of cups and saucers.

The noise and fury of the city, still only rises at a distance, as if from behind a garden wall, just out of view scenting the watery light with hints of diesel, mid-day heat, fatigue, but as yet it has no dominion.

We randomly duck into the less-used paths, passages and streets, zigging and zagging to avoid the busyness shaping around us.

Almost every lamppost shows patches of rough scale, glued bits of shredded white paper spotted with shards of fading color, where posters have been scraped off.

The sidewalk is so wet. Concierges or store keepers splashing cleansing buckets of water? Or has it rained in the night? Will it rain, do you believe? Misty this morning.

We raise our noses to sniff the air, catch the aroma of baking and, instead of hints of rain, we get faint whiffs of the fruits and vegetables stacked in open wood & wire boxes and leaned against the still-dark doors of the neighborhood restaurants.

Son? Is that strawberries? Still?

Toby, Son, you slow down in front of every shop window.

You ask dozens of questions, some so improbably pertinent they slow me down:

• Dad?
• Are we capable of flying?
• Dad? Can we fly?
• Dad? If people are poor why can’t they just use a cash machine to get money? Daddy? Are you old like Horace’s Dad?
• Dad? If somebody served you red beasts, would you go right ahead and eat them?
• Why do people like croissants? I hate ‘em. Do you?
• Dad? If they made fewer croissants, would they make more flan nature?

Despite your patter, you listen attentively, your gaze somehow intent on my face, you seem always two delicately-measured mountain-goat –  mountain-lion? –  leaps ahead of me.

Is it those expensive, brand name, ultra-white, ultra-red, ultra-blue sneakers, giant on your feet, like truck tires on a mini-sedan?

How is it you don’t trip over your undone laces, Tobe?

The school takes dark, heavy shape above and through a high evergreen hedge around the little public park opposite the school. The park also serves as the school playground.

I can already see the two doors, Ecole de garcons, at left, Ecole de filles, right. Separate doors was once progress.

Before my time, they meant girls were included in the great public instruction undertaking.

Progress in my time is one big double-wing door for all. All underlined, bold italic.

You raise your eyes, Toby, and you see what I see.

Your questions abruptly cease.

You yank your hand from mine.

-  Shshshshsh! Dad!

You don’t want your pals to know you can speak English.

You don’t like to be different yet.

I was watching carefully as you grew up. Still, it all escaped me. I expect that’s how it is when individuals are involved in anything. Unpredictable, I mean.

You can see your little pals, Tobe, boys and girls both, shuffling there between and around their parents. The parents are already checking their phones between a distracted Salue! to one another.

Some mamans stand off from the scene, solemn, up the sidewalk, toward the main street. African, mostly Malians, the women dress like nuns from a color-worship cult, topping off full-length, voluptuously form-fitting dresses of elaborate vegetal motif with prim black hijabs.

More than one has a baby pressed against her back, wrapped in a big kerchief whose ends are tied tightly under her breast.

These women watch the scene without apparent expression; their kids dart and swarm with the rest in front of the doors.

Like everybody else, they are waiting for that big middle door to crack open and snatch up their children. Then, these women will be seen no more and nowhere until the doors open again and the kids tumble out at the end of the day.

In silence now, Tobias, we approach the scene. We melt together in the jostling crowd.

Then, with a half wave – Shy? Proud? Embarrassed? – you glide away from me, lose yourself to my sight.

I recognize other parents, mamans and papas alike. I nod, smile, say howdy. Where did you go on vacation? Was it good? Super?

But you know this, Toby. You are watching me, lost to me as you are seeming to be.

Perhaps you don’t know this.

As always, without nameable cause, I am glad to catch Nathalie’s eye.

I don’t know Nathalie’s last name or even whose maman she is. I only see her here, fleetingly, on school days.

Gladness spreads over Nathalie’s face, too.

I hurry over to her. We smile broadly together, squeeze hands warmly, then turn away, she back to her little knot of friends, me to nodding, grinning and remarking.

Nathalie and I, it seems, are to each other one of those people we are just naturally glad to see.

Perhaps we are part of the same karmic druplet and, so, quite intimate on another plane of existence. I can’t really say, Tobe.

But our mutual delight does add to the pleasure of bringing you to school.

I check my watch, watch the big door for signs of movement, linger, a little restless.

Jules Ferry, who, as a minister in the first years of the Third Republic, put together France’s école laïque, wanted a school strong enough to challenge the power that religion, family and tradition exercise over the individual.

Ferry, as Robespierre and Voltaire before him, wanted to set up Reason as humankind’s arbiter. He told France’s primary teachers, the maîtres and maîtresses d’école, that they, not the priests or even the parents, were the legitimate bearers of moral light: L'instruction religieuse appartient aux familles et à l'Église, l'instruction morale à l'école.

The idea of the école laïque, the idea that built this very school where my boy is in fourth grade, that I’m physically standing before is to take that boy away from me, make of him a freethinking individual in a liberal state in a liberal society. With me or against me.

For me - I think for all the others, too, even the kids - the numen of the original idea makes this return to school, the opening of the school doors, much more than just a bittersweet parting in the cycle of family life. It is a new start, an entry into an individual life: leaving the family behind (parents are not allowed to accompany their children into the school) is just the penny paid to cross into a brighter world.

Bathed in morning light, Madame Bouledesuif, chef de l’établissement, school principal, appears on the threshold. As usual, she’s a bit disheveled. Her smile is reserved, but not unfriendly.Et hop!  First, one side, then the other, swings open.

Bouledesuif’s evidently her functional self. She has presence. That’s the essential.

She stands to one side, leans her head slightly out and welcomes the kids with a bit of principal-like hectoring on orderliness, precedence and calm.

She said she saw yellow leaves thickly spread under the warming Autumn sun when she turned into the park after leaving her children to their first day at school.

The parents of the littler kids, the ones new to school, hand them in to waiting maîtres or maîtresses. They wear very matter-of-fact expressions. The kids respond to this unsentimental reception by keeping emoting to a fairly manageable minimum.

The experienced kids just skip on in, pretty much two-by-two and, as previously advised by Madame Bouledesuif, pretty much calmly. There’s no pushing or pulling, no headscarves, no kippas, no crosses, no crying and no uniforms.

I can’t see Tobias in this Rentrée parade, so he must have gone in under my radar.

I turn my mind to my less sublime concerns and take out my cell phone. I call Karine.

She tells me she’s just now walking back from taking her children to school.

She says, Sure, let’s meet at Voltaire.

Later in the morning she has an appointment not far from there.

Do I snap my fingers? Does she just come running? Do I just expect her to?

I turn and walk up toward Voltaire, where I go into a café overlooking the busy intersection and wait for her to pedal from where she is to where I am.  

Comments

[Valerie B. Writer]

Happy Fall. I really liked your article on La Rentree!!! VBW

[Tracy Danison]

Thanks! And a nice fall for you!

[Marissa Despain]

This is a lovely essay. Thank you.