The other day I was on my way to my workplace near rue Menilmontant; the metro was just clattering out of the elevated la Chapelle station toward, all too appropriately, Stalingrad. Lost, as usual, in the riot of thoughts and feelings that engulfs me when I am not actually faced with a firing squad or business meeting, my basic wish was to go elsewhere, almost anywhere, but work. And, just as I was reproaching myself yet again for yet one more of my usual non heroic attitudes, I looked up to see Fifi, Karine’s sister, flashing before my eyes. Like destiny.
I love Fifi; we are great friends; she has the knack of being bad gaily; we share that.
Face almost flat on the glass, I was sure it was her. Sure she was making a silly face in the window of the train that was just that moment passing in the opposite direction from mine, toward Barbès-Rochechouart, at the dirty big toe of Montmartre.
Who else could it be? In the whole of realm of France, what other forty-something woman would be mugging at a métro window like that first thing in the morning?
But, prudence!
Just the day before this totally unexpected, potentially happy, potential answer to my fonder wishes and, apparently, fantastically coincidental, encounter with Fifi, I had attentively listened to a National Public Radio program that explained coincidence in mathematical and psychological terms.
These terms were supposed to extract the mysteriousness from coincidence and, so doing, make another, existential delusion dry up and blow off into the ash heap of debunked superstition. It may just be that I am so often and so utterly mystified by what goes on that I can no longer even understand things that are crystal clear to everybody else, but I was mystified by both the mathematics and the psychology.
Concretely, the mathematics demonstrated beyond a doubt that a woman who has so far won four different lotteries four different times has reduced the odds of her winning each time she has won, from some ridiculously high number to one with only 15 or so zeros. Coincidence? What nonsense! In addition, it was explained, there were plenty of factors, such as the woman’s liking for gambling and her increased ability to do so, that should put a stop to all the breathless talk of coincidence. At only 10 or so zeros, we listeners were sternly informed, the woman’s chances of winning are now much higher than at first! Obviously, if she wins again, there won’t be the slightest coincidence in it; we’ve been warned.
Psychological terms provided the pièce de conviction, as you say in French, to the mathematical proofs. Surprise, it turns out, is one of the six human emotions (anger, fear, disgust, happiness and sadness are the five others – they group together just like 0s&1s do to make binary feelings like schadenfreude or ambivalence…).
We humans feel surprised, Pardi!, when something unexpected happens, such as winning a zillion-to-one-odds lottery or seeing Fifi’s particular transit of Paris out of 4.1 million other ones I might have witnessed, even if she did unfairly lower the odds by mugging in the window.
“We” are not at all like goats or wolves. “Our” – the human – tendency to surprise at the unexpected event makes “us” lend too much importance to said unexpected events. So, unlike a goat or a wolf, “we” will stand there gaping rather than attacking or running off or something.
So. No coincidences here, Sir, no, Sir, just us roostin’ chickens!
I was reminding myself of all this when I got a text from Fifi.
“What big eyes you have!”
But could it really be Fifi? Perhaps, she is just sitting at home mischievously referencing my surprise before an unexpected event? Perhaps it was really her on that train.
Perhaps, but without a clear, scientific confirmation, I was not ready to believe in such a happy encounter with one of my favorite human beings. That would be a coincidence.
“C’est toi?” I texted.
“C’est toi?” she texted back.
The insolent tone seemed to indicate Fifi.
But we should pinch great grandma before we take what may be a mere vegetal echo for true consciousness. No?
I got on my handy blower, hoarsely crying “Feef?”
A bit of fuzzy sound came back.
I said again, “Feef? C’est moi. Que fais-tu là?”
– Ahhhh??!! Robin…!, came the reply
“Berlin?”
– Robinetterie!
It was Fifi.
Robinetterie – she was after faucets and maybe nuts and bolts and stuff!
From time to time, of course, nut-bolt&screw-buff Fifi goes looking for hardware to brighten up or advance some aspect of her multiple continuous improvement projects.
You would never know this from looking at her, but Fifi is very much the handywoman. She delights in planning, redesigning, rethinking, measuring, pouring concrete, hammering in precise joists, laying drywall, drilling, sawing, what have you. She’s helpful and loyal, too. When I’ve got some 10 foot by 40-inch by 38-inch beams to place against a crumbling stone wall – something that has more frequently happened than you might imagine – I can count on Fifi.
Fifi also loves all the stuff-hunting that goes with being a handyperson; don’t be surprised or misled into thinking you are facing a coincidence if you ever see Fifi pawing a bin of stainless steel objects on New York’s Canal Street or – whatdoyoucallit? – that Tokyo parts market, one fine day. Also, Fifi is a boy’s-own kind of girl; she manages to be everybody’s darlin’, even in the Paris region’s dusty, frusty, testosterone-poisoned quincailleries.
“Quincaillerie” is what the French call, appropriately, I think, both a hardware store and hardware.
Let’s say, for instance, that Fifi spends the whole of a sleepless night planning a faux-marble series of late Corinthian-style garden colonnades as supports for her cannabis plants. Eyes staring at the ceiling, she will probably decide she needs a merchant’s handful of rare, titanium, ferrorugululated pre-war artisanal four-and-two-quarter-half-inch (English imperial measure) platinum-tipped light suction-screws for the delicately molded pedestals of the colonnades. Her habitual affability means, of course, that she always knows who to see in order to know just what improbable quincaillerie has such quincaillerie, at the lowest price on the continent to boot.
So, from time to time, as soon as she gets her brats off to school, she’ll set her cap at getting the stuff in hand so her project can go forward.
It is fun to see Fifi hobnobbing with the seemingly pre-industrial-era geeks who haunt the more historic quincaillerie. For me, it brings back childhood. For, while some Dads rout their children out of bed to do chores or search for chestnuts or, even, for rare books, mine routed me from my bare pallet to search out new worlds of quincaillerie. Like Fifi, Dad sought rare screws, bolts, nuts and battered, twisted metals, plastics and organics, all squirreled into the more obscure nooks of the North American countryside.
As it was fascinating to the boy, it is fascinating to the man to watch the wondering frowns of the geeks as Fifi deftly dismisses their pretended incomprehension:
“Parbleu, Gaspard! This… this… femelle has knowledge of our secrets.”
It is risible to watch them tremble in her air of having musky secrets of her own: “Diable, Clovis! Prestement! Fetch maman and the priest!”
As I think of it, gender and era aside, and surprising as it may seem, it really is no coincidence I enjoy Fifi’s company as I did my Daddy’s. True, Fifi’s Goth-leather-performance-artist dress-style cuts a sharp contrast with Dad’s Sears Roebuck worn-till-rotted rags. And, no, I have never yet found Fifi in her boxer shorts brewing tea at four-thirty in the morning – ‘though I have found her on the couch, staring red-eyed and weary at the ceiling.
But, boy, is Fifi’s modus operandi vitae reminiscent of my Daddio, now long dead.
For Fifi, too, is a bricoleur – the French noun for somebody who is handy, of course, but especially the word used by Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe a human who links the patchwork pieces of existence to create an environment of interest and sense.
I never knew, as infant, child, or adult, a finished family house; neither has Fifi provided one for her own kids. But what interest, is, was, will forever be, there – suprising animals, unexpected mechanisms, bolts of sunlight and cloth! And what profound sense! Sending skyrockets into the Atlantic night, laughing as a baby laughs, Dad made the ethereal spheres sing; my Fifi throws some stones together, cocks her head at me like a peacock, then ties a cosmic fetish around my wrist that is as true, as real, as good as any by the ancient shamans.
Wiry, virtually hairless bricoleuse Fifi, born in 1970, 5-foot-five, 89 pounds, as alive as they come, and burly, hairy bricoleur Dad, born in 1920, 6-foot-two, 200 pounds and as dead as a mackerel share a take on a sense and interest that can belong to me only through them.
They also share a birthday which became for my Dad a day of inexpressible grief in the death of his protégée, Darlene, a young woman whose interest in getting the material world up and moving for the sake of a paycheck and Progress, usually at extreme temperatures, was equal only to my Dad’s. She had coke-bottle glasses, an impossible, small squeaky voice, carried around a slide rule in a way suspiciously similar to my Dad and seemed always embarrassed to meet you. And, on his birthday, as Fifi was being born, he watched as Darlene was killed in a grisly industrial accident.
That silly face was Fifi on her way someplace for some reason, no doubt, now, about it.
I hollered, “Montmartre, Feef?”
– “Montmartre, mon chou? Tu veux déjeuner à Montmartre?”
“Not really, Feef. Montmartre! A lot of hassle!”
– “Tu dis, Abbesses?”
“Ahh. Non! That’s a hassle, Fifi! I’ll have to change three times. What can we possibly eat there?”
– “Super, Tracy-chou. Vers 13.00. C’est parfait.”
She knows just the place. She’ll reserve.”
Well.
Seeing her is truly wish fulfillment; I really didn’t want to go to work. And didn’t even Mick Jagger say that you can’t always get what you want, but you shall get what you need?
An hour or two later, Fifi is full of la joie et bonne humeur; her purse is full of the obscure screws or whatever else it was she was looking for. What’s more and perhaps not unexpectedly, Fifi doesn’t look like my Dad, at all; dark as sultry sin, she’s as good-lookin’ and high-steppin’ as her sister, which, coincidentally, is good for my surprisingly fragile ego.
Fifi’s satisfied. So, so am I.
Besides, there’s nothing beats walking arm-in-arm in Paris in the Fall with someone who makes me laugh, even if I have to pay it with a fairly pricey lunch that, I silently feel, may have been softly extorted from me. As nourishment, it hasn’t amounted to much, either.
“Look at that, Tracy-chou,” Fifi says, stopping in front of display window for the Galérie l’oeil de la femme à la barbe, an itinerant gallery set up in a shop front – a galerie d’art & d’objets nomade. She is pointing to a very lovely collar of feathers, semi-precious stones and metals and such by a creator called Emilie Chaix.
We admire it awhile, and then, full of the energy of coincidence, walk on.
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