Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (11 page)

Our village in Normandy is too small to have its own paper, but there are several that serve the region and come out once a week. If it’s not that hard to get written up in, say, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
it’s really,
really
not hard to find yourself in
L’Orne Combattante.
In fact, it’s hard to stay out of it.

The farmer across the road from us, Robert “Bob” Gerbenne, was profiled in the late 1990s. “The Man Who
Truly
Whispers to Horses,” read the headline. The picture was of him, seeming to gossip into the ear of his Percheron, a dappled mare as solid as a dump truck. Hugh’s been in the paper as well—twice, as a matter of fact. The last story was about his landscape paintings, and the one before that appeared in October 2004. They wanted to talk to an American about the presidential election, a who-do-you-hope-will-win sort of thing. The resulting article, titled something subtle like “Local Man Distrusts and Despises Bush,” was, said the Horse Whisperer,
“pas mal,”
meaning “not bad.”

Weeks before the 2008 election, the
Combattante
interviewed our friend Mary Beth, who was born and raised outside Boston and moved to our area after marrying her French husband. “Being a white American, you wouldn’t vote for a black man, would you?” the reporter asked.

Though crudely phrased, the question was fairly common, and not just in backwater Normandy. In the year before the election, I traveled pretty much nonstop: Italy, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, and all through the U.K. and Ireland. These were book tours, so I sat for a lot of radio and print interviews. In the U.S., unless you’ve written about politics, you don’t expect political questions. Overseas, on the other hand, it’s pretty much
all
you get, at least if you’re an American. I could have written a history of frosting and still they’d have asked me about Guantánamo, and my country’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Accords.

It’s not that I don’t have opinions about these things; I just don’t feel they’re in any way special. Sure, I follow the news. I read the papers and listen to the radio, but I’m not privy to any inside information. When it comes to politics, all I can offer is emotion. My perspective might be slightly different, but so is anyone’s when they live overseas.

I remember my dad calling after the Iraq war started and asking if I felt safe on the streets of Paris. He had the idea that the Europeans, and specifically the French, had become openly hostile and were targeting Americans—even throwing bottles at them. If that was happening, I neither saw it nor read about it. In my experience, people were curious. They had plenty of questions, but I was never insulted or singled out in any way. It might have felt different were I a Bush supporter, but as it was, the president brought my neighbors and me together. It was like the Small World pavilion at Disneyland, everyone on the same page.

As the 2008 primaries began, so did the predictions. The reporters in Greece, the ones in Australia and Amsterdam and Dublin, all of them assured me that America would never elect a black president.

“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ll bet you that
half
of America could elect a half-black president.”

“No way,” said the German who’d once spent a week in Los Angeles, the Brazilian whose wife was from Tennessee, the Englishman who’d seen
Borat
four times. Everyone was an expert, and what they all knew was this: Americans are racist.

It always sounds false when white people talk about how gentle and color-blind they are. “One thing I’ve learned from my many Asian, Latino, and African American friends is that we’re all brothers under the skin.” Statements like this make me queasy, but they’re really no worse than the often heard “How could I be racist when my first boyfriend was black?”

My first boyfriend was black as well, but that doesn’t prove I’m color-blind, just that I like big butts.

If I’m walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I’ll say, “Hello.” This because, if I
don’t
say it, he or she might think that I’m anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I’d walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians.

Does this make me rac
ist,
or simply race
conscious?
Either way, I’m more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people. I think a lot of Americans are. Thus, when questioned by foreign journalists, I’d predict with confidence that Obama would win.

This would get me a shake of the head and a look that translated in five languages to “Poor dreamer.”

As in every election since 1998, I voted absentee and spent the month of October traveling across the United States on a lecture tour. It was all presidential campaign all the time, and what I liked was the directness of it. In France there’s a far-right political party called the National Front. Blame the immigrants, stop building mosques, down with the EU: their policies are fairly predictable. The National Front’s then leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, defined the Nazi occupation of his country as “not particularly inhumane” and had twenty-five convictions against him, an assortment ranging from grievous bodily harm to anti-Semitism to condoning war crimes. He’s an older guy, pale, his eyes made small by thick-lensed glasses.

When political campaigns are held in France, you see posters on the street, but they’re rarely attached to a home or business, the way they are in the States. Drive through any American city in the month before an election, and every other house will have a sign in front of it. So-and-so for president, for county commissioner, for town slut, etc. I also appreciate that Americans wear campaign buttons—identifiers saying either “You and I are alike,” “I am a huge asshole,” or, in the case of a third-party nominee, “I don’t mind wasting my vote.” It makes everyone so wonderfully easy to pigeonhole. I only wish that the buttons could be larger, the size of plates, at least. That way you could read them from a greater distance and have more time to activate your scowl. Still, it beats what you get in France, which is nothing. No pins, no bumper stickers. You can’t ask people who they voted for either. It’s considered rude.

I thought about this in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen won a primary in our village. After the votes were tallied, I took a walk, looking into the windows of people I thought I knew and thinking,
You? Really?
Those same neighbors unwilling to discuss their own election were, of course, more than happy to talk about mine. After the 2008 conventions it was
all
we talked about. “So who are you voting for, Obama or McCain?” they wanted to know.

I said to Hugh, “They have to
ask?
” I mean, really, you’d hope it would be evident.

After my month in the United States, I flew back to France, arriving on the morning of November 4, just as Americans were going to the polls. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, I caught a cab. The driver was listening to talk radio, and during my long ride into Paris, the callers explained why my candidate could never win. “Americans are racist,” they said. “Americans are afraid of anything different.” You’d think that Obama was the French candidate for president of the United States, that’s how possessive and prematurely disappointed everyone was. The cab driver got into it as well. “Who do you think will win?” he asked, and when I said Obama, he told me flat out that it was not going to happen.

So then, of course, it
did
happen. And everyone was like, “Obama!” Even people I didn’t personally know, cashiers at the supermarket and such who identified me by my accent. “Obama!” they cried, and, “You did good.” I’d like to say that their tone was congratulatory, but there was something else in there as well. Not “How wonderful that you have a thoughtful new president” but “How wonderful that you elected the president we thought you should elect.”

I was in London during the inauguration and watched the ceremony on the BBC, which reminded me every three seconds that Barack Obama was black and would become America’s first black president. At first I thought that this was for blind people, a little reminder in case they forgot. Then it became laughable:
Barack Obama, who is black, is arriving now with his black wife and two black children, a group that will form America’s first black First Family, which is to say, the first group of blacks elected to the White House, which is white and not black like them.

It got on my nerves, but then I thought,
If America elected its first gay president, I might want to hear it a few thousand times.
It might
take
a few thousand mentions just to sink in. For me, Obama’s race had nothing to do with my voting for him. I liked that he could deliver a speech, this as opposed to our previous two Democratic candidates, both of whom spoke as if they were reading the words phonetically in Korean and didn’t know where to put the emphasis.

In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable. One after another, they all threatened the same thing: “If McCain doesn’t win, I’m leaving the country.”

“Oh,
right,
” I’d say. “You’re going to leave and go where? Right-wing Europe?” In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church. The doctor might be a woman who became a man and then became a woman again, all on taxpayers’ dollars, but as long as she saves the stem cells, she’ll have the nation’s blessing.

That’s just me, though, being insensitive. Certain people might brand me “mean-spirited,” though I think that’s the pot calling the kettle black. States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don’t want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don’t want to marry a homosexual, then don’t. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor’s options? It’s like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Of course, Obama too was against gay marriage. Except for a couple of decided long shots, all the candidates that year were. Being for it was the kiss of death, which, again, can’t help but tick me off. I mean, honestly,
that’s
the deciding issue? Many of those who have fought and voted against it are Democrats, and that depresses me as well. But you pick and you choose, don’t you? Some things you can sit on, and others you can’t. While waiting for my party to come around, I listened to my French neighbors, all of them joyous and patting me on the back. “Obama!” they cried. “Obama! Obama!” I offered in return an increasingly forced smile, thinking,
Oh, get your own black president.

It was one of those headaches that befall every airline passenger. A flight is delayed because of thunderstorms or backed-up traffic—or maybe it’s canceled altogether. Maybe you board two hours late, or maybe you board on time and spend the next two hours sitting on the runway. When it happens to you it’s a national tragedy—
W
hy aren’t the papers reporting this?
you wonder.

Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is. “They told us we’d leave at three instead of two thirty, so I went to get a frosted-pecan wrap, and when I came back they changed the time to four on account of the plane we’d be riding on hadn’t left Pittsburgh yet. Then I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us that an hour ago?’ and they were like, ‘Ma’am, just stand away from the counter, please.’”

Because I’m in the air so often, I hear this sort of thing a lot. In line for a coffee. In line for a newspaper or a gunpowder test on the handle of my public radio tote bag: everywhere I go someone in an eight-dollar T-shirt is whipping out a cell phone and delivering the fine print of his or her delay. One can’t help but listen in, but then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, “Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!”

On Halloween, when I see the ticket agents dressed as hags and mummies, I no longer think,
Nice costume,
but,
Now we have to tag our own luggage?

I mean that I mistake
them
for
us.

The scariness, of course, cuts both ways. I was on a plane in the spring of 2003 when the flight attendant asked us to pray for our troops in Iraq. It was a prickly time, but brand-new war or no brand-new war, you don’t ever want to hear the word “pray” from a flight attendant.

You don’t want to hear the phrase “I’ll be right back” either. That’s code for “Go fuck yourself,” according to a woman who used to fly for Northwest and taught me several terms specific to her profession.

“You know how a plastic bottle of water will get all crinkly during a flight?” she asked. “Well, it happens to people too, to our insides. That’s why we get all gassy.”

“All right,” I said.

“So what me and the other gals would sometimes do is fart while we walked up and down the aisle. No one could hear it on account of the engine noise, but anyway that’s what we called ‘crop dusting.’”

When I asked another flight attendant, this one male, how he dealt with a plane full of belligerent passengers, he said, “Oh, we have our ways. The next time you’re flying and are about to land, listen closely as we make our final pass through the cabin.”

In the summer of 2009, I was trying to get from North Dakota to Oregon. There were thunderstorms in Colorado, so we were two hours late leaving Fargo. This caused me to miss my connecting flight, and upon my arrival in Denver I was directed to the customer service line. It was a long one—thirty, maybe thirty-five people, all of them cranky and exhausted. In front of me stood a woman in her midseventies, accompanying two beautifully dressed children, a boy and a girl. “The airlines complain that nobody’s traveling, and then you arrive to find your flight’s been oversold!” the woman griped. “I’m trying to get me and my grandkids to San Francisco, and now they’re telling us there’s nothing until tomorrow afternoon.”

At this, her cell phone rang. The woman raised it to her ear, and a great many silver bracelets clattered down her arm. “Frank? Is that you? What did you find out?”

The person on the other end fed her information, and as she struggled to open her pocketbook, I held out my pad and pen. “A nice young man just gave me something to write with, so go ahead,” the woman said. “I’m ready.” Then she said, “
What?
Well,
I
could have told you that.” She handed me back my pad and pen and, rolling her eyes, whispered, “Thanks anyway.” After hanging up she turned to the kids. “Your old grandmother is so sorry for putting you through this. But she’s going to make it up to you, she swears.”

They were like children from a catalog. The little girl’s skirt was a red-and-white check, and matched the ribbon that banded her straw hat. Her brother was wearing a shirt and tie. It was a clip-on, but still it made him and his sister the best-dressed people in line, much better than the family ten or so places ahead of them. That group consisted of a couple in their midfifties and three teenagers, two of whom were obviously brothers. The third teenager, a girl, was holding a very young baby. I suppose it could have been a loaner, but the way she engaged with it—the obvious pride and pleasure she was radiating—led me to believe that the child was hers. Its father, I guessed, was the kid standing next to her. The young man’s hair was almost orange and drooped from his head in thin, lank braids. At the end of each one, just above the rubber band, was a colored bead the size of a marble. Stevie Wonder wore his hair like that in the late ’70s, but he’s black. And blind. Then too, Stevie Wonder didn’t have acne on his neck and wear baggy denim shorts that fell midway between his knees and his ankles. Topping it off was the kid’s T-shirt. I couldn’t see the front of it, but printed in large letters across the back were the words “Freaky Mothafocka.”

I didn’t know where to start with that one. Let’s see, I’m flying on a plane with my parents and my infant son, so should I wear the T-shirt that says, “Orgasm Donor,” “Suck All You Want, I’ll Make More,” or, no, seeing as I’ll have the beaded cornrows, I think I should go with “Freaky Mothafocka.”

As the kid reached over and took the baby from the teenage girl, the woman in front of me winced. “Typical,” she groaned.

“I beg your pardon.”

She gestured toward the Freaky Mothafocka. “The only ones
having
babies are the ones who
shouldn’t
be having them.” Her gaze shifted to the adults. “And look at the stupid grandparents, proud as punch.”

It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something’s said by a stranger I’ve been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, “Listen. I’m with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.”

If the grandmother’s criticism was coming from the same place as mine, if she was just being petty and judgmental, we could go on all day, perhaps even form a friendship. If, on the other hand, it was tied to a conservative agenda, I was going to have to switch tracks and side with the Freaky Mothafocka, who was, after all, just a kid. He may have looked like a Dr. Seuss character, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t love his baby—a baby, I told myself, who just might grow up to be a Supreme Court justice or the president of the United States. Or, at least, I don’t know, someone with a job.

Of course you can’t just
ask
someone whom they voted for. Sometimes you can tell by looking, but the grandmother with the many bracelets could have gone either way. In the end, I decided to walk the center line. “What gets me is that they couldn’t even spell ‘motherfucker’ right,” I whispered. “I mean, what kind of example is that setting for our young people?”

After that, she didn’t want to talk anymore, not even when the line advanced and Mothafocka and company moved to one of the counter positions. Including the baby, there were six in their party, so I knew it was going to take forever.
Where do they need to go, anyway?
I asked myself.
Wherever it is, would it have killed them to drive?

Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It’s sort of like time travel. One minute you’re bending to unlace your shoes, and the next thing you know you’re paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering,
How did I get here?

No sooner had I alienated the grandmother in Denver than I was trapped by the man behind me, who caught my eye and, without invitation, proceeded to complain. He had been passed over for a standby seat earlier that morning and was not happy about it. “The gal at the gate said she’d call my name when it came time to board, but hell, she didn’t call me.”

I tried to look sympathetic.

“I should have taken her name,” the man continued. “I should have reported her. Hell, I should have punched her is what I should have done!”

“I hear you,” I said.

Directly behind him was a bald guy with a silver mustache, one of those elaborate jobs that wander awhile before eventually morphing into sideburns. The thing was as curved and bushy as a squirrel’s tail, and the man shook crumbs from it as the fellow who’d lost his standby seat turned to engage him.

“Goddamn airline. It’s no wonder they’re all going down the toilet.”

“None of them want to work, that’s the problem,” the bald man with the mustache said. “All any of them care about is their next goddamn coffee break.” He looked at the counter agents with disdain and then turned his eye on the Freaky Mothafocka. “That one must be heading back to the circus.”

“Pathetic,” the man behind me said. He himself was wearing pleated khaki shorts and a blue T-shirt. A baseball cap hung from his waistband, and his sneakers, which were white, appeared to be brand-new. Like a lot of men you see these days, he looked like a boy, suddenly, shockingly, set into an adult body. “We got a kid looks like him back in the town I come from, and every time I see him I just thank God he isn’t mine.”

As the two started in on rap music and baggy trousers, I zoned out and thought about my last layover in Denver. I was on the people mover, jogging toward my connection at the end of Concourse C, when the voice over the PA system asked Adolf Hitler to pick up a white courtesy phone.
Did I hear that correctly?
I remember thinking. It’s hard to imagine anyone calling their son Adolf Hitler, so the person must have changed it from something less provocative, a category that includes pretty much everything. Weirder still was hearing the name in the same sentence as the word “courtesy.” I imagined a man picking up the receiver, his voice made soft by surprise and the possibility of bad news. “Yes, hello, this is Adolf Hitler.”

Thinking of it made me laugh, and that brought me back to the present and the fellow behind me in the khaki shorts. “Isn’t it amazing how quickly one man can completely screw up a country?” he said.

“You got that right,” Mr. Mustache agreed. “It’s a goddamn mess is what it is.”

I assumed they were talking about George Bush but gradually realized it was Barack Obama, who had, at that point, been in office for less than six months.

The man with the mustache mentioned a GM dealership in his hometown. “They were doing fine, but now the federal government’s telling them they have to close. Like this is Russia or something, a Communist country!”

The man in the khaki shorts joined in, and I wished I’d paid closer attention to the auto bailout stuff. It had been on the radio and in all the papers, but because I don’t drive and I always thought that car dealerships were ugly, I’d let my mind wander or moved on to the next story, which was unfortunate, since I’d have loved to have turned around and given those two what for. Then again, even if I were informed, what’s the likelihood of changing anyone’s opinion, especially a couple of strangers’? If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn’t theirs be?

“We’ve got to take our country back,” the man with the mustache said. “That’s the long and short of it, and if votes won’t do the trick then maybe we need to use force.”

What struck me with him, and with many of the conservatives I’d heard since the election, was his overblown, almost egocentric take on political outrage, his certainty that no one else had quite experienced it before. What, then, had I felt during the Bush-Cheney years? Was that somehow secondary? “Don’t tell me I don’t know how to hate,” I wanted to say. Then I stopped and asked myself,
Do you really want
that
to be your message? Think you can out-hate me, asshole? I was fucking hating people before you were even born!

We’re forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it’s the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast-food restaurants. But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport’s just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?

Would Adolf Hitler please meet his party at Baggage Claim Four? Repeat. Adolf Hitler can meet his party at Baggage Claim Four.

It’s a depressing thought, and one that proved hard to shake. It was with me when I boarded my flight to Portland and was still on my mind several hours later, when we were told to put our tray tables away and prepare for landing. Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, “Your trash. You’re trash. Your family’s trash.”