the decision that changed our lives

      It was almost exactly 50 years ago. We were young and unburdened then—no mortgage, no kids, no car, no full-time salaried jobs. We were young and unburdened and maybe just a bit rash.

      We moved to Paris.

      Because we could. Or thought we could.

      We were writers! We had portable typewriters!

      What we didn’t have were all the new essentials of modern life. This was in the days before the internet, before smartphones and Fed-Ex and satellite TV. It was when traveling Americans would need to go to American Express offices to get their mail from home. It was living in France before it became easy. 

      The idea initially was to stay for a year or two, immerse ourselves in French life and culture, become more capable in the language, take advantage of the new-to-us cheeses and wines and most of all engage with a different way of life, a different set of experiences. 

      In fact, we ended up staying for nearly a decade, almost exactly divided between time in Paris and time in very small rural towns in the south of France. We ended up having our first child in France, working with a sage femme, a midwife, and seeing our child attend the maternelle, the preschool. We ended up working for French-owned companies and getting French healthcare and making French friends. We even learned to drive like the French.

      After almost exactly 50 years, some of the memories naturally have dimmed. We can’t quite recall the name of the neighborhood restaurant we used to go to around the corner from our first Paris apartment. And who was the pharmacist we became sort of friendly with in our mountain village? Where was that park where we took the stroller?

      And we wish some of the memories had dimmed, because not all are good. We still have distinct recall of the night the court officer knocked on our door to tell us we were being evicted from our apartment. We can still summon up the outrage we felt when the 16th-century stone house we had rented had no heat nor hot water upon our arrival with a sick infant. We remember the couple whom we lived next to for months who only said to us, “bonjour, monsieur, bonjour, madame,” and then quickly closed their door. Or the market vendor who’d make fun or our accent when we asked for a “kilo de tomates.”

Our mountain village, where our 16th-century stone house had 16th-century plumbing.

      But those have become only anecdotes, stories to amuse friends about our adventures and misadventures, about our foolish innocence in uprooting our lives half a century ago. They are small potatoes—or petite pommes de terre. More essential, more lasting, is how we still see the world differently than we did before the big move and differently than so many of our friends and relatives do.

      Sure, we learned to appreciate foods we had never encountered and people from all over the world whom we never would have met. But we learned, as well, to slow down, to savor sitting still in a café and watching the world go by or waiting five hours for the boeuf bourguignon in the oven to be ready.

      We learned about the reassuring formality of the rules of politesse and how people you didn’t know were always addressed as “monsieur” or “madame.” We learned to value the importance of precise language, how a single syllable or a letter or a slight mispronunciation could completely change meaning. We discovered there was not just one way to do things—and that our old ways were not necessarily the best.

      Perhaps, most important, we learned while living in France what it felt like to be an outsider, to be different, to be foreign. And because of that we learned we were more adventurous and resourceful than we had imagined.

      Fifty years on, we still try in small ways to nourish the sense of adventure that sent us to France in the first place and nurture those discoveries we made while there. We still try to see the world through a broader viewfinder.

      Now, almost exactly 50 years later, we will be heading back to Paris soon, a Paris and a France that have changed immeasurably in the intervening years.

As have we.

This time, we are not going to live there, but to mark the 50th anniversary of our momentous decision half a century ago. It’s a decision whose consequences, fortunately, are with us still.