The Stories We Tell

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Wednesday January 15th, 2020 - 10:46am.

We’ve been invited to our neighbor’s for “la galette des rois” - an Epiphany celebration and a January tradition in France surrounding a cake made of puff pastry and frangipane. The cakes, bought in bakeries, are accompanied by a little paper crown and inside each cake there is a “fève” - a small porcelain figurine: if your piece of cake has the fève inside, you’re crowned the king. The youngest person in the room crawls under the table while the cake is cut and then, from beneath the table, he or she assigns which piece of cake will go to which person in the room. Our neighbor Élise, 77, has the galette heating in the oven when we arrive around 4:30pm and it smells delicious.

We moved into the building almost five years ago, right around the same time as Élise. She lives alone in the apartment just below ours and she’s really indulgent about all the noise our little boy makes as he runs and plays and zooms trucks and trains along our hardwood floors. We do our very best to keep the noise down, but it’s inevitable. Children are noisy and she takes it all in stride. She’s got a grandson also named Elliot and when we first asked her if the noise was tolerable she said, “It makes me happy to hear him playing. I hope that the old woman listening to my grandson play will be kind to him.” That was the start of it, she listened to our son play with the ears of a grandmother rather than with the ears of an older woman who wanted to live alone in peace and quiet. We’ve grown attached to each other over the last few years.

So here we are, the second Sunday in January, a little late with our galette but happy to be together nonetheless. My husband has brought some tea but Élise pulls out a bottle of pink champagne and says, “Let’s celebrate the new year, eh? I’m ready to leave the old one behind.” Yes, let’s look ahead! We’re all in agreement. 2019 was hard for Élise: she gave everyone a scare this summer when she had a sort of stroke in August. She’s a lively and independent woman who seems much younger than her years. She’s always off on adventures, going to theatre class, movement class, tai-chi, traveling with girlfriends, entertaining gentlemen friends, visiting her grandkids…. but she took a hit and came back feeling very fragile after a 10-day hospital stay. She needed to get out for fresh air but wasn’t feeling very steady on her feet, so my husband took her out and walked arm in arm with her. He was so sweet about it. He somehow made it seem like he was just a kindly gentleman caller offering to take her on a stroll, rather than a man 15 years younger than her own children who was helping an elderly neighbor.

That was last summer, so we all knew why she felt like looking forward and was eager to leave 2019 behind.

The funny thing is...instead of looking forward, we got to talking about the past. It started because I was talking about my trip home to Minnesota for the holidays and going between my mom’s house and my dad’s house, both of whom have remarried. She told us about how when she divorced at 53, she decided to look up her first love from when she was 17. All of this was about 25 years ago now, well before the age of the Internet, so I have no idea how she went about tracking him down. A phone book, I suppose.

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