Working. Fixing something. Mowing something. Yelling about something. Providing. Achieving. Sitting in a recliner after a long day and making it very clear to everyone within a 30-foot radius that they had earned the right to sit there.

Then I moved to France and met Gérard. Gérard has been sitting outside the café since approximately 1987.

He has nowhere to be, nothing visibly productive happening and absolutely no concern that somewhere in America a man his age is listening to a podcast about maximizing his retirement years while reorganizing the garage.

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The longer I live here, the more I wonder if Gérard might actually have this whole thing figured out. The men in our lives teach us things, whether they mean to or not. How to work. How to love. How to parent. How to treat people. What strength looks like. Sometimes they teach us exactly who we want to become.

Sometimes they provide a remarkably detailed instruction manual for who we absolutely do not.

My own education in men has included fathers, friends, husbands, straight gym bros, French retirees, and men named Gérard.

So this morning, as I sat down to write about all of them, I put in my headphones, opened my iPad and hit shuffle. Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild came on.

Well. Apparently the universe had notes because today I am talking about the ones in our lives. You know. The man. The myth. And in several cases from my childhood, that is where the résumé abruptly ends.

What really got me thinking about this topic was a certain casualness about French men that still catches me off guard. Not lazy. Not unmotivated. Just...unhurried. Deeply, spiritually, constitutionally unhurried.

In America, I, like most, was raised on a steady diet of optimization, self-improvement and the vague suspicion that if I sat down for more than fourteen minutes, someone somewhere was going to become richer, fitter or more successful than me.

French men seem largely immune to this disease.

As a kid, one thing I remember my dad saying was that he wanted better for us than he had. I knew he mostly meant career-wise because he worked in a meatpacking plant. Those Dubuque canned hams? Yep. My dad helped make those.

Some children get, “My father built skyscrapers.” I got shelf-stable pork. This is about as far as legendary as I remember him being.

My dad was one of those guys who believed men did not cry, something we were routinely reminded of when he’d use his foot to send us to our room. We’d cry, which would then make him yell at us more for crying, creating a wonderful little emotional feedback loop I believe psychologists refer to as “Jesus Christ.”

Then my mom finally left him the first time and suddenly Clint Eastwood became a newborn baby. He cried. He begged. He created what can only be described as a shrine to her in his apartment. I swear he would sit there all weekend staring at it, crying into a Jim Beam with a cigarette burning between his fingers.

Apparently men could cry.

He was hardly much of a man in my life, but I think sometimes he tried. As my brother would say whenever Dad said something racist or homophobic, “You know, that is just who he is. It is all he knows.” He’s “small-town minded.”

As I got older, I stopped believing that pattern of behavior could be excused quite so easily. Maybe in 1987 you could claim limited access to information. Today however, we now have the entire collected knowledge of human civilization sitting inside our pockets.

He instead used it to try to out-tweet Trump most days often just retweeting the man in his MAGA hat while watching Fox News with a Busch Lite his hands. My mom is reading this thinking, yep.

One day he even reminded me in the comments section that I shouldn’t adopt “given your situation.” My situation. Gay.

I thought, sir, this is a conversation you need to have with yourself, not me. Because if you don’t think I am capable of parenting a child, I have some very uncomfortable news about the man responsible for raising me. Time to head back to church and pray about the math.

This post isn’t all about him though. I could go on for days, and we all have our daddy issues. Mine just happened to come with canned ham and Marlboro Reds.

I did finally get my mom to leave him in 2020 after she too suffered years of his verbal abuse the second time around. Now, in one of life’s greatest little comedy gifts, she is dating a wonderful man with the exact same name.

Apparently she wanted to replace the husband but keep the monogrammed towels.

Sonia was on the phone with Grandma the other day talking about her first day of school. I love razzing my mom with inappropriate questions because I am 51 years old and apparently this is still my primary love language.

I told Sonia to ask Grandma if she’d seen her boyfriend today. Sonia, never one to leave good material on the table, followed up with, “Do you sleep with him and kiss him with your tongue?”

I died. I think my mom almost did too.

There are moments in parenting when you look at your child and think, I have taught you everything you need to know. Go forth.

It was not until my mid-30s that I really had a lot of guy friends. I mean, obviously, as a gay man I had guys around me. Shocking, I know. I am talking about the straight men. The solid bro types.

They were the ones who took me under their wing and became my wingmen, helping me gain confidence and come out of my shell. Most of them worked in fitness, which for a gay man is basically the emotional equivalent of being befriended by the entire cast of Magic Mike and then being told they genuinely enjoy your personality.

These were some of the best times of my life when I lived in Cincinnati. They became bouncers at the gay bar I worked at. We’d party all weekend, wake up, hit the gym and repeat the entire operation with absolutely no concern for our livers, kidneys or future orthopedic needs.

We once took a trip to Pigeon Forge and somehow I missed Dollywood. Imagine being gay, traveling all the way to Dolly Parton’s geographical homeland and then NOT GOING TO DOLLYWOOD!

Instead, I traded Dolly’s amusement park for backwoods camping in the mountains and moonshine. Flannel. Trucker hats. Straight men. A campfire. Apparently I was conducting field research.

Those days are long behind me, and now I find myself wanting to make sure I am the dad I wished I had. I mean, Dad did teach me what not to do, so half the curriculum practically wrote itself. Now it is making sure Sonia is thriving.

And before you type, “Rich, she is clearly thriving,” in the comments section, I know. I know. She really is.

Some days, though, I hear my dad’s voice coming out of my mouth and it makes me sick. A phrase. A tone. Some impatient little response that sneaks out before I can stop it. I am sure many parents experience this. You spend your entire adulthood unpacking your childhood only to hear your father come flying out of your mouth at 7:42 on a Tuesday morning because someone cannot locate their left shoe.

Sometimes it is Sonia, other times it is me.

Where my dad led with fear, I am trying to trade fear for respect and a small functioning democracy in our house.

Sonia has a voice. She has opinions. Many, many opinions. She has the ability to plead her case before the court, although the court would like the record to reflect that her motions are frequently denied.

But I am also not teaching her that I want “better” for her than what I had. Better feels like the wrong word. I had a solid career. I did work I loved. I had incredible experiences. I accomplished things I am proud of. We have her living across the world.

What I want for her is not better.

I want her to understand that a successful life does not have to mean constantly reaching for the next rung of some imaginary ladder until you are 64 years old, standing in a remodeled kitchen you barely had time to enjoy, wondering why you spent three decades answering emails during dinner.

I want to teach her to trade hustle for presence.

Optimization for curiosity.

Productivity for occasionally sitting your ass down.

Networking for actual friends.

The five-year plan for Tuesday afternoon.

The American belief that every trip outside the house should accomplish at least four errands for the French approach of leaving for bread at 2 p.m. and somehow coming home at 7:15 with no bread, three stories and a mild buzz.

Which brings me to Gérard.

A few weeks back I was in Montolieu, a tiny book village near Carcassonne. We are talking very small, with barely any parking, especially on a busy afternoon.

I was parked in the church lot across from an area where a group of men had gathered to play pétanque. They stood around shooting the shit, occasionally tossing a silver ball before returning to their cigars and what I can only assume was a heated 40-minute discussion about whether the boulangerie changed flour suppliers in March.

“Bread has not been right since Easter.”

“Philippe says it is the humidity.”

“Philippe is an idiot.”

Another boule is thrown.

As I went to leave the lot, Monsieur Gérard had pulled up and blocked my car in.

I did what I have been trained to do. I sat there. Waiting. Cussing under my breath that only an idiot would park like this knowing perfectly well cars needed to exit the lot.

Yuri finally said, “Honk the horn.”

Absolutely not. That felt aggressive.

Eventually I caved.

Not the American horn. Not the long HOOOOOOONK that says, “MOVE YOUR FUCKING VEHICLE BEFORE I CALL NATO.”

No.

I gave them the gentle French-adjacent beep beep.

Weak. Pathetic. Basically a car clearing its throat and winking. Excuse me, gentlemen, terribly sorry to interrupt the boule situation.

They looked up and responded with roughly the same level of enthusiasm my horn had put out. Several shrugged. One waved his hands like he was directing a plane down the runway.

Excuse me kind sir, I am driving a large Toyota SUV, not a Vespa. I thought, for the love of God, just get in your car and move it. I will not fit.

Fit I did.

Do I know how I got out of that lot to this day? No. I believe at one point the Toyota may have briefly become two-dimensional. But it got me thinking about how profoundly unbothered French men can be.

There was no panic. No jumping up. No apology. No managerial escalation. Just four men staring at me with the collective energy of, “You have mirrors. Figure it out.” Somehow I did.

The same thing happens at the gym.

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The old owner still sits at the same table day in and day out talking with the new owner. They go for lunch together, take smoke breaks and return, toggling between the sofa and the table as though the gym is actually a social club that accidentally contains exercise equipment.

Their friends swing by and pull up a chair. I always think, are they working out? What exactly is going on here?

Nope. Just swinging by for a chat. Perhaps a quick set of biceps in khakis and dress shoes before casually disappearing back into French society.

I often think, do these people not work? Who is washing their clothes? Who is taking the trash out? Has anyone emptied the dishwasher? There are sheets somewhere that need changing, gentlemen.

Then I remember that I too may be someone they look at and think, what exactly does that guy do? Because we only ever see him here.

Actually, let’s be honest. They are French. They are not wondering what I do. They do not care. It is my American brain, still alive and well, conducting unsolicited audits of other people’s existence and worrying about whether Gérard has properly utilized his afternoon.

Perhaps they live with their mothers. Maybe Mom left for the weekend and they are just fathers and sons sitting around in their underwear eating ham directly from the refrigerator. Who knows.

But I do love this about French men.

They sit outside cafés for hours discussing absolutely nothing urgent. They occupy park benches while their wives shop, staring into the distance as though contemplating the meaning of life or perhaps simply wondering what they are having for dinner. Something Yuri begins asking himself somewhere around breakfast.

They linger at the gym long after exercising has ended, nursing an espresso and dissecting local gossip. They smoke cigars while playing pétanque with men they have known for 30 years. No phones. No side hustles. No podcasts teaching them how to leverage their personal brand.

Just men being exactly who they are.

As someone who was raised to believe that every free moment should be monetized, optimized or at the very least converted into a home improvement project, I find their commitment to doing almost nothing strangely radical.

I still fight the need to always be doing something, but I can proudly say I have learned the art of the nap. This is growth.

I also appreciate being in an environment where I can teach Sonia that when she is on, she is on. Work hard. Take pride in what you do. Show up. Care.

But, when she is simply out living her life, she gets to actually live it. She does not have to turn every hobby into income. She does not have to build a personal brand. She does not need to optimize childhood. She can be good at something without monetizing it. She can be terrible at something and still enjoy it. She can sit at a café without documenting the café.

We talk a lot about taking pride in our work, appreciating what we have, taking care of our things and setting aside time for life to simply happen.

Someday, assuming she chooses a man, I hope she chooses one who works hard but knows when to stop working. Someone ambitious enough to build a life, but not so consumed by ambition that he forgets to live inside it.

Someone who listens. Someone who is kind. Someone who can cry without requiring a bottle of Jim Beam and a marital crisis first. Perhaps someone French enough to understand that an entire Saturday afternoon spent drinking coffee with a friend is not an afternoon wasted. It was the point of the afternoon.

So naturally, after conducting absolutely no scientific research whatsoever, I have identified the six French men you will absolutely encounter. There are of course man more, share your favorites you have encountered in the wild in the comment section. If you are reading from America…share those personas too.

The Municipal Works Supervisor Who Does Not Work for the Municipality

Jean-Luc. He is 72. Retired. Nobody asked him to be here. However, the mairie has dug a hole outside on his street. There he is. Hands clasped behind his back. Slight forward lean. Deeply concerned expression.

He will stand there for forty-five minutes watching three actual employees repair a pipe, occasionally shaking his head in a manner suggesting he would have approached the entire operation differently.

At some point another retired man will appear. Neither knows the other. Within seven minutes they have formed an oversight committee.

Jean-Luc has nowhere to be. This is where he needs to be.

The Gym Member Whose Workout Is Mostly Social

Pierre. You arrived at the gym at the same time. You have done chest, shoulders, twenty minutes of cardio, showered, changed clothes and answered four emails.

He has completed nine reps. Total.

He is now sitting at the table in his best business casual because somewhere between rep four and five, Gérard walked in. They are sitting together near the microwave having coffee and discussing something that apparently requires an hour, several hand gestures and absolutely no concern that neither of them is technically exercising anymore.

Occasionally Pierre will glance toward the weights as if remembering why he came. He will not return to them.

In America, the gym is something you squeeze into your day. For Pierre, this is the day.

The Husband Waiting Outside the Shop

Bernard. His wife went inside twenty-seven minutes ago. He is sitting on a bench. That’s it. He is not scrolling LinkedIn. He is not checking emails. He is not comparing mortgage rates or trading stocks. He is not researching the best lawnmower of 2026.

Occasionally a pigeon walks past. He watches it. The pigeon leaves. Bernard remains.

Then another man sits down beside him. They nod. Neither speaks. This is apparently enough stimulation for both of them.

If an American man sat quietly on a bench for 45 minutes without touching his phone, his family would assume he had suffered a medical event. Bernard is simply waiting for Chantal.

The Pétanque CEO

Didier. He approaches a gravel rectangle with the seriousness an American man reserves for a quarterly earnings call.

There are cigars. There is pastis. There is arguing. Someone throws a boule.

Four men immediately walk over and stare at it. One crouches. Another produces a measuring tape. Suddenly everyone is speaking at once. A dispute begins.

Twenty minutes later, they are still discussing whether a metal ball landed two centimeters closer to a tiny wooden ball. Didier is visibly furious. Jean-Pierre has called someone over from another game. There may be an appeal.

Nobody is checking the time because there is nowhere else they are supposed to be. This is their board meeting and someone is about to be removed as regional vice president of gravel.

The Café Man Who Apparently Lives There

François. You saw him when you walked past at 9:15. Espresso. Cigarette. Sunglasses. You pass again at 11:30. He is still there but now with a different drink. At 1:00, you walk by again. He is having lunch. At 4:30? Back to coffee.

At some point you begin wondering whether the café accidentally included a French man with the outdoor furniture.

Six wicker chairs. Four tables. Three umbrellas. One François.

You have never seen him arrive. You have never seen him leave. He simply exists there. I assume the staff stacks him inside with the chairs every night.

The Man Who Has Turned One Errand Into His Entire Afternoon

Laurent. He went out for bread three hours ago. On the way to the boulangerie he saw Pascal. Pascal knew Thierry. Thierry was having a coffee. Then someone mentioned Bernard had finally fixed his gate. Obviously they needed to go look at Bernard’s gate.

There was wine. Now it is 6:15.

Laurent returns home holding the baguette like a man who has successfully completed an important diplomatic mission. This might be the French male quality I envy most.

An American man leaves the house thinking, What can I accomplish while I’m out? A French man leaves thinking, Let’s see what happens. Somehow both return home believing they have had a very productive day.

That is the moral of the story. Perhaps French men really are the legends in this one. Not because they are doing anything particularly legendary. Quite the opposite.

They have somehow figured out that being a man does not require constantly proving that you are one. You do not have to be the loudest person in the room. You do not have to work yourself into the ground. You do not have to win every argument. You do not have to turn your children into evidence of your own success.

Sometimes you can just sit down. Have an espresso. Talk to your friend. Watch someone dig a hole. Maybe my dad would have benefited from a little more French masculinity. Less yelling. More pétanque. Less Jim Beam. More pastis. Less worrying about whether his gay son was man enough to raise a child and more worrying about whether Didier’s boule was, in fact, two centimeters closer.

Maybe instead of spending all those years angry at the world, he just needed a tiny coffee, a plastic chair and absolutely nowhere to be.

I cannot change the man who raised me. But I can change what being a man looks like to the little girl I am raising. I hope Sonia grows up surrounded by men who make masculinity look less like something you have to prove and more like something quiet and solid. Men who show up. Men who listen. Men who laugh. Men who champion her and other women. Men who cry. Men who work hard when work needs doing and then possess the revolutionary ability to sit the hell down when it doesn’t.

And…if one day she brings home a French man named Laurent who disappears at 2 p.m. for a baguette and returns five hours later smelling vaguely of pastis with an elaborate story about Bernard’s new gate? I will try to remember everything I have written here.

But I am still American. So at 4:30, I will absolutely be texting Yuri asking where the hell he is.

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And if this made you think of a Gérard, Pierre, Bernard, Didier, François or Laurent in your own life, give it a restack.

Consider it a public service.

Somewhere in France, a 72-year-old man is standing over a municipal hole with his hands behind his back, and frankly, he deserves the recognition.

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Her answer: “The homework!”

We’ll see about that. The child has never actually had homework, so at the moment she’s basically reviewing a restaurant she hasn’t eaten at yet. Five stars. Amazing. Can’t wait to return.

Sonia does love a good challenge. I love that she’s excited school is about to get a little harder and that she’ll have more things to do. The flip side is that she has not yet figured out that getting better at things requires occasionally being absolutely terrible at them.

We recently discovered this over a game of checkers.

She lost.

Civilization briefly stopped. There were no survivors. FEMA was notified. France considered activating its national emergency plan. We have since rebuilt.

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Sonia likes being right. She likes raising her hand in class first. She likes finishing first. She likes knowing the answer before anyone else. Ideally, she would also like everyone else to know that she knew the answer before anyone else.

I have absolutely no idea where she gets this from.

(Looks in mirror.)

This year, while Sonia’s teachers teach her reading, writing and math, I think our bigger assignment might be teaching her something that won’t appear on any report card. How to be wrong. How to lose. How to handle something she doesn’t already know how to do. How to keep walking when the sidewalk ends.

Next Tuesday in France is La Rentrée, a national holiday of sorts when all the kids go back to school. The parents rejoice. Stores reopen. The bakeries finally take down their handwritten fermé signs. The public pools become kid-free again, and I head directly into what I like to call my nesting phase.

September has always felt a little like that to me. A reset. Summer leisure gets packed up, routines return, and suddenly everyone is standing at the edge of something new. New teachers. New classrooms. New schedules. New notebooks that, knowing Sonia, will remain pristine for approximately five minutes before becoming a mixed-media installation.

Watching her get so excited to step into the unknown made me think about one of my favorite books when I was a kid, Where the Sidewalk Ends.

I loved that book long before I understood why the title itself was so good. Because the end of the sidewalk sounds like a place you shouldn’t go. The pavement stops. The familiar disappears. There isn’t a nice little arrow saying, “THIS WAY TO THE NEXT PART OF YOUR LIFE. RESTROOMS AVAILABLE.”

You just reach the edge. You then have to decide whether you’re going to stand there staring at it or keep going. Which, now that I think about it, is basically childhood, moving abroad, parenting, and possibly La Rentrée.

In preparation for this year, we’ve been helping Sonia learn to read and spell in English. The problem is that she’s now accustomed to the sounds of letters in French, so teaching her English is basically asking her to forget everything school has taught her while also assuring her that school is correct.

“I” isn’t “E.” Except sometimes it sounds like it. “G” and “J” are apparently involved in an international custody dispute. Meanwhile, lowercase “b,” “d,” “p” and “q” are four identical children wearing different hats.

Suddenly Yuri and I are English teachers.

The other day I was sitting with her going over the word “CAT.” I dropped the first letter and replaced it with R.

“RAT!” she said.

Great. Success. We are getting somewhere.

I dropped the R and replaced it with B.

“BIRD!” she yelled.

Wonderful. We have abandoned phonics and entered wildlife.

Luckily, I found an excellent free reading app for her iPad, which is already basically an extension of her body. She loves gamification, so she is somehow thrilled that when she can’t watch TV, she can play a game where she learns to spell.

Each night in bed we read to her. When she was a baby, one of the first books I bought her was Where the Sidewalk Ends. She loves the silly stories, and sometimes it’s nice to read something where there is absolutely no lesson waiting at the end.

Nobody discovers the importance of sharing.

Nobody learns that their differences are actually their superpower.

Nobody realizes the real treasure was friendship.

Sometimes a child just gets eaten by a boa constrictor and everybody goes to bed.

Not every book needs to produce a slightly improved citizen by page 32. Sometimes a book can simply let a kid’s mind wander.

In America, we used to give Where the Sidewalk Ends as a gift to Sonia’s friends at birthday parties. I loved passing my love for the book on to other kids, and I loved the idea that Sonia was giving them a book instead of another doll, dump truck, or 50-piece plastic toy requiring three AAA batteries, a screwdriver, an engineering degree and the complete destruction of the planet.

As a Gen X kid, the idea that the sidewalk did, in fact, end was a perfect metaphor for our childhood because our parents would have simply told us to keep going.

We’d ride our bikes right past it, disappearing for hours and returning when the streetlights came on. There was no Find My Friends app. Nobody even knew where their friends were, if we’re being honest. Your mother had a general idea that you were somewhere outside.

This was considered adequate parenting.

When you’re young, “where the sidewalk ends” means adventure, exploration, curiosity and imagination. At 51 it means transition and uncertainty, preferably accompanied by a chair, maybe some ibuprofen and a glass of wine.

There are points in life where the familiar path simply runs out. Moving abroad was one of those. Becoming a parent was one. Raising a child in another country while helping with homework in a language you are also still learning is apparently another.

Which brings me back to the book.

I always thought it would be fun to write a modern-day version of those silly poems for kids. As a former artist, my niche was children’s illustration. As a former doodler, I loved the idea of getting back into whimsical drawings of kids, creatures and strange little worlds.

Now that I actually have the time, however, it sounds suspiciously like work.

Absolutely not.

Instead, it inspired today’s post.

What is the modern version of Where the Sidewalk Ends? What happens when the path you know runs out and you still have to keep going?

I have some thoughts.

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Go Past the Edge

Walk to the end where the cobblestone goes,
Then take one more step where nobody knows.

Silverstein never seemed particularly interested in perfect illustrations. Though I would argue they were perfect. His lines wandered as much as his poetry did. That’s what I loved about it as a kid. Nothing felt too polished. Nothing seemed particularly concerned with staying inside the lines.

Us Gen X kids were practically raised on unsupervised wandering. We rode our bikes.

Where? Somewhere. Someone produced a hose. We drank out of it. Someone busted out their dads playboy. Someone produced matches.

Just my brother? We can leave that one there.

Raising kids in today’s world is obviously different, and there is plenty to fear. But sometimes I wonder if, in trying to protect kids from everything, we’re also removing a little too much wandering from their lives.

Wandering teaches you that not knowing what happens next isn’t necessarily an emergency. Sometimes you don’t know. Sometimes you turn the wrong way. Sometimes you get lost. Sometimes you figure it out.

That is something I want Sonia to know. It is also something moving abroad has forced me to relearn.

Being Wrong Isn’t the Same Thing as Failing

If you knew every answer before you began,
You’d never discover how much more you can.

This is certainly one of our biggest assignments heading into this school year.

Sonia wants all the answers. Preferably first. Preferably while the other children are still looking for their pencils. If there were bonus points for announcing that you knew the answer before everyone else, she would already have tenure.

But I also want her to be the kid who gets something wrong and tries again. I want her to understand that learning why you were wrong and seeking out the answer for next time is just as valuable as shooting your hand into the air first. Perhaps even more valuable.

This is a difficult lesson to teach when you are an adult who spent decades thinking he had things pretty well figured out.

There is something uncomfortable about becoming incompetent again, which is exactly what moving to another country will do to your ego. You go from being a fully functioning adult to rehearsing a three-sentence conversation before entering the pharmacy.

“Okay. I’ll say this. Then she’ll say this. Then I’ll say this.”

Then she asks an off-script follow-up question and suddenly you’re a Victorian child who has recently suffered a head injury.

You smile.

“Oui.”

You have no idea what you just agreed to. Failure becomes part of the curriculum.

Eventually, though, you realize most of it isn’t failure at all. It’s learning. You embarrassed yourself. You survived. You probably learned three new words.

One of them may have been “suppository,” but knowledge is knowledge.

There Is More Than One Way to Say Something

We mastered our ABCs decades ago,
We moved to France and learned that’s not so.

We are headed into particularly strange territory this year. Homework. In French. Teaching Sonia to read. In English. Reading with her. In French and English. Math. Again.

Luckily, I still know 2 + 2, although after two years dealing with French bureaucracy I’m prepared for someone to request an apostilled copy of the 4.

Sonia is not attending an international school. She is being educated entirely in French. English belongs to us, which is hilarious considering my French tutor recently asked me to identify the adverb in a French sentence.

I stared at him. “I’m sorry. Apparently I don’t know English either.”

We are building a bilingual child while discovering how bizarre our own language is. Add in Yuri teaching her Russian, and basically everyone in this house is simultaneously a student and wildly unqualified faculty.

We’re relearning our native languages through Sonia. There’s something wonderfully Silverstein about that.

Words are flexible. Sounds are funny. Language is something you play with. Learning to read shouldn’t only be about getting every word right. Sometimes it’s about discovering how completely ridiculous words are.

There, their, they’re.

Read and read.

Lead and lead.

Fille, filles, fils, ville.

Then French gives you oiseau, a word containing nearly every vowel in the building but pronounced with roughly three letters’ worth of effort.

English responds with though, thought, through, tough and thorough, apparently because at some point the language was designed by a drunk Wordle committee.

Language is weird. That’s part of the fun.

Keep It a Little Weird

Learn all the rules and study what’s true,
Save a small corner for some nonsense too.

Silverstein gives kids permission to remain weird. His stories take them on bizarre adventures. There isn’t always a moral. Sometimes something is just funny. Sometimes something is just weird. Sometimes a man has eighteen arms and that’s the entire situation.

I want Sonia to succeed in school. We teach her that education is one of the most important things in life. Knowledge is power. She can already finish that sentence.

I want her to read. Write. Learn. Do her homework. I fully reserve the right to remind her of her current enthusiasm for homework sometime around February when she’s face-down on the kitchen table claiming we have betrayed her.

What I don’t want is for achievement to crowd out imagination. I want her to finish the worksheet. Raise her hand. Learn the answer. Draw something ridiculous in the margins. Wonder what happens where the sidewalk ends.

Eventually We Have to Let Our Kids Go There

We show them the road and we teach them the signs,
Then we watch as they wander beyond all our lines.

As an adult, I can look back at this book and realize how often we are the ones standing in our own way. As a kid, it just felt like silly stories and weird pictures.

Now it reminds me to keep the curiosity alive. To stop taking everything quite so seriously. To reinvigorate my imagination. To just have some fun.

My job is not to make sure Sonia never loses a checkers game. It is to make sure she never stops playing.

It isn’t to give her every answer. It’s to keep her curious enough to go looking for one when she doesn’t already have it.

That’s the crazy part of raising a child abroad. We deliberately did this to ourselves. We brought her somewhere beyond the sidewalk we knew. Her childhood looks nothing like ours. Her education looks nothing like ours. She will learn things differently than we did. She is absorbing French culture in ways we will never completely understand.

One day she will probably correct our French in public. Actually, scratch that. She already does.

Perhaps that day in Target in 2020, when I picked up Where the Sidewalk Ends thinking about little me back in Iowa, what I was really picking up was an invitation.

Go see what’s over there.

Stay curious.

Get something wrong.

Lose the game.

Learn another language.

Take the road even when you aren’t entirely prepared for where it leads. When you finally reach that place where the sidewalk ends, don’t assume you’ve gone too far. You might finally just be getting somewhere.

And normally this is where I would wrap everything up with a meaningful moral. However, as previously established, not everything needs one. So there is no moral today.

Sonia starts school Tuesday. She’s excited about homework. I’m relearning adverbs. Yuri is teaching Russian. Nobody knows why “through” and “tough” are spelled almost the same. Somewhere in France a bakery owner is reluctantly taking down a fermé sign.

And I think there’s a hose outside if anyone’s thirsty.

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With an upgraded subscription, you’ll also receive a copy of my new guide, Moving to France: The Paperwork, The Panic, The Plan, my guide to surviving the French Long-Stay Visa process without setting your printer on fire. Annual subscribers also get something even more dangerous.

Me.

If you’re moving to France, we’ll chat 1:1 and I’ll help answer your questions, share what I’ve learned and hopefully get your move started with considerably less panic than mine.

And if this made you laugh, think, or suddenly remember drinking from a stranger’s garden hose in 1987, give it a restack.

It helps more people find my writing.

No homework required.

Sonia is very disappointed.

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Well, technically not at. More near. But close enough that police removed a bullet from the backseat of our car, which feels like we are splitting hairs here.

We’ll get to that.

When I was 25 and had just come out, I moved to Minneapolis. Can you believe I was 25 when I came out? Late bloomer. Absolutely nobody was surprised. I basically burst out of the closet expecting a ticker-tape parade only to discover everyone standing around like, “Yes, Rich. We know. Would you like us to pretend to gasp?”

Like many of my moves, I had no real plan, just an alarming amount of confidence for someone with absolutely no evidence things were going to work out.

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Young and dumb, I decided I would take out enough student loans to move into a student apartment while I attended the Art Institute. The loans would cover the bills while I found a job.

Financial planning by a 25-year-old gay man newly released into the wild. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a bit, it turns out.

I went to TCF Bank in the Minneapolis City Center to open a bank account. This was July 2001. The manager asked where I was going to school and where I worked. I told her I had just started at the Art Institute and was looking for a job.

Coincidentally, she was hiring. My attempt to open a checking account somehow became a job interview, which somehow became employment at the bank for $12 an hour. I walked in looking for somewhere to deposit money and walked out getting the bank to pay me. Honestly, winning.

A month later, I met a guy. We moved in together.

Yes. Immediately. Please remember I had only recently been released from the closet and apparently had confused “coming out” with “making every bad decision available in the Gay Starter Pack.”

I was absolutely certain he was “The One.” He was, in fact, the one true pain in my ass for the following year. But that is not today’s story.

We moved a good 45 minutes outside downtown Minneapolis, where my banking job was, so every morning around 6 a.m. I would take the car and drive to the Mall of America. I would park there for free and take the bus downtown.

This was my financial strategy. Student loans. Free mall parking. Public transportation. Boyfriend I barely knew. Suze Orman would have driven directly into Lake Minnetonka.

I was also exhausted all the time, so I regularly fell asleep on the bus, missed my stop, woke up somewhere beyond downtown and had to backtrack to work. Eventually I’d arrive early, tuck myself into a corner of the skyway outside the bank and go back to sleep.

My manager would walk up like a mother discovering her toddler asleep behind the sofa. “Rich. It is time to go to work.” I would wake up and begin my day. Again.

Over time, that branch closed, another opened, and I finally moved out of the apartment with my loser ex. I traded him for the two Baptist women and their child who lived next door.

I realize every new paragraph of this story sounds like I am making increasingly questionable choices.

The Baptist gals hated my ex too and were thrilled to help me escape. Against all odds, we made a wonderful little household. They became great friends to me while I saved enough money to finally get my own place. Life was slowly coming together.

I was working constantly, putting myself through school one class at a time and eventually got a great apartment in Uptown that I could barely afford.

Which, in your twenties, is how you know you’ve made it. If you can pay rent but opening the refrigerator causes mild financial anxiety, congratulations. You are thriving.

As I did most Sundays, I was at the bank working. Sundays were quiet. It was just me, another teller and the assistant manager, who spent most of her day in the back.

We had our normal trickle of customers. My teller friend was helping a woman, and when she finished, she went into the back to speak with the manager.

That left me alone up front. The next customer walked toward me. A man wearing glasses and gloves.

Gloves. Inside a bank. Yep. We both know where this is going.

He walked up to my station and slipped me a note that said something along the lines of: “You’re being robbed. Give me all your money. I have a gun.”

I looked up. He pointed at me. “Do you understand? You have ten seconds.”

Then he started counting. “Ten... nine... eight... seven...”

This is where time does that strange thing where everything moves both incredibly slowly and impossibly fast.

I was working in more of a sales capacity that day, so I didn’t have my own cash drawer. I had no pile of money sitting there to hand him. I only had the machine that automatically dispensed cash for transactions.

I tried explaining this to the armed gentleman who, understandably, was not particularly interested in learning about the bank’s internal teller infrastructure.

“My coworker is just in the back. She’ll be right back. We’ll give you what you want.”

He continued counting.

“Six... five...”

So I did what any rational person staring down a potentially armed bank robber would do. Something incredibly stupid.

I deliberately jammed the machine.

I requested too much money at once, which triggered the machine’s security system and locked the whole thing down.

I looked at him. “I have nothing.” And, I really didn’t. I didn’t even have a dye pack to slip him. Eventually I found $80 sitting there from a recent deposit, handed it to him and showed him the locked machine. “This is all I have.”

He grabbed the $80 and ran.

Eighty dollars.

He threatened to shoot me for roughly the cost of dinner and two cocktails in Paris.

The second he disappeared, I ran too, straight into the back room, where I promptly lost my mind.

Later that day, the FBI arrived. I was interviewed what felt like 100 times. They asked the same questions in slightly different ways, checking whether my story changed.

What did he look like?

What did he say?

What did I remember?

What didn’t I remember?

Did I see the gun?

What was he wearing?

Meanwhile my brain was like, “Sir, I barely remember what I was wearing. I was busy trying not to die over $80.”

For the next few weeks, I slept with the lights on. I wouldn’t go out alone at night. I was constantly looking over my shoulder.

Had he followed me?

Did he know where I lived?

Would he come back?

The bank very kindly asked if I wanted free therapy.

No. What I wanted was a raise and witness protection. Preferably both.

A few weeks later, they caught him robbing the bank next door. Apparently my $80 had not provided the financial freedom he was hoping for.

I quit the bank a few months later. That was enough banking for me.

Fast forward to 2015. Yuri and I were living in San Francisco and didn’t own a car. Like many people in the city, we used Zipcar whenever we wanted to escape San Francisco for an adventure.

By “adventure,” on this particular evening I mean IKEA in Oakland.

Nothing says romance like Swedish meatballs followed by a disagreement about whether you actually need another KALLAX shelf.

The Zipcar garage was just down the street from our apartment in the Tenderloin. If you know San Francisco, we lived at Ellis and Leavenworth. The true heart of the TL.

You would assume that if I were ever going to get shot, have a needle launched at me or be peed on, possibly in some sort of Tenderloin triathlon, it would happen there.

But we were known residents. The street folks mostly left us alone, and honestly, most of them wanted to be left alone too. We stepped around people, carried our groceries home and went about our lives. That was the neighborhood.

This particular night, though, we had finished our IKEA shopping and were leaving the parking lot. Yuri was driving.

We were queued up with the other cars waiting to exit onto the main road when we noticed two groups of kids fighting. They were yelling at each other across the line of cars. You know, kids being kids. Except apparently these particular kids had chosen the deluxe American childhood package.

We pulled forward to become the next car waiting to exit.

And suddenly our car exploded. Not metaphorically.

BOOM.

A sonic blast hit the car so violently that Yuri and I both thought lightning had struck us. Which would have been remarkable considering it wasn’t raining.

Naturally, I jumped out of the car. Apparently after surviving a bank robbery, my emergency instincts had evolved into “go investigate the explosion.”

A man from the car behind us ran toward me.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so. Something hit the car.”

He looked at me.

“Your car was shot. They have a gun.”

Oh. Wonderful.

That was when I noticed everyone around us scattering.

I jumped back into the car.

“GO!”

Yuri drove us to another shopping center, where we called the police. They arrived, inspected the car and found the bullet in the backseat. The bullet hole was only inches from where I had been sitting.

The police took our report, gave us paperwork for Zipcar and sent us on our way. You know, just another relaxing trip to IKEA in America.

Lamp.

Meatballs.

Shelving unit.

Gunfire.

We called Zipcar and explained what had happened. Their response was essentially, “That’s terrible. Glad you’re alive. Unfortunately, you didn’t purchase the additional insurance, so you’ll be responsible for the damage.”

Excuse me? I did not damage your car. I did not shoot your car. At no point during our IKEA excursion had I pulled out a firearm and thought, “You know what this Toyota needs? Ventilation.”

If I had caused the damage, fine. But I refused to pay for this. In fact, the more I thought about it, the angrier I became. What if I had simply returned the car and said nothing? How many people would have rented it afterward and never noticed the bullet hole?

I was being financially punished for almost being shot and being honest about it. Absolutely not.

For more than a month, I went round after round with Zipcar. They threatened collections. I told them to go for it. We reached the point in customer service negotiations where everyone involved had clearly placed everyone else on a list.

Then one day I had an idea. Find the CEO of Zipcar. Her information had to be somewhere online. It was. So I called her. Apparently my lifelong response to encountering a locked door is to wander around the building until I find an unlocked window.

She actually called me back one evening from a taxi on her way home from the office. She couldn’t believe the story.

I explained the shooting, the police report, the bullet in the backseat and the fact that I was now somehow being billed because someone else had decided to use our rental car as a backstop. She agreed it was ridiculous.

She told me I would hear from customer service within a few days, all the charges would be removed, and she was glad Yuri and I were safe.

And they were. Gone. One phone call.

I remember hanging up feeling incredibly grateful that she had listened, but also thinking about how many people would have simply paid the bill because some company told them they had to. Sometimes the answer is no because you asked the wrong person. (Much like France I might add.)

Sometimes you have to keep pushing. Sometimes you have to call the CEO from your living room. You have to shoot your shot. Metaphorically. Obviously this essay has already contained enough literal shooting.

Which brings me to this morning. My neighbor messaged me, “Did you just hear that gunshot?”

Two years into living in France, I replied, “It was probably a transformer that blew.”

Then I realized what I had just said. I now live somewhere that when I hear a loud BANG, my brain doesn’t immediately go to gun.

Electrical equipment.

Construction.

A car backfiring.

Someone dropping something.

French bureaucracy finally collapsing under the weight of its own paperwork.

Gunshot is somewhere much farther down the list. Honestly, is a relief. I asked Yuri if he had heard anything walking Zelda. He hadn’t.

Then he looked at me and said, “Have you ever written about the time we were shot at at IKEA?”

And that is why today’s story is brought to you by Yuri Kagan.

But I always like to think there is some purpose hiding inside our misadventures, even the ones that happened long before France.

And then it hit me.

Not the bullet, the point.

I was recently asked during an interview what I would tell someone who was thinking about moving abroad.

My answer was simple. Get out of your own way. So often, we are the thing standing between ourselves and the life we say we want. After thinking about the bank, IKEA, Zipcar, Minneapolis, San Francisco and eventually France, I think I would answer the question differently now.

Shoot your shot. Shoot it on behalf of yourself.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been doing well in life, succeeding by every normal measurement, and then announced I was changing something.

People would look at me like I had just walked into Thanksgiving dinner and announced I was joining the circus.

“Why would you do that?”

“You have everything going for you.”

“You worked so hard to get here.”

“You finally have what you wanted.”

And they were right. I did.

The job. The money. The house. The friends. The career. The popularity. The comfortable life I had worked incredibly hard to build.

And then I wanted something else. So I tried something new. Then something new again. Until eventually “something new” became France.

None of those decisions came with guarantees. I just kept taking the shot.

So if you are reading this as someone who already shot yours, congratulations. You are doing the hard stuff. Maybe you moved abroad. Maybe you changed careers. Maybe you left the relationship. Maybe you started the business. Maybe you finally admitted that the life everyone keeps congratulating you for is making you miserable.

Whatever it was, you aimed at something different and fired.

And if you are still dreaming about it, here are a few things I have learned.

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Stop waiting to feel ready. Ready is mostly a myth we invented so procrastination could wear business casual. There will always be another reason to wait. More money. Better French. A different job. The kids getting older. The stock market improving. Mercury leaving whatever house it apparently broke into.

At some point, preparation quietly becomes procrastination. You can spend ten years getting ready for the life you could have already been living. Shoot.

Aim at the life you actually want. Not the life that looks responsible on paper. Not the life your parents understand. Not the life that makes your LinkedIn profile look like you were assembled in a laboratory by Human Resources. If I had built my life exclusively around decisions my mother immediately approved of, I would absolutely not be sitting in southern France writing this.

You think my mom heard “We’re moving to France” and responded, “What a sensible and financially prudent next chapter”? Absolutely not. Moving abroad sometimes begins with admitting something incredibly uncomfortable. The life you successfully built may no longer be the life you want.

That doesn’t make building it a mistake. It means you changed. Aim again. Shoot.

Bet on your ability to figure shit out. You do not need to know exactly how you will navigate visas, doctors, schools, taxes, banking, insurance and the French language before you leave. Because I have news for you. You can study all of it for five years and France will still eventually hand you a form you have never seen before and request another form proving that the first form exists.

You need enough information to begin. Then you need enough confidence in yourself to believe that when the next problem appears, you will figure it out. Look backward. You probably already have a lifetime of evidence that you do exactly that.

I survived bad boyfriends, student loans, a bank robber, the FBI, a bullet through a Zipcar and IKEA on a Saturday. Surely I can find the correct window at the préfecture. Shoot.

Accept that the bullet isn’t going to fly perfectly straight. You might choose the wrong city. Your first apartment might be a dump. Your French will absolutely embarrass you at some point. I once accidentally asked a man if he had a “pussy” instead of asking if he had a cat. So yes, things will happen.

You may discover the dream needs editing once you actually live inside it. That is okay. Missing the bullseye isn’t failure. You fired. Now adjust your aim. Preferably before speaking French to another unsuspecting cat owner. Shoot again.

Remember, not shooting is a choice too. We tend to imagine staying put as the safe, neutral option. It isn’t. Doing nothing is still doing something. Every year you don’t make the move is still a year of your life being spent.

There is risk in leaving. There is also risk in staying. Sometimes the bigger gamble isn’t moving to another country. It is waking up ten years later, sitting in the exact same place, wondering what would have happened if you had pulled the trigger.

I know a couple who moved to France a little over a year ago. It didn’t work for them. They’re moving back to the United States. And you know what? That’s allowed. They tried. They got their answer. Going home is an option. Changing your mind is an option. Choosing another country is an option. Admitting “Well, this was terrible” and reversing the U-Haul is an option.

But you don’t get to know whether the dream works unless you actually try living inside it. Shoot.

Moral of the story: You don’t shoot your shot because you’re confident it will hit. You shoot your shot because you’ve finally become confident you’ll survive wherever it lands.

That’s the part I think we misunderstand. Confidence isn’t knowing everything will work out. It is knowing that if it doesn’t, you will. The shot might land in Minneapolis with a terrible boyfriend and two Baptist women next door. It might land behind a bank counter with a man counting backward from ten.

It might land in an IKEA parking lot with a literal bullet in your Zipcar and customer service explaining that apparently surviving gunfire was not included in the basic rental package.

It might land in France, where you suddenly discover that the person you spent years becoming isn’t the final version of you after all. You adjust. You learn. You fill out another form. You murder the French language in front of innocent civilians. You try again.

Eventually you realize the goal was never to become fearless enough to take the shot. The goal was to trust yourself enough to know that wherever the hell it lands, you’ll figure out what to do next.

If you enjoy these stories and want to support my writing further, you can buy me a coffee or upgrade for $5 a month. Think of it as buying me one coffee a month, except I do all the drinking and you get the stories.

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With an upgraded subscription, you’ll also receive a copy of my new guide, Moving to France: The Paperwork, The Panic, The Plan, my guide to surviving the French Long-Stay Visa process without setting your printer on fire.

Annual subscribers also get something even more dangerous. Me. If you’re moving to France, we’ll chat 1:1 and I’ll help answer your questions, share what I’ve learned and hopefully get your move started with considerably less panic than mine.

If this made you laugh, restack it. Consider it your shot.

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Not normal questions like, “What was your favorite subject in school?” No. Obscure investigative journalism like, “What kind of curtains did you have in your bedroom when you were seven?” or “What did your mother usually make for dinner on Tuesdays?”

Sir, I don’t know. I was seven. I wasn’t keeping minutes.

And whenever I tell him I don’t remember, which is almost always, he looks genuinely concerned and asks, “Were you hugged as a child? How do you not remember these things?”

I was hugged. I think.

Honestly, I barely remember what I did last week.

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My French tutor kicks off every lesson with the same seemingly innocent question: “What did you do last week?”

And every week I sit there like I’ve just been questioned about my whereabouts on the night of a murder.

Last week?

Define “did.”

Today, the only thing I could confidently report was that I saw the eclipse yesterday. The rest of the week has been deleted from the server. I went to the gym. I read. I ate things. Presumably I parented. Everyone in my household appears to still be alive, so I’m counting the week as a success.

I am reading The Calamity Club, by the way, and it is excellent. So apparently my brain can retain the lives of fictional people while completely deleting my own Wednesday.

But every once in a while, something cracks open a memory so specific that I’m suddenly right back there.

And recently it was a playground. Gen Xers, you already know where this is going.

We walked past a playground with a metal slide.

A METAL SLIDE in 2026! I actually stopped and stared at it like I had just spotted an asbestos factory offering school tours. How are these still legal?

For anyone who did not grow up in the 70s or 80s, allow me to explain. The metal slide was less “playground equipment” and more “municipally funded hibachi.” You would joyfully climb those stairs in shorts on a 90-degree summer day, sit down and immediately realize you had made a catastrophic error in judgment.

There was no turning back. Your thighs had already bonded to the metal.

You pushed off and somewhere around the halfway point your legs were no longer legs. They were two Oscar Mayer hot dogs being dragged across a commercial griddle.

By the time you reached the bottom, you didn’t slide off. You were served. Medium well.

Nobody called the city. Nobody sued the park. Your mother just looked over from a bench smoking a Virginia Slim and yelled, “I TOLD YOU IT WAS HOT.”

Lesson learned.

The entire 1980s playground, looking back, was basically a torture park with monkey bars. There was the merry-go-round, which had no motor, no brakes and absolutely no adult supervision. Six children pushed it as fast as humanly possible while another six clung to the metal rails experiencing G-forces normally reserved for fighter pilots.

The goal was not entertainment. The goal was survival. Eventually someone flew off. Nobody stopped. That child simply became part of the landscape.

Then there was the seesaw, a piece of recreational equipment built entirely on trust, which seems like an insane amount of emotional responsibility to give an eight-year-old. You sat four feet in the air staring into the eyes of another child whose only job was not to suddenly jump off.

Eventually they did.

WHAM. Straight to the tailbone. Your first lesson in betrayal. This is why Gen X has trust issues.

The monkey bars were suspended approximately fourteen stories above packed dirt. There was no soft rubber flooring. No foam. No carefully engineered wood chips. There was Earth. If you fell, gravity handled the paperwork.

The swings weren’t any better. Nobody was casually swinging back and forth enjoying the breeze. The objective was to get so high that the chains went slightly slack at the top and for one magnificent second you genuinely wondered if today was the day you were going all the way around the bar.

Bonus points if you jumped off at maximum altitude. Again, onto dirt. We weren’t playing. We were training for ‘Nam, and most of us were born after it ended.

And let’s not forget the spring animals. You know the ones. A metal duck, horse or vaguely identifiable woodland creature mounted on a spring powerful enough to launch a six-year-old into another postal code. We still have these at our local playground here in Carcassonne. Because, of course we do. France looked at the accumulated child-safety knowledge of the past forty years and said, “Oui, but have they tried holding on?”

So why am I talking about playground equipment that would now require a liability waiver and possibly a tetanus booster? Because for someone who claims to remember almost nothing about his childhood, I remember a park.

Just down the street from our family butcher shop was Allison Henderson Park. And sometime in the early 80s, my mom took me there to see a solar eclipse.

Of all the memories my brain could have carefully preserved, this is one of them. I couldn’t tell you what I was wearing. I don’t remember what we did afterward. I have no idea what was happening at school that week.

But I remember my mom. I remember the park. I remember that ridiculous little piece of cardboard with a pinhole punched into it so we could watch something extraordinary happen in the sky.

Apparently my childhood memories are stored less like a family photo album and more like a junk drawer. Nothing is organized. Most of it is missing. Every once in a while, you reach in looking for something completely unrelated and pull out exactly what you need.

Which brings me back to the eclipse.

Not so once in a lifetime, apparently, because there I was again yesterday, more than forty years later, preparing to watch another one.

I told Sonia she was going to see an eclipse and asked if she knew what that was.

“Yes. It’s when the moon crosses over the sun and everything gets dark.”

Excuse me? You’re six.

When I was six, my primary areas of expertise were He-Man and determining which flavor of Kool-Aid had the highest probability of permanently staining the kitchen counter.

But yes, apparently she already understood basic celestial mechanics. I told her she wouldn’t see another total solar eclipse in France until she was 61.

Without missing a beat she replied, “You’ll be watching it from up in the sky.”

Well.

Thank you, tiny Grim Reaper. I was trying to make a childhood memory, not confront my mortality in a vineyard. Nothing keeps you present quite like your six-year-old casually reminding you that eventually you’ll be dead.

Earlier that day, though, I honestly didn’t think we were going to see it.

We didn’t have the glasses. They were sold out everywhere. It was hot. I had things to do. I figured, no big deal. Sonia will survive missing an eclipse. Children have overcome greater adversity. I survived metal slides.

But something kept nagging at me, because I remembered.

Of all the things I don’t remember about being a kid, I remembered my mom taking me to that park. Suddenly this wasn’t really about an eclipse anymore. I wanted Sonia to have her own version of that memory.

There was just one small problem. We still didn’t have the damn glasses.

After the gym, I headed to Monoprix to pick up a few things for dinner and ran into my friend Jack. He had been at the Italian shop in town and mentioned to the owner that he didn’t have eclipse glasses either.

Now, this is where small-town France becomes less like an actual functioning municipality and more like an elaborate network of somebody knowing somebody.

The Italian shop owner picked up the phone and called a local jeweler, because naturally the solution to an astronomical event was apparently somewhere between the prosciutto and fine jewelry.

The jeweler had glasses.

And where was the jeweler?

Right outside Monoprix.

At this point the universe was doing everything short of physically grabbing me by the shoulders and screaming, “RICHARD. TAKE YOUR CHILD TO THE ECLIPSE.”

Fine, universe. Message received.

I hurried over, secured the glasses in my best French like I was completing a black-market transaction in protective eyewear, ran home, made dinner and announced that we were going out.

Wine. Walk. Eclipse. The holy trinity of parenting in France.

And this was where I realized just how different Sonia’s version of this memory was going to be from mine. I saw an eclipse in the early 80s at a community park in Iowa with a piece of cardboard. Sonia was about to watch one from a vineyard in the south of France with a medieval castle rising in from of her.

Same moon, slight upgrade in production value.

We walked behind the Cité as the sun was getting lower, through a part of the landscape I had somehow never bothered exploring before, which is ridiculous when you think about it. People cross oceans to come here. They plan vacations around this castle. They take approximately 6,000 photographs of it before lunch.

I live ten minutes away and apparently had reached the stage of local residency where my reaction was, “Castle? Yes, yes. Seen it. What else?” Then we stepped into the vineyard.

The castle was glowing in front of us. The sun was dropping. Sonia had her ridiculous little eclipse glasses on. There were grapevines all around us.

And for a second even I had to admit:

Oh. Right. I live here. This is fucking beautiful.

And that might have been the bigger thing I needed to see yesterday.

Not the eclipse. My own life.

That is the weird thing about living abroad long enough. Eventually, abroad becomes home.

At first, everything is charming. The shutters are charming. The cobblestones are charming. The tiny French cars are charming. The old man carrying three baguettes under his arm is so aggressively French you consider taking his picture.

Then you live here for a while. Suddenly you’re not looking at the medieval architecture. You’re looking at bird shit on your window. You’re not admiring the ancient town square. You’re staring at the fresh graffiti thinking, “Are we just leaving that there now?”

You start noticing the overflowing bin. The broken shutter. The weeds. The dog poop someone has apparently decided is now a permanent municipal installation. Meanwhile, a tourist is standing three feet away from you absolutely losing their mind.

“Oh my God. This is MAGICAL.”

And I’m standing there like, “Is it, Susan? Because have you seen that wall?”

That is the strange thing about making a dream your everyday life. Eventually it becomes Tuesday. The castle you once couldn’t believe was real becomes the thing you drive past while wondering whether you remembered to buy toilet paper.

The little café in the square becomes the place where you’re mildly annoyed because your coffee is taking twelve minutes. The cobblestone street becomes the street where you almost rolled your ankle carrying groceries and briefly considered suing the Middle Ages.

The beauty doesn’t disappear. You just stop seeing it first. I think that is what happened to me.

When we first moved abroad, I wanted to experience everything. Every market. Every village. Every festival. Every château. Every street that looked remotely like someone might be selling cheese at the end of it.

But eventually you can start chasing experiences so hard that you forget to actually experience the place you already are.

You start thinking the next village will be prettier, the next trip will be more interesting. The next restaurant will be more French, the next weekend will be the one where you finally do something worth remembering.

Meanwhile, there is a medieval castle ten minutes from your house and you haven’t even bothered walking around the back of it. Apparently I needed the moon to physically move in front of the sun before I could be bothered.

Subtle, universe.

Sometimes staying present isn’t about pretending the mess isn’t there. The graffiti is still ugly. The windows are still dirty. The bird responsible for mine is clearly eating a high-fiber diet and thriving.

Presence isn’t walking around in a linen shirt whispering, “Everything is beautiful,” while stepping over dog shit. It is remembering that the dog shit isn’t the whole view.

Tourists are walking right past the things that annoy us most, standing beside us thinking, “My God, look at this place.” Maybe every once in a while we need to borrow their eyes.

Not permanently. That would be exhausting. I have errands…but long enough to remember what they can still see that we have learned to look past.

Maybe the secret to staying present isn’t learning to ignore the mess. Maybe it is refusing to let the mess become the only thing you notice.

Standing there in that vineyard, with Sonia looking up at the same kind of celestial event I had watched with my mom more than forty years earlier, I realized something else. Maybe that was what my mom gave me that day in the park.

She interrupted an ordinary day.

Whatever else was happening, whatever errands needed to be run, whatever dinner needed to be made, she stopped, and essentially said, “look up. Something is happening.”

Forty-something years later, I don’t remember the ordinary stuff from that day. I remember looking up. Now I was doing the same thing with Sonia only with significantly better scenery and fewer third-degree burns from playground equipment.

So here are a few reminders I’m working on this week, because apparently “be present” is too vague for my brain. I need instructions.

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Not everything needs to be spectacular to be worth showing up for.

Yes, an eclipse is spectacular. An eclipse in the south of France with a medieval castle in front of you is admittedly showing off. But I almost skipped it.

Too hot. No glasses. Dinner to make. Gym. Life. All the extremely important responsibilities that somehow feel urgent until you realize you cannot remember what any of them were three days later.

Sometimes presence means quitting the habit of asking, “Is this really worth it?” Go. Worst case, you wasted an hour. I have wasted considerably more time looking for something to watch on Netflix.

Think about what your child, or your younger self, will remember, not what you will accomplish.

I don’t remember what my mother accomplished the week she took me to see that eclipse. I don’t know whether the laundry was done. I don’t know what she made for dinner. I don’t know if she answered all her emails, although it was the 80s, so she had the enormous luxury of not having any.

What I remember is that she took me to the park. Will Sonia remember that the eclipse she saw was only 98 percent? Of course not.

She’ll remember standing in a vineyard wearing ridiculous glasses, looking at the sun, asking if she could steal grapes off the vines and casually informing her father that he would be dead before the next one. Core memory secured.

Stop waiting for the postcard version of living abroad.

France does not have to be Paris. Italy does not have to be Rome.

Living abroad does not require you to spend every weekend frolicking through lavender fields carrying a baguette like you are being photographed for a pharmaceutical commercial about moderate depression.

Sometimes life abroad is just life. You take out the garbage. You buy toothpaste. You argue with an appliance. You go to Monoprix because you forgot onions.

Sometimes you walk outside because something interesting is happening in the sky. That counts too.

Become a tourist in your ordinary life.

Until yesterday, I had never even walked behind the castle to see that view at sunset. I have lived here for more than two years. This is insane.

On vacation, I will walk 25,000 steps uphill through a European capital in 97-degree heat because some website said there is “a charming little street” at the top.

At home? The bakery is ten minutes away and suddenly I’m Dorothy heading to Oz. How far is this fucking bakery? “Walk? All the way there?”

We will cross an ocean to look at someone else’s ordinary life and then refuse to cross town to look at our own. Every once in a while, pretend you have three days here.

Where would you go? What would you notice? What would you photograph? What would you stop complaining about long enough to actually see?

Notice your “I can do it next time” reflex.

Living abroad makes this one especially dangerous because there is always another market, another festival, another château, another village, another summer, another Christmas market.

You start believing proximity equals permanence. “I live here. I can do it anytime.”Which is exactly why you don’t. Until one day the restaurant closes, the festival ends, somebody moves, your child gets older, you move somewhere else or life simply changes. Sometimes “next time” is real. Sometimes it is just procrastination wearing a beret.

Let your old memories remind you what matters now.

My memory took me back to Allison Henderson Park in the early 80s. I couldn’t tell you what I was wearing that day. I couldn’t tell you what was on television that night. I couldn’t tell you whether my mother had a million other things she should have been doing. But I remember where I was.

More importantly, I remember who I was with. That became my compass yesterday. Hopefully forty years from now, Sonia won’t remember what she was wearing either. She probably won’t remember what we had for dinner. Maybe she won’t even remember exactly where we stood.

But, perhaps something will happen one day when she is 46 or 56 or 61 and suddenly she’ll remember being six years old in a vineyard with her dads, wearing those stupid glasses and looking up.

And maybe she’ll stop whatever she is doing, and look up again.

And finally, put the damn phone down after you get the photo.

I almost worked harder at documenting the eclipse than experiencing it. I wanted the castle in the shot. I wanted the sun. I wanted Sonia. I wanted the vineyard. I wanted a photograph so perfect it could emotionally manipulate strangers on Instagram.

And at some point I realized I had the eclipse glasses in my hand instead of on my face, which feels like a fairly accurate summary of modern life.

We go to concerts and watch them through our screens. We photograph our dinner before tasting it. We record our children doing something instead of watching them do it. We become unpaid documentary filmmakers for lives we are forgetting to actually live.

Take the picture. Absolutely. I love the picture. Then put the phone away. You rarely know you’re making a lifelong memory while you’re making it.

Sometimes it just feels like a Wednesday, until forty years later, when you realize it wasn’t.

Maybe the moral of the story is this:

Life is a little like an 80s playground. You’re going to get burned. Someone you trusted is occasionally going to jump off the seesaw and send your ass crashing into the ground. You’re going to fall off the monkey bars onto something considerably less soft than you were hoping for.

Every now and then life is going to spin so fast you’re just hanging onto a metal pole wondering who the hell thought any of this was safe. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you get back up and keep playing.

Somewhere along the way, we grow up and get so busy trying not to fall that we forget to look around. We start protecting ourselves from the hot slide, the hard landing, the dirty window, the graffiti, the disappointing day, the trip that might not be worth it.

We notice all the things that could be better. Sometimes we miss what is already beautiful. Maybe staying present isn’t some grand spiritual practice requiring meditation, linen pants and a personality that enjoys herbal tea. Maybe it’s much simpler.

Maybe it’s occasionally remembering to look up. My mom did that for me more than forty years ago. She took an ordinary day and interrupted it with something extraordinary. I don’t remember most of my childhood. Yuri will undoubtedly continue his investigation into whether I was adequately hugged. But I remember that.

Yesterday, I got to pass it on.

Different country.

Different park.

Better glasses.

Much better backdrop.

Same sun.

Same moon.

Same feeling of standing beside someone you love while the universe does something incredible and, for a few minutes, absolutely nothing else matters. One day Sonia may not remember that she casually predicted my death while I was trying to create a tender father-daughter moment, but I hope she remembers that we went.

If you enjoy these stories and want to support my writing further, you can buy me a coffee or upgrade for $5 a month. Think of it as buying me one coffee a month, except I do all the drinking and you get the stories. Honestly, excellent arrangement for me.

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Annual subscribers also get something even more dangerous.

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If you’re moving to France, we’ll chat 1:1 and I’ll help answer your questions, share what I’ve learned and hopefully get your move started with considerably less panic than mine.

If this made you laugh, give it a restack. Then go do something future-you might actually remember.

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But before we get there, let’s talk about aging.

Getting older is a funny thing. It quietly swaps your existential crises for physical ones. One day you’re wondering if you’re living up to your potential. The next you’re Googling whether your body has finally decided to declare war on itself.

I know, I know. “Rich, you’re hardly old.”

Honestly, when I look at photos of my parents twenty years younger than me, they look like they had already accepted they were someone’s aunt and uncle forever. Meanwhile, thanks to modern skincare, enough moisturizer to waterproof a canoe, and the collective denial of Generation X, I still feel about thirty-five. Most days.

I live in a pretty constant state of inflammation thanks to my HLA-B27 autoimmune issues. To be fair, I don’t exactly help myself. Gluten and dairy and I are in what can only be described as a deeply toxic but passionate relationship. I know they’re bad for me. They know they’re bad for me. Yet every time a fresh croissant enters the room we somehow find our way back to each other.

I’ve already cut way back on alcohol, and every time I decide to have a drink my body files a complaint within twenty-four hours. This is criminal when you live in France.

You move to wine country imagining yourself becoming one of those effortlessly sophisticated people swirling a glass of red while discussing notes of cherry and oak. Instead your body responds with, “Best I can do is inflammation.”

After a week of drinking in Spain, it finally caught up with me in the form of a spectacular hemorrhoid flare-up.

I know exactly what you’re thinking.

“Jesus, Rich. We didn’t need to know that.”

You’re probably right.

But I am nothing if not an oversharer, and honestly... why does nobody talk about this? Half the population walks around pretending their digestive system is running a Michelin-star operation while secretly sitting down sideways on restaurant chairs.

So off to the doctor I went.

She took one look and casually informed me I’d likely need surgery.

I’m sorry... surgery? For something the size of a rogue blueberry?

She explained I’d be out of commission for about a month.

A month. I am already a slow healers. A month for the average person is at least 6-8 weeks for me.

Madame, people recover from replacing entire hips in less time.

Naturally, I did what every emotionally stable adult does after hearing unexpected medical news. I opened TikTok.

Within minutes my algorithm had become nothing but strangers documenting “Hemorrhoid Surgery Day 3,” “Things Nobody Told Me About Recovery,” and people dramatically pointing at captions that made me question every decision I’d made since ordering that second glass of Sangria in Spain.

The comments weren’t any better.

One person said, “It’s not that bad.” Thirty-seven others replied, “Liar.”

Surely one of you has a success story. Please. Throw me a life preserver in the comments below before I start writing my will.

As if my body hadn’t already organized enough meetings against me, I had also just had a tooth extracted and an implant placed the very same day.

The first few days were surprisingly fine. I thought, “Wow. Modern dentistry. Science. We did it.” Then the medication wore off. Turns out the pain had simply been waiting patiently for its entrance cue.

I powered through it during our trip to Spain. By the time we got home I was on the verge of tears, so back to the dentist I went.

He examined everything, looked at the X-rays, nodded thoughtfully and announced that there was no infection, everything was healing perfectly, and I should be experiencing absolutely no pain.

Sure, Jan.

I’m literally sitting in your chair because I would like to remove my jaw with a spoon. Perhaps we could troubleshoot that part?

Instead he smiled, told me to take Advil at night, and said he’d see me in three months.

Three months.

Fantastic. I’ll just pencil in “ongoing suffering” until November.

Thankfully a friend suggested I stop by the local CBD shop. At that point I had already tried mouthwash, numbing gel, Advil, positive thinking, and bargaining with whatever higher power oversees dental implants. I figured, why not?

I hadn’t been inside a cannabis shop in years. In I walked to find two impossibly cool French guys behind the counter who looked like they either sold CBD or played bass in an indie band that only performs in converted warehouses. I immediately thought, these guys definitely know where the good stuff lives.

Five minutes later I somehow had a loyalty card. Nothing makes you question your life choices quite like realizing you’ve become a rewards member at the neighborhood pot shop in France.

Fast forward to the next day. Pain free. Completely. I have no idea what was in that tiny bottle, but if those two French hipsters ever start a religion, I’m at least attending orientation.

My mouth doesn’t hurt. My backside has agreed to a temporary ceasefire. My entire body seems to have called a staff meeting and decided to stop filing complaints against me overnight.

My spirits are up.

Which is funny, because just yesterday I had a completely different post ready to go.

I’d written this funny, slightly snarky piece about the ridiculous people and situations you inevitably encounter living abroad. The pains in the asses. You know the ones. Every expat town has a cast of recurring characters. The Woman Still Auditioning for Prom Queen. The Professional Victim. The one person who somehow makes every dinner about themselves. I was all set to hit publish.

Then I read it back.

And I realized I wasn’t actually writing about those people. I was writing around them. It was one of those moments where you catch yourself using humor as camouflage. I could absolutely publish it, get a few laughs, maybe even a few “I know EXACTLY who you’re talking about” comments...

Or...

I could just deal with what was actually bothering me. Which, if you know me at all, is wildly out of character. I don’t enjoy confrontation. I don’t run toward conflict. I run away from it at Olympic speeds while convincing myself I’ve “protected my peace.” Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it's just me convincing myself I was taking the high road when really I just took the nearest exit.

Then I thought, if I’m suddenly feeling this emotionally mature, maybe I should keep going before it wears off.

Because another thing had been sitting with me all week.

I’d also been writing about the family situation we’ve been carrying around for more than a year. The one where everyone seems to think someone owes someone an apology, except nobody can even agree what the original crime was anymore.

As I furiously typed out all the reasons I was right, another thought crept in. What if nobody apologized? Not because nobody was hurt. Not because everything was okay. Because maybe we’d all spent so much time standing at opposite ends of the bridge waiting for the other person to cross first that nobody noticed the bridge had started to rot.

What if, instead of trying to return to where we were, we simply started from where we are?

Maybe there are hurt feelings on every side. Maybe there are things we’d all handle differently if someone handed us a time machine and a decent therapist. But what if none of that actually mattered anymore?

So...

I sent the message.

Which, for someone who hates confrontation, felt suspiciously like emotional cardio.

Sonia is getting older, and with that comes questions. The other day she looked at me with complete sincerity and asked, “Can you ask Mama Tyra if she’ll have another baby for us?”

I said, “Absolutely not.”

She immediately hit me with the most dramatic, toothless, six-year-old, “But whyyyyyyyy?” I explained that Daddy and Papa only ever wanted one little girl, and we got exactly the one we wished for. Then I added, “Besides, what if you wanted to play and we couldn’t because we’d be busy taking care of a baby?”

She didn’t even hesitate.

“Yeah... I don’t want that.”

Case closed.

Imagine if every adult disagreement could be settled with that level of efficiency.

“No thanks.”

“Fair enough.”

Everyone goes home.

Unfortunately, life insists on making things unnecessarily complicated. Yuri’s family is in town visiting his cousin who has always been more like a sister to him.

Or at least she was.

They’re the family members we had a massive falling out with over a year ago. To this day, we honestly couldn’t tell you why. One day we were family. The next day...

Blocked.

Phone.

Social media.

Messages.

Everything.

You’d think for something so serious we’d know.

A few months ago they had a baby. Now Yuri’s family is visiting, and naturally they’ve been posting photos of everyone together. Sonia sees them over our shoulders.

“Oh... are they here?”

“Oh! There’s a baby?”

“Can I see the baby?”

How do you explain that to a six-year-old?

You can’t exactly say, “Well sweetheart, the adults are participating in a long-running mystery where nobody tells us what season we’re on.” You just smile and change the subject.

With family in town, it stirred up feelings we’d mostly packed away. We’d finally accepted that maybe they simply didn’t want us in their lives anymore.

When Yuri’s family first arrived they told us they needed a few days to recover from the jet lag before getting together. Completely understandable, except since then it’s been an Olympic event of Instagram stories.

Lunches.

Dinners.

Wineries.

Canal cruises.

Family photos.

Apparently they recovered from jet lag somewhere between the appetizer and dessert.

Seeing the photos hurt. Not because people were enjoying themselves. Because there was a time we would’ve been in every single one of them. Back before anyone had children. Back when we were the kids.

Now we’re raising children of our own in France, and instead of watching our daughters grow up together, we’re trying to explain why one little girl keeps asking about the other one.

Then, at 8:30 one evening, we got a text.

“We can see you now.”

I’m sorry...

Now?

This isn’t OpenTable.

You don’t make a same-night reservation with the parents of a six-year-old at bedtime. Ironically, these are the exact same people who expected us to eat dinner at five o’clock sharp when their son was little because, understandably, children’s schedules mattered.

We politely declined.

But as I sat writing about all of this today, ready to wrap it in jokes and sarcasm, something shifted. Maybe the funny post wasn’t actually the honest one.

Maybe humor was doing what I often ask it to do. Keeping the real feelings just far enough away that I wouldn’t have to look directly at them.

When my grandpa died years ago, he told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said he had no problems with anyone in the world anymore. Not because nobody had ever hurt him. Somewhere along the way he’d either forgiven them, forgotten them, or simply decided he wasn’t carrying it anymore.

He figured that was probably a good way to show up at heaven’s front door.

I always thought there was something quietly beautiful about that. Then my father reminded me families are complicated. When Grandpa died, my father, ever the disappointment, decided Yuri and Sonia wouldn’t be included in the obituary.

Everyone else was there.

Spouses.

Children.

Grandchildren.

The whole family tree.

Mine just... stopped growing.

I was listed as though I were still a single grandson who occasionally wandered in from the woods. So I called the newspaper and had it corrected.

He called...

...and changed it back.

I called one last time and said, “Fine. Remove me completely.”

Then, because apparently subtlety has never been my spiritual gift, I wrote my own obituary for Grandpa.

The newspaper called.

“Sir... we can’t publish this.”

The editor kindly suggested perhaps the classifieds would be a better fit for my brutal takedown.

I laughed so hard I couldn’t even be offended.

So I rewrote it.

Instead of writing about the family drama, I wrote about Grandpa.

I wrote that he was survived by me, Yuri, and Sonia, and that if anyone knew my grandfather, they knew he would’ve welcomed every one of us into his home without hesitation. Every family. Every color of the rainbow. That’s who he was.

Ironically, I was then labeled the disrespectful one.

Which is one of life’s great magic tricks.

Exclude someone’s family. Then clutch your pearls when they notice.

But somewhere in all of that, a lesson stuck with me.

People are going to behave badly. Sometimes spectacularly. Sometimes creatively. Sometimes with enough confidence to make you wonder if they rehearsed it in the mirror. The only part you actually get to control is what you do next. I suppose that’s another thing age does to you.

One minute you’re twenty-five, bartending in the Castro, convinced you’re the social director of the entire city. Slinging cocktails, knowing everyone, orchestrating the party like some mildly drunk cruise director.

The next...

You’re discussing hemorrhoids, family estrangements the town gossip queen and sprinting to the window because a cardinal landed on the balcony.

“Everyone! Quick! Look! A bird!”

Honestly, the bird wins every time.

Yuri always tells me that when we first met I was one of the nicest people he’d ever known. Always please. Always thank you. He says it in this funny, childlike way whenever he wants to remind me that I wasn’t always so quick to write people off.

I usually laugh and tell him the same thing every time.

“You taught me that.”

So what does any of this have to do with France?

Maybe nothing. Or maybe everything. As I reflect on all of this, here are some thoughts I have sat with as time has made me calmer.

France taught me that not every conflict deserves a funeral. Back home I was quick to pronounce people dead to me. Relationship over. Block. Delete. Gone. France has this funny way of refusing to let that happen. You’ll see them at the bakery next Tuesday. Their cousin lives down the street. Your kids end up in the same class. You learn that not every disagreement requires an emotional burial. Sometimes people are just... people. Annoying on Tuesday. Lovely on Friday.

France taught me the difference between peace and winning. In America I think I wanted to win every disagreement. Now I mostly want peace.

Not because I’ve become enlightened. Mostly because being angry is exhausting and, frankly, I have hemorrhoids now. Some arguments aren’t worth carrying around longer than the person who caused them.

France taught me that relationships are maintained, not managed. Americans love closure. The French seem oddly comfortable with... continuation.

People argue. They disappear. They show back up six months later at someone’s birthday as though everyone collectively agreed to hit “skip intro.”

It’s maddening. It’s also strangely freeing. Not everything needs a final chapter.

France taught me to leave the door unlocked. Not every person deserves unlimited access to your life. But maybe they don’t deserve a lifetime sentence either. You don’t have to invite everyone to dinner.

Sometimes leaving the door cracked open is enough. If they walk through it kindly, wonderful. If they don’t, you still slept just fine.

France taught me that everyone is carrying something. The older I get, the less interested I am in assigning heroes and villains. I don’t have some “bad people” list. The woman embarrassing herself at the party in a see through dress. The neighbor who never smiles. The family member who disappeared. The person who disappointed me. None of it excuses bad behavior.

But age, and maybe France, has made me just curious enough to stop assuming I know the whole story.

Moral of the story: People know exactly what they do. They know what they've done. You don't have to hold a committee meeting to decide whether they're a good person. You just decide where they belong in your life. Maybe that's your dinner table. Maybe it's a wave across the canal. Maybe it's absolutely nowhere. Either way, your job isn't to chase every train. It's just to decide which ones you're getting on. I prefer the next one to Paris most days.

If you enjoy these stories and want to support my writing, you can buy me a coffee or upgrade for $5 a month. Think of it as buying me one coffee each month, except I do all the drinking and you get the stories.

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With an upgraded subscription you’ll also receive my guide, Moving to France: The Paperwork, The Panic, The Plan, a survival guide for navigating the French long-stay visa process without setting your printer on fire.

Annual subscribers get something even more dangerous. Me.

If you’re moving to France, we’ll chat one-on-one, I’ll answer your questions, share everything I’ve learned, and hopefully help you panic considerably less than I did.

And if this made you laugh, give it a restack. Apparently oversharing is my love language.

Share

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