Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road

All’s Well That Ends Well…

At a certain point I thought that instead of spending my 70th birthday with my two sons in Paris, I was going be spending it alone at our home in Champagne, waiting for a repairman to come and do the necessary work to avoid our entire swimming pool emptying into our basement.

The night before, when my son was cleaning the pool filter, a key part–the screw that holds the pressure gauge on top of the dome-like structure that the water passes through in its cleansing process–broke and left my son stuck holding the gauge firmly in place in order to avoid water spouting out of the top of the dome and continuing on to empty the contents of the pool into our basement. Quite an awkward position!

I’ll skip over some of the next steps, which involved an emergency call to my husband–who is known to keep a cool head and offer brilliant practical suggestions in such a situation–and who offered same from his home in Vermont. With the help of his long-distance creative thinking (and his knowledge of the basic physics and mechanics of the pool mechanism) and with my son’s admirable practical ability to fix things and also stay calm in these kinds of emergencies, as a temporary solution my son ended up fashioning a plug made from a wine bottle cork that he was able to insert in the place where the pressure gauge should be, and fasten it down with several layers of some very strong tape.

This part of our unplanned evening adventure ended at about midnight, at which point my son, who was really supposed to have been packing for his trip to the US 36 hours later, not doing makeshift pool filter repairs, went off to bed, exhausted, saying he’d have to pack in the morning.

Before turning in for the night, I composed an email message to our pool maintenance service with the subject line “Situation URGENT!” hoping that they would read their email first thing in the morning and maybe–if we were very very lucky–they would be able to come to the rescue sometime the following day.

Americans in France do quite a lot of complaining about their feeling that French service providers do not respond to requests for service as quickly as they ought to. (Americans have a rather inflated sense of entitlement as consumers. They don’t really get that the “customer is always right” mentality just does not work in France.) I have often remarked, in response to such complaints, that it seems to me that French service providers tend to respond to requests for service when they are able to actually provide it, and sometimes not before. This can, I agree, be frustrating for Americans, who expect an answer one way or another, and often don’t get it from French people, or don’t get it as quickly as they think they should. “Well they tend to respond in their own time,” I have said more than once, in trying to help bridge this particular cultural gap. But I have always added: “EXCEPT when there is an emergency, in which case they tend to show up very quickly.”

I was hoping that would be the case this time.

And indeed, the first good thing that happened on my birthday is that I got a call at 8:00 in the morning from the owner of the pool service, responding to my appeal for help. I was not really holding out hope that I would be able to get them to come on that very day (and–not to stress the point too much–but it was my birthday). So I was resolved to it just being one of those birthdays that didn’t go quite the way you had hoped.

However, to my surprise, here is what happened next. (The hard bits will be translated from the French.)

Pool Guy: Bonjour, Madame, c’est [first name, last name]

Me: Oh, merci, monsieur, you got my message…

PG: Oui…

Me: And you can come and help?

PG: Yes, I don’t want you to be bothered by this problem…

Me: And [holding my breath] when can you come?

PG: Today.

Me: Today…

PG: This morning.

ME: Oh, that’s good! [Then, remembering] But…I have to take my son to the train station, I have to leave here about 9:30…

PG: That’s okay, we’ll come before then.

ME: Oh, that’s wonderful, thank you! (Oh, c’est très bien, merci!)

PG: Pas de soucies. Bonne journée. (No problem. Have a good day.)

ME: Merci, monsieur, à vous de même… (Thanks, monsieur, same to you…)

Now I must confess that I did not fully believe that they would be able to get someone to us quite that quickly. The pool place is nearly an hour away from us, and it was already 8:00. So I still didn’t really think I was going to be able to go to Paris that day, and I wasn’t sure I would even be able to get my son to the train he was hoping to take either. Nevertheless both of us began preparing as if this rather unlikely event was actually possible.

And now: having made my point about French service people answering with an amazingly quick and helpful response when it is truly needed, I’ll skip to the happy ending of this story: a young technician got to us in time to make the needed repair; he gave us a couple of bits of advice about how to deal with the problem we were also having with controlling the chemical balance in the water; and he went on his way.

And as he left, my son and I went into a sitcom-worthy race to the train (you can imagine the giddy sound-track yourself): we quickly closed up the house, threw our bags into the car, and drove off as quickly as we could to our train station; where we got the last available parking space; and ran (through a rather heavy downpour) to the platform; and got onto the train–which came gliding into the station at the exact same moment that our feet hit the pavement of the platform. And we got onto the train. Which then pulled out of the station, and away toward Paris. (It is a very short stop at our station, very short.) And we weren’t even that wet, since our race had been so rapid, and our time in the pouring rain so brief.

So. When a friend gave me a one-day-late birthday greeting on Facebook, and said he hoped I had had a nice birthday, I answered as briefly and as truthfully as I could. “It was wonderful,” I said.

And I saved the rest of my answer for this post. 🙂

Janet Hulstrand is an American writer, editor, writing coach, and teacher of writing and of literature who lives in France. She is the author of Demystifying the French: How to Love Them, and Make Them Love You, and A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France, and coauthor of Moving On: A Practical Guide to Downsizing the Family Home.

July 30, 2023 at 3:55 pm Leave a comment