“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle,” she nervously asked her shoes, “but do you speak French?”
“Yes,” I affirmed, wondering if she was lost. “What’s this about?”
“I’m on a scavenger hunt!” she told me. “See?” she exclaimed, thrusting a laminated list in my face. I took the list from her hands and skimmed it quickly. It requested the usual items, such as a four-leaf clover, a pure white feather, and a letter with a stamp from a foreign country. She pointed a chubby pink finger at the upper part of the page. “I have to get a foreigner to sing a song in her native language.”
Yes, there it was, item 32 on the 100-item list.
She fidgeted some more, and then blurted, “Would you most kindly sing for me?”
Who could refuse such politeness? “Sure,” I agreed. What the heck. It was for a school project.
She jumped up and clapped her hands, overjoyed.
“Do I start singing now?” I asked.
“No,” she replied firmly. “I must get the teacher.”
That made sense. Otherwise how does she prove that she really got a foreigner to sing for her?
Retrieving her list, she started to head off, then turned and eyed me doubtfully. “You aren’t going to go away?”
“Don’t worry,” I nodded reassuringly, “I’ll stay right here.” I sat down on one of the wooden benches at the head of the garden. As she disappeared, I started rustling around in my tote bag for a stray song I might have tossed in there.
“Arirang”? “Doraji”? These are Korean folk songs my mother used as lullabies. Bad idea, because they’ll put me to sleep.
“Three Blind Mice”? It’s a round. That requires coordination. No good.
“Joy to the World”? It’s the wrong season for Christmas carols.
Hymns? Pop songs? “Happy Birthday to You”?
When I finally emerged from the murky depths of my bag, where I’d turned up a bottle of antihistamines, a bottle of water, a copy of Plan de Paris par arrondissement, three broken mechanical pencils, a cough drop, a skeleton key, a dozen library cards, a crumpled brochure from the Hôtel des Arènes, and the all-important packet of toilet paper but no lyric sheets or karaoke cassettes, I was greeted by the terrifying sight of twenty uniformed girls heading straight for me. In seven minutes, one French schoolgirl had multiplied like a rabbit, and a warren of warm and fuzzy creatures was determinedly hopping my way.
This was not in the plan. I’d agreed to sing for one person. Now I was singing to an entire crèche.
The original girl came running over to me, pulling me off the bench, and dragging me over to meet her classmates. She was clearly the Girl of the Moment, having bravely asked a total stranger to sing and getting a positive response. “See! Here she is!” my little friend declared, gesturing dramatically towards me as if I was a unicorn she’d discovered lurking under her bed. “She’s going to sing for us!” More clapping and hopping ensued.
The exhausted teacher greeted me with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. “What will you sing for us?” she asked tiredly, shushing the giggling girls who’d surrounded me, trapping me inside a straightjacket made of sugar and spice. Grubby fingers intertwined and patent-leather feet thumped away in anticipation. Who knew such cuddly creatures could be so scary? Run away, run away . . .
Up until then, I hadn’t known what song I would sing. At that moment, I was inspired. “I’m going to sing ‘Do Re Mi,’” I announced triumphantly. “You know, from The Sound of Music.”
The teacher gave me a puzzled look. “Isn’t that an American song?”
“Yes, but you said native language, and I was raised speaking English.”
Ooohs and ahhs of surprise from the girls.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” the teacher sighed. “The main point is that you’re a foreigner.”
“True,” I agreed. “I’m not French.”
More ooohing and ahhing from big-eyed girls. The teacher shushed them again.
I took a deep breath and started the song:
Do, a deer, a female deer,
Re, some stuff about the sun
Mi, a girl who likes to run
Fa, La, Ti, etc.
By the time the second stanza landed back on “Do,” the girls started singing along on cue. The weirdness of the situation hit me between Mi and Fa the second time around. Here I was, a Korean-American graduate student, singing an English song from an American movie set in wartime Salzburg to twenty French six-year-olds and their teacher in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. I felt like a combination of Julie Andrews as Sister Maria, and Bugs Bunny as Maestro Toscanini. By the time we’d built the song up to its big crescendo, we’d become a gleefully possessed chorus. Nothing like a bit of singing to unify the masses! We’d also gathered a little audience of confused tourists struggling to decipher the performance. I would have been very pleased if at least one tourist mistook us for busking musicians, but nobody threw us a few centimes or anything.
When the song finished and we’d caught our breath, the teacher thanked me and briskly checked off her list. Twenty schoolgirls echoed her in chorus, “Merci beaucoup mademoiselle!” and off they scattered, vanishing with alarming swiftness behind the rows of linden trees. A few Germans hung around, waiting to see what would happen next, so I shooed them off in French, announcing, “That’s all, folks!” Then I gave them a big, toothy, American smile, gathered up my things, and skipped down the path.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was casting a spell on myself, singing a song that set out my destiny, starting off with Do, a deer, a female deer and ending with a triumphant Do!
Do what, exactly?
A deer, dummy.
The French schoolgirls knew all the words to the song but not their meaning, and so we understood each other perfectly. One of the perks of speaking a foreign language in a foreign country is that nobody expects to understand you. To the small pink ears of my fluffy new friends, Rogers & Hammerstein’s definitions for the Sounds of Solfeggio were as good as any in a city where wombats jirbled while lunting. (These are actual words, by the way, taken from Jeffrey Kacirk’s nonfiction book, The Word Museum. Jirble: “To pour a drink with an unsteady hand.” Lunting: “Walking while smoking a pipe.” Wombats are crepuscular marsupials with stubby legs. I have been accused of bearing a certain resemblance to them.) Like the schoolgirls, I thought I was on a scavenger hunt, scrounging for items that were terribly important at the time. If I’d been paying attention, I would have realized that the girls were doing the hunting, and the Do they’d found was Mi.
Now, there are millions of deer on the planet, but they’re oddballs in the city. Do deer like shopping? Will they stay for lunch? No, they flee into the nearest woods, until they find something they can eat. That is how, by going around and around in circles and running a very long way, I ended up in a totally different place from where I started, because where things began, and where they ended, were both in Paris. One Paris was in France. The other was in Maine.
It would have been a more efficient use of my time on earth if I’d just figured it out right then, headed back to my home state, and started hunting for deer instead of singing show tunes about them to schoolgirls bestowing buttery kisses on my cheeks. But there is one thing that I’d learned from cooking my own meals: you can’t rush the process or the dish will get burned. So I