The moment I set foot in northern France, I was pretty certain my study abroad experience was going to be a disaster. In the fall, I was accepted and committed to a program in Paris. One month before I was supposed to leave, I was essentially told by Pitzer, “That isn’t happening.”
Hence, I found myself in Reims, a town that’s just close enough to Paris to see what you are missing, but far enough away to still be distinctly not Paris. It’s also really cold, and home to 177,674 people and a lot of champagne.
I knew complaining about studying abroad in France made me sound pretty stuck-up. But I mean, come on. It’s Paris. So I was pretty bummed out.
I assumed the semester (and my writing) would follow a convenient narrative arc. I would begin cynical, gradually make peace with Reims and eventually arrive at some profound realization about what the experience had taught me.
I had no idea what the realization would be at that point; I was banking on one to appear. Writing –– and much more importantly, life –– doesn’t work like that, and that was quite the harsh awakening. You can’t just manufacture memories.
Still, for the first few months, I tried. At one point, I forced myself to sit in a field in Bezannes, just outside of Reims, and journal, because I thought enough reflection might uncover the profound realization I was waiting for. I ended up staring at a hospital for two hours.
Clearly, it didn’t work.
My host mother Anne was fantastic; she helped me pull my head out of my ass. She didn’t speak English, so I spoke French. I didn’t cook very well, so she taught me how to cook better. There wasn’t much to write home about — most nights, we’d make dinner together and talk about nothing particularly important. It makes me happy looking back. Nothing especially memorable seemed to be happening at the time, but now I think that mundane routine was the essence of my semester.
It wasn’t until late March that I realized the profound realization I’d been waiting for was right in front of me. While I was busy lamenting Reims, I was also spending evenings cooking with Anne, playing soccer in the hail, and subsequently packing onto the 11 p.m. tram with my teammates after practice. I should have been more content that my days were spent running around in a field listening to Nights by Frank Ocean and Purple Rain by Prince instead of standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and wandering the Louvre.
We were a wonderfully rag-tag bunch, that team. A couple of current and former Division III players who had found themselves in France, a few former European academy players who had been spit out by the system, and a lot of people who just hadn’t made the cut. The technical level wasn’t the highest, the language barriers didn’t help, but those months made me realize why I fell in love with soccer in the first place.
We ended up winning the regional championship in Le Havre, and a group of us, collectively representing Sweden, India, France and the United States, ended up stranded at a party, 30 minutes from our hotel, all trying to get home on electric bikes.
A larger university from (you guessed it) Paris knocked us out in the nationals shortly thereafter, and suddenly the semester was nearly over.
The extent to which I had failed to notice Reims became obvious the day before I left. I was walking back from class with a couple of friends when we passed a beautiful church that I had failed to notice in my four months living there.
One of my friends, shocked I hadn’t seen this, asked if I had eyes, to which I told him, “Not very good ones.” I don’t think he realized what a fantastic question he had posed. It was pretty baffling. I’d lived in Reims for four months and never once bothered to look around.
I’m sure this isn’t a unique experience. We spend so much time trying to identify the moments we’ll remember that we end up missing them while they’re happening. You’ve probably told yourself that the move to a new city will change you, or that the big internship you’ve been chasing for months is going to give you the revelation you’ve been looking for. And that’s all probably true, but you really can’t predict how that change is going to happen.
When the change doesn’t announce itself, we assume nothing is happening. Usually, though, it is happening quietly in our routines and the places we barely think to notice. I didn’t realize Reims was changing me until it did. I spent the better part of three months trying to will memories into existence, to the point where I missed the actual ones unfolding in front of me.
I had wanted to be the omniscient narrator of my own life while I was still living it. The truth is, you can’t do that. My revelation was simple: It’s hard to write nostalgia in advance, and if I could do Reims all over again, I would.
Otto Fritton PZ ’27, unfortunately dubbed “OF” by his close friends, is an avid Peanuts fan. He finds Charles M. Schulz’s portrayal of Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Haired Girl fantastic — the perfect example of unrequited love. He wonders if Charlie will ever truly succeed, and suspects that’s exactly the point.
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