Stories, Thoughts and Snippets


Cultural Differences 1 Cultural Differences 2 Cultural Differences 3 Cultural Differences 4

I held off on kids till I had finished grad school and had a fairly secure job lined up, still believing that any day she was going to come to me and tell me she had found someone else. But she never did. We had Lucy, and she seemed happy, she wanted another right away, so we had Cindy. By that point I really did believe her, I let go of my logic and doubt and accepted that somehow or another Lorraine and I were just meant to be and she had known since school what was really important to her. She gave me very little reason to doubt this assumption over the next five years, she was an attentive mother, and loving, if somewhat more distant than I was. And then there was today, after I made her wait seven years because I doubted her, and after five more in the life she had waited so long for, she did exactly what I had expected her to do when we were both still eighteen.

I suppose one can't hate a person without loving them first. They cannot truly hurt you otherwise. As I flipped the crepes, all I could think of was how I was going to explain to the girls about their periods, it seemed impossibly awkward to me. There must be a book on the subject.

"I like French pancakes!"

"Me, too!"

"In France they call them crepes."

"Crepes? Why do they call them that, Daddy?"

"Well, you see they don't have to call them French because they're already in France, the same way you don't call a hamburger an American Hamburger, even though we make them a little differently here than they do anywhere else. So to the French, French pancakes are just pancakes, and the French word for pancake is crepe. They made that word up all on their own, the same way the English made up the word pancake."

"Why would everyone make up a different word for the same thing?"

"Well, for a long time, people lived really far apart, and it wasn't easy to go and see everyone else, so nobody knew how other people were talking and after enough time passed each little group developed their own language, and now people pass the language of their parents down to their children, the same way you learned English from me."


Cultural Differences 1 Cultural Differences 2 Cultural Differences 3 Cultural Differences 4