I’m sitting at a red light in Friday rush hour traffic. It’s a ridiculous time of day to be out and I know it, but here I am, stuck and fidgeting, when the cell phone sitting in the passenger seat rings.
I answer, pushing speaker phone.
“Hi Mom,” he says.
I’d been hoping he’d call home. He’s been in Switzerland for two weeks now. We’ve tried to coordinate our schedules on Skype and missed each other. And this time I won’t forget to ask a few questions.
“How are you? How is it? How’s the research going?” I ask.
International Study for College Students
I’m hungry for details; I know nothing at this point about his time in Switzerland.
He reassures me that he’s fine and he expects the research will be interesting. He begins to talk about particle physics – bombarding something with something else at some magical place called CERN. He moves on to a mention of 200 million events per second though I can’t for the life of me figure out what he’s referring to, but traffic is barely inching along and he sounds excited and happy.
Apparently 200 million events per second must be a good thing; whatever it is, he’s intrigued by the details that are over my head.
“It’s crazy expensive here,” he says. “So I’m doing my own cooking when I can, and now I know the words for rolling pin, pressure cooker, and food processor in French.” (Damn. I’m fluent but I don’t know those words. Note to self: Look up the words for rolling pin, pressure cooker, and food processor in French.)
“It’s also 10 degrees,” he adds.
I look at the temperature reading on my dashboard. It’s unusually warm. 60 degrees. I spare him that bit of information.
“So I went skiing in the Alps last weekend,” he says. “With my buddy from school who’s actually from here.”
“Wow,” I say, as the line of cars ahead of me begins to nudge forward at a faster pace. Now the phone is propped in my lap and I’m wondering what the Alps must be like beyond the pictures, the video clips, the movies I’ve seen.
I don’t ski. I don’t know Switzerland except to pass through and that was decades ago.
Adventures Abroad
My son begins to speak of his weekend and I picture Jean-Claude Killy, and then 1969’s Downhill Racer with Robert Redford. I’m imagining mod fashions in primary colors, teased hair, Elke Sommer types, fur-trimmed jackets before the days of PETA.
Ah yes. Camilla Sparv. That’s her name. Stunning woman.
“It was beautiful,” he says.
“Et ton français ? Tout le monde parle français ?”
We switch languages and continue in French. My kid is a little miffed that he has yet to use his French a great deal; he was fluent with a superb accent after a high school experience in Brittany. He’s annoyed that some of the special sessions he’s attending are taught in English rather than French, but his German is handy albeit basic, and he tells me – it isn’t “High German” they’re speaking, so it’s a stretch for him.
“Je ne suis pas obligé de parler tout le temps. Il faut faire un effort et j’y pense pas,” he says, explaining that he has to remind himself to speak French.
I tell him it’s certainly worth making the effort, since he’s living in an international city.
“Tu as raison,” he says, agreeing with me.
The Value of Language Immersion
I’m remembering how helpful the language immersion was for him a few years earlier, living with a French family. Though he’s older now, and studying as well as doing part-time work, I wish the opportunity to speak French and German was more regular.
As I hear the pleasure in his voice, it’s clear how much he enjoys Europe. How at home he feels.
“I need to go,” I tell him. “Traffic is moving.”
“We’ll Skype,” he says, and I wonder how to translate that into French. I guess I’ll add it to my list, along with rolling pin, pressure cooker, and food processor. I’m impressed that he was able to dig up those particular appliances. He’s a resourceful kid.
“Je t’aime,” I say.
“Moi aussi,” he answers, and I disconnect.
I look down at the phone in my lap. My son is a world away, so close for those few minutes, and then a world away, again. I recall my own year abroad at that age, the international experience that reinforced my independence and language fluency, the opening of doors, philosophies, opportunities.
Traffic starts to flow more easily now, and I smile again.
Swiss Alps image courtesy Flicker, http://www.flickr.com/photos/babasteve/6741434167/in/photostream/
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Glad you know he’s doing fine. Our modern communications encircle the globe — amazing.
It is indeed amazing, Paul.
He’s very lucky to be where he is and at the right time for what could be a revolution in quantum physics, detecting the presence of the Higgs boson. I’m crossing my fingers that they get an answer with the current accelerators; it will be increasingly difficult to fund and build larger and more powerful ones in these uncertain times.
Could you translate any of what you just said into French, batticus? (Or even – English?)
Ah yes, so far away, but it’s the close for a few minutes that really matters.
You’re so right, Carol. Those few minutes are very sweet, and with residual effects of the very best kind.
I love this, BLW—a dialectic of opposites conjuring love across up and down, mother and son, near and far, cold and temperate, self and other, fast and slow, before and after. Under the microscope and through the telescope, in the lab and on the street… it’s that love that cannot be defined or pinned down that would seem to make us, bind us, release us, undo us and remake us again.
As you suggest Bruce, so many ways our lives with children and parents continue to criss cross and inform each other.
Il a de la chance d’être là où il est, au moment où il faut y être, pour assister à ce qui pourrait être une révolution en physique quantique : la détection du boson de Higgs.
Je touche du bois pour qu’ils obtiennent une réponse avec les accélérateurs dont ils disposent maintenant; ça va devenir de plus en plus difficile d’obtenir des financements pour en construire de plus gros et plus puissants par les temps qui courent.
Pressure cooker : cocotte-minute
Rolling pin : rouleau à pâtisserie
Food processor : robot ménager ou robot culinaire
Merci, Alain ! Robot !?! Curieux…
While I can’t translate what I said into French (merci Alain!), I’ll try to translate it into less geeky English. I thought about an analogy and while it isn’t perfect, it is the best I can offer with my limited understanding of quantum physics.
The real accelerator is basically a huge (miles wide) donut shaped tunnel where they use lots of energy to speed up particles and smash them together; the photos of the collisions are then studied to see what the particles are made of (the wikipedia article on the Higgs Boson shows what they think this picture will look like).
A real-life analogy would be a racetrack where two cars are sent around the track in opposite directions, as they gain speed they are careful to avoid each other on each lap and once they reach top speed, the cars smash headlong into each other; the resulting crash and flying parts would tell you a lot about how the cars were put together (glass would shatter into little pieces, wheels would probably roll away, each piece of the car would act differently in the crash, etc). In the same way that you would learn different things crashing the race cars into each other at 60mph compared to 200mph, physicists need larger and more powerful accelerators to cause the particles to crash into each other faster and with more energy. Sorry for the interruption, now back to our regular programming 🙂
Wow. Thanks batticus. I think I (almost) understood that!
You’re welcome, Bruce!
Avec plaisir, BLW!
Un prêté pour un (petit) rendu! ^_^
With apologies for coming back to more prosaic matters than quantum physics and parental and filial love, “robot” is a term inherited from the sixties.
From Wikipédia :
“Un robot de cuisine ou robot ménager, parfois abrégé simplement en « robot », est un appareil électrique de cuisine utilisé pour faciliter diverses tâches répétitives dans le processus de préparation des aliments.
… Le premier robot ménager fût lancé en 1972, son inventeur est le français Pierre Verdun1. Ce dernier, observant le temps passé par ses clients à la découpe d’aliments en cuisine se mis à réfléchir à une machine permettant de faire gagner du temps à ces derniers.”
In physics, there’s this thing I read about called entanglement. Two particles on opposite sides of the universe, and each knows what the other is doing. There’s no communication between them traveling at the speed of light. It’s instantaneous. They just know. Ask your son about it.
I am glad you had a chance to have this exchange with him. I love the context and substance of this conversation. Hope to have this same rapport with my daughter some day.