What Does It Mean Anyway?

I think certain significant experiences define most families. My husband's family, I believe, was largely defined by its three-year sojourn in France in the late 1970's. The title of this blog, Just Allez, is a beautiful example of "franglais," the special form of not quite French, not really English either, that Bob, my late and great father-in-law spoke. Enough people have asked me about the blog's title so I thought it time to tell the story behind it. Because there is always a story.

Bob never managed in French, as Jeanne, my mother-in-law likes to say. That's sort of an understatement, even though Bob loved all things French. He loved the food and the culture; the art and the architecture.  He loved Paris, his adored second city. He also loved the language, except for the fact that he could not exactly "parler en francais," even though he fancied himself somewhat fluent.

 To illustrate the point, let me take you to a family of seven traveling together in 1979 or 1980 (who really knows at this point) from Venice (could have been Rome, too), where they had been on holiday, to France in a Peugeot 504 familiale wagon. That is a generous name for a small car (with no air conditioning or radio) filled with Bob and Jeanne and their five sons, including my husband who would have been about 13 and his brothers who would have ranged in age from 6 to 14, and their luggage.  I imagine it was a bit like those clown cars at a circus.

As the story goes, Bob, who was driving the clown car, arrived at a tunnel through the Alps to France with a toll, of course. Bob stopped the car at the toll, and the toll taker -- long before automated tollbooths or EZ Pass -- asked, "Monsieur, voulez-vous seulement 'allez' ou 'allez et retour'?" "Sir, would you like a one-way toll or a round-trip toll?" The more literal translation is "Are you "going" or "going and returning?"

Now, if you are truly bilingual, you can automatically switch gears from one language to another and speak and think in that language without -- and this is the key -- simultaneously translating. The rest of us need to translate, however. If you have ever tried to parler in another language, via translation, you also may have experienced that truly horrifying instant when your mental dictionary slams shut, and you cannot remember the words to use.

I believe that this is what happened to Bob at that moment when the toll taker asked "Allez ou allez et retour?" Yet, without missing a beat, legend has it, Bob replied, "Just allez!" He paid the one-way toll and rolled on through the Alps to France, while Jeanne and his sons spasmed with laughter.  "Just allez" became a commonly used franglais expression in the Corrigan home evermore. "Where are you going?"  "Oh, we are just allez-ing to the bakery." "We are just allez-ing to the movies." The boys rode Bob about this for years.

That's the story, as told to me, and I am sticking with it. Because sometimes all you can do is keep going!