I imagine I am running along the side of the record,
spinning like a hamster in a wheel along its black
lines, churning out a French folk song that does not
belong in this part of New England where the largest
attraction of the year was when Edward (god bless that
man, and his mustache gray as the stainless steel oven
and his lawn mower that looks like a tractor and rumbles
like a little Irish storm simulator [we do all we can to get
a bit of the foreign in here when Quebec is not
near enough]) took off the old tin roof on the abandoned
grocery store that forever advertised “Rainbow Trout,
¢39/lb” and renovated it into an Airbnb for bored
city folk. The singer drones on, his melancholic
straight-tone “Marie!” lacking just enough vibrato for
just long enough to feel like the desperation of a real person
and his real love, and I am thinking “Oh, Marie, love him
while he is still there to love!” while in the other room,
my mother listens to her own voice in her unread voicemail
to another empty lover. The track is fading into a
different song, in the few seconds of static
I hear her recorded voice shout “What are you afraid
of?” The French continues, “Ce, ce jour la...ce, ce jour la!”
and a quick percussion, a bass crescendo. I am still
running, though now I can hear my mother’s voice shouting
“What are you running from?” A shudder of jingles amid
the percussion solo. “Ma vie, ma vie / c’est plus petite que
cette grande nuit / ici-bas...” Down here, a cafe away from
the hottest new French intellectual conversation, down here,
a Dollar General in every town, and a town away from
another grande romance d'Amérique.