Amazing older people

So the theme of my past two days has been meeting older people who have done way more interesting things with their lives than I could ever dream. Serious manimals here.

Yesterday I had an interview with Maurice Nadeau, who is the editor of La Quinzaine Littéraire and who has his own elite publishing company. What makes Nadeau so fascinating is that he was born in 1911...thus meaning that he has seen a hell of a lot of history. And not just SEEN a hell of a lot of history, he has PARTICIPATED in a lot of history. He was a major contributor to Combat, Camus' underground resistance journal during WWII. And before that he was tight with all the leading surrealists and had written "the book" on the history of surrealism. After the war he launched such luminaries as Perec, and he also ran afoul of the French government in 1961 for publishing the "Manifeste des 121," a document prepared by all the leading intellectuals of the era to protest the use of torture in the Algerian war. Later he launched the career of Tahar ben Jelloun, one of the first (and most consecrated) authors from North Africa writing in French today. He also discovered Houellebecq, but we'll pretend that didn't happen (hahahaha). Three members of the Academie Française got their start with him!

In any case, I was mainly interviewing him because I was lucky enough to have a former professor at Bryn Mawr who knows him and set it up. Which was awesome. Like I said, he's 99, but you would NEVER guess it. He met me in his office, which is in a building overlooking the main entrance to the Pompidou Center. Nothing short of awesome. He gets around better than I do on some days, like when my knee is acting up. hahahaha. He's totally lucid, hears everything just fine, and just generally rocks. Everyone should aspire to be like him when we're 99, because DAMN.

So that was Monday. Tuesday I continued my winning streak by going to visit a woman another professor from Bryn Mawr put me in contact with. This woman has nothing to do with my research, but she's also nothing short of awesome. She falls into that category of Bryn Mawr women who totally raise the bar for the rest of us, because again, if in my lifetime I manage to do 10% of what she has done, I'll be a success. She is French and was a teenager when her family fled the Germans. They came to NYC and she ended up at Bryn Mawr. Graduated in 1942 and joined the Free French forces. She landed in Normandy as a translator in July 1944, like a month after the Allied landing! She told me that there's a special window of her stuff on display at the D-Day museum in Caen, so obviously I have to go. There's apparently a picture of her team in the Invalides military museum, since her group of women were considered a special case in terms of female participation in the war effort. Again, how awesome is that?! Leave it to the Bryn Mawr woman to take everything to the next level, including liberating her own country. Yes!

My afternoon with her was both serious and light, in that she told me both war stories and hilarious Bryn Mawr stories. My favorite Bryn Mawr story was about how shocked she was by the other girls who weren't prim and proper. She's VERY Parisian in that awesomely classy sort of way, haha. I had met her briefly before, at the Bryn Mawr lunch, and fortunately I have a well enough trained cultural nose to smell what I was getting into. Sure enough, her apartment is exquisite. She collects modern French tapestries, so they're hanging all over the place. Very, very classy. As soon as I walked in I knew I had made a wise choice in wearing a crisp button-down shirt, skirt, and pearls. hahahaha.

Anyway, the funny part was when she told me she had never heard of jeans as a concept until she arrived at Bryn Mawr and was horrified to see everyone wearing them. I laughed hysterically at this point, thinking of the classy French girl showing up at Bryn Mawr and thinking, WTF. And I'm sure that relatively speaking, it probably wasn't that bad in 1940 as compared to the informality of today!!! But I was appeased to think that Bryn Mawr women were pushing the envelope from day 1, haha.

So there I was smugly thinking to myself that thank god I had chosen the right outfit, when I reached down to fix my shoe and my hand came back covered in blood. Like, fairly seriously covered. I knew I had hit my ankle on a construction barrier while biking over to her place, but I didn't think it was that bad and it didn't really hurt so I forgot about it. Yeah, that's adrenaline for you, because once I figured out that it was actually apparently split open, that's when it started to hurt. I am a rockstar. Anyway, I felt like a dumbass at that point since I hadn't realized it sooner, so I figured, whatever, I'll deal with it when I get home. So I didn't say anything and continued our conversation (which then took a turn for the more serious as she discussed the war). Needless to say, when I got home I had a bit of a mess on my hands...it's not all that big of a cut, but it's DEEP. Which is saying a lot for an ankle, since there's not very much fat or anything right on the bone! Took forever to stop the bleeding, but it seems fine now. Fortunately I still have some of that weird French scab-forming webbing stuff from when I gashed my arm on the airplane coming over in September!