My doorbell rang around 6 pm without anyone buzzing my apartment. “How strange”, I thought. So I looked through the “judas” (that’s what they call the peephole here) and standing in front of my door was a fireman. The thoughts that ran through my mind in that 15 seconds were quite dramatic. “Was the building on fire? ... Had there been a firebomb thingy placed in or near the apartment? Has the violence reached our neighborhood?” It wasn’t an overreaction since a few days ago, around 10 am, I noticed that the traffic was at a standstill just outside my window. There is not usually a traffic jam at that time of the day. But upon further inspection, I noticed that there was a s#*!load of blinking lights from emergency vehicles down by the metro station. I never did find out what was going on... but on the same day... when Paul came home from work and tried to get into his parking garage, he was not allowed to do so (and not told why). And with all the ‘excitement’ around here, we even scrapped our plans to celebrate the Nouveaux Beaujolais event this year.

So... when I saw a fireman at my door, I was starting to hyperventilate. I finally found the courage to open the door to see what the problem was. Turned out, the (fine looking!) young fireman wanted to know if I would buy a fireman calendar. ...funny how they even do that here, I thought... as I envisioned a calendar filled with pages and pages of muscular fireman just like the one standing at my door. How could I refuse?? So I found some money, bought my calendar and said au revoir to the cute fireman guy.

I tore open the calendar to find... well... now I shouldn’t have been surprised... (this is france and they do love paperwork)... a folder ... with a complicated system of papers that had a “day timer” look to it... one paper for each month... and then lots more papers with information about the mission of the firefighters and other stuff that I didn’t take the time to translate.

This would make a nice gift for a former student turned firefighter. I’ll send it along with my kids to Houston.