The American Dream

This summer I went home to Minnesota as usual, but this time I brought Bruno with me. This was Bruno's first trip to the land of the red, white and blue....er...well, I guess the French flag is red, white and blue.....so, it was his first trip to the land of stars and stripes! I think Bruno must have felt like he was the new attraction at the museum. When we were in restaurants my dad would tell the waitresses, 'This is my daughter and this is her boyfriend Bruno visiting us from France.' The waitress would invariably turn to us with wide eyes and ask, 'Whoa, so you like SPEAK French?!?!' Um. Yeah. He's French. Anyway, I thought this was all pretty funny at first but before I knew it I found myself getting caught up in the fun... We were down by the Lake Minnetonka having dinner and this big old-fashioned ferry came pulling up by the restaurant. We went down to have a look at it...my family was all explaining to Bruno how the ferry was from 1904 and that it was reaaalllly old. ( Ha! Bruno's parent's house is from 1677!) We went down near it and were kind of poking around and a lady gave us a look that said "What are you kids doing down here?" and I blurted, "He's French! This is his first time in America and his first time seeing a big boat!" The lady's face broke into a smile, "Weeellll! My boy works on this boat, why don't you hop on and have a look around!" She poked her head into the boat and started calling her son, "Brad, this boy is from FRANCE! He's gonna come look around the boat! He's from FRAAANCE, okay?!" And the next thing we knew we were wandering around the boat and checking out the old-fashioned steam engine!

Especially during the beginning of the trip, I kept waiting for him to be really shocked or excited or appalled or amazed by something. I kept showing him things and being like…’WHOA! Bruno isn’t this WEIRD!?!’ But he just didn’t really seem that freaked out. “Bruno…THIS is a DORITO!” “Bruno…THIS is a homemade cookie!” “Bruno…THIS is American TV!” "Bruno...this is a TANK near the high school where my mom works!" “Bruno…we call this POP and you can drink as much as you want because there are FREE REFILLS!” He liked Doritos (though was a bit baffled by the orange residue left on his fingers), he adored homemade cookies, he thought American TV was okay but had way too many commercial breaks, we were BOTH freaked out by the tank, and never even came close to needing one of those ‘free refills’ because he never managed to finish his first gigantic beverage serving…but all in all, he seemed to be taking everything totally in stride.

After the first couple of weeks, I stopped trying to freak him out. Sure, he noticed the differences…he was surprised to see drive thru teller windows for the banks and also surprised by the number of flags that were on display at people’s homes, in shops, on cars, etc. but in general he just seemed to be very accepting of things. Then one night we stopped to get a movie at Hollywood Video and got to talking about how it’d be great to eat a little ice cream while we watched the movie. It was about 10:30pm and I whipped us into the Byerly’s grocery store parking lot. Bruno gave me a puzzled look and asked, ‘What are you doing?” At which point I gave him a puzzled look and said, “Getting ice cream. I thought you wanted some too?’ He said, “Yeah, but…” and trailed off in his confusion. I looked at him and said, “It’s 24 hour.” This is when Bruno started to get a crazy look in his eyes. “Twenty-four hour? Twenty-four hour? Twenty-four hours a day?!?!?!? Like we can go in there NOW?!?! We could go in there at three in the morning if we wanted to??!?!?!?’ Now, to help you appreciate Bruno’s enthusiasm, I must tell you that grocery stores in France are only open until about 7:30pm and they are closed on Sundays. Sot that means that when you are heading home from work at 7pm with everyone else you have to first fight them in the public transportation and then fight them in the little tiny grocery store to try to get down the aisles that are really only wide enough for one person and THEN wait in a huge line at the check out because there is usually only one or two check out lanes. It is a disaster and is, understandably, one of Bruno’s least favorite places.

So, I had finally stumbled across the one thing that seemed to shake Bruno to his core: 24 hour grocery stores. He pranced up to the automatic sliding doors, gleefully calling to me, “This is amazing! I would never shop during the day again! I would come get my groceries at 3am! There would be nobody here! Vive l’Amérique!” When I finally caught up to him in the ice cream aisle he had a crazy look in his eyes and he was holding little cartons of Ben & Jerry’s, Haagen Dazs and The Dreamery and frantically reading the labels, “Caramel chunks or caramel swirls? Caramel chunks or caramel swirls?”

In the end we wound up with some Ben & Jerry’s which made Bruno’s night, and I wound up with the satisfaction of seeing him really, truly surprised by something in the ole U.S. of A!