gather ye rosebuds while ye may

back in the day, i was quite proficient in the français. i once won an award for reciting a poem with the proper accent. or, i guess, no accent at all since the goal would be to have the recitation sound as if one were a native speaker de la français which now that i think about it doesn't make too much sense because there are all sorts of different accents within the range of normal language so i guess what we need here is for me to get specific and say "no accent of the teenaged american varietal".

anyway.

i won an award, so i must have done it correctly, and there is really nothing like winning an award to inspire you to further heights of success so i continued to delve into français and imagined i might one day be a translator at the UN. i took français classes in college and took up smoking clove cigarettes b/c nothing says "i am a true intellectual of the european varietal" quite like holes in your clothing from the sparks of a burning cookie spice.

in college we read candide in français and i thought at first that i just didn't get the français quite like i thought i did, but then i realized that candide is a stupid book and i felt better about my français skills. of course, after school i allowed my skills to lapse but just as of-course, i fancied myself still fluent in français.

pan forward 15 years to a time when i am visiting montréal on bidness and i was all excited to use my skills de français. i attempted reading la presse which is montréal's newspaper de français. you can probably not deduce this so i will tell you that la presse means "the press" in english. see how fluent i am? so i was reading la presse and was horrified to learn that a guy who had chopped up some kid with an axe was loose on the streets of montréal. this was really frightening to me, so i tuned in to the local english speaking news to get the latest details on the manhunt and realized after a few moments that i had the story prigzactly bassackwards and the guy was not loose but had been nabbed. it is possible that i was wrong about the axe thing, also, and that his crime was maybe robbing something perhaps like a gas station.

the poem i memorized is ronsard's pour hélène. my memory holds the paltry quantity of the first two lines but i can still recite those two lines to perfection.

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant :
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.

Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,
Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.

Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os :
Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos :
Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.
Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain :
Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.