Comments:
Like several other members of our class, Annette arrived in America as a grade schooler surrounded by strangers making unintelligible noises that would become her new language. The only help for foreign students then was de facto immersion, and like the others Annette had become part of the class in less than a year. Her experience makes her a skeptic about today’s preference for bilingual education. Learning English, she says, “wasn’t that hard. I had wonderful wonderful teachers, and they stayed after school to help me. I had kids that wanted to help me, and they did, they taught me everything. I learned. They even drove me home from school, but that was before people got sued.”
Soon the memories of the war and its guns and the bombs that fell around her in France, the Nazis and the American soldiers on whom her family had depended for life soon faded. How completely she put that time behind her may be reflected in her description of life in high school. “I didn’t really appreciate what life is. I thought it would go for ever and ever.”
“I was busy being Americanized. I wanted to be like everybody else.” We thought she was. She thought she was, but to be like everybody else did not that we wanted to become carbon copies. As Annette puts it, “the meaning of life was to be accepted and have fun.” She became close friends with Gail Capobianco and Angelica Izzo. Since graduation, “We kind of floated in and out of each other’s lives.”
She was also good friends with Margie Repucci who would babysit for Annette’s great Dane. If any of her friends was dedicated to having fun, it was Faith LaJoy. She and Annette reconnected toward the end of Faith’s life as Faith was dying of cancer.
Annette still loves her native language though she finds little opportunity to speak French, except to her dog. “If can grab someone who speaks French I will.” More importantly, life has come to mean much more than being accepted and having fun. “I think if you are lucky and you have children, that’s part of it into infinity. I think the good that you do, that’s important. Each day—the birds on the trees, the flowers that grow. To me that’s the meaning of life.”
