À la vie et à l'amour

In high school I took French. I chose French because when I was little I took ballet and already knew a lot of French words. Yep, it was a pretty stupid reason. I really love the French language but have found that when one lives in California (where I lived at that time) and then Texas (where I have lived for all but those 4 dark years of my high school life), French is not a very useful language.

Anyway, my high school French teacher was a pretty cool old guy even though he wore too many sweater vests and his pants way too high. He did have a kind face complete with floppy bulldog style cheeks and he was an excellent French teacher.  There were several kids in our class who were a bit obnoxious, though, and somehow we managed to bully talk Mr S into letting us have a Cheese Party during class one day. The only way we could do this was if everyone brought in money to buy the party items and they all had to be French related. So we had croissants and various cheeses, french bread, etc. We weren't allowed to have wine so we had grape juice, although I imagine Mr S would have LOVED to have partaken of something stronger just to get through our class period.

The party was going well (as long as you don't include the stinky Camembert cheese adventure which pretty much made the whole room reek and resulted in a pile of regurgitated cheese in the classroom trash can) and Mr S gloriously raised his cup of grape juice in a traditional French toast and said with a jovial smile:

“À la vie et à l'amour which means, To life and to love”

We sat there with our cups of grape juice halfway to our lips and stared at him for just a few seconds before the entire class, except the girl who sat next to me reading her paperback smut novels all year, launched into a tirade about how it should be, “To LIVE and to love” because “To LIFE and to love” doesn't make sense! How can you LIFE something?

He tried explaining for the remainder of the Cheese Party that it's a toast to two nouns (life and love) not to two verbs (live and love).  Some of us got it but the imbeciles just couldn't wrap their tiny nugget brains around the concept.  Poor Mr S... we ruined his beautiful Cheese Party toast.

Alas (I love that word), that is the story behind my Blog title. I know, it's pretty amazing, right!