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After They Have Seen Paree
After more than thirty years of pediatric practice I had an experience today that I could not have predicted.
I was seeing three members of a polygamous family to bring them up to date with their immunization status. Years ago I began to see a number of polygamous families for some reason; once you gain their trust you start seeing others. It is probably a question of not seeming judgmental and not asking too many questions.
The three family members were a boy age six, his brother age twelve, and his sister age twenty. While I was preparing to administer the vaccines to her siblings the sister asked me, "If you need special shots to go abroad?"
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Paris," she replied. "I am getting married on the tenth and we are leaving on the eleventh."
I was astounded although she looked a bit more cosmopolitan than most polygamous patients I see, had a delicate beauty and none of the characteristic halting deferential speech pattern I had gotten used to with these families. It was an odd phenomenon that I never understood.
"Where are you staying?" I asked.
"I am not sure. My husband is arranging it. We will be there for the week."
"You don't need any special immunization, just money."
Not really knowing her situation I imagined what Paris would be like for her. She had never been out of Utah and suddenly, the day after her marriage, she would be traipsing along the Seine. I wondered whether she would stop to stare at pastels by my favorite bouquiste, M. Gavros, whose stall was just east of the Pont Neuf.
Suspending all disbelief, I wondered what sort of magic Paris might wreak on this heretofore-sheltered Mormon, but I had a hard time getting a grip on her life.
As she left my office she asked if there was anything she should not miss in Paris.
I was stymied. "Just walk around and discover it for yourself."
"Yeah, I guess that's what they do there," she said.
As she was about to leave I asked her if she liked ice cream. When she nodded I handed her a piece of paper on which I had written:
Berthillon
Nutella Crepe
Later that night I looked on the Internet to see if there was an LDS temple in Paris. It turned out that the church had bought land twenty miles outside of Paris in 2006 but had not yet built on it.
The next day I kept thinking of my patient getting married, flying from Las Vegas to Paris and then returning to the town on the Arizona border to live out the rest of her life, perhaps Colorado City. The cultural juxtaposition was too great to comprehend.
It is highly likely I will never see her again, but given the size of her family am sure her mother will be in the office with one of her children sometime in the next year. I will make a point of asking her how her twenty-year old daughter's honeymoon in Paris went.
Who knows. Perhaps she will be testimony to the words of the song popular with returning servicemen from WWI, "How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they¹ve seen Paree?"
