Episode 3 - French Connections
- Leslie Bradford-Scott
- Mar 18, 2020
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
CLICK HERE TO READ ***Spoiler Alert*** Have you listened to Episode Three?
I actually thought my mom was seeing a ghost. Meg really wanted it to be a ghost. I think she was a bit disappointed it was a mouse.
What did you think when you heard my mom? Do you think the mouse was the spirit of my father?
My husband and I have a double rocking chair, and this is what we do every night at 5 pm with a nice glass of wine. If you were a mouse, wouldn't you want to hang out here with us?
This is my family on a trip to Caracas, Venezuela, in the 1970s. I’m fascinated by how old young people looked back then.
My parents were probably only in their 30s here, and, like most people of that era, they somehow looked younger as they aged. Nowadays, 40-year-olds look like they’re 28 to me!
I’m the short one with the Princess Leia hairdo. I’m pretty sure that’s how George Lucas got the idea for Carrie Fisher’s hair in Star Wars. Perhaps he was in Caracas that day?
I honestly couldn’t get enough Shirley Temples back then. Have you ever had one? The more cherries, the better. You know I have a long history with cherries. It’s clear my brother, Brad, was also a Shirley Temple aficionado.
And how about those pant hems? Mom must’ve been sleeping on the job that day. Looks like Brad could’ve loaned my dad some pant leg, doesn’t it? Brad has that glint in his eye like, “Hmm. I bet I could get into some trouble around here.”
Whenever we went to resorts like this, our parents let us have the run of the place. We basically didn’t see them for a week and just charged everything to the room. It was kind of like Home Alone—a steady stream of ice cream sundaes and French fries.
Brad and I had some scams going. We learned a few card tricks and stopped drunk grown-ups in the lobby to take some money off them. We made daily rounds of the coin return trays in every pop machine at the resort. We’d rake in tons of coin, which we’d gamble at the nightly hermit crab races. Yes, they let kids gamble at resorts in those days.
My dad looked a bit plump here. He yo-yoed between 20 and 40 pounds throughout his life. When the lady at the farm called his ghost “lanky,” she definitely wasn’t referring to this period of his life.
I’m noticing that, between the people in the background and my family, check prints were all the rage. Now that I live on a farm full-time, my closet is basically breeding flannel. Life comes full circle.
It wasn’t until recently that I realized it was unusual for Canadian families to vacation in Venezuela, then or now. Most of my friends were going camping in a station wagon with wood paneling and Styrofoam coolers.
Ah, yes. Good times.
Meg and I debated whether my dad was telling the truth about being the personal bellboy to Charles de Gaulle at the Hotel La Pérouse when he was 13, and about getting fired for allegedly selling secrets to the press.
I recently stumbled across a photo of the then–future President of France standing in front of the La Pérouse during that era. Apparently, he lived at the hotel. So now, we’re inclined to believe my dad, especially since he never mentioned it to me or my mom, and only wrote about it in the manuscript. What would be his motivation for lying about it?
I love that era of the old guard press—the trench coats, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, and those giant cameras slung around their necks. De Gaulle looks like such a dapper gent in this image.
This is my Uncle Tony's French passport photo. I think he looks a bit like the actor who plays Joel, Michael Zegen, from the series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. What do you think?
Although I don't remember Uncle Tony, I think I was five when he died, I was always curious about what really happened to him. My mom tells me he was a lovely man who adored us children and spent lots of time playing with us at our home.
This is a current-day map of the town where my father was sent to live during World War II in France. Peyraube is located in the Pyrenees Mountains, about a 15-minute walk from the town of Tournay, which has a more village-like feel.
Over fifty-five years later, my dad and step-mom went in search of the farm where he’d lived. As you heard in the episode, he did find it, and the woman who owned it was still there. My father told me the old woman knew exactly who he was the moment she opened the door. She was in her 90s at the time, and the house hadn’t changed one bit. Even his bedroom was exactly the same. Just like my own childhood farmhouse. More history repeating itself.
The townspeople threw my dad a parade as a “son returning home,” and even the mayor came out for it! I imagine, being a small town, he was more like the French version of Roland from Schitt’s Creek.
This is my father about two years after he emigrated to Canada from Paris. In his manuscript, he complained that Canada was bleak, there was no sunshine, and it was miserable. I’m going to challenge the whole “bleak” thing, and I think this photo backs me up. What was he doing at the beach if it wasn’t sunny?
I laughed at his comments to my grandmother about Canada being full of igloos and not much else. I can’t tell you how many times in my own youth people in Florida earnestly asked me, “What’s it like living in igloos?” or “What did you think the first time you saw a television?” as if we didn’t have such modern privileges in Canada.
FYI: if you’ve never been to Canada, it’s like the USA minus the political ferociousness (we have hockey divisiveness instead). And yes, we say “sorry,” “eh,” and “one large poutine, please” a lot.
This is my mom at 16, and her only sibling, Billy, at 21. In this photo, he had already been diagnosed with cancer and had lost a lot of weight. I believe he died not long after it was taken.
At his funeral, my grandmother told my mom, “It should have been you.”
That’s Billy’s baby photo with the stuffed dog. Billy was my mom's only ally in the world. Just like me and Brad. His loss was devastating to her, too.
As we uncover more truths about my family’s history, I’m struck by how history constantly repeats itself; moments keep surfacing.
This is my mom when she was in nursing school. She recently told me that her dream had been to work as a nurse in remote communities in the far north of Canada. She was looking for a bit of adventure and the extra pay so she could save for her future. But that dream jumped the track when she found herself pregnant at 19.
Mom was an excellent nurse. She was just born to do that kind of supportive, compassionate work. She especially enjoyed working in mental health.
Now 81, my mom has never fulfilled a dream. That saddens me. But she did find joy in simple things—her dogs, cooking for the family, and binge-watching crime shows. She’s pretty good at sleuthing out the plots.
Which makes me wonder: how did she not know what was going on in our home?
Have you fulfilled a dream in your life? If not, what’s holding you back?
This one breaks my heart. Not just for my brother, or for me, who also had learning disabilities, but for the fact that, 45 years later, education still does not serve people like us well. It remains one of society’s biggest failures.
Educational institutions are built for left-brain, math-and-science types.
Bradley dropped out of school at 15, and so did I. He went to work for a traveling carnival and had a horrendous time. He struggled with asthma and felt alone and scared.
It’s my personal belief that the entire education system needs to be torn apart and rebuilt from the ground up. Not offering environments where people like us can thrive leads to mental health issues, crime, and all sorts of social fallout. I wonder what percentage of inmates have learning disabilities?
There is a solution. I know there is.
Maybe one day, when I have the time, money, and energy, I’ll take the system on.
Meg gives us a tour of our not-so-professional “professional” bedroom podcast studio at the farm. Hey, you have to make use of what you’ve got, right?
We record two episodes at a time, and each time I edit, I discover new ways to improve the audio quality.
The first two episodes have a bit of an echo. That’s because we used the internal microphones on the Tascam DR-40 recorder. I’d read they’d be fine for a small space like this, but I wasn’t happy with the outcome.
So, I purchased a couple of external mics for the next two episodes, which significantly improved the quality. During editing, I noticed the “p” and “b” sounds were popping. That’s when I learned about something called pop filters, one of which refused to stay screwed to the mic stand, so I ended up taping it to the arm. Very annoying. And yet... still a bit of echo.
That’s where the boxes and blankets came in. I read that if you fill a room with “soft stuff,” it absorbs the sound. And it worked. You’ll hear a noticeable difference in Episodes 5 and 6.
Like any new endeavor, it’s hard to know how much to invest, time and money, when you’re not sure the project will work. Launching a podcast feels a lot like starting a business. Well, it is, really.
When we began recording, Meg and I had only met briefly, in person, twice. Neither of us knew if we’d have the chemistry to carry a show. That’s why I was hesitant to invest in gear up front, in case there wasn’t any “magic,” or we found the whole thing too complicated to make.
We didn’t have any Family Secrets stories when we recorded the first six episodes, so we had to share the first two episodes with friends and family to solicit submissions. We received several, and chose two that worked for our needs, dropping them into Episodes 3 and 4. That’s why those segments sound a bit different from the rest of the episode.
At the time of this writing, we still don’t have suitable Family Secrets for Episodes 5 and 6, but we’re hopeful they’ll come in just after the official launch on March 19.
This podcast came together because Meg is a truly brilliant person. She has a great eye for details, a gift for getting to the heart of the story, and she’s compassionate, community-minded, and incredibly talented. She’s a strange hybrid of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore.
Meg feels like a long-lost kindred spirit, and I think that comes across in the show. Of course, being connected by a ring may carry some secret meaning.
If I’m being honest, I was kind of hoping we’d discover she was my dad’s illegitimate child, and I’d found my half-sister. Or maybe there was a switched-at-birth scenario waiting in the wings. Now that would’ve been a story, wouldn’t it?