An American Story
Nothing to do with church multiplication
I meant to write this day after July 4, but things got busy. July 5 was the 5th stage of the Tour de France. It was the first mountain stage, running from Pau to Laruns. Pau is a large town at the foot of the Pyrenees, a very beautiful town. First time I went there, French paratroopers were doing practice jumps that I could watch from the window. We were staying with my grandmother’s cousin. We were there to visit family; my great-grandfather and great-grandmother were from villages not too far away.
My great-gradfather, Jean-Jacques Arnal, was from Laruns. This part of France is kind of the Texas of France; large, agricultural, very proud of its heritage. Their language, Bearnais, split from French in the Middle Ages, and is kind of like Italian, Spanish, and French rolled into one.
Pepé, as we called him, left Laruns in 1910 for America. He was tired of being a peasant. He came to San Francisco, which had a large French population. Then World War I broke out, and Frenchmen from around the world were called home, told if they did not return to fight for France, they could never return.
So Pepé spent 1914-1918 back in France, but nowhere near the south, nowhere near home. There is a lot to his war story, even in what little he shared, but that is for another time.
He met a guy in the army who had a sister, Maria Arbues, my great-grandmother. She was from a village, Mauleon in French; Licharre is its Basque name. It was maybe 40 miles from Laruns, but it may as well have been a world away… across mountains, across language and culture.
I was bummed the Tour did not show much of Laruns…. The beautiful St Pierre church, the memorial to the WWI dead. I get it, a small village, 1000 people, like any other across France. Not much to see here. But there’s a lot I wanted to see. How crazy, Pepé left Laruns for America, came back to fight in that awful war, then found Memé, 40 miles from where he started. Had to go across the earth to find his wife had been right next door. [Memé was born in Spain, raised in France. We always thought that was the story; turns out her mother was from Bosnia. This showed up in a DNA test which had us confused, but someone working on genealogy learned she left Bosnia due to Muslim persecution of Christians, and ended up in the Basque region of France and Spain.]
Our freedoms in America are unprecedented. We take them for granted. We have a history that, like all human history, is both sordid and glorious. Part of our freedom is to say so, to look at it, to look at the present as well with a critical eye.
Consider though: for decades before Pepé got here and ever since, the whole world is trying to get here. It’s a great country.