The Sole Heir Rides Again

Few things are more boring than listening to someone else go on at length about how his kid won the refrigerator drawing contest at Millard Fillmore Elementary School for the fourth week in a row, a new third grade record. Unless he shows you photographs of all the drawings on his iPhone. With that in mind, I don’t spend a lot of time promoting The Sole Heir. She knows what I think of her. Frankly, it’s none of your business.

Once in a while, though, she does something that merits special attention. A junior at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, she has been accepted into a five-week undergraduate pre-med program in Nice, France. She’ll stay with a nice Nice family, attend classes, observe doctors, and generally build on the experience she gained from watching her father get his eyes sliced open. She gets to do this while spending the late spring in the south of France, less than an hour’s drive from Cannes while the film festival is underway. (That’s less than an hour in kilometers, so it’s even closer than it sounds.)

As far as we know, TSH is the first St. Mary’s student to be accepted into this program. (This opinion is based largely on the fact the interviewer had never heard of the school before reading TSH’s application.) She’s excited, and the entire family couldn’t be prouder of her.

She’s already thinking of what she’ll need there. I have told her, no matter how prepared she thinks she is, something will come up she hadn’t expected. For example, in the immortal words of the poet-philosopher Steven Martin, in France a street is a rue; a hat is a chapeau; a house is a maison.

Those French have a different word for everything.