grout
\ˈgrau̇t\
\ˈgrau̇t\
Illustration based on U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Kate Thornton-Maurer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
One of the highlights of our family trip to Paris this summer was our adopted neighborhood in the 11th arrondissement. We rented an apartment a bit removed from from the museums and tourist spots, on a boulevard with the leafy, occasionally gritty vibe of a slowly gentrifying urban center. Pensioners, students, young professionals, and immigrants mingled in the streets. Metal shop shutters were marked with multi-lingual graffiti. Interspersed with the groceries and halal meat shops and boulangeries were places selling electrical equipment, plumbing supplies, surgical scrubs. I told a friend how lovely it was to be in a part of Paris where, instead of souvenirs and guidebooks, you could buy a bag of grout.
Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. Photo by Clicsouris (Photo personnelle), via Wikimedia Commons.
I don’t know why I am fascinated by grout. I’ve always loved watching people apply it, using that thin, soupy mortar to seal the gaps between tiles. And I just like the word: it is a old, plain word for an old, plain substance. It comes from the Old English grūt, meaning meal or porridge (which is after all what it looks like), and it harks back to a proto Indo-European root *ghreu- meaning “to rub or grind.” There’s a connection to beer as well (the other great permutation of porridge): in the Middle Ages “grout” referred to the fermented infusion of malt that settles to bottom of the brewer’s vat. It’s related to the Dutch word gruit, which means “dregs,” as well as to modern English “grits” and “groats.”
I have been thinking a lot about Parisian grout, after the neighborhood we so briefly called home came under assault last Friday. In the past few days I have been mentally retracing our steps across the district, recalling people we encountered. The red-haired bartender at the café across from the Bataclan concert hall, where Everett and I stopped for a drink after buying food for our Bastille Day dinner. The lady at the nearby boulangerie who greeted me kindly every afternoon and grinned behind her hand at my bad French. The restaurant we visited on our first night in Paris, around the corner from Le Petit Cambodge, where we sat at a sidewalk table into the long evening. The middle-aged man at the table next to ours who rose, smiling, to greet his companion with a kiss. The knots of young adults—black, brown, white—lounging on the canal embankment, chatting, smoking, drinking cheap beer. I hope they are safe and well, and that they find healing.
One article I read in the aftermath of the attacks pointed to a possible rationale behind the terrorists’ choice of targets: this was the heart of young, progressive Paris, the author said, places where white Parisians and folks from the banlieues mingle and hang out. Where the bonds between immigrant and native are being hesitantly, imperfectly strengthened. The terrorists could not have been blind to this symbolism, he said, when they struck here—not at government ministries or cultural sites or tourist magnets, but at ordinary life and the promise of a more integrated society.
Perhaps so. They struck at the young bartender and the baker and the restaurant goers and the young people beside the canal. At places where you eat and drink, where there is porridge and beer and good bread. Places where people rub up together. Where a community is bound together by a thin, fluid mortar that flows into the gaps between them. A smile, a nod, a can of beer. Music. A kiss. Grout.
I have been thinking a lot about Parisian grout, after the neighborhood we so briefly called home came under assault last Friday. In the past few days I have been mentally retracing our steps across the district, recalling people we encountered. The red-haired bartender at the café across from the Bataclan concert hall, where Everett and I stopped for a drink after buying food for our Bastille Day dinner. The lady at the nearby boulangerie who greeted me kindly every afternoon and grinned behind her hand at my bad French. The restaurant we visited on our first night in Paris, around the corner from Le Petit Cambodge, where we sat at a sidewalk table into the long evening. The middle-aged man at the table next to ours who rose, smiling, to greet his companion with a kiss. The knots of young adults—black, brown, white—lounging on the canal embankment, chatting, smoking, drinking cheap beer. I hope they are safe and well, and that they find healing.
One article I read in the aftermath of the attacks pointed to a possible rationale behind the terrorists’ choice of targets: this was the heart of young, progressive Paris, the author said, places where white Parisians and folks from the banlieues mingle and hang out. Where the bonds between immigrant and native are being hesitantly, imperfectly strengthened. The terrorists could not have been blind to this symbolism, he said, when they struck here—not at government ministries or cultural sites or tourist magnets, but at ordinary life and the promise of a more integrated society.
Perhaps so. They struck at the young bartender and the baker and the restaurant goers and the young people beside the canal. At places where you eat and drink, where there is porridge and beer and good bread. Places where people rub up together. Where a community is bound together by a thin, fluid mortar that flows into the gaps between them. A smile, a nod, a can of beer. Music. A kiss. Grout.
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