It's Not a Job Interview Till Someone Has to Go to the Hospital

I really have very little in the way of what one might call a history of "neutral luck." It can be astonishingly good, like the time my sister entered a contest twice, once in my name and once in hers, and I was the one who ended up winning the free birthday party at United Skates of America.  Or it can be astonishingly bad (see: any time I try to accomplish anything in France).  I did not know that this was a contagious phenomenon; apparently, it is.

So yesterday, I went to interview with a mother for a prospective part-time nanny position.  Due to her busy schedule, we decided that it would be best to meet at her petite chou's horse-back riding lesson.  Much to my delight, le petite chou is a charming child who, on the tram, told me all about the English animal noises that he is learning, and then demonstrating the proper way to make them (apparently, a walrus "bellows").  And when he stopped to pick a wild flower for his maman, he made sure to get an extra for me.  And he just lost his first tooth.  In short, he's a cacophony of adorable.

So the three of us enter the stables, and maman begins trying to wrestle a bit into the mouth a particularly stubborn pony (whose name apparently means "stupid thing"- how apt).  She sees me watching with apprehension, and assures me that I myself will not be responsible for preparing the horse when I bring le petite chou to riding lessons; I can leave that to the trainers.  I breathe an audible sigh of relief:  horse whisperer is not on my limited list of skills.

After maman finally wrestles a saddle onto the pony with the help of another rider, petite chou leads his mount out to the corral with the rest of his class, and maman and I are free to get a cafe.  We take our drinks back over to the corral to watch the lesson and conduct the interview.  Maman tells me that her son has been riding for several years (impressive, since he's only five), and in that whole time, he's only fallen once, and that was last week.  So now, my friends, you see where this is going.  In this course of our brief conversation, my terrible luck must have caught on the breeze and blown towards poor, unsuspecting petite chou.  It happened very quickly, and not at all what it looked like in Gone With the Wind: all of a sudden, he's on his horse, and then he's not.  And then maman is running, and I'm running, and petite chou is screaming hysterically.  And my mind goes into the crisis mode that keeps me from freaking out, and instead focuses on the fact that screaming is vastly preferably to silence, and him scrambling under the fence to hug his mother is much better than him lying flat and unmoving on his back.  While the damage is thankfully not on the inconceivably scary end of the spectrum, I see that petite chou's face is not that of a sweet little five-year old but of a five-year old who was on the losing end of a bar fight.  And so, after a heated and rapid argument in French between maman and the trainers, punctuated by petite chou's wails, an ambulance is called.  

I, of course, having satisfied myself that there's no way that I can be personally useful, hover at the periphery.  I would offer to go back, but at this point I realize that in all likelihood I wouldn't be able to find my way back through the park and through the winding streets to my tram stop.  It's a moot point, because sweet, kind maman, craddling her traumatized son, tells me we will talk in the ambulance, and she'll point me to the metro closest to the hospital.  

And so this is how I came to have my first (and hopefully only) job interview in an emergency vehicle.  Had it been conducted in a coffee shop, it really would have been quite pleasant and ordinary.  But the sirens and the sad little prize fighter face looking up at me from his mother's lap made the discussions of work history, hours and expectations somewhat jarring.

We arrive at the hospital, and true to her word, maman finds a piece of paper and a pen to write down directions to the nearest metro station.  I thank her and promise to be in touch soon.  Before I leave, I kneel down in front of petite chou, now in a wheelchair comically too big for him.  I tell him, "I am going to be with my mommy and daddy and sister for a week, but then you and I are going to play.  And when we play, there will be no smashing of heads.  That's a promise." He nods solemnly.

There are time I'd surely like to distill my bad luck by spreading little bits at a time to other people.  But in the future, I'd like to keep the kind of luck that lands you in an ambulance away from little gap-toothed cherubs and all to myself, thankyouverymuch.