Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,43

little friends,” I announced. “There’ll be no waiting in line for you.” It seemed unfair to restrict myself to men, so I included any woman with braces on her teeth.

“What about us?” asked the pregnant and the lame. And because it was my show, I told them to wait their fucking turn.

After a month in the United States, I flew to Canada to finish my tour. On my first night in Toronto, I read at a chain store called Indigo. That event ended at midnight, and the next afternoon, following a half dozen radio and print interviews, I was taken to Costco, not to buy pain relievers and condoms but to meet my readers. Or, rather, not meet them. My appearance had been advertised by way of flyer and was to last no longer than an hour. Shoppers passed with their enormous carts, most loaded with children who gaped through the bars at this ridiculous nobody, sitting by himself at a folding table. Making it just that much more pathetic was the sign next to me, the big one reading “No Photos, Please.”

It would be my greatest pleasure not to take your picture, I imagined people thinking. I mean, really, just who the hell do you think you are?

It’s a question well suited to a cavernous space. There your eyes can roam heavenward, past the signs for frozen food and automotive supplies, past the arrow pointing to the cash registers, and on to that boundless parking lot, which leads, eventually, to home.

Obama!!!!!

Our village in Normandy is too small to have its own paper, but there are several that serve the region and come out once a week. If it’s not that hard to get written up in, say, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it’s really, really not hard to find yourself in L’Orne Combattante. In fact, it’s hard to stay out of it.

The farmer across the road from us, Robert “Bob” Gerbenne, was profiled in the late 1990s. “The Man Who Truly Whispers to Horses,” read the headline. The picture was of him, seeming to gossip into the ear of his Percheron, a dappled mare as solid as a dump truck. Hugh’s been in the paper as well—twice, as a matter of fact. The last story was about his landscape paintings, and the one before that appeared in October 2004. They wanted to talk to an American about the presidential election, a who-do-you-hope-will-win sort of thing. The resulting article, titled something subtle like “Local Man Distrusts and Despises Bush,” was, said the Horse Whisperer, “pas mal,” meaning “not bad.”

Weeks before the 2008 election, the Combattante interviewed our friend Mary Beth, who was born and raised outside Boston and moved to our area after marrying her French husband. “Being a white American, you wouldn’t vote for a black man, would you?” the reporter asked.

Though crudely phrased, the question was fairly common, and not just in backwater Normandy. In the year before the election, I traveled pretty much nonstop: Italy, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, and all through the U.K. and Ireland. These were book tours, so I sat for a lot of radio and print interviews. In the U.S., unless you’ve written about politics, you don’t expect political questions. Overseas, on the other hand, it’s pretty much all you get, at least if you’re an American. I could have written a history of frosting and still they’d have asked me about Guantánamo, and my country’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Accords.

It’s not that I don’t have opinions about these things; I just don’t feel they’re in any way special. Sure, I follow the news. I read the papers and listen to the radio, but I’m not privy to any inside information. When it comes to politics, all I can offer is emotion. My perspective might be slightly different, but so is anyone’s when they live overseas.

I remember my dad calling after the Iraq war started and asking if I felt safe on the streets of Paris. He had the idea that the Europeans, and specifically the French, had become openly hostile and were targeting Americans—even throwing bottles at them. If that was happening, I neither saw it nor read about it. In my experience, people were curious. They had plenty of questions, but I was never insulted or singled out in any way. It might have felt different were I a Bush supporter, but as it was, the president brought my neighbors and me together. It was like the Small World pavilion