home 
coquelicot 
o-pine 


Coquelicot

When I was a little girl, my dad would sing me songs at bedtime. He sang French songs from his childhood and there was one in particular I loved that he would sing every night. The refrain was "gentils coquelicots, mesdames, gentils coquelicots nouveaux".

So I asked him, what are gentils coquelicots? And he told me, pretty little puppies. So, I loved my song about the pretty little puppies.

Flash forward twenty years. T and I are watching Roi de Coeur which is an old movie about a town in France during WWII. In the movie, the hottie young girl (played by actress Genevieve Bujold) is named Coquelicot. So, due to my French lineage, T asks, "what does Coquelicot mean?" And I respond (so proud to know the answer to this bit of arcane trivia) "it means puppy."

"That can't be right," he says.

"It is," I assure him. And I explain the song about the gentils coquelicots.

"That just can't be right," he insists. "Her name isn't Puppy."

When the movie ends, T goes to the French/English dictionary on my desk and looks it up himself.

And, of course, as you all realized two paragraphs ago, the little girl misunderstood her papa's French accent when he said "pretty little poppies".

And yet? He married me anyway.

updated: March 16, 1:56 PM





 

 

  all material on this site © 2001 bluepoppy.com design by omworks
roundabout 
email