Adieu.

French, like English, offers its speakers a number of ways to say goodbye, most of them dependent on when you expect to see each other again. A tout à l’heure has one of the smallest lapses of time between departure and reunion: it translates loosely to “within the hour,” although in conversational French it’s just used for “see you very soon.” There is the weekday staple a demain!, which means “until tomorrow.” From there, you have your generic goodbyes of indeterminate length but with certain reunions, expressions like salut for your friends and au revoir for your superiors. Then, there’s the scary one. It connotes a forever goodbye, quite literally translating “to God,” as in “I commit you to God.” This is a very certain goodbye, not one that had ever been said to me, not even mistakenly from a student, until today.

E and I were at the market for the last time this morning, picking up our final selections of bread, cheese, fruits, and vegetables. On our way out, I stopped at the Bread Man’s stand because I just couldn’t pass up being his customer one last time. Besides, he had my favorite bread, pépites au chocolat, which he hasn’t had since that first week. It was a sign.

When we approached his display, he said, “Ah! You were in Avignon, no?” Surprised at his remarkable memory—he must see a few hundred people pass by every Sunday—we replied that indeed we were. “You went to see the plays of the festival. I remember. I went there myself once, spent an enjoyable weekend there. This is a good tradition of France.” We agreed that we too had had a great time in southern France but that we were glad to be back in Lyon. I ordered my pépites au chocolat loaf and then informed him that it was our last market visit before returning to the States. “I had to come back once more for your bread!” I said with a smile.

He raised his eyebrows. “Your last market?” He shook his head. “When do you return? You are American, no? Going back to America?” We told him he was right and that our planes for America would leave on Saturday. “What city will you go back to?” For simplicity’s sake, E and I just gave him our home states. “Well, I must take my breads to America then! You have nothing like this in America. All factory breads!” We all chuckled as he handed me my box. “Well, I guess this is adieu then,” he said with a regretful expression. “Yes, adieu.” I nodded, almost tearing up, and echoed his goodbye.

It’s amazing that someone I spoke to for only a few minutes each week could cause such emotion in me. But this, this is why I chose language for my career. You learn a language so that you can hear other people speak: their stories, their joy, their pain, their fragility. You learn a language so that you can appreciate the Godlikeness of other people. You learn a language so that you can laugh with them, understand them, be welcomed by them and welcome them in return. That’s why it’s so close to God’s heart. He said at the dawn of mankind that it’s not good for us to be alone.

The Bread Man and I never spoke more than ten minutes at the time. We don’t even know each other’s names. But for four weekends, we looked forward to seeing each other and exchanging a few words of conversation in his native language. He clearly enjoyed regaling E and I with brief stories of traveling to Avignon and America and with proud claims of the superiority of his bread to anything else at the market or across the ocean. I enjoyed hearing it. That, if you ask me, is a little bit of God showing up in everyday life.