Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

May 17, 2001
Paris
I received a long, confusing letter from a German woman that begins, “Dear Mr. Sedaris, To be
forced expressing myself in English makes me become a daisy! A fatal starting point for me. By the
way—I cannot find anything which I could present you as an equal output—I am a petitioner, that’s the
fact.”
I’m not sure what she wants, but she mentions SantaLand and Season’s Greetings, referring to the
latter as “a cutting, ambiguous, controversial, subtle text giving us laughing the creeps.”
May 27, 2001
La Bagotière
I biked to Flers and was inching past a red light when I heard someone blow their horn behind me.
They honked a second and third time, and I turned to find a police car carrying three officers, two up
front and one in the back. You see that a lot here, and it always seems strange to me. The driver
yelled, “Hey, that light is red,” and I got off my bike and moved it onto the sidewalk, pretending he’d
said, “Here’s that butcher shop you were looking for.” I could physically feel the common, stupid
expression on my face and I stood there looking in the window at meat until they had passed.
May 30, 2001
Paris
One of yesterday’s interviewers brought me a Swiss army knife. She was a small blond woman
from Zurich who arrived complaining about the heat. Complaining is too strong a word. She
commented on it, as did the earlier Swiss interviewer.
Both journalists found Paris to be boring and asked me what I thought of Zurich. I told the second
woman that I liked the grocery store at the airport and she said, “Yes, we all go to the airport on
Sunday.”
And Paris is boring?
I’d thought the store was for travelers who wanted to pick up a few things on the way home, but
it’s actually a way around the Swiss blue laws demanding that shops close from Saturday afternoon
until Monday morning. The laws apply everywhere but the airport, so they built a massive
supermarket in the Swiss Air terminal. “It’s the place to be on a Sunday,” the woman said.
I received a letter from an American woman living in Paris who wrote to say she’d read my
interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “I fully intend to read your book,” she said, “as I, too,
have hoped to ‘Talk Pretty Someday.’” It’s always queer when people work a book title into a
headline or sentence, especially this book title. She wrote about her two-year-old daughter and their