It occurs to me that if
you skimmed the title of this post too quickly, you might have mistaken the
word "Homeric" for "homoerotic." If so, you'll probably be
disappointed when my story fails to deliver on that intriguing expectation. I
can only imagine what you might imagine to be entailed by a homoerotic epic journey
in Provence. Wild boar hunting in bondage gear, perhaps, accompanied by regular
rubdowns with rosemary-infused olive oil, or something like that? Like I say, I
can only imagine.
But no, my journey home from Marseilles was pretty much the opposite of erotic.
And if it wasn't exactly Odysseyian, it was still unexpectedly long,
circuitous, and fraught with frustrations. It began with a simple premise:
After arriving in Cotignac with Quincy and the kids on Saturday, I would drive
alone to Marseilles on Sunday to return our rental car, and then return myself
home by train and bus. Train from Marseilles to Brignoles, I figured, and then
the bus from Brignoles to Cotignac. Should be home sometime Sunday afternoon, I
thought. But I thought wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. Not only was I not home
Sunday afternoon, I wasn't even home by Sunday evening. And instead of spending
Sunday night relaxing with my family as we settled in for our second night in
our new home in Cotignac, I instead spend an almost completely sleepness Sunday
night alone in Aix-en-Provence, tossing and turning in a strange and costly
bed, lamenting my lack of serviceable language skills, obsessively revisiting
the false assumptions and wrong turns that had characterized this unexpectedly
challenging day, paranoiaically imagining another surreal series of
obstructions that might surely strand me again tomorrow, and flipping through
the pages of my phrase book in rueful preparation for these possible
privations. I felt sure I might need to know how to say, in French, "You
mean there is no service on Monday either?" and "I've lost my contact
lenses and cannot see," and "Please stop the bus because the coffee I
drank this morning has affected my bowels in a way I had not anticipated,"
and – of course – "I am humiliated."
What transpired that grim Sunday to have delivered me to such a desperate and
sleepless lonely night in Aix? I won't bore you with the details. Instead, I'll
just say that I learned a few things firsthand that I really should have anticipated
in advance, had I been better prepared and less willing to blithely trust my
own ignorant optimism. I learned that, in France, even international car rental
offices are liable to be closed for a two-hour lunch break between 12:00 and
14:00. I learned that, despite the physical presence of a passenger train
station in Brignoles, there is no train that actually reaches there from
Marseilles. I learned that there are a surprisingly large number of bus
companies in France, each of which is decidedly regional and highly
circumscribed in its scope of operations, and none of which seems to know or
care very much about where the other companies drive their buses to, or when
they do it. Also, I learned that bus services tend to be severely curtailed on
Sundays, and that some buses – like the one to Cotignac – don't run at all that
day.
I don't know why I thought it might be easier than it was. I mean, I've
traveled by cross-country bus plenty of times before, even in countries where I
speak the language well, and it's rarely transparent or straightforward or
stress-free. I don't know why I thought it would be any simpler while
jet-lagged and linguistically impaired. There was a time, back when I was a
cringingly un-self-conscious 19-year-old reader of Kerouac and Ginsberg, when I
indulged in a peculiar affection for the grim uncertainty of long-haul bus
travel – the monotony, the delays, the missed connections, the overnight
layovers in fluorescent-lit way-stations in some cold unsavory section of a
city I didn't know, while some surly janitor mopped the floor around a snoring
drunk sleeping two seats away from where I madly scribbled an endless longhand
letter to a girl I'd dated a couple of times and who had already told me she
wasn't interested in dating me anymore, and who certainly wasn't interested in
my ten-page tedious sophomoric screeds about fluorescent way-stations, surly
janitors and snoring drunks. Yikes. What the hell was I thinking?
So, anyway, I spent the night in Aix – a town that hadn't figured into my plans
at all when the day started – feeling like a failure, and trying to sleep but
failing at that too. I tossed and turned as the dark night crawled by. I
unendingly rehashed the day's disappointments. I anxiously imagined ever more
outlandish mistakes and humiliations that I might have to endure when morning
finally arrived. As I lay there wide-awake all night, thinking that this was
about as miserable as I've ever felt, I actually found myself indulging in the
clichéed thought that maybe this whole hellish experience was all just a bad
bad dream.
Now, somewhere in there, even if for just a moment, I'd like to think that I
was able to take a step back and enjoy a little perspective on what I was being
forced to endure: A night in a quaint hotel just off the famously lovely Cours
Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence. For many people, I guess, that's not exactly a
living Hell.
Oh, and I guess I should mention this too: Once Monday morning rolled around,
everything went just fine. I was back in Cotignac in time for lunch with Quincy
and the kids.
Officially, we live in the
Var administrative department of the Provence / Alpes / Cote d'Azur region of
southern France. Now, I don't know about you, but whenever I've heard the words
"Provence" and "Cote d'Azur," it has conjured up images of
bright sun-baked landscapes shimmering under balmy Mediterranean breezes. Warm.
Sunny. Dry.
Well, if you were looking out our windows this past weekend, you might have
thought that it was North Dakota out there. Snow on the ground. More snow
falling from a gloomy sky. People hunched against an icy wind as they attempted
to navigate the slippery streets.
Of course, if you look past the frigid wind and whipping snow, it's pretty darn
prototypically and picturesquely Provencal. Underneath the dusting of snow are
the pleasing planes of red-tiled rooftops joining each other at odd angles
astride stucco homes painted pastel shades of yellow and orange and brown. The
houses are packed into tight terraces that march up a steep hillside that stops
suddenly against the spectacular backdrop of a huge undulating face of a
curving cliff. The cliff face is punctuated by holes and folds in the eroding
rock, and abandoned caves, and an ancient fortress of some sort. And at the
very top of the cliff, standing like sentinels at the edge of the looming
plateau, are two large towers, hundreds of years old, slowly crumbling, but
still an imposing sight to see every time I look out our living room windows.
It's sunny today, actually, but it's still freezing cold. So it's a bit of a
relief that a man – wearing a beret, by the way – arrived today to pump 1000
liters of heating oil from his truck into the holding tank for our furnace.
Actually, I'll count that as a significant personal achievement. Not only am I
more confident that we can keep this drafty house warm until more appropriate
weather returns, but I'm practically giddy with delight that I was able to
actually arrange for this fuel delivery, entirely in French, without the whole
event going off the rails in some cascade of erroneous assumptions and
linguistic faux pas. Quincy and I had a similar moment of emotional uplift late
last week, simply as a consequence of walking out of a local Allianz insurance
office, having successfully employed our limited command of French to buy some
"l'assurance scolaire" for Jasper that, apparently, schoolchildren in
France all must have. It's this sort of thing – somehow accomplishing in French
something that I've never actually had to in my native language nor was
anticipating at all when we moved here just over a week ago – that makes me
think that, yes, we will manage.
My favorite part of that whole insurance episode was when we paid for the
policy. Credit card? No, not an option. And so I pulled some cash out of my
wallet, while the insurance agent reached under her desk to retrieve some
battered-looking little metal box from which she made change. A crummy little
cash box. That cracked me up. I mean, here we are dealing with one of the
largest financial companies in all of Europe, and it's like we're buying a
couple of cucumbers at a roadside stand.
The last time I took a
sabbatical, we went to Sri Lanka: Civil war, chaotic traffic, wandering boars
and flying bats and mangy dogs and malarial mosquitoes and water that we had to
boil before drinking. But being in Sri Lanka was surprising easy because, hey,
at least lots of people there speak excellent English. Not so much here in
rural France. It's definitely an adjustment – for some of us more than others.
Take me, for instance. Yes, I've been able to struggle through some
interactions with my amateurish deployment of French. But I live with the
constant threat of being linguistically lost. There are a few contexts in which
I feel confident – like when I'm buying bread or pastries (really amazing
pastries) at one of the three bakeries that are within a five-minute walk from
our house. But I feel very differently about the prospect of, say, answering
the telephone when it rings. I did answer it once and was somewhat relieved
when there wasn't actually a real person at the other end of the line; just an
automated recording of some sort, which I didn't understand at all and which
refused, as automated recordings are wont to do, to acknowledge my feeble
requests to speak more slowly and with a more childlike choice of vocabulary
words. No, generally, I leave the phone-answering to Quincy.
Maddox too struggles with the language.
His knowledge of French was essentially zero at the time of our arrival, and he
didn't have much chance to splash around in the shallow end of the linguistic
pool before we plunged him directly into the deep end of full-time daycare at l'école
maternelle. We've been trying to coach him a bit at home – teaching him
French phrases for "Hello," "Thank you," "I'm
thirsty," and stuff like that, and he is doing a great job of counting all
the way to neuf – but he's clearly not happy with the language. The
director of l'école maternelle, Madame Blanc, reported to us that he
resists saying anything at all in French. He refuses to answer "présent"
at morning roll-call, or to repeat even the simplest words in French when
prompted. Intriguingly, his refusals aren't limited to just the linguistic
domain. Madame Blanc also reported that he refuses to write out the letters in
his name (which he's been doing since he was, like, two), and that he's unable
to use scissors (which is crap, because I know from experience that he likes
nothing better than to take a pair of scissors and turn any sheet of paper – no
matter how indispensable it might be – into a pile of tattered strips). I'm
guessing that his apparent dumbness at daycare is strategic. If he was older
and, say, in prison, I suspect he'd be refusing meals and flinging feces in a
willfully misguided attempt to attract media attention to some sort of idiosyncratic
sociopolitical cause. But, well, he's four; and we're not worried. At the end
of the day, when we walk him home, he always claims to have had some fun.
It's been a lot easier on Jasper, since she arrived here with an excellent
command of French already. Still, she was anxious when we walked her to l'école
primaire the first day, and was actually fighting back tears as we
introduced her to her teacher that morning (which is pretty notable given how
famously stoic Jasper usually is). She told us later that she spent her morning
recess alone inside, just trying to get acquainted with her new surroundings.
But this period of nervous adjustment was short-lived. By her second day of
school, she was already rattling off the names of all her friends (Josephine,
Jelena, Marie-Justine, etc.), and excitedly studying times tables and
practicing how to write in cursive.
This quick transition, and the discovery that she could so successfully make
that transition, seems to have emboldened Jasper more broadly too. She now
insists on walking home from school unaccompanied by a parent, and she's
excited to start exploring Cotignac on her own as well.
This past weekend, for
instance, she was very keen to make a solo trip to a particular patisserie to
buy some custard-filled sacristains for dessert. It's the furthest of
the three bakeries, and although it's still an easy walk, Cotignac ain't
exactly laid out on grid. The streets are curvy narrow alleys, and it's easy to
lose one's bearings. I drew Jasper a map, and I told her that I'd be following
her from a distance, just in case. She objected to that, but I insisted, and I
assured her that I'd stay out of sight so that she wouldn't feel like she was
being chaperoned at all. So she took off with map in hand and a couple of Euros
in her pocket. I left a minute or two later, to make sure she didn't end up
miles away. Should we be concerned about our 8-year old girl walking by herself
in a town she barely knows? Nah. It's a small village and kids here go around
unaccompanied all the time. It's safe. In fact, given the way that I was
furtively following her – hiding behind the pale trunks of leafless trees,
periodically flattening myself against peeling stucco walls in order to stay
out of sight – the only suspicious-looking person in the whole town was me.
Jasper's outing was a complete success, but I can only imagine what might have
transpired if my apparent stalking behavior had caught the eye of the gendarme
(there is one, exactly one, policeman in the village). It's one thing to
buy a loaf of bread in French; I reckon it would be a bit more of a linguistic
challenge to try to convince local law enforcement that I'm not, in fact, a
pervert.
We're living in someone's
holiday house in Cotignac, and there are lots of things here of the sort of
that a family keeps in a second home. Random toys and tools, odd assortments of
plates and bowls, a bunch of old bicycles rusting in the garage, that kind of
thing. And bookshelves full of books: Gide and Camus and Saint-Exupéry, and
translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Cent Ans de Solitude) and
Philip K. Dick (Coulez Mes Larmes, Dit le Policier).
I amused myself last night by imagining how Camus might have blogged about our
life here so far ("Aujourd'hui, Jasper a vomi. Ou peut-être hier, je ne
sais pas...").
Or Garcia Marquez, perhaps: "Many years later, when his own children were
grown and he lay dying slowly and painlessly in an antiseptic room instead of
succumbing to a tragically heroic fate as he had once wished, the fading
sunlight slanting through the hospital window reminded Mark, for the first time
in years, of that bright cold day in January when he first rode a rusted
bicycle through the scrubby pine forests and olive orchards of Provence and,
upon returning home in the late afternoon, he imagined, wrongly, that he would
always associate his sabbatical in France with the sweet scent of wood smoke
and rosemary."
Alongside the creaky bicycles, there's also a car that came with the house.
It's a beater (an old Renault 5 with a shrill engine and floormats that are,
mysteriously, always wet), but it's serviceable.
And it's not like we really need a car very much. Right in the center of the
village, just a couple of blocks from our house, there are half a dozen shops
that supply Cotignacians with basic necessities such as bread, cheese, wine,
and entire skinned carcasses of rabbit, head and all. There's a bank with a
bank machine (and that's handy because we're going through Euros as though they
were rupees, or dollars). There's a hardware store where, among other things,
we can get spare keys made. And these include not just the slim little
streamlined keys we're accustomed to using in our modern doorlocks in North
America, but also those elaborate cast-iron things with cloverleaf handles that
look like the sort of oversized gimmicky prop brandished by grinning civic
leaders in cheesy 1950s-style "key to the city" ceremonies. And
there's a tiny, but surprisingly well-stocked supermarket of sorts – the one in
which Jasper famously vomited on her shoes a couple of weeks ago – that sells
pasta and milk and toilet paper and couscous and Nutella and little pots of
thick tangy sheeps-milk yogurt that immediately became my fermented breakfast
food of choice.
I don't have great confidence in our damp and belchy car, and I'm sure that it
will, one day, leave us all stranded by the side of some picturesque rural road
somewhere. But we did drive it to Brignoles (about 20 km away) last week to buy
some things – like peanut butter – that can't be found in Cotignac.
The next day, Quincy went further afield to do some shopping in the larger
metropolis of Toulon. Although, really, she didn't see much of Toulon. She
spent her time in a mall, and at Ikea. She might as well have been in Burnaby.
She returned home with a squishy plastic nightlight with an unpronounceably
cute Swedish name, and a new cell phone. Which now brings the total number of
telephones in the house to four – three of which actually work, two of which
have French phone numbers, and none of which I intend to ever touch.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, we all had lunch in an olive garden. And, no, I don't
mean one of those faux-Italian restaurant franchises of the sort that you can
find dotting the suburban landscapes of North America (and, I assume, Toulon).
I mean a real olive garden. We've met some people (Nathalie and Ollie – he's a
plumber here in town – and their three kids) who live in an old farmhouse
inside an olive orchard, and they invited us over for a lunch that went on for
several hours. Beer and wine and bread and olive oil, muscat squash and rice
and monkfish simmered in herbs and tomatoes, and salad, and three cheeses, and
finally a cake – a galette du roi, with crowd-pleasing prizes baked
into it, accompanied by crowns to wear on our heads.
Afterwards, while the kids were turning windblown branches into a sort of fort
in the woods by a spring, I picked some twigs of wild rosemary that I found
growing in the rocks nearby. I wandered into a hunters' shelter there by the
spring, where I found a woodfire still smoldering. I tossed the rosemary into
the embers and it smelled so good. I barely noticed all the fresh dogshit
underfoot.
Hemingway too spent some
time in France, and he famously had this to say about it: "If you are
lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for
the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."
I'm not sure how that might relate to our situation, though, because we're
living a long way from Paris, and I ain't exactly a young man any more. Still,
I do feel lucky. I think. Sometimes.
It's lucky, for instance, that our house here comes with a car.
It's unlucky, though, that the car is at least twenty years old and – judging
by the fistfuls of pine needles and oak leaves that I dug out from under the
hood the other day – appears to have spent most of its long life parked out in
the lonely woods somewhere.
It's lucky that, after taking it to the local garage, the mechanic pronounced
it to be in fine running condition. Of course, given the antiquity of the car,
we were only guardedly encouraged by this opinion.
It's unlucky that, on exactly the same day that (in a previous blog entry) I
predicted the car would "one day leave us all stranded by the side of some
picturesque rural road somewhere" we were, in fact, stranded by the side of
some picturesque rural road somewhere. We were chugging our way over the hills
to Brignoles, on a narrow shoulder-less highway, when the engine just suddenly
died. And not only wouldn't it start up again, there wasn't even the slightest
encouraging sound when I cranked the key. But, actually, my prediction was just
a little bit wrong: We weren't actually stranded by the side of the
road. There was no side to the road. The car was sitting dead right in the
middle of the motorway.
It's lucky that, despite being a complete mechanical moron, I was able to get
my head under the hood and to diagnose what I thought was the problem: A loose
of set of electrical wires. And, in a stunningly unlikely turn of events, after
poking haphazardly at those wires for a few minutes, I was actually able to get
the car going again.
It's lucky too that Quincy is thoroughly sensible in the midst of stressful
situations. She smartly suggested that we drive directly to the local mechanic
to get the damn thing professionally fixed.
It's unlucky, however, that I just don't listen.
It's unlucky that, buoyed by the semi-magical fact that we were suddenly
unstranded, I somehow convinced myself that I could fix that wiring problem
myself. In hindsight (and, really, even in foresight, if I had possessed such a
thing) my self-confidence was completely preposterous. Not only because I'm a
mechanical moron, but also because we have no tools at all – not even the
simplest wrench in our possession.
It's lucky, though, that I have some training as scientist, and a desire to
test hypotheses before plunging blindly forward. My tests – most of which
involved pulling wires in and out of places that they either should or
shouldn't be – appeared to confirm that the problem was, in fact, exactly what
I thought it was.
It's lucky I didn't end up with a faceful of battery acid.
It's unlucky, but hardly unsurprising, that I not only failed to fix the
problem, but also made the original problem much, much worse. Wires that once
were merely loose became increasingly impossible to connect at all. Not only
that, but my amateurish efforts caused another essential wire – which
apparently was as brittle as the ancient pine needles that I continued to
excavate from the engine – to break entirely in half.
It's lucky that I was home, so at least I had a familiar bed to lie down in
that night. It's unlucky that the night passed as a sort of sadistic parody of
my famously miserable night in Aix-en-Provence a couple of weeks before. I
spent the night in an all-too-familiar sleepless torment, relentlessly
rehearsing my errors and failings, and imagining the immense variety of ways in
which any additional attempt to solve the situation would render it even more
hopeless.
It's lucky that I don't really take those kinds of thoughts too seriously. It's
even luckier that, although we have a nodding acquaintance with no more than 3
people in this entire town, one of those people – Ollie – is a plumber by
trade, who drives around in a van stocked with an immense array of tools,
including a substantial soldering kit that would come in very handy indeed.
It's lucky too that Ollie speaks English with the near-perfect fluency of
someone who was born in Holland, which he was. And luckier still that, despite
the fact that I'd only met him once before (when he and his wife treated us –
near strangers – to a sumptuous feast at their house in the olive orchard, so
he certainly doesn't owe me any favors), Ollie was entirely willing to take
time away from a massive plumbing project that he's doing at a bar here in town
and to instead spend a valuable chunk of his afternoon rehabilitating the
ruined wires under the hood of our car. And when I offered to compensate him
for his time and effort, Ollie demurred, and suggested that we should soon go
bicycling together instead (which we did, today).
Yes, it's freakishly lucky to have accidentally befriended someone so helpful
and generous. In fact, just yesterday, Ollie and Nathalie invited us to their
house to use their laser printer and fax machine. And, while there, for reasons
that remain shrouded in the mystery of his impulsive munificence, Ollie put a
welding helmet on my head and a power supply into my hands and invited me to
try my luck at arc welding. And while I was amateurishly spraying hot showers
of sparks all around, he proceeded to invite me to borrow his motorcycle and
his chain saw too.
And, with that, I think that we've entirely transcended lucky, and
entered the domain of downright scary.
I was panting. I was
sweating. I was cranking hard on the well-worn pedals of a balky bicycle,
hoping that its rusty chain wouldn't snap. Meanwhile, gliding effortlessly on the
bicycle beside me, a genial grape-grower with cigarette-stained teeth asked me
a question that I have come to dread: "Are you on vacation?"
The simple answer, of course, is "Non". But that simple
answer just doesn't seem to satisfy folks. Their skeptical squints demand that
I explain more fully just exactly what I'm doing here in the south of France,
if I'm not on holiday. I'm forced to find some way of convincingly articulating
that fact that I'm actually working when, by all appearances, I spend
my days sampling soft cheeses and noodling around on the internet.
And at this particular moment, I needed to do so while pantingly pedaling my
way to the top of Le Grand Bessillon (which is the highest point for miles
around and, even on days in which winter woodsmoke is shrouding the valleys in
a sweet-smelling haze, offers a spectacular view). I was riding with Ollie and
Jerome. Ollie is my plumber friend – although, really, it doesn't seem quite
right to call him a friend exactly. Friendship usually implies a certain
reciprocal give-and-take, and thus far Ollie's been doing all the giving and
I've been all the taking. It might be more accurate to call him my patron or my
benefactor or something. Anyway, I was riding with Ollie, who was popping
wheelies on his fancy new top-of-the-line mountain bike, and Ollie's friend
Jerome (the grape-grower) who was on Ollie's other mountain bike. As for me, I
was astride the bike I found in our garage, with its creaky gears, balding
tires, and squishy brakes that squeal like a terrified schoolgirl (and they
would be squealing plenty, about an hour later, on the harrowing off-road route
that Ollie chose for our descent down the side of the mountain).
I try to explain: "No, I'm not on vacation; I'm on sabbatical." And
I'm fully aware that when I say stuff like that out loud – especially when I
say it to rural tradesmen who work with heavy tools all day long – I might as
well be saying, "No I'm not wearing a skirt; it's a sarong." And so,
I press on.
But how exactly can I talk about my sabbatical without sounding like a slacker.
Do I say that, although I teach at UBC, I only teach one or two classes anyway,
and so it's no big deal that I'm just not teaching this term? Do I say that,
although the main part of my job is to do research, it's not actually me
personally who spends the long hours in the lab collecting data, and so it's
barely noticeable when I disappear for six months overseas? Do I tell people
that, on my sabbatical, I'm mostly expected just to stare at a computer screen
and write?
Or do I take a different approach and assert that the objective of a sabbatical
is not just to provide me with more time to write, but also to supply the sort
of mental stimulation that will promote scholarly productivity for years to come?
And do I offer the patently self-serving opinion that, in my case, that
objective is partially satisfied simply by being here in the first place?
Yes. I do offer that opinion, and I truly believe it. Although I didn't say it
exactly like that on my ride with Ollie and Jerome, that is why we're here: To
shake our brains up a bit. And no, I don't mean "shake our brains" in
the way that my brain was juddering like a jackhammer on that rocky ride down
the mountainside. I mean that, in some eventual way, I benefit intellectually
from the accumulation of all these new and unpredictable experiences. Whether
it's an unexpected night of existential anguish in Aix, or the dizzying array
of raw goats-milk cheeses at the local market, it's all part of the package of
reasons why an overseas sabbatical ultimately pays off.
Which means that (and, again, I realize that what I'm about to say may
undermine my assertion that a sabbatical is not a vacation) in order
to fully repay the taxpayers' long-term investment in my overseas adventure, I
really do need to do more than just stare at my computer screen. I need to
struggle with the language. I need to get stranded by unreliable automobiles. I
need to immerse myself in the weekly open-air market, where people are selling
everything from cheeses and sausages and olive oils to hunting knives and
chainsaws and queen-size mattresses. I need to spend a muddy Monday morning
loading and unloading a truckful of aromatic oak branches that will, for the
rest of the winter, smolder unconvincingly in our fireplace. It's not just an
errand that has to be done. It's my job.
Just like, when someone invites me go bicycling to the top of a windblown peak,
it's my job to say "Oui". And when Ollie chooses to plunge
down a precipitous route for which neither my bicycle nor my aging skillset is
suited, it's my job to fearlessly follow. That's what I'm being paid to do – to
shake my brain.
My job is not, however, to flip my brain over the handlebars or to slam it
ferociously against a rock-strewn slope. And, happily, I didn't. Despite the
irresistible tug of gravity, and despite my foolhardy faith in a bicycle with
wobbly wheels and howling brakes, and despite the fact that I'm no longer much
of an athlete but am instead just another aging academic on sabbatical, I
remained intact. Barely. There was a moment toward the end of the ride, after
we had passed the hilltop chapel of Notre-Dame de Grâces and were hammering
headlong down the rocky remains of the ancient Chemin des Pénitents –
my thighs cramping, my wrists aching, and my brakes shrieking like a wounded
weasel – that I came close to losing control entirely. But I didn't. Five
minutes later, Ollie and Jerome and I dismounted our bicycles beside a fountain
in the central courtyard of Cotignac, and sat down to enjoy an espresso
outdoors under the winter sun.
Like most mornings, I woke
up at 6:00, while Quincy and the kids were still asleep and the sun had yet to
rise. I spent the next hour or so sitting on the couch with my computer on my
lap, drinking coffee, and reading The New Yorker. Riveting reading, as
always. A lot of stuff about J. D. Salinger who'd died just a few days before.
Laptop computer. New Yorker. Salinger. Yeah, I know: I'm not exactly
ripping off A Year in Provence here. I'm not exactly inviting any
lawsuits from goddam Peter Mayle. That's the thing about digital technology, I
guess. We're living in a house that's hundreds of years old, but it's outfitted
with a high-speed wireless internet connection. So, with a computer on my lap,
I could just as easily be back in Vancouver, or anywhere else in the world.
Anyway, I got to thinking about Salinger and his writing that I like so much. I
was reminded of how I was inspired to write a couple of Holden Caulfield parody
pieces back in the 1980s, which actually found their way oddly into print (in
the Daily Tar Heel and the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity
– not exactly The New Yorker, of course, but, as Richie Brockelman
might have said, what the hey), and which I wrote mostly to amuse myself and a
few friends. I was reminded of how, when Quincy and I were first living
together in Vancouver many years ago, I discovered that she'd somehow never
read The Catcher in the Rye, and so I proceeded to read the whole book
out loud to her as we lay in bed at night, with the rain failing softly
outside.
And, naturally, I got to thinking about the very first time I read the book
myself, on the banks of the Rio Paraguai in Brazil, when I was fourteen years
old. It's pretty cool, of course, to have spent months living in the wilds of
Brazil, and there was no internet then, that's for sure; so you'd think that
the stuff I remember from that particular time would be unique to that
particular place. Fishing for piranha. Leaning over the bow of a boat to lasso
alligators at night. Eating a dinner my dad made from day-old capybara meat
scavanged from a jaguar kill. That sort of thing. And I do remember those
things. But I also remember, just as meaningfully, that I spent that summer
lying in a lazy hammock reading and re-reading the same three books over and
over again. One of those books was The Catcher in the Rye, and I read
it the most of all. I must have read it about a hundred times that summer, if
you want to know the truth. I'm not kidding.
It makes me wonder what exactly Jasper and Maddox will end up remembering most
fondly from their half-year here in France. I'd like to think it'll be
something uniquely Provençal. The local sacristains maybe, or
stumbling upon vine-covered ruins in the middle of the forest, or our walks
down the narrow alleyways of Cotignac, sidestepping dogshit while the church
bells ring and the swallows and swifts dart in and out of the caves in the
cliffs overhead. But I'm sure I'm wrong. They'll probably remember watching
Speedy Gonzalez and Tom & Jerry over and over and over again on DVD.
So, really, much as I like to emphasize the exotic elements of life in France,
life here is pretty mundane too. In fact, I'm tempted to make that point in a
full-on Holden Caulfield kind of way. You know, something like: "If you
really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is
where we're living, and what the food is like, and where to find all the famous
fountains that tourists are always breaking their goddam necks to take pictures
of, and all that Lonely Planet kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into
it, if you want to know the truth. That stuff always ends up sounding phony as
hell. I'll just tell you instead about all this crumby stuff that happened the
morning that Maddox woke up with the grippe, stumbling around like a madman,
and coughing on my computer about a hundred times while I was trying to read
the goddam Talk of the Town..."
But I won't. It sounds less like a loving homage to Salinger and more like a
garish parody of myself trying to sound like Salinger. And, you know, given
that I'm an Anglophone academic spending a sabbatical in the south of France,
I'm already working the self-parody angle pretty hard.
I'll just say instead that, while reading The New Yorker online that
morning, with pre-dawn light just beginning to illuminate the cliffs outside, I
liked especially something that Adam Gopnik wrote, which reminded me in some
weird way of something that John Cheever wrote many years ago when he heard the
news that Hemingway was dead. Hemingway, who, like Salinger, I fetishized for a
while; especially when I was a sophomore at Chapel Hill. It was in the spring
of that year when I camped alone one night without a tent at the edge of a
resevoir outside of town. The ground was uneven and at night it was cold but I
didn't mind very much. In the morning the sun rose and it was warmer then. I
sat in the sun and I ate many pieces of bread and cheddar cheese that I sliced
with a pocket knife, and as I ate my bread and cheese I also narrated what I
was doing in a manner that was as careful and exact as the way I wiped the
blade of my knife clean on the tuft of grass beside the place where I sat. If a
man was to have walked by and overheard me then he might have guessed that I
was making a poor parody of Hemingway whose stories I had read many times and
liked very much. And of course I was. Kinda like what I'm doing right now. See,
I just can't resist the temptation.
Anyway, here's what Cheever had to say about Hemingway: "He put down an
immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain. There
was never, in my time, anyone to compare to him."
And here's what Gopnik said about Salinger: "no American writer will ever
have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than
his."
Maddox has been sick
pretty much all week. He's had that ugly cough for a while, and a runny nose;
and then, a few days ago, blood seeping out of his ear. Not much fever, though,
so I wasn't particularly worried. As I write that, I realize that you might
wonder exactly what sort of secretions could actually pique my parental
concern, if ear-blood (ear-blood!) isn't up to the task. You might wonder also
whether to characterize me simply as "optimistic," or whether a
better word would be "negligent" or "nuts." But we're
getting off topic here. Besides, Quincy's here, and she decided to take him to
a doctor, just to make sure.
Doctors are like bakeries here, in that there are several of them, but never
all open for business at once. We've been told that they – bakeries and doctors
alike – maintain some sort of strategically staggered schedule to ensure the
greatest possible coverage of the public need for fresh bread and occasional
health care. Still, it's a bit of a crap-shoot predicting exactly which one
might be open on any particular day or time. As you might imagine, I was happy
to let Quincy take charge the situation, since she's so much more sensible than
I about things like this (see ear-blood, above). Anyway, Maddox is fine. He's
taking some antibiotics and he spent a few days at home.
Jasper was home from school on Wednesday too. Not because she was sick, but
because there's never any school on Wednesdays here. So while Maddox fell
asleep after lunch (listening, for a change, to something other than Neil
Young; he's been especially into Neil's jammin' electric early work with Crazy
Horse – Down by the River, Cowgirl in the Sand, that kind of
stuff), Jasper and I went for a walk to the waterfall.
It's a shockingly lovely waterfall – higher and louder and more impressive than
I'd expected – and it's just a short walk through the forest at the edge of
town.
Before we reached the waterfall though, we prowled through the overgrown
remains of a ruined building (a long-abandoned mill maybe) that appeared
suddenly in the middle of the woods across the stream. We first had to traverse
a slippery tree-branch that had fortuitously fallen across the torrent, and
then scramble through the thorny underbrush. And then the crumbling walls of
the ruins themselves loomed above us like something you'd expect to find in a
Cambodian jungle somewhere, like something out of Apocalypse Now or Tomb
Raider, perhaps, only without any Marlon Brando or Angelina Jolie to liven
things up. Although maybe this is a good time to mention that, actually, if
we'd gone for a longer walk through these same woods, we might've substantially
increased our odds of running into Angelina Jolie for real. Turns out that she
and her pretty-boy husband rent a wine chateau in the neighboring village. It's
the same chateau in which Pink Floyd, many years ago, recorded part of The
Wall.
Unlike me, Jasper wasn't pondering pop-cultural references or over-wrought
rock-operas about metaphorical walls. She was focused entirely on the real-life
crumbling rocky walls in front of us – walls covered in wrist-thick vines that
offered an irresistible temptation to climb. So she and I spent a good long
time prowling through the derelict structure with its roof long gone and a
thicket of trees grown up inside and an uneven earthy floor that gave way, in
several places, to crevasses plunging down to a dark and mysterious cellar deep
below.
I was reminded of those times when I was Jasper's age and my brother Eric and I
roamed the wooded hills of Vermont. There was nothing more thrilling than the
discovery, deep within the forest, of some junk-pile of old tin cans and wagon
parts overgrown with wild blackberries, or some ancient automobile with a birch
tree grown up where its engine used to be. Or that time when I was 11 and we
were living in Pakistan. It was the Islamic Summit of 1974, and emirs and prime
ministers from all over the Muslim world were in Lahore and security was
super-tight, and a friend and I spent a day wandering past police lines and
military barricades, peering with a homemade periscope into compounds patrolled
by men with machine guns. It's the sort of thing I'd never do as a grown-up.
But kids, you know, always think that they can get away with anything.
Okay, I admit it: As much as I want to encourage my own kids to experience the
unmatched excitement of exploration, that wasn't the only reason that Jasper
and I were skulking around these ruins. I was indulging my own inner Indiana
Jones as well.
I also saw it also as an opportunity to demonstrate that, even though Maddox's
ear-blood barely registers on my parental radar screen, I can sometimes be a
responsible dad. Like last year when I showed Jasper how to use a magnifying
glass to start a fire. "Responsible?" you scoff. "Isn't that
just Mark being an incurable pyromaniac?" No. Hear me out. Sure, I'm a bit
of a firebug. But all kids are too. So it's not a bad thing to offer a little
grown-up instruction on how to indulge those dangerous tendencies in a semi-safe
manner. On Wednesday, for instance, I made a point to tell Jasper that no
matter how much fun it was to do what we were doing, it's the sort of thing
that's best not to do alone.
"Imagine if these vines broke and I fell," I said. "Or imagine
if this floor gave way suddenly, plunging me down into that dark pit below. I'm
be a lot better off with you here to help me out."
"Yeah," she said. "And you should probably always carry a cell
phone too."
Smart-alecky kid. Me carry a cell phone? I'm certainly open to serious
suggestions, but come on! A cell phone? Really? That's just nuts.
On Sunday morning I drove
down to the Kroger's for some Doritos and a half-rack of Bud Lite so that I
wouldn't show up empty-handed to the Super Bowl party over at Philippe and
Étienne's place. Also, because I knew that their friend Laurent was a huge
Saints fan, I figured I'd balance things out by cheering extra-loud for the
Colts while wearing a throwback Johnny Unitas jersey. But, damn it, the local
Foot Locker and even the NFL memorabilia outlet store in Avignon were all sold
out of Unitas, and Art Schlichter too, so I had to settle for a pair of Mike
Pagel pants instead. That put me in a bad mood. And then I drank way too much
of Philippe's sister's Jägermeister-and-grape-juice punch. By the time the
fourth quarter started, I'd already broken one of Étienne's commemorative
Little League World Series mugs, chipped another, and spilled a pitcher of
strawberry daiquiris all over his cousin Pascal's taco salad. It still might've
been okay, I think, until I told that crude joke about Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir and the guy who played Horshack on "Welcome Back Kotter."
That was it. Étienne cut me off. Philippe started yelling at me. His sister
damn near punched me. They wouldn't even let me stick around for the end of the
game. At about the time that Peyton Manning threw that comeback-killing
interception and the "Who Dat!" cheers started echoing through the
cobbled streets, I was stumbling to my knees in an ancient alleyway and
vomiting all over the back bumper of somebody's Citroën.
Okay, actually, that's a lie. All of it. Even the vomiting part. Especially
the vomiting part. Total fiction. Nobody here cares about the Colts or the
Saints or the Super Bowl. They don't even care about "Welcome Back
Kotter," as near as I can tell.
What I really did was this: I walked with Jasper down the street to the local
cinema to catch a Sunday afternoon showing of "Max et les Maximonstres."
The movie theatre (although it'd be more accurate to call it a "movie
room") is in a sort of multi-purpose municipal building called La
Grainage. We'd been there once before to investigate one of the elaborate
and long-lasting bingo events that seems to happen every weekend. Yes: bingo.
It seemed suddenly like I was spending a sabbatical at a senior center in Boca
Raton. Darn near the entire population of Cotignac was there, filling out their
5-Euro-apiece cards with the hope of winning computer equipment or electric
animals or baskets full of wine and cheese. I left quickly, but Quincy and
Maddox and Jasper stuck around for several hours. Jasper managed two cards at a
time, and then a third, and then five at a time after Maddox turned over his
cards to her. She's precocious, Jasper is, with the enthusiastic bingo skills
of someone 10 times her age. Didn't win anything though.
Actually, given the time difference, the Super Bowl didn't even start until it
was already after midnight and into Monday morning here in France. So, what'd
we do on Super Bowl Monday? We went for a little family hike – through the
village, past the soccer field and the skate park, along the path of the
penitents through the woods to the top of the hill, to la Santuaire Marial
Notre-Dame de Grâces. It's been around ever since the Virgin Mary appeared
in a vision to some local lumberjack back in 1519, and it's a very big deal
place for pilgrimages – especially pilgrimages by women who are keen to
conceive. Some lady from Austria famously made her way here in the 1600's and
then proceeded to give blessed birth to Louis XIV. There's now a whole wall
adorned with tiles – hundreds of them – engraved with thanks from parents whose
prayers have been similarly answered. I may be an atheist, but I'm also I'm a
sucker for heartfelt piety and uplifting architecture. It's a pretty cool
place.
There was some sort of Monday morning mass going on inside the church, while
nearby a couple of guys with chainsaws noisily destroyed a dying tree. We sat
outside and ate a picnic lunch (baguette, goat cheese, dried sausages and
apples; also pretzel stix). At one point during our picnic some old guy in
flowing robes – the local Bishop, I believe – ambled by accompanied by a cat.
"He is my friend," the Bishop said in French, and he hopped up onto
Quincy's lap and she stroked him lovingly behind his ears. (I'm talking about
the cat here, by the way; not the Bishop.)
The Bishop seemed to be in an exceptionally upbeat mood and when I asked him
why, he said that he'd placed a big bet on the Saints the day before and so had
won a ton on the Super Bowl. Not only that, he'd also cleared a tidy profit on
a ridiculous prop bet involving the halftime show, Pete Townshend, and a
porkpie hat. He was such a good-natured fellow that one thing led to another
and before you knew it I was telling him my raunchy existentialist / Horshack
joke. He laughed like a hyena, which is more than I can say for that jackass
Étienne and Philippe and his goddam mirthless sister.
Okay, yeah, I made up that last bit. That whole last paragraph isn't true. But
the rest of it is. And the good folks at Notre-Dame de Grâces really do appear
to be a culturally savvy lot. They have a surprisingly sophisticated website,
for instance, on which the latest Message from the Bishop starts off like this:
"Today the internet is an indispensable means for the apostolate."
As some of you know, I am
(or, at least, insufferably pose as) an architecture buff. So let's play a
game, shall we. Let's pretend for a moment that you're a brilliant modernist
Catalonian architect, and that Quincy and I are your wealthy patrons, and we
have charged you with the task of designing a feverishly detailed cathedral in
Barcelona. But, at our behest, instead of embellishing its facades with lavish
representations of the Nativity and the Passion, you have instead decorated it
with a more mundane sort of iconography – a set of images that depict our
five-day family holiday in Spain last week.
Just what tales do these tableaux tell? Ah, what tales indeed...
One facade of this mythical building might be adorned with a set of panoramic
panels depicting the banal beauty of Our Home Away from Two Homes. "Our
home away from two homes" is exactly the phrase that Jasper used as we
returned to a plastic cabin in the southernmost section of a vast parc de
vacances outside of the coastal town of Vilanova i la Geltrú. Ours was one
of hundreds of prefab structures parked alongside hundreds of trailers and RVs,
around which prowled dozens of mewling homeless housecats. The entire
"camping" complex was like a weird pan-European mini-city comprised
by linguistic ghettos of people speaking French and English and German and
Dutch, all energetically pursuing a leisure lifestyle largely isolated from
Spain itself. It addition to its playgrounds and swimming pools, the complex
had its own supermarket and shops and restaurants, and even its own mini-zoo.
We explored them all, and – because it was unseasonably cold and wet – we also
occupied ourselves indoors a lot. A lot of mad-libs and art projects. (Maddox
has largely abandoned abstract expressionism and is now producing
representational art with surreal flourishes, such as his habit of drawing
stick-figure people with unusually long feet that curl and swirl and circle
around their entire bodies.) Also a lot of games of twenty-questions. Which
could've become tiresome but never did, despite – or perhaps because of – the
fact that Maddox's first question was invariably "Is it a goat?"
We also spent time in the indoor swimming pool. So much time, in fact, that
some extravagant depiction of the swimming pool deserves to dominate an entire
wall of the shrine that you, the eccentric architect, have designed to commemorate
our Spanish holiday. But, in this sculptural masterpiece of yours, it's not the
pool itself that grabs the eye; it's the people splashing within it. And,
specifically, it's what they are all wearing on their heads: Swim caps.
Everyone has a swim cap on. It's the law. Well, okay, it's not exactly etched
into the Catalonian penal code, but the parc de vacances did have a
strict policy requiring everyone to wear a swim cap in the swimming pool. Now,
as many of you know, I just don't do headwear – because caps and hats always
look ridiculous on my tiny head. But rules are rules, and so I was compelled to
find a store that sold Speedo-style swim caps for all of us. I tried to be
optimistic. I hoped that maybe it'd make me look like some angular Australian backstroke
bronze-medallist or something, or at least not look completely laughable. No
such luck. When I slipped that lycra cap over my nut-sized noggin, I looked
less like an Olympian, and more like some pasty Russian cosmonaut in awkward
orbit around the Earth.
The kids would've been happy to spend their entire holiday swimming in the pool
and cuddling up to half-feral housecats, but we did venture occasionally
outside the "camping" complex. So maybe a third and final facade of
your ornate architectural masterwork should depict the highlights of these
excursions. For instance, we spent some time on the beach in Vilanova i la
Geltrú, where the kids took great delight in climbing onto a statue of muscular
naked woman curled up inside an enormous bull, and took equal delight in
watching a big bulldog take a crap on a miniature railway.
And we took a daytrip to Barcelona too. I've already forced you to recall that
I am (or, irritatingly, pretend to be) an architecture enthusiast. So it won't
surprise you to learn that Jasper and Maddox were forced to participate in a
Barcelonian walking tour dictated almost entirely by my desire to see some of
the modernist architectural marvels for which the city is so famous. It'll
surprise you even less to learn that this was decidedly not the
highlight of their holiday. My own lasting memory of Barcelona won't have
anything to do with the intricate organic forms of the Casa Batlló or
the hallucinatory magnificence of the Sagrada Familia. It'll probably
be the half-hour we spent in a very ordinary playground directly in the shadows
of the glorious soaring towers of Gaudí's famously-unfinished masterwork,
watching Maddox happily slide on a slide, while Jasper sat on a bench with her
nose buried in a book about a magic school-bus and butterflies.
It has been brought to my
attention (by Quincy, lovingly) that some of the things I say in these postings
may not be readily meaningful to all readers. You know, like when I riff, in
French, on the opening lines of a Camus novel, or refer obliquely to some
particular piece of ornate architecture, or make some obscure allusion to someone
like T. S Eliot or Richie Brockelman. "Nobody's gonna get that
reference," Quincy says, "Nobody's gonna know who that is." And
when I assure her that there may be someone out there for whom those lines from
Camus ring a distant but fondly-remembered bell, or who might actually recall
that Richie Brockelman, Private Eye debuted on NBC in the spring of
1978 and ran for all of six episodes, she (Quincy) just looks and me and nods
and says, "Uh-huh." And when I mention that it's all okay anyway
because anybody reading this blog is just two mouse-clicks away from a full
deciphering courtesy of websites like Wikipedia or IMDb or KnowYourMeme.com,
she just closes her eyes and exhales slowly to show me how much it pains her
when I insist on using words like "meme" [1] in ordinary household
conversation.
"Maybe you need to add footnotes," she says. It's possible that is
was a joke. I mean, I don't think Quincy really wants our blog to resemble some
semiotics essay published in PMLA [2]. But still. Footnotes. Hmmm.
Okay, I'll try it.
It turns out, though, that this Blogger interface doesn't make footnoting all
that easy. Clearly, the software code wasn't written for T. S. Eliot [3]. So,
okay, here's how I'm going to handle it. I'll indicate foonote numbers in
square brackets like the ones you just ran into after "meme" and
"PMLA" and "T.S. Eliot." The explanatory notes
themselves will appear in separate post below. (That separate post will be
titled, simply, "Footnotes," to distinguish it from the more prolix –
but deceptively straightforward – title than this one has [4]). Got it? Okay,
let's proceed.
But wait. There is one more issue that I'm struggling with here: The question
of just what exactly needs a footnote. Does T. S Eliot really need a footnote?
Does Camus? And if I worked in some timely allusion to Epic Beard Man [5],
would I need a footnote there? And what about when I conclude this post with
the words "Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih" – does
that need a footnote too? Well, actually, that last one's easy. "Datta.
Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih": That's pretty transparent
stuff, isn't it; no explanation needed.
Whew, that's a long preamble. I'm exhausted. And I still have the footnotes to
write. I'd better get the point of this post. The point is this: What, if
anything, does any of this have to do with France? Why am I even posting this
stuff here, on our blog about France, instead of on our blog about blogging
about France? Well, smarty-pants, it's cross-posted. [6] So there.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih. [7]
[1]. The word
"meme" was coined by Dawkins (1976). But it's now in common parlance,
at least in some circles. So there's really no need for Quincy to give me that
pained look.
[2]. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. (Again: pained
look.)
[3]. The allusion here is to T. S Eliot's poem The Waste Land which is
so famously abstruse that Eliot himself added footnotes. There was a time (back
when I was a parody of a 19-year old University student, so please prepare to
roll your eyes) when I fetishized T. S. Eliot's opaque oeuvre. I can always
elicit a particularly pained expression from Quincy simply by bringing up the
fact that, in 1982, I attended a Halloween party dressed as the title character
in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. "I'm so glad I didn't
know you then," she says.
[4]. The phrase "a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned
allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general" is not just an apt
description of this particular post. It's also the exact phrase that another
writer (H. P. Lovecraft, of all people) used to describe The Waste Land.
It's true. And, yes, Quincy is making that face at me again. Oh, but you should've
seen the original title I'd put on this post before I changed it to that H. P.
Lovecraft line. The actual title may be footnote-worthy, but the original title
– of which I was embarrassingly proud – is the verbal equivalent of me going
out in public dressed up as J. Alfred Prufrock. When I read it out loud to
Quincy she ... well, you can just imagine the pain behind her eyelids. [i]
To spare you, I've buried it in a footnote. Or more exactly, it's in a footnote
to this footnote. I'm signifying footnotes-to-foonotes with little italicized
i's in square brackets -- like what you saw after "eyelids" a couple
of sentences ago. These foonotes-to-footnotes themselves appear in the post
immediately below this one. (You suggest footnotes to me, you get footnotes. In
fact, you don't just get footnotes; you get an over-the-top exercise in
self-refential silliness. You're welcome)
[5]. Oh yes, I've been going on and on about Epic Beard Man recently, waving my
laptop at Quincy and blathering madly about video mash-ups and Amber Lamps and
the whole weird cultural power of camera-phones and the Internet. It's entirely
the fault of Epic Beard Man and all those millions of YouTube enthusiasts that
I've been using the word "meme" a lot recently, and causing Quincy so
much pain. (You don't know about Epic Beard Man? Well, look it up. I recommend
KnowYourMeme.com.)
[6] Yep, I actually created an entirely new blog simply so that that I could
take this ludicrous exercise to whole new level of hackneyed self-referential post-modern
pain.
[7] Nope, sorry; I told you I wasn't going to offer an explanatory footnote for
this. Besides, if I did, it'd just be painful. [ii]
[i]. "He Do
the Police in Different Voices." Yep, that was the working title of this
particular post. Why? Do you really want to know? Really? Okay, you asked for
it: It's because that exact title – "He Do the Police in Different
Voices" – was T. S. Eliot's working title for The Waste Land.
Hey, don't blame me for the intense pain you're experiencing behind your eyes.
I warned you.
[ii] No. Absolutely not. I refuse to torture you any more. If you're
that kind of masochist, you can just look it up for yourself. No more
footnotes.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Yesterday was market day
in Cotignac. So, while the kids were at school, Quincy and I wandered from
stall to stall under a sunny sky, filling our shopping bags with sheepsmilk
cheeses and olives and mushroom-and-hazelnut tapanades and lots of green beans,
lemons and Spanish clementines. Also a whole roasted chicken and an enormously
tasty ham that (if I accurately interpreted what the meat-man said) was cut
from a baby pig. And if you're appalled that I'm not appalled by that, I'll
remind you that although I do still consider myself a vegetarian, I'm a non-practicing
vegetarian. And besides, this is France.
More than any of us, Jasper has been trying new foods here in France. It helps
that she eats lunch at the school cantine practically every day. Some
days she discovers new things that she loves; other days not so much. For
instance, one day last week the menu included assiette de la mer. When
she got home in the afternoon, I asked her how it was. She liked the sauce, she
said, but not the scorpion that was in it.
Scorpion! I flashed back to when Jasper was just one year old and we lived for
six months in Sri Lanka. Quincy was brushing her teeth before bed one night and
very nearly stepped on a scorpion on the bathroom floor. I was already almost
asleep, but I pushed aside the mosquito netting and climbed out of bed to deal
dutifully with the arachnid intruder. It turned out to be scarier than I'd
anticipated. The scorpion wasn't one of those slim little pinkie-sized things I
remembered from my days in the Arizona desert. This Sri Lankan scorpion was a
big as a banana, with monstrous claws and a thick black cord of a tail that
arched menacingly toward me, making me acutely aware of the fact that I was entirely
naked. It took a while, and was a bit of a struggle, but I eventually chased it
out into the hallway and then cornered it on the stairs where I clubbed it to
death with the end of a broom.
This is the image that jumped to mind when Jasper told me of her distaste for
the scorpion she was served for lunch. "Scorpion?" I asked.
"Well it looked like a scorpion," she said, "I didn't eat it
all." Turns out, though, that it wasn't a scorpion. It was a prawn.
Maddox hasn't yet been sampling such a wide range of local foods. There's a cantine
at his preschool but he hasn't been eating there. We figured he needed a
bit more time to acclimate to the new school, new rules, and a new language
that he still (purely on principle, I think) refuses to speak. The plan is for
him to start eating at the cantine at the end of this week. In the
meantime, he's been eating lunch at home.
Lately the kids have been bringing home lots of xeroxed reminders and
announcements about the upcoming celebration of Carnival. It's a very
big deal around here, with parties and parades, and all kids are expected to
dress up as some legendary storybook character. We've lucked into a secondhand
homemade Robin Hood costume that would be perfect for Maddox (among other
things, there's an awesome leather vest and a green felt hat adorned with real
feathers) except for the fact that he wants absolutely nothing to do with it.
He's at that endearing / irritating age where he still regularly says hilarious
things (such as the other day when, apropos of nothing, he said "I can
feel my testicles growing"), but also increasingly refuses to listen to
good advice. His stubborn rejection of Robin Hood is just one example. So too
is his principled refusal to speak French.
Yesterday Maddox brought home a notice about a Carnival party at his
preschool. Parents are asked to provide a snack of some sort, and the
announcement listed several suggestions: "des crêpes, des beignets,
des pets de nonne, etc." Pets de nonne? My trusty old
French-English dictionary wasn't any immediate help there. So we got onto the
computer for a little on-line translation: "Nun's farts." Nun's
farts? Yes. Apparently, they're a popular pastry.
Also this week Maddox went with his preschool class on a field trip to a local
olive orchard. He was very excited about it. When Quincy asked afterwards what
he did in the olive orchard, Maddox said that he played. "Who'd you play
with?" she asked. And he replied, "You know: my friend."
Ah yes, his friend. Her name is Hannah and, according to her mother, she talks
about Maddox constantly. When Quincy dropped him off at school yesterday Hannah
was already there; Maddox ran up to her and wrapped his arms around her in a
long hard hug. When I returned him to school after lunch, the gate to the schoolyard
was locked and so we waited outside the gate for a few minutes until a teacher
appeared to unlock it. A bunch of other kids – the ones who stayed at school
for lunch in the cantine – were running around inside the schoolyard.
One of those kids was Hannah and she immediately ran over and grasped
desperately at Maddox's hands through the iron gate. Meanwhile, Hannah's best
friend (who speaks some English) ran up and, gesturing toward Hannah, told me
this: "She is the amour of Maddox." Neither Hannah nor
Maddox said anything. They just stood there, holding onto each other through
the iron bars, like something you might see during non-conjugal visiting hours
at a penitentiary. It was pretty charming.
It's that time of year.
Branches are budding, bushes are blooming, fruit trees are flowering. And you
know what that means: It means that I'm spending my days itching and sneezing
and filling handkerchiefs with watery snot. That's what I do every spring back
home in Vancouver too.
So, yeah, the more things change, the more ça même chose. Or at least,
almost the même chose. Some things are a tiny bit different. The springtime
pollen is different, for instance, emerging as it does from almond blossoms and
walnut buds and whatever that great big tree in our back yard is that spills
fuzzy red allergens all over the terracotta terrace where, increasingly, we're
eating our mid-day meals.
Despite the airborne tides of pollen, it's probably a good thing that we've
started to move our life-style out of doors, if only because it's a departure
from our previous routine. Having been here already more than two months, the
novelty of being in France itself has worn off, and it's easy to feel that
we've settled into a comfortable sort of sabbatical rut. You know: Yet another
trip to the weekly market to buy fruits and vegetables and cheeses. The
specifics may change from week to week (last week we discovered a delicious gaperon,
the week before it was a cantal vieux) but really, it's the same ol'
same ol': Wandering from vendor to vendor in the shining morning light,
uttering a few phrases in haphazard French, handing over the euros, and
stocking up. (And even some details never change at all: every week I seek out
a particular vendor who specializes in eggs and flan and un-aged curds, and I
buy a fourpack of sheepsmilk brousse.) If not for the unnecessary
French mots I'm forcing into these sentences, I might as well be
writing about a trip to a Safeway supermarket. Yawn.
Anyway, in order to be a semi-responsible blogger, I'm trying to attend more
vigilantly to those things – the little things – that actually are different or
unexpected or somehow peculiarly Provençal. (Because the alternative, as you
may have discovered, is that I don't write anything at all. Or worse: I fill up
the blog with tedious faux-erudite ephemera.) And I'll try to notice things
that are at least a tiny bit more interesting than the mundane fact that
instead of eating a bowl of yogurt and granola for breakfast every day, as I do
in Vancouver, I'm instead eating a bowl of fromage blanc and muesli
(or, as they call it here in France: muesli). Still, I apologize in
advance to those of you who are hoping for tales of embarrassment and
humiliation. What's been happening these days is all pretty modest stuff.
Like the other day when, after putting it off and putting it off some more, I
finally went to get new license plates for the car. Not for the new car. Nope.
The new plates were actually for the other car: the 1980s-vintage beater that,
despite performing without incident on fully 3/4 (exactly 3/4) of its outings
with us, now just sits rusting in our damp and dusty garage. You see, France
has adopted a new car registration system of some sort and all cars, even old
and unreliable ones, are supposed to be getting new plaques
d'immatriculation. Well, you can see why I kept putting this off. Even
under familiar circumstances, this sort of task is typically just time-wasting
and tedious – the boring journey to some wearying government office, the
endless waiting in line, the hesitant inquiries about opaque procedures, the
forms to fill out, the forgotten document that requires you to return home,
find the damn document, and then start all over again with another boring
journey and more waiting in line and more forms to fill out...yes, it's the
sort of errand I'd put off even if the interaction was to be entirely in English.
Add in the fact that I'd be navigating this tricky bit of bureaucracy in my
awful French and, well, frankly I'm shocked that I didn't somehow finagle a way
to get Quincy to do it instead.
But – and here's the vaguely anthropological twist – it turned out that it
wasn't like that at all. No Byzantine bureaucratic maze; no tedium. A quick
walk to the local gas station; a single piece of paper, 30 euros, and no more
words of French than I'm using in this very sentence, and voilà: des
nouveaux plaques d'immatriculation. You've probably had sneezing sessions
that took longer. I know I have.
Our little musical-theatre outing last weekend was also just a bit different in
the details than it would have been if we'd been doing it back home. In
Vancouver, the performance (comically embellished re-imaginings of Aesops
fables, which were actually much less awful and lot more fun than I just made
them sound) would have taken place at some community centre or somewhere
secular like that. Here, it was at a famous hilltop church. In Vancouver, the
curtain call would probably have been followed immediately by kids' wheedling
pleas for a post-performance trip to Dairy Queen. Here, we instead hung around
outside under the pine trees, helping ourselves to Fanta and slices of cake and
cashews that someone had put out on the picnic tables where the actors and the
audience mingled with nuns and a bearded bishop. And, on our walk home through
the woods, we stopped to explore a crumbling roofless building being reclaimed
by trees.
And then there're my bicycle outings. Every time I go riding with Ollie, I'm
reminded that we're living a different lifestyle here in France. Now, partially
that's because when I'm home in Vancouver my time in the saddle is mostly
limited to slow-motion cautious commutes with one or more children in tow,
whereas here I'm regularly risking a bent rim or a broken chain and a shattered
clavicle while following fearless Ollie down treacherous trails. But it's also
because these rides inevitably take me into scenes that seem just amazingly,
iconically, clicheédly, even embarrassingly Provençal. A monestary on the side
of a mountain. A small stone chapel appearing suddenly in the middle of an
oak-filled forest. A tiny red-roofed hilltop village where the wind blows hard
and we ride under the narrow arches of ancient alleyways. Yet another dusty
hillside track alongside yet another olive orchard. Last weekend Ollie led me
along some centuries-old trail that wound it's way through the middle of a wine
chateau, through the vineyards, up over a rocky hill, and then, like many of
the trails here, suddenly crossed a stretch of private property, where there
suddenly appeared a burly dog that lunged loudly at our furiously pedaling
feet. Of course, as I know from sad experience, that last part isn't peculiarly
Provençal at all.
Last
week I had a lunch in a restaurant here in Cotignac and it occurred to me that
it was the first time I'd eaten in a French restaurant since we arrived almost
three months ago. There's something a bit funny about that. I mean, most foody
folks – and I think that Quincy and I might qualify as foody folks – fetishize
French cooking, and when they visit France they make a point to eat out.
Somehow that just hasn't been our priority. When Quincy (who wasn't even with
me at lunch) asked me about my meal afterwards, I used words like
"murky" and "fishy" and "sludgy" to describe it.
Her reaction suggested that she thought that I'd found the food disappointing,
which isn't true at all. I meant those words in the most positive possible way.
The food was fine, and it filled me up.
(Hmm, maybe that last sentence disqualifies me as foody folk after all.)
The impetus behind my restaurant meal was the fact that my parents were
visiting for a week. The weekend before they arrived, our friend Carol came
down from Geneva for a visit. And just before my parents left town, our friend
Helen from Seattle arrived. Yep, now that spring has arrived, the onslaught of
visitors has begun.
Please don't misunderstand my use of the word "onslaught" (especially
if you're among the parade of people who're planning on visiting during the
coming months). I assure you that I'm using the word in the most positive
possible way.
Also, if you do visit us, I promise that we won't subject you to the same
hardships that Carol endured. Carol's visit coincided with a brief stretch of
unseasonably cold weather and we hadn't yet discovered how to successfully heat
our guesthouse. We've since learned that the guesthouse "radiator" is
merely decorative – kind of like having an ugly painting of a clown on your
wall. (Or, more to the point: it's kind of like having an ugly sculpture of a
radiator on your wall). We've also now located a portable space heater. And
it's sunny and warm now too. After Carol, none of our subsequent guests have
needed to sleep clothed in multiple layers of fleece jackets and woolen caps.
Also, Maddox hasn't vomited on anybody since her visit either.
Of course, if you want something to read when you're here, I suggest you bring
your own books. There's French literature on the bookshelves here, but we don't
have much in the way of English-language books lying around. Rather than
lugging tons of books over from Canada, Quincy and I opted for lighter, more
electronic solutions. Quincy's got a Kindle. And I do a lot of reading on-line,
a strategy that produces pleasingly haphazard entertainments. (A few days ago,
for instance, and without any intention whatsoever to do so, I spent all
evening reading about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.). Carol resorted to
scrounging a Lemony Snicket book from Jasper's room, and my parents spent their
week reading and re-reading Tintin comics.
In addition to Tintin and delicious sludgy
restaurant food, I kept my parents intermittently entertained with walks around
Cotignac. On one walk I picked a bunch of wild asparagus growing by the
roadside and, despite my mom's contention that it'd be coated in dog urine, I
served it up for dinner. We also played a lot of table tennis. My dad used to
be a ping-pong demon during his undergraduate days – almost 60 years ago – and
he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to once again throw down some topspin-heavy
forehand smashes. My mom holds her own at the table too, and the mere act of
palming a paddle again brought forth a flood of proud recollections her about
sporty teenage years. You probably didn't know, for instance, that she had the
highest bowling score among all the girls in her gym class.
("Oh that was just on that one day," said my mom when I read that
previous sentence out loud to her, "and then that man died"
– referring to the fact that news of FDR's death irritatingly overshadowed her
moment of gym-class glory. She also suggested that I blog a bit about her high
school badminton exploits; but, alas, I've failed to record the details.)
She flew back to the States today. My dad left a couple of days earlier, to
attend a meeting in Switzerland. I accompanied him via train to Geneva where,
after making sure that he boarded the right train to continue his onward
journey to Montreux, I spent the night at Carol's place, before returning home
the next day. (It was super warm and cozy in Carol's apartment, by the way, and
chockablock with English-language books; I borrowed one for the long ride
home). It was a lot of train travel in a short time. But I was happy to hang
out with my dad and to make sure he actually made his connections. Although
he's traveled in crazy ways in crazy places all his life, this was the first
time he'd actually ridden the rails in Europe in over 40 years, so he was
feeling a bit clueless and uncertain about the whole thing. My favorite part of
the journey occurred when a French train conductor came around to check our
tickets. He was wearing a cheap gray suit over a purple turtleneck, and an
old-fashioned driving cap of the sort that I associate with golfers of the Ben
Hogan era. I nudged my dad to tell him to get his ticket out. "There's the
ticket puncher," I said. My dad looked. "He doesn't much look like a
ticket puncher," he said, "He looks like the kind of guy who wants to
sell you dirty pictures." For reasons that I can't quite explain, I found
that hilarious in about six different ways.
The real shocker is that
all four of us were in upbeat moods throughout the morning that we explored
Carcassonne. That was quite a change from the two previous days, at Pont du
Gard and Peyrepertuse – both which I now know to be among the most visually
awesome places for any parent to spend his time wishing that he could legally
thrash the hell out of his determinedly grouchy daughter.
Yes, Jasper is precocious. She's still only 8 years old, but increasingly she
acts like she's 12 or 13. And I mean that, obviously, in the least
positive way possible.
Of course, if you asked her, she'd assure you that the cause of her sullen
displeasure can be traced to me and my Draconian parenting practices.
Regardless, it was irritating. And aesthetically frustrating: Jasper's been
regularly wearing a red sweater that just happens to look dynamite in photos –
a great wet splash of color to punctuate the monolithic earth-tones of all
these ancient ruins – but she vigorously refused to be photographed. When she'd
see me with my finger on the shutter, she'd bolt immediately from wherever
she'd been so picture-perfectly posed and flee, as fast as she could, up some
flight of stone steps.
But at Carcassonne, Jasper was all smiles as she cheerfully characterized the
legendarily well-preserved medieval city to be "kind of boring." I
didn't find it boring. With its turrets and portcullises and throngs of
camera-toting tourists, Carcassonne is like some sort of derelict Disneyland.
And even though the castle is a UNESCO World Heritage site, it's still part of
the living urban landscape, full of retail shops and restaurants and motorcycles
zooming over historic drawbridges and diesel trucks rumbling down medieval
alleyways barely big enough for a bicycle. As a pedestrian and parent to two
distractable children, I didn't find that boring at all.
That's something that I really get a kick out of here in France: the way that
deeply historical stuff is taken for granted; the way it's just part of the
ordinary landscape.
Traveling around France, or even just walking around Cotignac, I'm reminded of
the phrase that V. S. Naipaul famously used to characterize the American south:
"a landscape of small ruins." During the times that I've traveled
around North Carolina and other southern states, I've really resonated to those
regular bits of ordinary wreckage – old barns overgrown with kudzu, uneven porches
being slowly shattered by wisteria, that sort of thing. But, if anything,
"a landscape of small ruins" is an even more apt description of
southern France. I mean, sure, there are plenty of impressive huge ruins here
too – immense displays of ancient architecture like the Pont du Gard and all,
blah blah blah. But it's the countless little ruins – the ones we see
everywhere – that I dig so much on a daily basis: The crumbling mill at the
edge of a village; the half-collapsed hilltop chapel; the cylindrical remnants
of abandoned wells amidst the rocks and rangy weeds of almost every orchard. At
an intellectual level, it's humbling to encounter these constant casual
reminders that, no matter how sturdy we might try to make the things we make,
our things are ultimately no match for the rain and the wind and the sun. And
there's also something so aesthetically pleasing in these juxtapositions of
engineering and entropy: I just like the way they look.
The big ruins look pretty great too, and even Jasper's headstrong grumpiness
was no match for the dilapidated awesomeness of Peyrepertuse – which, with its
dizzying mountaintop location and sharp geometries, has an almost Machu
Picchu-like quality about it. Hours later, after we'd returned to the cramped
little "camping" cabin where we spent the night, Jasper snuggled up
to me as I downloaded that day's photos onto my laptop, and she giggled in
amusement at the pictures that I had taken of her attempts to avoid being in
the pictures I was taking. And then we looked at them again, and she laughed
out loud all over again, and so did I.
I drove to Nice last
Thursday, to pick up our friends Erica and Bob (and their baby) at the airport.
I figured they'd be tired after their long flight from Vancouver, via
Frankfurt; and, as I know from sad experience, traveling with an infant is
rarely conducive to fine dining in transit; so when they emerged from customs,
I planned to welcome them to the south of France with some of my favorite fresh
olive bread and an assortment of cheeses – including an amazing Comté
that I'd discovered the week before. But – spoiler alert! – they didn't arrive
on schedule. They were late!
You maybe haven't heard because it's probably been buried in the back pages of
your local paper that you don't even read anymore and is going out of business
anyway, but apparently there was some volcano in Iceland that erupted last
week, spilling ash into the sky, and causing problems for flights in and out of
European airports. Yeah, it was news to me too. So, anyway, they missed their
connection in Frankfurt. What a pain. Sure, Luftansa found room for them on the
very next flight to Nice that afternoon, but that was, like, three hours later.
Three hours! That's three hours I was forced to spend hanging out on the Côte
d'Azur, munching on olive bread and aged cheeses under the palm trees and
Mediterranean sunshine. That's three hours of my life I'm never gonna get back.
Freakin' volcano. Talk about inconvenience!
Wait. What? You'd already heard about the volcano? And what's that? You don't
think that my faux-outraged tale of minor delays and fine cheeses
registers – not even a tiny bit – on the ash-related tale-o'-woe-o-meter? Oh.
Okay, fine. I'll stop fishing fruitlessly for sympathy. I'll go back to
tolerating your envy instead.
Given that almost all European airspace has been off-limits to airplanes for
the past week, and that a hundred thousand people have been spending days and
days becoming all the more depressing familiar with the bright un-cozy
corridors of FRA or LHR or CDG, with no exit in sight, it's really quite
amazing that Erica and Bob and their baby made it here at all. When you're
traveling overseas with a squalling infant, it's hard to remain chipper in the
face of airline inconvenience; but it maybe helps just a bit when, for days on
end, the news stories remind you that, in fact, you are about the least
inconvenienced air travelers in all of Europe.
So, anyway, instead of spending their week surreally trapped in transit, Erica
and Bob have been doing exactly the kinds of things that you'd envision our
visitors doing – and which you'd be doing yourselves if you were hanging out
with us: Drinking rosé and eating leisurely lunches on our terrace, going for
sunny walks where the rosemary grows wild and abundant on the hillsides,
spending ever more money on ever more vast quantities of olives and cheeses at
the Tuesday morning market. Playing a lot of ping-pong. Oh, also, Erica and Bob
have been wiping copious amounts of baby slobber off of their baby's chin,
their own clothes, and pretty much every surface of our house. You know, it's
not been so very long since Jasper and Maddox were that age, but I'd totally
forgotten how much drool an infant can produce. Like a spaniel or something.
Anyway, wine and cheese and drool. That's life here in France these days. That
and an eager interest in the volcano and its consequences.
Speaking of which: Quincy's brother Galen has been staying here with us as
well. He arrived way back when the airplanes were still flying regular
schedules, but his stay here has gone on longer than originally planned. He was
ticketed to leave last Sunday, from Marseilles to Frankfurt and then onward.
So, obviously, that didn't happen. He's been on his laptop a lot, monitoring
the ash cloud chaos with some amusement, and working out a plausible exit
strategy. His latest plan involves taking advantage of our relative proximity
to the open-airspace promised-land that is Spain: A series of trains from Aix
to Marseilles to Montpelier to Barcelona, and then to Madrid, and then an
alleged flight out of Madrid. We'll see.
On the weekend before we
went to beach, there was Carnaval. It's a very big deal in Cotignac.
It started Saturday morning with a parade, and lasted through nightfall when,
down in the dirt field where the old men play at boules, there was a
burning-in-effigy of a gigantic tissue-paper gingerbread man – a spectacle that
maybe symbolized something but, if so, I don't know what. In any case, the
burning of this faux-confectionary effigy started and ended so quickly that
Quincy and Maddox and I (arriving late to the boulodrome) missed it
entirely. Jasper was there though, and she said it was awesome.
We'd been anticipating Carnaval for weeks and weeks. The kids had been
advised, through endless flyers sent home from school, to dress in déguisements.
In the days leading up to the big day, we could watch a massive truck-sized
dragon – a parade float – being built in the garage across the street from our
house. Maddox loved peeking in on the emerging monster as it got a freshly
painted coat of bright green scales and a bright red mouth. Eventually, the
dragon even breathed fire (well, okay, just smoke).
On the morning of Carnaval itself, Jasper and Maddox mustered at their
respective schools along with every kid in Cotignac. They were all in costume.
The theme this year had something to do with myths and legends and fables and
fairytales, and I suspect that this theme was made explicit in order to cut
back on the number of kids dressed up as Spiderman and Iron Man. There were
still a few, of course. But mostly there were lots of princesses and pirates,
and lots of medieval knights waving cardboard swords. Jasper was the Mad Hatter
– although, with her oversized flamboyant floppy hat, she might easily have
passed for a pimp informant instead, or Bootsy Collins.
Maddox was a pirate and, as is his fashion, he wore his eyepatch well up on the
top of his head, where it looked less like a pirate's eyepatch and more like a
lopsided homemade yarmulke, or maybe some sort of embarrassingly weird
unnecessary toupee.
Quincy borrowed one of my many bandanas to make herself a last-minute pirate
costume as well, and she marched in the parade along with Maddox and his
classmates from l'école maternelle. In fact, Quincy found herself
suddenly appointed a parade marshal of some sort, which was a little scary
because it suggested that she would be burdened with lots of opaque
responsibilities. But, ultimately, her primary responsibility seemed simply to
wear an orange armband.
The parade was led by a car full of blood-donation enthusiasts dressed up as
corpuscles. (They looked a lot like Woody Allen as a giant sperm in that famous
movie scene from 1972, except bright red instead). The red corpuscles were
followed by a rag-tag massive mob of schoolchildren, all in costume, and some
of them riding elaborately decorated bicycles and scooters as well. There were
also various grown-up groups too, including an enthusiastic troupe of French
cowboy dancers (who later would please the crowds in semi-synchrony to the tune
of "Achy Breaky Heart") dressed up in the kind of ornate West Coast
western wear once favored by Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Bringing up the rear were a few whimsical floats, including one with a
human-sized deck-of-cards, and another that appeared to be celebrating some
sort of vaguely sexual union between Pocahontas and The Big Bad Wolf (and maybe
the three little pigs too; it was pretty high-concept). Finally, tugged by a
tractor, came the smoke-belching dragon itself, accompanied by confetti-tossing
wig-wearing dragon-wranglers and a set of massive speakers blaring out songs by
the Rolling Stones. After a few slow boisterous processions around town, the
parade petered out, the dragon and wolf and Queen of Hearts parked themselves
on the sidewalks, and tout le monde spent the rest of the day milling
festively around the central square, eating crêpes, drinking drinks,
and bouncing on the bouncy castle.
Later, when I asked the kids what their favorite parts of Carnaval had
been, Maddox singled out the bouncy castle. Jasper especially liked the burning
gingerbread man. She also really liked it when the costume contest awards were
announced: She and her MadHatterBootsyPimp outfit won second prize.
The prize itself turned out to be a flimsy pen and spiral notebook, and she
loves them both. She has begun to fill the notebook with the first lines of a
book that she says she's writing. It's got illustrations too.
I'm reminded of when I was a kid, living in Pakistan in the early 1970s, when
my brother Eric and I were both deeply under the influence of Spiderman and
Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer, and one day we decided to draw our own
superhero comic books. We were on a 3-week road trip with my dad, from Lahore
up the Karakoram Highway into the Hindu Kush. (It's here, by the way, that
Quincy and Erica and Doug Kenrick all start rolling their eyes skyward as I dip
knowing into my deep reservoir of self-parody.) With the snowy peaks of
Rakaposhi and Nanga Parbat towering over us, Eric and I hunched for hours over
our notebooks, drawing muscular panels modeled after the familiar formulas of
Marvel Comics: the predictable super-powers that arise from random accidents,
the sudden super-villains with their ludicrous names, the dumb dialogue.
Jasper, happily, has chosen to go in a rather different direction in her first
book. Her book reads like this: Once upon a time, there was a bunny who
lived in the blakberry bushs at Jericho beach. On the other side of the beach,
there was a house and in that house, lived a cat. Now it just hapyned that one
day they met. The bunny said "who are you?" Then the cat said
"I'm Srauberry. Who are you?" "I'm Buttercup" said the
Bunny. "do you whant to play eneathing Buttercup" asked Srauberry.
"No" replied Buttercup.
So far, that's it; but it's only been a week, and Jasper's been pretty busy
with school and other entertainments. She hasn't really had the time to work
out exactly how to move her narrative forward in the face of Buttercup's curt
indifference. My Pakistani superhero comic never made it past its second page.
Jasper's book may, or may not, run longer than that.
We took a picnic lunch up
to the hilltop ruins of Castellas à Forcalqueiret a few days ago, and
it was pretty darn awesome. That night, as Quincy and I were putting the kids
to bed, I was reflecting enthusiastically on the day. "I love ruined
castles," I said. The kids had their own opinions. Said Maddox: "I
love castles what aren't ruined and have bakeries inside them."
Meanwhile, we're hoping that our house here in Cotignac doesn't become a ruin
itself before we're done with it. It's a rental, after all. It's not like we're
bad renters, but things do break down. (We bought a brand new coffee maker to
replace the one that succumbed, on our watch, to years of calcium deposits from
the famously hard French tap-water). And things just break, period – especially
on these stone-hard floors. Cups, saucers, plates, bowls. Hell, last week we
broke 3 wine glasses in just one single evening. (I realize that makes us
suddenly sound like we're Def Leppard trashing a hotel room here, but I assure
you, there is a legitimate and non-drunken-debauchery explanation for each and
every bit of breakage.)
We're especially attentive to breakage because of all the kids passing through
our house. Our friends Donald and Jane arrived in Cotignac a few days ago, with
their daughters Cara and Caity Rose, both of whom are at the ages (like our own
kids) where hands and feet seem especially likely to seek out and slash
themselves on any stray shard of broken crockery. Plus, Bob and Erica are here
as well, with baby West; and West is at the age where he explores his expanding
world by putting everything possible in his mouth. Anyway, keeping things
pristine is a bit of a chore, what with our doors open to the terrace all to
the time, and the breezes blowing, and kids tromping in and out. Luckily, the
mottled terracotta floor-tiles disguise most of the dirt, so it doesn't look
quite as filthy as it always is. The flip side, though, is that we're sometimes
reminded of that hidden filth in ways that are, well, just a bit horrifying.
Like the other day when Erica heard West half-gagging on something and, upon
extricating that something from his mouth, discovered it to be an old Bandaid.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Maddox yesterday decided to
re-decorate his bedroom with a crayon, and he spent the better part of the
morning doing so. His bedroom is a sizeable estate, including (and I'm only
exaggerating the slightest bit) his own antechamber, bathroom, and office, as
well as the bedroom itself. That's a lot of walls to cover with crayon. And he
covered them all with a series of designs that, while not exactly
sophisticated, were impressively coherent in style and motif. Mostly they were
cycles of loops and swoops and rounded humps – like an endless series of hills
seen from afar, or the world's largest herd of purple elephants – plus a few
generous X's and hearts for visual punctuation.
And of course, because this house isn't actually ours, it's all illicit
graffiti. It's not allowed. We punished him by sending him down the street,
with Jasper and Cara and Caity Rose, to spend several hours playing with clay
in the studio of a local potter. He loved it (that'll teach him). They all
loved it. Meanwhile, I spent a good chunk of my afternoon with a sponge and
bucket of soapy water.
Is there a scene in some
adventure tale that depicts a secret cave hidden behind a waterfall? In a Tintin
book maybe? (Or Lord of the Rings? Or Planet of the Apes?) It
seems like an iconic image anyway, but I just can't place it. All I know is
that when I was a kid I wanted to discover a secret cave behind a waterfall,
and explore it.
There are lots of caves around here in southern France. Cotignac butts right up
against a massive cliff that is full of holes. Some of these holes, high up,
are home to hundreds of swifts that dart and swirl in the skies in search of
insects. Lower down are bigger caves, hollowed out hundreds of years ago by
local troglodytes. Some of these caves are still used today by people who own
houses up against the cliff, although they use them in fairly pedestrian ways –
as garages, for instance, or to store patio furniture. Not exactly
Tintin-esque.
There are also waterfalls around. A nearby town – Sillans la Cascade – is named
for its huge waterfall, which is a popular destination for weekend walkers.
Although, before you get to the deep blue-green pool at the base of those
falls, you encounter several barriers with scare signs posted on them. Danger
de chute! Acces interdit! Things like that. But there are wide paths worn
around those blockades. That's one thing I appreciate about France: It's a relatively
less litigious environment than North America, and so people have easy access
to potentially dangerous places like abandoned mills, ruined castles, and
slippery cliffs. Sure, there might sometimes be signs warning you away, and
sometimes even easily-breachable barriers, but they come across as little more
than half-hearted municipal suggestions. Nothing to really stop you.
There are waterfalls right here in Cotignac too. There is an easy well-worn
path to one of them, and we've been many times. And there's another one too,
which isn't exactly unknown, but also isn't exactly easy to get to. It's hidden
high up along one side of the cliff, and there's no real path, and I think it
might be on private property anyway. Jasper and I finally made it to this
"secret waterfall" one recent weekend while Maddox was having an
all-afternoon play-date at Hannah's house, and Quincy was enjoying a rare
opportunity to have the house to herself. To get to the waterfall, Jasper and I
had to beat our way through tall grasses and vines and wild roses along a
barbed-wire fence, and then scramble steeply up over crumbling shale alongside
a sharply cascading stream. Jasper is a strong climber, and a sensible one too.
More than once, as we fumbled for footholds in the slippery rock, she suggested
that we stop. "It's too dangerous, Dad," she'd say, "Let's go
back before one of us gets hurt." Fair enough. But if she was gonna talk
precociously like a parent, I had to respond like an eight-year kid – "Oh
come on, just a little bit higher? Please?" – and after three or four
dodgy maneuvers, we hauled ourselves up to a large hollowed-out bowl shrouded
by trees in the side of the cliff, with the waterfall suddenly thundering down
above us and gathering in a wide pool at our feet.
A couple of days later, Eric and I revisited Jasper's secret waterfall while
the kids were at school. It was then that we discovered the secret caves as
well. There were multiple entrances, including a big one carved into the dry
cliff on the far side of the pool, and even one small wet one – barely big
enough for a malnourished troglodyte to slip through – partially hidden behind
the roaring plume of the waterfall itself. We resolved to come back the next
day again, with Jasper, and with headlamps.
And so, the next
afternoon, Eric and Jasper and I set off on foot one more time toward the
secret waterfall. It really is a lovely walk. Deep-throated croaks of bullfrogs
lurking in shallow pools choked with mosses and algae. Black-and-white skittery
flashes of magpies in the fig trees. Weedy fields dotted with red poppies and
purple irises and rustling stalks of wheat. We munched on tender shoots of wild
fennel. We talked about that time many years ago, when Eric and I, along with
our friend Noodles, set out with flashlights to explore the abandoned tunnels
of a long-defunct iron mine carved deep inside a Connecticut hillside. Some
previous trespasser had done the dirty work of cutting through and bending back
the steel bars that were supposed to keep foolhardy teenagers like us out of
the mine. So only common sense – which we chose not to possess that day – could
have prevented us from risking our lives inside the lightless subterranean
obstacle course tricked out with sharp stones and broken ladders and deep vertical
shafts that appeared suddenly at our feet.
There wasn't quite so much danger lurking behind the secret waterfall here in
Cotignac. The caves didn't go very deep. Most of them were pretty well
waterlogged, and the one dry tunnel ended in a cave-in after about 15 meters.
So, while it was definitely fun and exciting, it's wasn't exactly like my
iconic comic book imaginings. No Tintin in pleated pants disappearing through a
waterfall with an old-fashioned flashlight in his hands and an exclamation mark
above his head. No Snowy with a worried look. No Captain Haddock making a
blustering hash of things. And as we explored, we had to be wary of broken
glass. Because, of course, Jasper's secret waterfall isn't exactly a secret to
people who've grown up in Cotignac. Evidence suggests that local teenagers have
been climbing up here for years, to explore, to carve the cliff face with their
names and initials and earnest declarations of unrequited love, and to party.
The kids brought home
handbills; posters were pasted on walls; and on Saturday, a small car with a
large loudspeaker on its roof made a tour of the village, fuzzily blaring the
news: a parc de loisirs was coming to town. Quincy and I studied a
flyer carefully. Among the various spectacles and amusements,
we figured the kids would be especially excited about the objets gonflables
– a phrase that we assumed, correctly, to be a French way of talking about
"bouncy castles." As for me, I was intrigued by the promise of Sourisland
– a "village miniature de souris savants!" Because, you
know, if there's one thing more entertainingly surreal than a miniature
village, it's a miniature village populated by preternaturally smart mice.
The parc de loisirs was set up in a dusty parking lot next to the
gasoline station. There was a small circus tent and four large inflatables,
each as big as a house. Despite all the pre-parc publicity, there
weren't a lot of people there. Which is not surprising, given that Cotignac is
a sleepy little town. Also, a lot of families probably preferred to spend their
sunny Sunday afternoon on amusements that didn't cost 8 euros per child (but
only 5 euros for grown-ups!). Quincy and I got our money's worth by relaxing in
the weeds at the edge of the lot, leaning against a makeshift fence, and
watching the action on the inflatables. Which was mostly stuff like this:
Jasper slides to the bottom of a giant inflatable sinking ship. Maddox too.
Jasper takes off running, in shoeless stocking feet, across the dusty gravel in
the direction of a giant inflatable chicken. Maddox, also in his socks,
stumbles across the gravel after her.
The gonflables scene went on until a loudspeaker called everyone into
the tent, where a series of entertainments began to unfold. As they unfolded,
it became abundantly clear that the whole thing was very much a
mom-and-pop-and-their-collection-of-kids operation (the dad and the kids
provided the entertainment, while mom sold popcorn and cotton candy from a cart
outside) which made me enjoy it all the more.
It started with the trained goat. It appears that this is de rigeur among
carnies in the south of France: A scrawny goat with gigantic distended teats
balancing upon an increasingly tall stack of increasingly tiny stools. Then
there was the teenage daughter of the troupe, dressed for burlesque, walking on
a wire and twirling a dozen hula-hoops. At one point, Jasper leaned back and
whispered, "She would be more beautiful if she didn't have braces." I
reflected on my own metal-mouthed high-school years of braces and retainers and
headgear. "Hey kid, don't be so judgmental," I wanted to warn Jasper,
"That's you in about 5 years, minus (I hope) the sequined bikini."
After she was done, the patriarch (and head clown) invited the audience into
the ring so that we could try our own amateurish luck at hula-hooping. We were
all comically bad at it. And some of us were comically badder than others. I'm
told that I attracted an especially loud set of laughs when, after failing to
spin the hoop around my waist, I tried to spin it around my neck by jerkily
jackhammering my head back and forth like some sort of spastic woodpecker.
There was one little boy, though, maybe about Maddox's age, who was amazingly
adept, and kept his hoop spinning perfectly with a confident rapid rhythm that
reminded me of a masturbating monkey I once saw at a zoo. After we all gave him
a big round of applause, it was revealed that he was a ringer: He was the
youngest of the circus siblings, and this was his dad's amusing way of
introducing him. A few minutes later, though, the boy wasn't feeling so great.
While his two older brothers – dressed like identical homeless mimes – showed
off some elaborate balancing skills on piles of barrels and planks, the
4-year-old nearly collapsed in tears while trying unsuccessfully to set up his
own apparatus on the uneven ground. This led to some vivid acting-out in the
direction of his dad who was trying simultaneously to energetically emcee the
show and to keep the whole thing from becoming a train-wreck of predictable
family dynamics, and who was doing it all while wearing a ludicrous orange
shag-carpet wig.
Things soon got back on track with another crowd-pleasing piece of audience
participation, in which Jasper played a prominent role. This particular act
involved a dancing elephant. Except that it wasn't a real dancing elephant. It
was two people bending over with an elephant-shaped sheet fitted over them,
blindly following a bewigged clown's Svengali-like instructions to kneel down
and to stand up, to trot and to boogie and, inevitably, to fall over sideways
in a hysterical heap. Jasper was half of that elephant. Specifically: the back
half.
I found it all entirely cheesy and delightful and worth every centime,
but I did wonder if we were ever going to see that miniature village of
super-smart mice. After all that audience participation, I was starting to
half-seriously think that there weren't any precocious rodents after all, that "souris
savants" wasn't to be taken literally, that maybe it was just some
ironic euphemism meaning, loosely, "easily-gulled country folk who pay
good money to become spastic woodpeckers and elephants' asses in front of their
friends and neighbors."
But I was wrong. Sourisland did indeed exist, and it was finally
unveiled after a second sweaty round of bouncy castle fun. Yep, it was a
miniature village all right, with a school and a church and post office and
all. But the mice inside it didn't seem so savants. Aside from climbing
a tiny ladder and sliding down a tiny slide, they didn't show off any special
skills. They mostly just stuck their heads in and out of the tiny windows of
the tiny buildings, and pooped their tiny turds all over the tiny streets. Big
deal; I could do that myself.
You know the dictionary
game, right – where you choose some weird word out of the dictionary that
nobody knows and everyone has to make up a definition that sounds like it might
be the real definition, and the best bluffer wins. It's fun. There was a time
when I played a lot of dictionary, and I loved all those ridiculous but
semi-authentic-sounding definitions that emerged – like "a honey-colored
ceremonial bathcap" or "any statue of a chicken." I still
treasure the memory of that evening in the early spring of 1987 when (in
response to the word nobble) my friend Snacker ventured the following:
"To eat corn on the cob in a violent and bucktoothed manner." It's an
absurd definition, of course, but because it made such visually astute
reference to a treasured comic strip panel (depicting, if I recall correctly,
Dennis the Menace's dad), it was very much a winner.
It's with this in mind that I thought it might be fun to use the dictionary
game as a means of conveying to you one specific aspect of our life in France
that, for obvious reasons, I won't exactly miss very much, but in a weird sort
of way I will miss just a tiny bit.
Okay, so here's the gimmick. I'm gonna give you a phrase in French, and then I'll
list some options as to what it translates to. And you gotta guess the right
answer. Okay, ready? Here we go.
Here's the phrase in French: s'apporte à bonne chance.
And here are your options as to what it means:
1. A polite way of referring to a tall, thin, small-headed man from another
country.
2. To insist on wearing preposterous-looking sports sandals every day,
regardless of the weather.
3. To amble down the street in an eager, distracted manner.
4. The quaint custom, common throughout much of Europe, in which people
blithely let their dogs crap all over the streets and sidewalks, and very
deliberately choose to NOT pick it up.
5. To glance down at one's feet finally, a split second too late.
And the answer is....
None of above. Or, wait, maybe it's all of the above. In any case, it was a
trick question. Translated directly, that French phrase is about bringing
oneself good luck. And, apparently, people in France might say something like
that to you when you step in dogshit, which you inevitably will. Kind of like
how someone in Germany might say "Gesundheit" after you
sneeze. Except that this isn't about sneezing, obviously; it's about stepping
in dogshit, which really isn't the same thing at all.
has been pointed out that
maybe, for my own protection, I should be blogging under an alias.
Lots of the bloggers use wacky handles. Plus, there is a long and honorable
tradition of using a pen name when contributing to a genre outside of your
usual domain. If the pseudonym approach to off-brand work has been good enough
for Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie and Dustin Hoffman, then, hey, maybe I
oughta give it a whirl as well.
And then there's the whole self-protection thing. "Our French Files"
doesn't always present me in the most flattering light. While I'd like to think
that this blog portrays me as an intrepid international adventurer, it's more
likely that I come across as some sort of clueless doofus with a footnote
fetish. Do I really want all that embarrassing small-headed spastic woodpecker
stuff attached to the name "Mark Schaller"? Shouldn't I be protecting
my brand a bit better than that?
So, yeah, I'm thinking about an alias, some sort of handle that would be
appropriate for a blog about a sabbatical in southern France. But how might I
arrive at my French blogger name?
Is there some sort of formula to follow for a nom de blog (or nom
de blague)? You know, like how there are these half-serious recipes for
figuring out other hypothetical pseudonyms – your stripper name, your drag
queen name, your professional wrestler name, that sort of thing – which always
involve combining the name of your first pet with your favorite crayon color or
your fourth-favorite 19th-century German philosopher, or something like that.
The outcomes aren't always realistic. (I mean, I can't even imagine a professional
wrestler named "The Raspberry Snowflake," And no self-respecting
stripper would call himself "Cerulean Schopenhauer." Come on.) But
still, it's something.
So anyway, Quincy and I got to talking about this yesterday, and decided to
come up with an recipe that I might follow in order to cook up a nom de
blague.
"How about using the street that we live on for part of your name,"
suggested Quincy. "That sort of thing always shows up in these sorts of
things." Good idea. Here in Cotignac, we live on Rue de la Cadelle. It's
not exactly a street (it's more of an invisible alley that narrows further into
a foot path, but which people sometimes drive their cars on anyway because, you
know, this is France). But it's good enough for half of a made-up name: Cadelle.
But what about the rest of my blogging faux-nom?
Here again Quincy offered some cunning guidance: "What's something else
that's emblematic of your time here in France?" she asked, leadingly.
Hmmm, let's see. Intrepid international adventuring? She laughed. Pitch-perfect
conversations in my flawless French? She laughed again. Nose-to-the-grindstone
16-hour days completing solemn scientific articles, one after another? She
laughed long and loud, and then turned serious. "Bakeries," she said,
"Boulangeries. Patisseries. You've spent weeks and weeks sampling all
kinds of breads and tarts and puff pastries. What's your favorite? Because
whatever it is, that oughta be part of your French blogger name."
Excellent idea. But there is so much to choose from, and it's almost impossible
to identify the one bakery item here that is my absolute name-worthy favorite.
There's that olive bread that they make at the bakery that's closest to
Maddox's school, but which they only make on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
I do love that. (Although I'm not sure pain d'olives works wonderfully
well as a personal name.) Oh, and there are those croissants aux pinons
that we buy there too, stuffed with an amazing almond paste and coated with
pine nuts. Yum. And then there are the sacristains – especially the
ones that we buy from the bakery down by the fire station – and which Jasper in
particular has repeatedly identified as the thing that she will miss most of
all when we return to Vancouver. A sacristain is truly awesome. (Although
I might feel a bit uncomfortable appropriating that word – which refers also to
a Church caretaker – for such an unholy purpose as a prankish nom de blague.)
Ah, and then there are the slices of custard pie – des flans. I'm
particularly partial to a singularly fantastic coconut flan that they sometimes
sell in the narrow little bakery near la mairie. Mouth-wateringly
wonderful. Yes, yes, the coconut flan. (Which, happily, no one actually ever
calls flan au noix de coco, because that would be just way too much of
a mouthful to include in a made-up name). Mmmm... coco flan. Or, as Dustin
Hoffman's pseudonym's character's student's father might say: "Mmmm...
coco flan."
So: Coco Flan Cadelle. If I can figure out how to change my username on this
website, that just might become my alias – my French blogger name. (Although,
now that I think about it, it might actually work better as my French stripper
name instead.)
It's hot. I've taken to
wearing my sarong around the house. Although not in public. Not yet anyway.
It's hot, and so we've been in the water a lot. This past weekend we drove up
to Lac de Sainte Croix, rented a pedal-boat, and pedal-paddled our way up into
the Gorge du Verdon. Spectacular. It's like being in some deep canyon in the
American southwest, except that the cliffs are a surreal golden yellow and the
water is a surreal milky blue and instead of being surrounded by a bunch of
hooting and hollering Arizonans drinking cheap beer and throwing the empty cans
in the water, you're surrounded by a bunch of hooting and hollering French
folks drinking real Champagne and popping the corks in the water.
We've also been swimming a lot. Jasper swims like a trout. Maddox still uses
artificial floatation. Quincy went with him to buy some water-wings a couple of
weeks ago and Maddox chose the bright pink Hello Kitty ones. No surprise there.
Whereas most of the world might think that Hello Kitty apparel is designed to
appeal to 6-year old Japanese schoolgirls, Maddox is under the impression that
it's the epitome of classy European menswear. I suppose I must take the blame
for that. Because, well, because of my wristwatch.
I don't usually wear a watch back home in Vancouver where I'm surrounded by
clocks. But here in rural France, I figured a wristwatch would come in handy. I
didn't want to spend much money on it, though. So, a couple of months ago, when
Quincy drove to Brignoles to do some shopping, I asked her to buy me the
cheapest wristwatch she could find. Turns out the cheapest wristwatch she could
find was made by Hello Kitty.
It's pink and sky-blue. Its skinny little plastic band barely fits around my
skinny little wrist. Its petite little digital watch-face is embedded in a
petite little plastic flower. It keeps time flawlessly. I wear it every day.
And now that it's hot outside, it's no longer lurking behind long sleeves.
People are taking notice.
For instance: I was at the bakery a few days ago, buying bread, and as I was
offering up my handful of coins, the bakery-woman smirked and nodded toward my
wrist and said, "C'est une très jolie montre." Yes, I
agreed; it is.
And it's not just grown-ups that are impressed. We attended a picnic recently,
on a hippie farm of some sort near Lac de Sainte Croix, where they have
chickens and swine and yurts and fanciful treehouses. It was a pot-luck affair
("auberge Espagnole," as they say in France – because,
apparently, pot-luck is for Spaniards), organized by a bunch of organic food
enthusiasts, and so we ate lots of rustic breads and quiches and patés made
from the flesh of local pigs and cheeses squeezed from the teats of local
goats. After lunch a bunch of us, accompanied by our kids, went for a walk. As
we were walking, one little girl suddenly started yammering at me in very
excited and slightly disconcerted French. I didn't know what she was talking
about. She pointed to my wrist, and then I began to understand. Hello Kitty.
Yes, I agreed (in French), it isn't often you see a Hello Kitty watch on a man.
And, yes, it might seem reasonable to assume that the watch belongs to my
daughter. But it's not Jasper's, I said; it's mine. What do you think of it, I
asked her proudly. And she said, "Elle est très belle." Yes,
I agreed (in French); she is indeed.
So, you know, maybe I should just go ahead and wear my sarong proudly
everywhere I go. It's not like I have some sort of manly reputation to keep up.
A couple of weekends ago,
we went on a lovely little family hike through the forests and the hills just
outside of town, during which we ate a picnic lunch under the warm midday sun
and examined butterflies and bugs among the flowers and the rocks. Later that
evening, as I was putting Maddox to bed, I was reflecting on the day's events.
"I really enjoyed that hike with Quincy and Jasper today," I said.
And Maddox replied: "I wish I could keep a hammer in my ear; or a
flashlight."
Naturally, I take delight in his gift for non sequitur. It is a gift he shares
generously with the rest of us at home. At school, though, he remains
linguistically tightfisted: He pretty much doesn't say a word. He's got friends
aplenty, it seems, but – even with those who speak some English – he appears to
communicate primarily through a series of cryptic peeps and squeaks. And,
although he is happy to say "Au revoir" to his teacher
(Madame Blanc) at the end of the day, he refuses to say anything else to her.
Not even "Bonjour." At first we attributed this to
second-language shyness. But it's been going on for more than five months now
and I'm pretty sure that, for Maddox, the refusal to greet Madame Blanc has
simply resolved into a matter of principle.
There was a time, almost two months ago, when we tried to bribe him into saying
"Bonjour" to Madame Blanc. He resisted, but did suggest a
sort of compromise: "How about if I say 'Salut' instead?" We
said sure; although, in hindsight, it was obviously a set-up for comical
disaster. Madame Blanc is famously severe and formal in her demeanor, whereas
"Salut" is about the most casual sort of greeting going.
It's the kind of thing you might say to your buddies at a bar – a sort of French
equivalent of "Howdy!" or "Whassup!" or "Yo! Yo! How's
it hanging, bro!" It's not something that kids often say to grown-ups. And
it's definitely not something Madame Blanc expects from her 4-year olds.
Anyway, when Maddox got to school that day he ran up to Madame Blanc and yelled
out "Salut!" and was so delighted with himself that he
immediately wrapped his arms around me in a great big prideful hug. I was proud
of him too. As for Mme. Blanc: Well, let's just say that she expressed
unsmiling surprise. To the best of my knowledge, Maddox hasn't said "Salut"
to her since. Or "Bonjour" either, of course.
But, you know, seemingly simple greetings aren't always as simple as they seem.
Personally, I struggle with "Ça va." It's a phrase that
literally means "That goes"; but of course it doesn't really mean
that. In a cordial context it's both a question and an answer too,
corresponding variously to English phrases such as "How're you
doing?" and "Fine" and "Can't complain." It should be
simple (it's just a mindlessly casual greeting, after all) but sometimes people
attach other words to it too (like oui and bien) which makes
it all more complicated, and I've never been able to quite figure out how
exactly the script should go. Consequently, when people say "Ça va?"
to me, my wheels fly off and I usually end up dumbly mumbling a semi-incoherent
stream of random French pleasantries and then, just to keep my bases covered, I
lean in close for a kiss on each cheek. It's working so far. (Well, with the
women it is.) Still, I'm acutely aware of the fact that my high-school French
classes never prepared me for the ordinary pleasantries of life in France.
Instead, we all learned stiffly formal phrases like "Comment
allez-vous?" – which, it turns out, on one actually ever says out
loud.
Speaking of stiffly formal phrases that no one actually ever says out loud:
"Je m'appelle Mark." Now I don't know about you, but that
was one of the first things I learned in French class. I was taught that it was
practically on par with "Bonjour" as a common, polite, and
useful thing to say. In fact, I always considered "Je m'appelle
[your name here]" to be part of the unofficial Holy Trinity of emblematic
French phrases, right there with "Où est la bibliothèque?"
and "Le fromage est sur la table." Well, apparently I was
wrong. In real life, just as no one ever inquires as to the whereabouts of the
library, or declares the whereabouts of cheese, no one ever says "Je
m'appelle [your name here]." Well, no one but me that is. And after many
months here, I finally realized this. I think that, unlike every other phrase
in French, this one perhaps translates in a rather literal way: "I call
myself Mark." Which makes it not only severely formal and old-fashioned,
but also a plainly preposterous thing to say. It's as though I've been going
about France shaking people's hands and saying "I wish I could keep a
hammer in my ear." Or, perhaps, it's as though when I first meet people, I
stare coldly into their eyes, point both of my thumbs rigidly toward my
puffed-out chest and, like some tribal overlord declaiming his intentions to
conquer the world, announce myself to the trembling masses: "I call myself
Mark."
So, even though I still haven't exactly learned the right way to greet people,
at least I've learned that everything that I always thought was right is
actually wrong – and makes me come across like some sort of arrogant asshole
from the 17th Century. And I've learned why whenever I bend down to chat with
children, they just look at me like I'm from Mars.
Anyway, back to Maddox: A couple of weeks ago he did a series of three
drawings. I asked him what he was drawing, and he told me. These are his exact
words:
Drawing #1: "No stars, no sun, no moon, and no tape"
Drawing #2: "The world's largest paintbrush"
Drawing #3: "Two birds, the sky, air, and a vacuum cleaner"
I won't be offended if you
think that, little by little, we're going insane. I just glanced back at the
stuff we've been blogging about recently, and it occurs to me that a
superficial skim might suggest a family increasingly unhinged. Mark
unselfconsciously flouncing around town wearing a little girl's wristwatch and
a sarong; Quincy claiming to hear the serenading songs of birds all night long;
Maddox speaking in surrealistic riddles; and so forth. Even the recent photos
may suggest that we've succumbed to some strange madness that drives us to
obsessively sculpt towering toothsome concrete rabbits and to gaze oddly at our
reflections in sheared-off auto parts deep within the Provençal woods. It's
like we're no longer just a family on sabbatical, but are instead minor
characters in a Werner Herzog movie, or Alice in Wonderland, or Apocalypse
Now. You might half expect Quincy to start blogging about the sudden
appearance of a strung-out ghost of Dennis Hopper in the vine-grown ruins of an
ancient olive mill; or for me to report on how, during a recent trip to the
market to buy cherries and flan we encountered the lumbering form of Marlon
Brando sitting in the shadows of a cheese shop reading the poetry of T.S. Eliot
and telling far-out tales of gardenias and riverbanks and razorblades and
snails. (The horror. The horror.)
So, yeah, I won't be offended if, while reading our blog, you're reminded of
that famous remark by Francis Ford Coppola: "We were in the jungle, there
were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and
little by little we went insane."
If not for the bits about being in the jungle and having too much money, that
remark might be an accurate assessment of our lives. Oh and also the bit about
going insane. Because, despite appearances, I assure you: We still have all our
marbles. In fact, our lives are so boringly normal here that it's hard to find
anything to blog about.
But, while I cannot report on any torrential rain of madness, I can tell you
about something that Jasper and I did a couple of days ago that found us
dropping down through a sort of rabbit-hole and plunging into the (non-metaphorical)
heart of darkness.
I wrote once before about the secret waterfall and the caves. What I didn't
mention was that, in addition to the big easy entrance into the short tunnel we
explored already, there's another cave entrance that I'd previously ignored
because it's just a little hole in the side of the cliff and I wasn't sure I
could even fit through it. On a return visit, I just had to try. And I fit. And
so did Jasper and Maddox too. And, once through, we were inside a substantial
tunnel just goes and goes. We explored it for a little ways – far enough for
the dry tunnel to start getting damp as it bore back darkly through the
limestone. Having gone that far, Jasper and I were keen to return and explore
it as far as we possibly (or safely) could.
We did so as soon as Quincy's brother Kelin and his family arrived in town. It
was the perfect opportunity because (as those of you who subscribe to Nature,
Geology, and the Journal of Geophysical Research already
know) Kelin knows a thing or two about water and rocks and geomorphology. And
because one of his girls (Teagan) is 10.
"I'm not going in there!" Teagan exclaimed when, after hiking out of
town and climbing up to the waterfall, she saw the narrow slot in the rock that
we'd need to shimmy through.
But she did. And with Jasper leading the way with the chirpy enthusiasm of an
eager mole, the four of us plunged onward and gently downward through the
darkness. Despite her vocal misgivings, I think there was only one moment when
Teagan had any real regrets about being there. It was the moment when, as we
dropped to our knees to get through a particularly low passage, our headlamps
suddenly illuminated a large dense ragged-looking spider web right in front of
our faces, occupied by a burly spider the size of my hand. We quickly scuttled
on, and on, pausing occasionally so that Kelin could point out interesting
features created by the interaction of gravity, water, and calcium carbonate.
Because, you know, when you're hunched back-breakingly over inside a damp
lightless passageway deep inside the earth, and you've just been nose-to-nose
with a spider that looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings,
nothing beats an impromptu geology lesson. Seriously.
Eventually, Jasper yelled out that she saw light ahead. And moments later we
reemerged blinkingly, along with some gently flowing groundwater, in a familiar
spot along a tiny road on the upper edge of the village.
And then we turned around and plunged into the heart of darkness again, back
the way we came. Not because we were so especially keen to blunder once more
into the webs of blind and bloated spiders, but because we were keen to take a
bracing swim in the churning gray-green pool underneath the secret waterfall
where we began.
Yeah, I know: It's not exactly a paranoid florid fantasy of razorblades and
snails and Marlon Brando in his pajama pants. But it's all I got.