Sunset from the terrace of L’Auberge du Vieux Fox, 2007 June 8, 8:23pm

After a long hiatus, while Linda’s body (with the assistance of her doctors) continued to tinker with itself, we are finally back in the place we are disposed to put on the very short list of those we like best. Welcome to Provence, our first visit since the New Year.

It is very late spring in Fox-Amphoux, which means that whatever species of flowers bloom around early June are in full display.

We arrived in Nice to sun, which quickly disappeared in favor of rain. This threatened to be a theme.

We also arrived with dreadful colds, each of us, coming upon us suddenly, spontaneously (apparently as we both had our first rest to neutralize jet lag), and simultaneously. So thanks to whatever or whomever elected to ignore their little respiratory inconvenience at the risk of infecting ordinary blokes like myself, and anyone who happens to have an impaired immune system, like Linda. Your deep feelings of guilt at the moment — however mysteriously they have come upon you — are your just recrimination.

We rented our car. It’s another new one on us. A very large sort of station wagon-ish van from Opel, a model called the Zefira. It’s modish, and stylish and replete with discrete mechanical niceties,which would be boring in the telling. In short, it goes, and it runs diesel, and it’s a stick, and it’s comfortable. What the hell.They had to give us this one, instead of the cheaper smaller car I reserved, because they didn’t have anything but this bigger more expensive more luxe vehicle available. Tant pis.

We got to Fox, where, again, with our arrival, the sun appeared and disappeared in alternating stints with light showers.

There were torrential downpours for a couple of days, and a fearsome, yet wonderful electrical storm. Its only real danger lay in the prolonged loss of electricity, which is a usual artifact of these storms at this time of year, in this place. But the worst outage was a mere 20 seconds. And the world was once again safe to receive, at my whim, reams, practical tides of words.

The inevitable result of the always short-lived unsettled weather is that we get some spectacular sunset conditions. In this case, deep ground fog, that rose and settled, like cover for pixie invaders. It left the plain below sometimes invisible as if we were floating in the village on an enormous cloud. It sometimes veiled the plain lightly in barely penetrable mist, which combined with the enduringly beautiful ochre hues of deep sun set (lasting say from 8:15 and for a full hour), and the unblemished blues of the stratosphere, and cloud formations in between that have vexed painters who set up their easels anywhere in the path of the jet stream for centuries, made for a very nice view out the window of the dining room of the inn. The terrace was too wet to sit outside. So we sampled the fare of yet the latest cook our friends Rudolf and Nicole have had to hire over the course of the past two years. They have had more than their share of the failings of the French economy in terms of supplying reliable competent help. The new guy seems to have a sweet spot. The food is once again something to tell your friends about, though the menu is even more spare in its choices.

There are some new offerings, like venison stew, and a ragout of lamb, neither of which we tried. But the salmon was good, as was the reliable test of French cooking skill, a bloody rib steak. Though still no frites from our friends at the Inn, but the other garnishes more than make up for the lack. The salads — mine a shrimps flamed in anisette and garlic sauce, and Linda’s warm nuggets of scallop (that is, American-style, as the French usually serve the whole muscle, with roe attached) — were more than fine. The desserts are back up to par. The price for the prix-fixe menu hasn’t changed in a year. So we’re happy that the Inn — as we cross our fingers — is back on the road to fame and fortune.

Even the usually dour and acerbic Rudolf struts around with a smile on his mug. So things must be good.

Our colds are wearing off by now, four days after their onset. And the accompanying misery slowly abates so that the news from home, which involves the usual inexhaustible insanity of condo politics doesn’t seem quite so dire, in fact seems wholly ridiculous, as would have been the case were I graced with a full state of health on our arrival.

Not much news apparently in the village. We’ll probably get filled in with gossip, if any, later. Three houses, at least, are on the market — two by their owners, though one of these has been for sale for close to a year now. The sales lag being accountable entirely to the fantasy price the owner has attached to her modest abode.

Construction has stopped, apparently, on two major residential projects on the other side of the village, the side that looks west to those spectacular sunsets, and the better view of the plain below, which includes a peek-a-boo view of Chateau Barras, recently restored and now housing a chichi art gallery we have yet to visit.

The trees are in full leaf. The pigeons are cooing. The owls are hooting. As mentioned, the flowers are blooming, including the large pot of laurel rose in front of our tiny love nest — a phenomenon I had yet to see in five years of ownership and testament to Rudolf’s promise last January to water our plants every day that he should.

With the colds we had abating so is the threat of Linda getting pneumonia, though I wasn’t allowing her to sleep through the day more than the one day that each of us needed it. And this in turn eliminates the threat of my dropping dead of terminal anxiety and guilt — the former of which is always, of course, threatening to undo me and the latter of which is otherwise not a threat, myself having been inoculated against all other sources of the provocation of this completely useless feeling.

We’ve been to market twice now, though on the late side. We almost missed it entirely yesterday, as we both woke up at 11am. But I somehow dragged myself to Aups for the bare essentials (three kinds of farm fresh chevre, the first of the season’s local tomatoes, a rotisserie chicken, a bunch of garlic, still soft and purple and still on its greenish yellow supple stalks, a box of Carpentras strawberries (look that up) a Cavaillon melon, reeking of its freshness and weighing not quite a kilo (2.2 pounds) and so costing about two euros, which is $2.80 at the current usurious rate of exchange — just before we left, I noted that at Il Formaggo kitchen, the chichi gourmet shop for rich retiree cognoscenti from West Cambridge, they were selling Charentais melons (not quite the same as the Cavaillon, and consequently deservedly not so famous because not so delicious — Charente, specifically Poitou-Charente is a tiny region way to the west and a pretender to the glories of Provencal specialties) about the size of a softball, or about a pound I would say, for 12 bucks apiece, which would make them 24 dollars a kilo or so, or about 17 euros, which is to say, almost six times as much in cost. If we eat enough melons this trip it might pay for my ticket (we got Linda’s ticket for Amex award points).

In short, once we’ve shaken these colds completely, and I keep chasing the blues away, and we keep eating the very fresh produce (I bought four peaches at marché today in Salernes — this time we left in plenty of time; they actually sell out of stuff at this time of year by mid-morning — and had to put them in the basket gingerly, they’re that ripe: juicy and good to go on a moment’s desire; one is already gone to Linda’s gullet), and once I forget the friggin’ condo, we’re in business specifically not being in any kind of business at all but enjoying ourselves.

by

Writing about travel exposes the writer to a certain peril. It’s the same threat any writer faces, the danger of being read as not credible, inauthentic, insufficiently vetted or in the simplest terms, not having made one’s bones. Simple expeditionary bones, if not, more drastically, the bones that derive from looking for danger in exotic places (anyplace other than an American downtown of any middling sized city; multiple muggings in any one of the five largest U.S. cities might qualify, but only as a credential for writing about how to act in case you get mugged in these towns).

Writers who have more daring than brains, whatever their writing skills (which may, indeed, be prodigious) and stumble off to a war zone to rescue dogs abandoned as a result of carpet bombing or misplaced missile strikes are instant best-seller material, and, it goes without saying, may then write on any subject with the utmost credibility, no matter to what degree their activities leave their sanity in permanent doubt.

Being well-traveled is another kind of credential. And there are sub-categories of the sorts of dust one has collected on one’s boots before settling into an easy chair to record one’s experiences, if not exploits (exploits are far more interesting in and of themselves than mere experiences). Knowing the favorite local confections in the most obscure of towns in each and every one of the continental forty-eight states of the United States carries with such knowledge the potentiality for making informed, and innately rich and colorful allusions that, by their very curiosity and esotericism, renders them interesting and, more importantly, attests to the bona fides of the author. Being able to say, authoritatively, “Why this reminds me of the quaint native custom in the panhandle of Oklahoma of dosing crisped roadkill entrails with Cheez-wiz and gulping down a shot of Four Roses after each bite…” is good for a multi-book contract, and a chapter printed in Esquire, National Geographic Traveler, and the Best Travel Writing of 2007.

Living for more than two years in some far-off, hard-to-reach, if not partially inaccessible (during the “rainy or snowy or windy or war games season”) outpost is good for one’s reputation as a potential writer in this rapidly growing category. It used to be that opportunities for reporting on truly exotic locations far outpaced the common man’s ability to book passage on any means of conveyance to such destinations. Patagonia and the Aleutians, as recently as 50 years ago were subjects of some assurance that one could merely publish one’s random journal entries on the arduous passage in order to flirt with entry for at least a week or two on the New York Times Bestseller List, if only the paperback version.

Nowadays, one may arrange for an Orthodox Bar Mitzvah on a cruise ship with eighteen dining rooms (for as many classes of passenger), and whose main entertainment is watching the northernmost glacial cliffs on the Alaskan coast disburden themselves of several thousand tons of centuries-old ice as the behemoth vessel slowly and silently (save for the band blaring Hava Nagila for 200 frolicking celebrants) sails past, or there’s the monthly visit to the main sites of conflict during the War for the Falkland Islands. This significantly disenfranchises a great many would-be travel writers, with the derringdo (and the wallet) somehow to convey themselves to far-off outposts.

But we live in the days of annual counts of amateur climbing victims of Mount Everest, plus the yearly allotment of books based solely on bizarre methods of assailing this no longer daunting peak: “Climbing Everest in a T-Shirt.” Hence, durability counts for so much more than mere managed recklessness achieving rare objectives. Indeed travel writing now seems to have subsumed more abstract or virtual landscapes, many of them inner landscapes, of the growing up, not only absurd, but completely demented variety (preferably as the spawn of certifiably psychotic parents). The real world equivalent is to overcome the usual adversity, usually gastrointestinal, for protracted periods, or with significant and frequent recurrence: “Eating Unwashed Fruit on Seven Continents *plus two hundred minor islands in the South Pacific.”

To sum up, the basic virtues, superb writing skills combined with a keen observational eye, are no longer sufficient to pique interest, never mind to expect to elicit interest from any greater number of people than you can accommodate on your cell phone speed-dial (blood relatives not included).

by

Part of the underground passageway in Montréal from Place d’Armes Mètro station to Square Victoria Mètro station, with stops along the way. These passageways are collectively a network (in French, reseau) called the RÉSO, which pretty much connects the core of the city neighborhoods to one another so that, in winter, when it’s beastly cold in this beautiful city, you need never step foot out of doors if you play your cards right about where you live, work, and play. The above passageway is relatively new, part of the newest restoration project, called the Quartier Internationale, and mainly consisting of the renovation, and repurposing of an odd assortment of nineteenth century stone buildings, and the abandoned skyscrapers formerly housing financial institutions and government offices. Architects are awarded projects on the order of the above image—essentially one section of people tunnel underneath the city streets. In the middle of August, 2006, in the middle of the day we never saw more than two or three other people in the same section with us.

There is nothing like a writer’s memory. I don’t mean necessarily that
I, a writer (for sake of argument; so go ahead, pick a fight), will
remember what Linda, my wife, told me 15 minutes ago concerning her
whereabouts as planned for the rest of the day.

I mean that what is important to a writer, which falls roughly into two
categories, he will never ever forget. These two are, whatever a writer
has written, and whatever seems worth remembering to write about later.

Continue reading →

by

[started on 30 September 2006 / completed and posted on 27 December 2006]

This entry, at this writing, for Per Diem (in September) for the first time in about a month, deserves a brief preface. Having just read that one-page interview they do in every issue of the The New York Times Sunday Magazine, this week with Warren Beatty, I am reminded by his light way with the irrepressible Ms. Solomon to lighten up myself. I have a tendency to laugh at things and people, sometimes (often?) inappropriately—even when doing so with myself as the object—and I repress it. So I often, I think, come off as serious, overly so perhaps, if not stern, severe, and censorious. That’s not right. And I really really believe in doing things right or not doing them at all. This being the subject of this posting, let’s see how I can do. Especially without the aid of toxic substances.

I have been called many things that to me are of a piece. Control-freak, perfectionist, obsessive, fastidious, overly scrupulous, exacting, demanding, hypercritical. And these were likely meant as compliments. I may indeed be all these things, perhaps at once, which may explain my frequent end-of-the-day exhaustion. It may even be the pejorative meaning that I think is attached to the use of any of these phrases and descriptors is appropriate. However, I protest that my own motives are far more positive. The behavior elicited in me is possibly unavoidable.

Continue reading →

by

Sundown on Christmas Day, about 5pm. Why is it so green? That’s winter wheat, which is planted in autumn in this climate. It will be harvested some time in very late spring. The first real stirrings of spring occur in February. About the middle of that month, we’ll see blossoms on the almond trees—the ones that are left. Almost all of the almonds in this region and further north were eliminated in time. It used to be a significant crop. Still, the tender white blossoms of these trees are a reliable harbinger of spring. Way in the distance, on the left of the horizon, is Mont Ste. Michel, near Aix-en-Provence.

It’s clear enough that on Christmas morning, the inmates take over.

At least this is so on RadioFrance, France Musique, the classical music station throughout the country. It’s as if some ur public radio station had been decimated some time in the past, and the parts parceled out to different portions of the FM dial. FranceCulture features talk about the obvious. FranceInter, more of the same, with a thin line separating these two programming groups to this impaired francophone. Then there’s FranceInfo, and God knows what that is—though it seems to be news, weather and financial matters. FranceBleu is for the hoi polloi, interpolating nondescript French pop music with call-in shows that are localized so listeners can banter with the host and then offer something to sell, the asking price, and their phone number. It’s wildly popular.

France Musique is a throw-back, in this analogy, to the days of Boston FM radio of the 60s, which offered at least three professional FM stations playing classical music (and a modicum of jazz) around the clock: on the public station WGBH, and two commercial stations, the still extant CRB, and the now defunct outlet in the city of a fledgling network of concert music (with outlets as well in Hartford and Providence, and others planned before they all went bust—BCN [Boston Concert Network] is now, of course, a mélange of shock jock radio (and the station for Howard Stern before he was forced to decamp to the terrestrial orbit of satellite radio), New England Patriot game broadcasts, and the same old combination of fringe and golden oldie rock music.

Continue reading →

by

I had coffee the other day with a friend. It was market day anyway. By long standing habit, usually in the company of Linda, on market day, coffee-making and the matinal visit to the bakery are suspended. On Wednesdays, the boulangerie in Fox is closed in any event, and one must go at least to Tavernes, the nearest town with a bakery, for croissants or whatever else may be in stock. Hence, café is served au café, and this day, as well, I have my first croissant, as a treat, for this entire trip.

My friend, who I shall call Renaud Petit, mainly for reasons of protecting myself, is someone I have known pre-dating the purchase of our house. Suffice it to say, he has a business in Aups and he was instrumental (though not the main instrument) in procuring our little corner of paradise. His office, which opens right off the street, is in one of the squares of Aups, shaded in its entirety by a tree overlooking a fountain. There is a small terrace bounded by a curb surrounding the fountain. Three streets, plus a barely passable alley, join in this square or place, which is named for a general of the first Napoleonic Empire, born in the town.

Opposite Renaud’s office is a small bistro, always open on market days. For the greater part of the year, including a warm fall like this one, tables and chairs spill into the street. They also occupy a portion of the terrace paved in stone across the intersection. These three streets and the place are very busy, especially so on market day. Foot traffic, trucks and cars and mobylettes, that is mopeds, motorcycles, and prams stream by at a steady if studied pace. Trucks park to deliver goods. Drivers park their cars for any number of reasons—to run into the Casino grocery, or the cafe or Maison Presse [newsstand], or sometimes, more exotically, the butcher or even the tiny store which sells digital cameras, flash memory, and mobile phones (and has always seemed incongruous to me, but I’m a romantic). As a result of these ad hoc stops, all traffic above the square frequently, but only intermittently, clogs and halts. If it were a pulse, we would call it a stoned-out pulse, only here no one is under the influence of anything, not at 11 o’clock on a lovely warm late Fall morning on market day.

Renaud has claimed one table in the bistro, that is outside the bistro, just within view and easy conversational distance of the patron within. He calls it his “annex,” and unless business matters of a certain kind, mainly appointments with clients, keep him behind his storefront desk, and weather permitting, and during office hours consisting of a posted five hours a day that he honors scrupulously, he sits there, cell phone on the table in front of him, as well as a dead soldier of an espresso cup.

Having done business in the town for over 20 years he has had an opportunity to make the acquaintance of a great many people. In the course of a market day, any number of them will pass and, like the men and women who invariably bear the honorary title of “mayor” of some equally small locale or neighborhood, he greets them, often with a jest or a bon mot. I have never sounded him out, but once, on his status. He admitted as we discussed the subject of nativeness that he, a Niçois, for all of his years in the town, was still considered an outsider. As for the quotidian bonhomie of the Aupsois passing through this particular place you would never know it.

Renaud is a big man, less stout than sturdy, though he has a pot belly, which seems out of keeping, given his swaggering walk and bulky muscled arms. He has grey hair worn in a small pony tail, and a generous salt-and-pepper beard. He is only five or six years older than I am, but somehow we relate as if I were of a generation to follow his. This is probably the lack of acculturation I suffer, obvious and notable to anyone else in what I nevertheless think of as my terroir. Renaud speaks almost no English, though he pretends to speak even less and to understand almost none at all. This is no ploy. He is on better ground in French, as he has a bluff and congenial nature and he has the Frenchman’s natural expectation that in his country you will speak his language, if for no other reason than his own mastery. He, like most French, adroitly, tactically, and always tactfully, corrects my worst gaffes. I cannot predict when he will offer a succinct correction, brief enough to make the point and keep the flow of conversation going.

We speak in French, and have had several occasions to make one another laugh. There is no greater sense of achievement for one as enthralled with language and its potentialities as I than to make another person laugh intentionally in his own language. Renaud, as you might suspect or intuit from my description so far, has drollness as a major factor in his slightly larger than life persona. I enjoy getting him to enter that realm of expansiveness that borders on the philosophical. He has offered me explanations of many things—simple, direct, common sense explanations of how things are, with the suggestion that they are as they should be.

The other day, we played each other a bit for straight men (though we are often content to sit in silence in each other’s presence; as often as not some copain, some buddy of his, however tenuously I may use this word, has sat down, and they have an animated conversation that sometimes I follow, and sometimes I catch only the gist). He has stopped long since introducing me as “my friend Howard, an American.”

The occasion for remarks may be unpredictable. This market day, as I entered the place, he caught my eye and rose to greet me, an open hand raised almost to his chin. “Un moment… j’arrive, j’arrive,” I said as I continued into the newsstand to get my daily “Var-Matin” (the largest daily in Provence, which I like to quote to American friends—like the “New York Times,” it is printed in regional editions, cut about as fine as the “Times” would if it had a Staten Island edition, as opposed, say, to a Yonkers edition) and the “International Herald-Tribune” if they weren’t sold out of the three copies they stock each day. I also entered the boulangerie just down the street for a banette (the size of a baguette, but with characteristic ends, drawn out to a point; they are indistinguishable for taste; though the ends of a banette get, predictably, very crunchy) and the aforementioned prize of a croissant. It was sufficiently late that they had already sold out of croissants au beurre. The latter are especially sinful, as the raised pâte feuilleté has an additional enrichment of butter, or so it seems. It is also possible that the  croissant nature, for which I had to settle, has no butter at all, but some other semi-solid fat. I don’t really know. Nature, of course, means “plain” in this context. And it’s a perfectly good croissant. The au beurre variety is unmistakable. No matter.

I joined Renaud, and we bussed one another on each cheek. We exchanged pleasantries. I drank my coffee, ate my croissant. I will now embark on the substance of our conversation. I will not make things difficult for you, or flatter myself by attempting to recreate the conversation in French—even if I presumed to remember it. His comments for me are always a triumph of substance, if not expressiveness, much more than elegance of language. He is a thinker, but not an intellectual.

He read from a booklet of classified advertising, distributed free and freely from flimsy metal stands around the town. He read from the real estate ads, and observed there were many properties for sale. I could tell he was warming up. He turned to the automobile section and eyed the pages randomly. He observed there were many cars for sale. I had an observation of my own and made it, hoping it would elicit a reaction.

I said I noticed that many of the ads were in fact placed by dealers. Bulls-eye! He commented that if one took any notice of car prices in France versus those of any other European country, there was a disparity. Take a car that sells for a hundred euros, in another country, any other country, it will be selling for 75. This proves, he said, that the French are thieves. Or, I said, it means that the consumer is ignorant. He conceded the point.

At this moment, having reached a quick impasse, Renaud focused his attention on the passing parade. Among those with whom he exchanges pleasantries or a bon mot, at least half of those he greets are women, and several walked by in each direction. He practically ignites in the presence of comely women, though he treats them all as if they were comely. One woman was cause enough for him to rise, greet her warmly, give air kisses, and have a brief conversation of no particular consequence. She was, to me, like so many women in this town of semi-retirement: attractive, beautifully made-up, casually well-dressed, and well-coiffed, in this case in a silvery hue.

I remarked to Renaud, once he seated himself, that he seemed to know every good-looking woman in Aups, the older ones, the young ones, and those in between. “Too thin,” he said, in response. She’s too thin, and he made a face. I immediately pictured a Renoir portrait in my mind. “Thin women live longer,” I said to him. “Thin women live longer, yes, but the nasty ones (femmes méchantes) live even longer. You know why?” I looked at him questioningly—as if I would presume to know—inquiringly.

Here, for the first time he became slightly tongue-tied. He explained it was because they reacted to all things in the same way and they got caught up, and this substance…, he simply could not come up with the word, filled them, energizing them, driving them on, and it was this substance, this… this extract… “Testosterone?” I suggested, “l’essence masculin.” “Yes! and there’s more. It gets in their cells…” “Adrénaline perhaps?” “That’s it. It pumps them up, it fills their cells with energy, the essence of life. It keeps them alive. Their meanness keeps them going.” I laughed enough to keep him going. But I had to leave. He had clearly shot his wad, as I saw he had settled back to look indolently at the classified ads. Then he arose, as I arose, and said something about going to work.

I had to leave because I was expecting a delivery of a new dishwasher that afternoon. He said, well, I’ll see you tomorrow, and I said, “Only perhaps. I leave in two days for the United States.” And he said, “Soon enough then. Tomorrow…”

Tomorrow is not soon enough.

by

And speaking of stereotypes (well, I was, but you wouldn’t know it, as that essay hasn’t been posted yet), let us not deny, we Americans, the bulging sack we bear of images of our French brethren that are none too complimentary. With the onslaught of recrimination that ensued the French refusal to implicate themselves three years ago in our adventures in Iraq, that sack well nigh unto burst, with a renewal of invective, a revival of old stereotypes, and a passel of largely invented, if inventive, new ones built on somewhat twisted views of history, and utterly devoid of any true experience in the vicinity, never mind the company, of a living breathing French person.

All that being said, and my bona fides consisting chiefly of having lived among them for increasingly longer periods of time over what will soon be two decades, I will say, certain things are true.

I won’t indulge the more rabid appetites of my red-blooded countrymen who are ready to brand the French as inveterate cowards, and devour them whole. The propensities of the French, like that of Americans, to pick their fights and engage sometimes in the worst of fights for the worst of reasons are not material to this discussion.

Rather, it is more the perennial domestic behavior, the true nucleus of the national character of a people, if not a whole continent below a certain parallel (I’ll get to that by and by) that is under my scrutiny. It is the disposition of the French toward work and their fellow citizens that is my subject, and my thesis is, it’s true, the French national character is to be summed up non-verbally, as a shrug.

Let me instance you some for instances. I am here on a mainly administrative mission on this trip. The necessity for it and the compulsion was shared, if not inspired, by my beloved wife, who could not accompany me, and whom I miss terribly. I got on the plane somewhat reluctantly, much as I love it here short of comparison, but not of being exceeded, only because of my feelings for Linda, for the few paltry tasks that one must do as a homeowner anywhere. They all fall into the category of you gotta’ be there or it won’t get done.

We’ve owned our house here, it will be five years in February, long enough, and had enough work done—to the tune of many thousands of dollars, lest you think these are ordinary chores, better suited for Monsieur Bricolage [“do-it-yourself”]—to know the latter thought is a truth and a truism. You can count on an artisan, kind of a jack-of-all-tradesmen (who does a little electrical, a little plumbing, a little carpentry, a little masonry, etc.) to get work done unattended, and only with the promise of payment, even if you are an eighth of a world away, and incapable of supervision or scrutiny. It’s especially reassuring and there’s a stronger guarantee of completion if you are away for extended periods of time (that is, months, not mere weeks or days) with no stronger bond than a handshake and a farewell. But first, you must get the artisan to agree to begin, and accept a key to the premises.

We have had two excellent artisans work on our house, both at the recommendation of my dear friend Yann, who knows more about these things than I will ever know, including how to do the work himself if need be. The first of these excellent gentlemen is now off in some posh place, engaged in a two- or three-year process of renovating from roof to basement a magnificent ruin, purchased by some baron of industry or commerce here in France, who has the predicated patience, and the very deep pockets, necessary for such an enterprise.

The second is actually a transplanted Brit, who spent parts of his youth in Provence and speaks the lingo fluently, and now has lived here on a permanent basis for almost 20 years himself. He did a wonderful job tackling what turned out to be an arduous and dirty job of ripping up our rooftop terrace and making it waterproof (which the previous owner was only led to believe had been done by his favorite artisan). In the process the job got dirtier and more arduous because he discovered that a very short wall (thank goodness for short) separating the kitchen up there from the terrace, and also serving the very important perpetual mission of having a very large window installed in it, was rotten, in a word, and either had to be re-built or have a new wall built alongside it, like an intentional Siamese twin of masonry. We chose the more difficult and expensive recourse of ripping out the bad and building anew—on the verge of the rainy season in spring. That he managed it, without getting more than a few drops inside our property, endeared him to us further.

However, some smaller, less challenging, spit on your hands and leap into the fray, dare I say, picayune, projects remain. And these are not his meat, or his daube de boeuf. They are not even his pot au feu. And so he eludes us—easy enough to do by email. When I arrived here, I left a message on his mobile. Unanswered as yet. I sent another email. Rien.

Then I stopped in to say hi and chat with his wife, who owns a little boutique in a nearby market town, painting in the inimitable local provincial style—the main decorative motifs being floral, including native flowers and lavender, plus the equally inevitable olives and olive branches. The style is attractive, if you are well-to-do and have decided to bend your decor in this direction, and the work is professional, nay artistic. In short, she is an artisan in her own right. She always assumes a certain gentle, but steely-eyed, air of amusement, or, possibly, bemusement whenever I ask about her husband.

I asked if he was in the country, meaning the terroir, meaning anywhere within 250 kilometers. He likes to go on adventure expeditions. Our last trip here, this past summer, he assured us that after his kayaking trip somewhere near Kashmir, assuming he didn’t break anything or render himself permanently invalid, he would be ready to tackle our little projects—even with marching orders only from afar.

Having not heard from him, I gave him the benefit of being somewhere exotic and involving gear you buy from Eastern Mountain Sports or REI. But no. “He’s in his tower,” she informed me. Which I immediately understood to mean he had a chantier [work site] in operation, and it was located in a tower somewhere nearby. It’s possible he didn’t get his email, because their computers had been screwed up, sometimes she was getting his email (though she didn’t receive the one I had sent), etc. etc. And, they were about to leave briefly, until yesterday, which was Sunday. A visit to their college-age daughter, in university in the motherland of England.

Saved by circumstance for another five days! But I must track him down and pin him down. The wife offered no excuses, except to note that their son was getting more and more like him everyday, being at home at the moment doing homework, which would be due on his return (that would be today) and hence taking advantage of the holiday last Wednesday, the day I went into her shop, but which he should have done before this trip, etc. etc. I noted that hubby had gotten very French. She didn’t demur. Indeed, she observed that it seemed to be a quality that deepened with each passing day.

What one would expect, right? Situation normal, all Frenched up… The sort of thing you read about in those obnoxious fictions created by Peter Mayle, who re-ignited all the fuss among English-speakers for Provence, and raised property prices at a faster rate than anything else might have—except that his colorful, if lovable malingerers are always quintessentially French. And, in such a circumstance, one can always pretend incomprehension on both sides of the conversation. But my guy is British! It’s something in the air, in the earth, in the food and the wine. It gives me an idea for what I can tell Linda, when I have to report not exactly getting to everything we needed to get done here.

But wait!

I’m not done.

I ordered some items on-line to assist in implementing the expanding communications needs of the household (don’t scoff, dear reader, as you are a beneficiary; broadband has finally reached our tiny out-of-the-way community, and now we must outfit ourselves with new paraphernalia and gadgets to make the most productive use of the technology). I ordered from Amazon, whose long profitable arm has long since reached France and the rest of the European Union. I ordered the items delivered rapide, that is, by expedited means through the French equivalent of Express Mail from the U.S. Postal service.

I ordered the items on Wednesday, the holiday I referred to earlier (and, in part, the subject of another blog entry, stalled in the parturition, so to speak, and still not posted) and this meant, as they made clear, that they would not ship until Thursday, for delivery Friday, guaranteed, before 1pm.

It is at the moment, Monday, past noon, and they still ain’t here. Here’s what it says on the ChronoPost site, where they allow you to track your shipments:

lun 06/11/2006
07:22        TOULON CHRONOPOST
Envoi en cours de livraison       

sam 04/11/2006
05:29        TOULON CHRONOPOST
Envoi mis en instance le samedi au point de retrait       

sam 04/11/2006
05:29        TOULON CHRONOPOST
Tri agence d’arrivée effectuée       

ven 03/11/2006
01:31        ROISSY CHRONOPOST
Envoi ayant pris du retard pendant l’acheminement       

jeu 02/11/2006
18:36        ORLEANS CHRONOPOST
Tri agence de départ effectué       

jeu 02/11/2006
12:07        ORLEANS CHRONOPOST
Envoi prêt chez l’expéditeur

The package was prepared for shipment on the day it was supposed to leave at the shipper’s quarters, though it was, essentially, in the hands of the post office. That was at noon on Thursday. By 6:30 that evening it had been sorted. All this took place in Orleans, a city to the south of Paris.

On Friday, the day it was intended to arrive at my door, eleven-and-a-half hours before the promised latest time for deposit in my hands, it was at Roissy, the town in which a little airport called Charles De Gaulle is situated, in honor of the national hero of World War II and later (I know, I said I wouldn’t bring these matters up). For those of you not aware, Roissy is north of Paris. It can take an hour by car  to get there, as any of you do know knows, trying to get from Paris to your flight home. Having arrived there, the shipment was delayed (“having taken [part in] the routing backlog”). It’s the fault of the package.

Nevertheless, in only 28 hours it reached Toulon, which is a 70 minute flight away. However, it arrived on Saturday. Hence, the moment it arrived, or at least during the same minute, it being Saturday, the package was put in a holding area (a point de retrait, given the ambiguous and multi-purpose functionality of so much of the French language, could also be interpreted as a “retirement home” or, perhaps, the staging area for a retreat, but, as I said, I’m not going there…) The plain and simple fact is, although the mail is delivered on Saturday, the banks are open for business, and posting to accounts, on Saturday, all shops are open on Saturday, it’s Saturday, for God’s sake! You can’t expect an express delivery to be made on Saturday!

Then this morning, everybody woke, refreshed, renewed, and hungry for providing service, and at 7:22 this morning, my packages were en route from Toulon, and now they are in my hot and sweaty little hands, having arrived while I was writing this paean to the wry sensibilities of those who determine the French way of life—the very people who live it. Indeed, all the electrons making up the bits that form the bytes that constitute these less than sanguinary, but also less than sanguine, more than sarcastic, doubtless ungrateful, words will for the briefest of moments, briefer than the imagination of a native Frenchman can conceive of, pass through one of the marvelous high tech devices I procured with so much trial on my part, impatient American that I am, and so much imposture and mastery of indecipherable euphemism, such is only one facet of the genius of the French (none dare call it turning the obvious into pure bullshit).

By the way, another shipment, two audio CDs that are a lot cheaper here, even with the egregious value added tax, than in the U.S., where there is little call for the wonderful new music that is hard to categorize, sort of an amalgam of World music and cabaret, arrived in the mail this morning, before my express packages. I ordered those on Friday, and I relegated them for standard shipment, which is free. My express packages will also be free, as they didn’t deliver on time. But still. [One CD is the latest, but one, of my absolutely slap-down, Han Sho King Duck favorite French singing group, called Lo’Jo, whose music is indescribably wonderful, well, to me: check it out, http://tinyurl.com/y6pdap; try listening to anything, but in particular, try De Timbuktu à Essakane. or C’est la vie.]

I give. I admit it. I’m an American. I have to be taught a lesson once in awhile. A true Gallic lesson.

As a coda to this sad tale, let me tell you that, not having learned as of last Thursday the fate of my packages and their premature, if brief, retirement-to-be in a bonded warehouse belonging to the French government in Toulon, I foolishly ordered a really big item. It’s a new dishwasher, because our old one, the main unit, in the kitchen where I do all my cooking on the first floor (remember, there’s another kitchen, fully equipped, sort of for show, on the third floor, just next to the terrace; probably intended to make sure ice cubes are always at hand, and that the brandade de morue stays warm, and the lobster salad stays cold) has shit the bed, as we so impudently like to put it in the ‘hood. It overflows.

I bought the new one from Darty, which is kind of the Best Buy of France. They are all over the country, and they’ve got the Web thing sewn up tight. I hope. They deliver on Wednesday afternoon in their own trucks, and cart the old clunker away, for free. So they say.

Supposedly, it is the behavior I describe, in the land of farniente, and bordered to the southeast by Italy, and to the southwest by Spain, if one should not say the whole of the Iberian peninsula, lands where the concept of tomorrow takes on eternal proportions, that makes France an innately Latin country. It’s certainly hard to tell otherwise down here in Provence, but let me remind you, all of France is warmed by the Gulf Stream. And we excuse it in Italy and Spain somehow, because, well it’s warm and soft and dreamy, and you can’t count on either of these countries for anything when it comes to a good honest fight. But the French! The French! Our bankers in the Revolution (never mind that it bankrupted the country and the king, and was the proximate cause of their own Revolution)! Lafayette! Montcalm and Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham!

Baloney. Or should I say, saucisson! Sit down my dear, have another glass of rosé, and try the brandade de morue, it’s fresh and warm.

by

[Fox-Amphoux, Var, Provence] One of the implacable, albeit stereotypical, facts about France is that it is an overwhelmingly Catholic country that is also consummately irreligious. Almost no one goes to church with any regularity, and the hand-wringing, to which not too many people pay attention, sounds unremarkably like the hand-wringing that garners more attention from, say, American-Jewry. In the latter case it is especially the rabbinate that wrings its hands as it wonders at the modern propensity of largely assimilated young Jews to marry out of their faith.

Such is not the problem in France. If I recall seeing the percentage accurately, something like 88% of the country is Catholic, or so identify themselves as of not too many years ago. So when young Jacques marries young Marianne, no parental feathers get ruffled about the perils of mixed marriage. Of course, even if they weren’t both Catholics, there’s little likelihood of remorse. Scratch a Frenchman or woman, and you will find some taint of another religion or ethnicity under there somewhere. But in the main, the French wear their religion as easily as their skin.

The purest of the pure Gallic French are small in number. Mixing it all up is Celto-Ligurian-Greco-Romano-Teutonic-Nordic-Anglo-Saxon inter-breeding over two millennia. For all that, and perhaps because most of the world surrounding France—not to mention occupying it—about the time that the Moors and other elements of the Caliphate left the Iberian peninsula was Catholic one way or another, France is Catholic, whatever the purity of the stock.

Around here, in the lofty reaches of the central Provencal department of the Var, there are many Italian surnames to be encountered. This sort of clinches the deal. My personal theory is that the reason name after name on the headstones and tombs of the permanent inhabitants of the cemetery just down the hill end in vowels (as we say in the ‘States) is that some time in the late fourteenth century the black plague decimated town after town. Those towns and villages that didn’t die off altogether were abandoned.

A slightly complicated set of political alliances resulted in Nice and a significant part of the Var (essentially most of the land between the river of that name, west of Nice, and the Rhône River as it courses its way more or less southwesterly, into the Mediterranean) becoming the property of the House of Savoie. In league with the Duke of Anjou and the Count of Nice, that august state (now, itself, also a part of France) repopulated with the good citizens of Liguria the towns and villages ravaged by pestilence. Liguria was, and still is, Italian. Indeed, where the present French Riviera ends and the Italian one begins is Liguria. If we can thank them for nothing else—aside from my thanking them for repopulating this part of Provence—we can thank the Ligurians for pesto. However, there is so much more for which they are responsible, and someday, someday, my friends, I will tell you about it.

Whatever their roots, here and elsewhere in France, the people of this great nation remain mindful of their spiritual inheritance. They honor it largely in the breach of course, until it comes to that great invention, le jour ferié. It’s what the British call a bank holiday, and everyone else, including us, calls a national holiday, that is, when banks, the stock market, and hence, most businesses, are closed. The United States, despite all appearances, not being a particularly deterministic society, has, as one would expect from a country where CEO salaries are a multiple by several hundred times of the lowest salaried worker, and productivity is unequalled, and two weeks vacation is standard, very few national holidays that close the banks. The French, who are smarter than we think, and had a very smart scientist, named Laplace (Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace, who, despite the marquis title, lived from 1749 to 1827, in short, he beat the Revolution…) who believed that if you could account for every atom in the universe you could pretty well predict everything that was going to happen—in short, a guy who was just waiting for computers to happen—have a lot of jours feriés. And funny thing, a damn lot of them correspond to, well, the Christian—let me be more specific, the Catholic—calendar.

After years and years of arriving here late in May for an all too brief two weeks of the most glorious weather anywhere, never mind that of one of the most enduringly beautiful places on the face of the planet, I wondered for awhile, being innately stupid and unobservant, why we always seemed to arrive on a three day weekend, when everything was closed. Turns out, there’s this little phenomenon called Pentecost (you could look it up—lunar calendars, Easter, all that stuff…) and it’s, well, it’s a national holiday in France.

Which brings me, among all the other subtly crypto religious jours feriés, to the one I essentially just discovered, called, in common parlance, “the day of the dead.” That is, it’s the Jour des mortes, and it occurs on the day after the one we know as All Hallow’s Eve, or All Saint’s Day, or, dadgummit, it’s called Hallowe’en for chrissake. The French close their banks, their stores, their supermarkets, they close everything but the emergency room, on the day after Hallowe’en… And we think they’re craven and irresponsible, smug, self-satisfied, and contemptuous.

Think about it while you’re workin’ a Hershey’s miniatures gastric hangover with extra-strength Pepto-Bismol.

So the French have figured out how to take a lot of holidays. And when they don’t take holidays they’ve figured out how to provide minimal service short of dysfunction (see my next blog entry, “Customer Disservice,” which actually was posted before this one; why? jour ferié. I’m union.).

Lest I give you the wrong impression, let me add this very important set of observations.

Just like the high holiday Jews who show up at synagog on the high holidays, and primp in their high-price ticket seats, the only time they will appear in a place of worship, there is a certain reflexive response from the media (who else) when it comes to All Saints’ Day. They send photographers to the cemeteries and take photos of the lugubrious assemblages of entirely sincere people who gather to honor the dead. It’s become, apparently, prelude to observance of that day, a little later this month, that used to be called Armistice Day and is now Veterans’ Day (no doubt, just to make sure that veterans of the First World War, most of whom we should remember are dead at this point, don’t gain some kind of memorial hegemony). A lot of veterans’ groups and town officials gather in the local cemetery and lay a wreath. The local paper the next day is filled with snaps of this sort, from one town to small village to another.

In the local daily for the Var, and a major Provence news vehicle, the lead story on the Day of the Dead concerned the rapidly increasing cost of burial, thereby making this day a matter of mercantile greed. It’s a valid issue, but the Day of the Dead isn’t official burial day. It’s a day to remember the departed. That’s what the French call them, les disparus (which immediately conjures up for the Anglophile with peculiar cognate propensities the spectre of the “disappeared,” and there is a weary, yet disquieting sense of death as a disappearing act).

I was told by our lovely vivacious neighbor, Paule—whose appearance and liveliness vastly belies her apparent years—that one couple in particular (she pointed out their car, parked near the cemetery of the village) appears every week at the cemetery, yet every day of the week leading up to the Jour des Mortes, to honor their daughter, who died in her 20s in an automobile accident. This occurred four years ago. Who am I to say, let it go, already?

During the days before le Jour des Mortes there is indeed, on a country-wide basis apparently, a significant increase of such visits. As it turned out, there was no let up, even after last Wednesday, on which the day in question fell this year. There is no sign of lugubriousness about any of this activity. No sign of obsessive preoccupation. There are few signs of grief, unless, of course, the departed departed fairly recently.

For some, in short, the Day of the Dead is an honest and solemn institution. The chapel, which lies mere meters from my front door, showed signs of increased activity the day before. A squadron of locals, vaguely familiar, but no faces I could identify for sure, appeared in the village, disappeared into the chapel, and for about 15 minutes there was the sound of benches and other furniture being moved about, let us say, by force, mainly scraping the 13th century stone floors.

The next day, le parking at the foot of the village filled with cars. And the inhabitants thereof, in turn, filled the chapel. There was no joking, no vainglory, no kibbitz, no grand gestures of greeting and kissing of the cheeks. Just a stream of middle class, mainly middle aged people who showed up to do what they gotta’ do.

Now, there are officially 380 inhabitants of the town of Fox-Amphoux, including our little village. And I can assure you, there were not 380 people in that chapel, nowhere nearly. Whatever the number, no doubt it was a fraction. Probably it was a fraction greater than the fraction reported to the census as “devout” from among the 80-odd percent of Catholics in this nation, yet significantly less by a very long shot, of the 80-odd.

And it is, of course, for them that the banks and the stores and the supermarkets and just about everything else (though Wednesday is a market day, and we did have a market…) is closed on le Jour des Mortes. And who are we to say that they don’t deserve the holiday, even as much as the price to be paid is the mindless exploitation the rest of us engineer on a day that our thoughts about the departed, or anything else of any spiritual significance, may take a back seat to thoughts typical of just another day off? And don’t we deserve it anyway?

by

One of the deficiencies of Chris Schlesinger’s great grill and restaurant, East Coast Grill on Cambridge Street in Inman Square, right here in Cambridge (and just a twelve-minute walk from our door) is that in its 21-year history he’s never seen fit to open it for lunch. It’s not clear why, though one reason must be that the prep, including firing up the grill, and preparing certain menu items in time for meal hours, would mean putting people to work in what are the wee small hours for restaurant folk.

Indeed, my original introduction to the place was by my boss at the time, when I was a VP of one of Boston’s hottest advertising agencies at the time. East Coast Grill had just opened. It was 1985. The place consisted of two side-by-side holes in the wall, one of them the grill/bar/restaurant in a single bay of a building, perhaps 22 feet wide. The other hole in the wall deserved to be, being a simulacrum of a roadhouse barbeque joint that Chris dubbed Jake ‘n’ Earl’s, and really with no seating to speak of, but intended mainly for take-out (and in those days, a pulled pork sandwich with two sides, cost $3.95—a sit-down restaurant and wait staff would have put him out of business). Unfortunately, my boss, who was treating me to lunch, was not aware that the Grill did not open for lunch. The only benefit of this excursion was that I learned of the existence of the place at all.

Continue reading →

by

My life happens to span the age of nuclear proliferation, as we now refer to it.

It’s not about me, of course, as my chief concern about anything nuclear (as in radioactive materials) involves the location of the nuclear medicine department in a couple of nearby hospitals for reasons that are personal. I also regularly cut out the inedible core of cabbages, artichokes, and fennel, but these are hardly nuclear issues to be concerned about.

Continue reading →

by