Chez Guy

Let’s say that you have longed for, planned for, and prepared for an experience that you fully expect to be glorious and wonderful. 

Let’s say also that you finally arrive at the moment of that much longed-for experience, and it goes just about as well as is realistically possible.  You planned for years, hoping that your trip to Tahiti would be sunny and warm and full of sweet and icy drinks.  And lo and behold, the sand is smooth and the hotel is newly renovated, and the people are nice, and you aren’t late for the Tahitian dance class, and not only are there no typhoons, but also you never get even one mosquito bite. 

That said, here is the crucial question, one that you can allow to roll around in your brain for awhile before you read the rest of this post:  

Given how very long you have longed, how high your expectations have taken you in advance, can that wonderful experience ever be exactly and everything you dreamed?  Can you be spoiled, in other words, without overhigh hopes spoiling the experience?

 

(Still thinking?  Good.  Keep it up.  I’ll want your answer when you’re done reading.) 

I spent nearly the entire afternoon on Tuesday in Paris with my almost-sister Jackie and her mother Loni.  We lingered decadently over an extremely fancy, luxurious, and (perhaps it goes without saying) delicious three-hour lunch at the flagship restaurant of renowned French chef Guy Savoy.  One hour there for each one of his precious Michelin stars.  Following that remarkable and palate-altering blowout of a meal, I took a little poll on this question as it related to our lunch in the adorable Marais apartment where I am staying with Jackie and Loni, the major planner of our dejeuner blowout.

Here are our answers on the question of the possibility of satisfaction in the face of enormously high levels of expectation:  

According to Jacqueline, “Oui!  Bien sur!” 

According to Launa, also a resounding “Yes,” but I’ll give you a little more detail on why.  I’m certainly not (just) a country bumpkin, but three star Parisian restaurants have up to this point been pretty much out of my league, if not out of my general awareness.  Various generous parental figures in my life have taken me to remarkable restaurants in New York City, but Paris is another kettle of bouillabaisse.  So as I have never knowingly eaten at a three star restaurant before, I hardly knew what to expect. 

Guy and his cast of dozens provided better food and a more beautiful room than I could have quite dreamed up on my own.  Plus I was with Jackie and Loni.  And free in Paris (yes THAT Paris) for several days. So maybe I didn’t even long or expect enough to get to the heights that lunch achieved.  It’s like I just came along on the trip to Tahiti on the last minute, and got on the plane as a tagalong without really knowing where Tahiti was. 

But for Loni, the major architect of this remarkable and once-in-a-lifetime experience, the jury is still out.  At the end of this post, I will share with you the rest of our conversation, and my sense of the final verdict.

Until then, back to our blowout with Guy Savoy.  You might wish to go get a little towel or something right now so that you don’t salivate too much on your computer while you read.  And if you are not hungry right now, you will likely be so by the end of this post, so I hope you’ve got the ingredients for a sandwich (if not a velouté or some coquilles St. Jacques) lying around the house.

The first thing that you notice at a three-star restaurant is the vast number of staff members who are dedicating their finest professional efforts towards the goal of your own personal pleasure.  Service, even as much as food, is what earns stars, and the people who work there must live to serve if they would like to remain employed.

In this restaurant, all you had to do was to let a desire cross your mind, and suddenly someone would arrive to fill it and then some, doing everything just a little more nicely than you might have even thought to request.  This leads to an interesting phenomenon of otherwise full-blown adults being treated as helpless children.

So as I drifted near the door of the restaurant, a few minutes early for our 12:30 reservation, several people were on hand to receive me and begin meeting my needs before I realized I was having them.  The receiving staff included a real-live doorman in a brown Guy Savoy uniform, who was there to spare me all that trouble of opening the door all by my lonesome.  Although they were French, somebody must have told them that I wasn’t, because several of them were already smiling in my direction.  They nicely received my favorite aqua umbrella, sussed me out to be sure I had a reservation, and then sent me through the second set of charmed doors, past several nervous young men whose job it seemed to be just to say “Bonjour, Madame” to me as I was directed towards our table and eventually on to the ladies’ W.C. 

As I learned later in the meal, a discrete and friendly staff member is delighted to accompany one to the bathroom at any time, (and more than once, if that’s what Madame would desire) just to be sure that one is never lost.  In fact, they don’t really let you go on your own. As Loni put it, there were almost as many waiters as diners, and it was this ratio of help to helpless that made you feel so deeply attended to.  And just the tiniest bit controlled by a benevolent but ever-present parent. 

The plates were individually painted, big off-white disks with smiling faces or parallel lines or other innocently adorable designs in bright primary colors.  (Cue the childish glee:  whee!) An artist friend of Guy’s had painted each one differently; they keep sixty different plates on hand to serve the three sets of sixty different diners they serve each day:  one at lunch, then two for dinner.  Another good friend of Guy’s had made the jewel-colored glass dishes for salt, pepper and butter.

The restaurant was split up into four little rooms, each of which could accommodate about sixteen of the world’s most fortunate diners at any one time.  The walls were made of long slabs of fine-grained dark wood, or huge panels of leather, or pocket doors made of glass, or silk fabric panels.  The big painting in our little dining cabin was on a monumental scale, completely interesting and compelling, but not at all fussy.  Presumably that was painted by yet another one of Guy’s buddies.  

As I was waiting for Loni and Jackie to arrive, I decided to practice my French bored stare while enjoying my government-issued reverie in the direction of the painting.  I was offered a menu, but decided to wait for my fellow dejeuner-ers to start charting my course through the meal.  I skipped breakfast, and I must have looked a little hungry, because one of the nice men in charge of my personal happiness stopped by with a little one-tined silver fork, on which he had skewered some stacked up foie gras and toasted bread.  Foie gras is the silk of food, in that it involves both luxury and animal suffering, but is nonetheless irresistible.

There was only one other diner in the room at that moment, a middle-aged man sitting alone at a table and eating while checking his Blackberry and reading the paper.   He looked genuinely bored by the whole thing; I could compare him to the guy who does Tahiti’s taxes, gets comped vacations on a regular basis, and has tired just a little bit of the whole lie-on-the-beach and be-super-pampered plan.  Too bad so sad for the businessman; although his lunch was as good or better than any of ours, and he had all the pleasure of being a regular and knowing we were tourists, he was not at Guy Savoy in the way that we were at Guy Savoy.

Loni later told me that after researching restaurants on Chowhound, the New York Times, and Zagat, she selected this particular restaurant for two reasons.  First, it was one of the most amazing restaurants in Paris.  But, second, as she put it, “I didn’t want a place that would be so formal that I couldn’t act like my foolish self.”  Both Jackie and I agreed that Loni is enthusiastic rather than foolish, but given the French propensity for reserve, she would certainly stand out in a place that took itself too darn seriously.  Guy Savoy is renowned for service that is deeply, deeply friendly – almost un-Frenchly friendly.  Nobody said, “I’m Kelly and I’m going to be your server!” or wore lots of weird pins like at T.G.I. Friday’s, but the smiles were not parceled out any more than were the rolls or even the desserts. 

This tone and approach is definitely set at the top of the establishment and filters down.  Because as soon as we had all been seated and offered a nice little skewer of foie gras and tiny toast points, (yes, I did get a second one, as a matter of fact) Guy himself arrived to welcome us personally to his restaurant. 

Yes, that Guy Savoy, one of the most famous chefs in all of Paris.  If you’re a foodie, this sentence will already have impressed you.  If you are instead a sports fan, imagine that this was Eli Manning coming out to say hi just because.  Or if you’re, say, a regular old American, this was kind of like getting a genial welcome from your own personal Senator just as you’re getting off the plane at JFK.

Loni described this as a great sign of the warmth of the restaurant.  Star power always gives me a nice little warm feeling.  Loni, never one to be shy, asked for a photograph to be taken, and Guy, never one to be stand-offish, brought in the official staff photographer and napkin folder (the only woman we saw working in the dining rooms) to get us to say fromage.  Immediately following the several snaps, he invited us back to the kitchen for an even more intimate look at the engine room, and another set of photographs.  At first I was mortified.  (It doesn’t take much to embarrass me in a new situation, after which I become quickly overconfident.  Perhaps on my next visit to Guy, I’ll ask for a personal lesson in the proper way to make mayonnaise.) Since I didn’t expect this particular little flourish, I was at first taken aback, then charmed and fascinated by the way his enormous kitchen staff stepped aside from their purposeful endeavors to allow us to feel particularly special. 

The staff initially spoke to us in French, assuming by our nods of assent that we understood every word.  As is always the case, I understood precisely 38% of what was being said, which I assumed would be enough to get me from the entrée to the dessert.  Jackie’s French is better than mine, and between the two of us, we could translate nicely for Loni.  But, as usual, Loni had many questions of her own to ask, so our exchanges with the staff quickly and gracefully shifted into English.

Even once the staff shifted into their perfect English, the actual ordering process proved somewhat intimidating and scary.  What does one order when the menu is so subtle that it outstrips your limited vocabulary? This was sort of like my efforts to entertain in French – I had the double challenge of understanding menu-talk (words like terrine and turbot and semolina and volontée and feuilletée aren’t just for French anymore) while remembering French words for things I do know, like chicken and pepper and lamb.

There was much discussion over our order, and much helpful advice provided by the order-taker Hubert.  But I could not quite get over the sense that Hubert felt that he knew better than I did what I might wish to eat.  I’m not the kind of person who asks the waiter his opinions on the food, so it was just the tiniest bit strange to have Hubert expressing such strong opinions about what I would enjoy.

Eventually I just decided to go with the spirit of all that infantalization, and let Pere Hubert tell me what to do. 

I heartily approve of the French practice of reserving the wine list until you have finished ordering from the menu.  This means that nobody has to juggle more than one set of papers, and also that you’re not trying to re-pick your food to blend with everybody else’s food so that somebody can get some kind of wine that nobody likes anyway.  In France, it’s food first, with wine the closest of seconds.

The wine list was larger than most ceremonial Bibles.  And if you added up the cost of each of the bottles of wine from which we were invited to choose, you might be able to pay off the home loans of most of the inhabitants of a medium-size town. Loni had some champagne as an aperitif, then we ordered a few individual glasses.  Jackie ordered, as she is wont to do, a nice dry Reisling.  I hope that some wise vintner names his favorite Reisling after her someday.  But we didn’t order a whole bottle.  It was, after all, lunch.  And the wine was, after all, ridiculously expensive. Some of the bottles cost more than a nice used car.  This did not stop me from later requesting a second glass, this time a light red, to have with my main course.  Like Hubert, the sommelier had some clear opinions about our orders.  At Guy Savoy, you might be a little infantilized, but at least the drinking age is low enough that you still get to drink.

After the ordering, we got tiny little thin pieces of bread shaped to actual sharp points at both ends, then tiny little espresso-cups worth of pumpkin soup with fresh carrots and celery.  The cup was devised in such a way that its handle also made a little hat for a tiny herb-filled samosa hidden underneath.  This amused my bouche precisely as it was intended to do. 

Jackie and her mother ordered one of the most famous specialties of the house (when in Tahiti, you really should have the poi.)  The “soupe d’artichaut a la truffe noire, brioche feuilletee aux champignons et truffes” was (as further described on the translated and embroidered menu,) an “artichoke soup with black truffles, slices of black truffle and parmesan shavings. “ Alongside was an ethereal “layered brioche with mushrooms, spread with truffle butter.”

In every wonderful experience, there has to be a high point.  Here at Guy Savoy, the high point arrived early, in the form of the brioche.  Mushrooms are the only forbidden fruit in my house, so I don’t like to turn down an opportunity to have one when I am out on the town.  So when Jackie gave me a bite of hers, it blew me away.   And it wasn’t even the thing that I ordered.  Hooray for friends who share.

My entrée was little pieces of fish, “gougonettes.”  They were perfectly cooked (though certainly no more perfectly than Judith’s cod the night before.  Maybe Guy should think about hiring a new fish expert from rue St. Paul) and arrived on the edges of a plate with a well the size of a big marble in the middle, full of the appropriate dipping sauce.  Dipping was encouraged here at Guy Savoy, explicitly so with the brioche and the artichoke soup. 

In order to further encourage dipping, our favorite waiter (the cutest of all of them) brought us a little hand truck full of nine different kinds of bread shaped into fantastical shapes.  There was a stick of seaweed baguette, a circular chestnut bread with scales like a dragon, a cereal bread, a small-grained bread with dried fruit, and a few other kinds that sounded perfectly nice but which I can’t really recall in any detail.

But here is where Loni’s doubt crept in.  There was a small flaw in the menu for which Loni had planned and hoped and dreamed.  Between the entrée and the main plate we received another little taste of soup, but again made from some sort of squash.  The flavor was quite different this time around, as it was capped with a little piece of truffle.  When I later asked Jackie to remind me how it was different, she just said with a giggle, “It was better.”  Since I liked both soups, and generally am quite fond of pumpkin, I could not have been happier.  But for Loni, the menu was suddenly and problematically less-than-perfect. 

Which is to say, not as she would have done things herself.  

Jackie and Loni ordered the “Turbotin entire “tartiné” aux champignons en deux cuissons (2 pers)” which was, for the non-Francophones out there, “Whole young turbot fish oven-roasted with chanterelle butter, accompanied with chanterelle mushrooms prepared with cream and sauce, pan-fried chanterelle mushrooms, extra-fine green beans and young turbot jus with chanterelle mushrooms (for two people.)” 

The meal had already provided us with copious amounts of butter and cream, much of it mixed with truffles, and a great deal of it in and on the brioche.  This enormous fish, split down lengthwise, was brought to the table with its head and tail attached, then sliced and diced on a special table alongside us.  One of our two favorite waiters deftly undertook this important task, then served the fish and brought back the little bits to be further sautéed in butter.

Jackie is one of the only women I know who does serious fishing, so it made sense that she would order the Turbot.  However, little old farmgirl me here ordered “agneau croustillant-moelleux a la graine de legumes.”  This was “different parts of lamb cooked with various methods:  thin-sliced roasted saddle of lamb, stuffed and braised shoulder of lamb and roasted lamb ribs accompanied with vegetable semolina, chick pea purée and lamb stock.”  Oh, and a gracious egg-shaped spoonful of mushed up spinach, flavorful as could be, and cooked to the consistency of extremely fancy and well-seasoned Gerber babyfood.  The little pieces of lamb could not have been tinier, and I could not have been happier to eat every little one of the nine bites, and even to pick up the lamb chops and chew the meat off (like the dipping, this was also encouraged, by the kind offering of a silver fingerbowl with warm water and a thick slice of lemon.)  By the end of this course, I was a happy little infant indeed, although I did manage not to spread the spinach puree on my face and hands. 

I’m quite sure that a few other little things were served post-big-plate and pre-dessert.  One of them was a little floating cloud on a tiny silver spoon.  Jackie and I each have a vague memory of Earl-Grey flavored sorbet, but can’t place exactly when it was delivered our way.  But we still had some serious eating to do, because of the fact that our good man Hubert had – at least an hour earlier when we were ordering – talked us into the concept of two desserts each.  He was eager to have us try their three fruit desserts:  A terrine of grapefruit and tea sauce, a pear wonder served with a perfectly poached pear hollowed out and re-filled with pear-flavored ice, and a figgy delight topped with a thin cookie and then almond ice cream.  According to Hubert, who had a real theory about this whole dessert, he doesn’t often get three women dining together.  His concept was that we could share these three things, then have the dessert cart later, from which we could choose a second (chocolate) dessert. 

Hubert was quite specific on this topic, and while we’re not exactly the kind of gals to roll over easily, we were gradually convinced.  When there are so many staff members around to help you/tell you what to do, you eventually go with the flow. 

We had about eight or ten minutes of anticipation after our three fruit desserts, and after the nuts dipped in chocolate were served, and even after the itty-bitty “just in case” slice of apple tart arrived, unbidden but not unappreciated.  For even though I had been offered and served a cup of black coffee, and had finished same, the dessert cart had not (yet) been offered.  Although we were all completely stuffed, Daddy had promised the cart. 

Following our moments of anticipation were a few moments of real dread, when we all believed, despite having been treated so very nicely the whole afternoon, that we had been inexplicably snubbed of the experience of the desert trolley.  We had seen it nosing around from table to table, its many pots and tarts and containers promising all sorts of sweet bliss.  And the menu had promised a spread worthy of Willy Wonka:

“rice pudding, caramel cream, prunes in wine and spices, chocolate mousse, ‘diamond’ shortcake, chocolate-vanilla macarons, marshmallows, ice cream and sorbets (green apple, salted caramel) cheesecake, pies, wafers, chocolate sweets, dried fruit and almond milk cookies.”

If you’re having any sort of moment of alarm yourself, please rest assured that we pampered little girls were not robbed of our eventual sweet satisfaction.  By that point, we were all so sated as to be barely upright, but happily agreed to the flavored marshmallows (mint made with real mint leaves, and lemon, and strawberry with basil inside) and the chocolate macarons, and then the little scoops of ice cream, sorbet, and chocolate mousse.   

So back to my initial question about longed-for experiences.  While I could not possibly have been happier with being with good friends and eating such remarkable food, I have admitted to a grave lack of sophistication and therefore a lack of ability to distinguish between what is great and what is shockingly, stunningly great.  Aside from the strawberry marshmallow, which I could have taken or left, I adored every single bite.  So one way of being assured you will never be disappointed is to keep your expectations uninformed.  Keep a toothbrush in your purse, because you never know when you might be whisked to Tahiti.

But really the meal was much more a fantasy and creation of Loni, who served as travel agent and financier for the whole gustatory vacation.  And while she adored Guy’s friendliness, and the beauty and subtlety of the room, and the amazing friendliness and grace of the staff, she is not afraid to leave wanting just a little more.  As she put it later that night, while we were talking together in the rented apartment, “I always feel, very honestly, that one overestimates the nature of a meal.  Can the food every really be as good as you anticipate?”

During our conversation, Jackie was busy at this point posting the photo taken of the four of us in the dining room – Jackie, Loni, me, and of course Guy Savoy.   (Loni’s facebook update for the day was “Food, glorious food:  Lunch at Guy Savoy in Paris:  a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”)

It’s exactly that phrase, “once in a lifetime” that may have made Loni ask this initial question, and then kept me pondering it.  Perhaps it is the knowledge that you don’t actually live in Paris, that you will never be the kind of person to get used to dining at Guy Savoy, that this is all so ephemeral as to be nearly impossible to be real:  it makes you want to squeeze every drop of pleasure out of this thing that can’t go on.

But when you cook as much as Loni does, you get some strong opinions about what food should be like, and how it should be served.  There was in fact a whole lot of butter, and way more cream than any human being could need.  According to Loni, if she had created the menu, all that cream and butter and pumpkin would have been balanced with something green and acidic and simple.  Like maybe instead of spinach babyfood, some actual fresh, cool spinach.  And in Loni’s world, there would not have been that one untoward smudge of pear mush on the edge of that one otherwise beautifully presented dessert.

When you leave your own kitchen and let someone else take charge for awhile, you open yourself up to all sorts of new experiences and riches and remarkable slices of foie gras on little silver skewers.  But you don’t get to balance the menu, and you can’t decide the ratio of butter to spinach to squash soup.  To adapt the old having-your-cake corollary to this remarkable meal, Loni couldn’t have her lunch at Guy Savoy and cook it too. 

Still, there is no question that the food that afternoon was nothing less than wonderful.  It was made from a profusion of ingredients that are coveted by cooks and diners and foodies.  We had foie gras (twice.)  A plethora of truffles, or as Jackie put it, “Truffles, truffles, everywhere.”   The experience was neither overblown nor overly formal, and we were treated so kindly.  As Loni put it, “You associate the French with such snobbiness.  While you could say they were kissing up, I felt a tremendous warmth, and I did feel welcomed.” 

 Jackie, typing away at her computer, piped up, providing just the right brilliant touch of acid reality to balance all that sugar and butter: “I’m sure your credit card felt welcomed, too.”

 Paris always surprises me by being somehow ridiculous in its fanciness, and intimidating in its demands, but also completely above and beyond.  There you are, and the apartments are incredibly small, the garbage workers are on strike.   Your dollars are worthless, and your clothes aren’t chic enough, and you start to think that you really should lose about eighty-five pounds. 

You think that the Tour Eiffel is too kitschy to be believed, but then they put little sparkle lights on it, and somehow it can be both over-the-top and beautiful at the same time.  There is the Seine, the stunning flowers in the Luxembourg Gardens.  For Americans visiting Paris, all their pleasure is overdetermined.  But Paris never needs to be exactly what you would have ordered yourself to be exactly as it should be.  It shapes your desires around itself; it takes control, and you are best off just letting that happen. 

Family Table

For months now, my little family has been together as a tiny unit.  Then, today I broke away to spend time with one of my oldest and dearest friends.  Jackie might best be described as my sister, in that I have known her so very long.  We have celebrated birthdays together longer than either of us were children, and Bill and and the girls and I now and again reverse-adopted her parents, Loni and Ray, as members of my own extended family.  

Gare Lyon is the shortest of trips from the apartment that Loni and Jackie had rented for their week of dining and walking and shopping and museum-ing.  As the visitor, rather than driving the car and making all the plans, as I do at home, I’m tagging along their adventures for a few days before whisking Jackie back down, at hundreds of miles per hour, to the Var and Nice and the funny little world we have cobbled together there.

I may have mentioned my lackluster entertaining skills in an earlier post.  If you know me, you might have had pretty good takeout served on our stoop.  If you know me very well, you may actually have had the rare opportunity to eat an actual meal cooked in my house, in the actual kitchen.  Our family certainly eats the requisite number of calories, and what we put on the table is awfully darn nutritious, but the detail work of great cooking is not exactly my forté.  Nobody has ever called me a bad cook, exactly (OK, except for the first few days at Bastide de la Loge when I seemed to burn just about everything I touched:  a carbon Midas) but the kitchen is really not where I live.   

So you know how in a family every child is seen as gifted with one particular set of attributes (she’s the pretty one, but she’s the smart one?)  Well, in this chosen sisterhood, it’s easy to know which one is the one who is amazing at cooking.   And this is not just because she is good relative to me.  Jackie has seriously earned her reputation as an incredible cook.  She pays attention.  She cares.  She doesn’t just know food, she loves the food, and loves her diners enough to make it really special.

I have had more remarkable meals with Jackie and her family than I can easily count, most of them have been jointly created by Jackie and Loni, often with help from the hands or often the gardens of Jackie’s (actual) sister Robin.  The happy bit about this is that since Jackie is one of the sisters I’ve chosen for myself, I don’t have to have deep-seated lie-on-the-analyst’s-sofa anxieties about this particular sibling rivalry.  Instead, I can savor and appreciate and enjoy and praise what I’m given with a much more open heart. 

So when I got off the train, starving, I was pretty sure I would get an enormous hug.  And then, that I would be well fed.  

Jackie has many more cousins than I can usually keep track of, but most of the ones I have met are on her mother’s side.  So I was particularly excited my first night in Paris to meet a new member of her family, a cousin from Ray and Uncle Eddie’s side of the family.  Judith is an American in Paris, displaced by choice and by love after meeting the love of her life, Frederick.  At least according to Frederick, their move to Paris twenty-four years ago was Judith’s idea, and she brilliantly chose to capitalize on her American roots by cooking the great American recipes in a French kitchen.  She and Frederick operate Thanksgiving, a store that caters to American ex-pats hungry for a taste of home, and Parisians who crave some authentic American tastes.  Nestle’s toll house morsels.  The really good kind of cheesecake. Pop-Tarts.  H & H bagels, (boiled, of course.)  Some of this food is just like the Marmite at the counter in my grocery store in Provence.  But the food she serves at the store is the real deal, the food we made famous:  three kinds of enormous pancakes, turkeys roasted for all of the days leading up to Thanksgiving (holiday, not store), the real kind of stuffing:  where the recipe never, ever, ever changes.

And, because I have reverse-adopted Jackie’s family for the week, even this inexplicably cooking-challenged child would be included in the warmth of Judith and Frederick’s table.  We were offered champagne as soon as we walked in the door, and then a steady stream of white wine throughout the evening.  Wine is just different here – not exactly like water, but nearly as elemental.  It is the liquid on which meals and social occasions and café life flows (although they mostly use café au lait before noon.)  If America runs (to work) on Dunkin Donuts,  France floats on its wine.

While we asked Frederick questions about their life story, Judith and Loni caught up on members of their family that Judith had not seen for her many years of supplying the people of Paris with everything down-home.  When we came to the table, Judith had made us a very French dish with Americana at its core:  a tart of green tomatoes, assembled and baked upside down. 

I am partly guessing here, partly going on the wisdom of Jackie and Loni here, so I hope to be forgiven if I get the techniques wrong. Judith had cut the tomatoes into big chunks, sautéed them and then packed them tightly into a pie pan with onions and peppers and olives.  Then she baked all of the vegetables in the oven.  On top of this went delicious puff pastry, a feuilleté, at the end of baking.  When she was ready to serve it to her hungry Americans, she flipped it over.  The French have the best word for this flourish: Voila. 

(I, who am particularly challenged to flip a pancake, could not have been more impressed with the directionality of the dish, much less its sweet-and-savory vegetable core.)  The bi-cultural tart came to our plates married to a little salad of mâche and microgreens topped with rounds of strong, creamy goat cheese.  It was a very happy little marriage.

Because this is France, and because these are Shermans, there is never just one special course, but always several.  While we talked some more about their family history, and Jackie and Loni and Judith did some serious recipe-swapping, Judith served us a perfectly-cooked fish dish, a special back cut of a cod, with oven-roasted tomato confit, courgettes, (a much better name than plain old “zucchini”) and onions that formed a colorful and perfectly seasoned sauce for the lucky cod. 

My favorite, however, was an amazing gratin of potatoes and leeks with tons of cheese.  I seemed to remember there being an interesting spice somewhere in the creamy sauce, but neither Loni nor Jacqueline could confirm this assumption, and I have to defer to the experts in important matters like this one.  If all potatoes could be treated with this kind of love and affection, they might forever and always give up their propensity to become either baked or fried.  I’ll just say it again:  Yummy.

But then, even on top of this enormous bounty, there is always room for dessert.  No, not Jell-o (I know you were hoping) but Judith’s renowned specialty: a creamy American cheese cake, based on her mother’s own recipe.  I may or may not have been sworn to secrecy on one or a dozen secret ingredients that may or may not be the source of the wonder of this dish.  It was the good kind of (real) cheesecake:  the silky New York kind, not the baked disaster way-too-hard dry kind that should by all rights be against international law.  That whole heavy-on-the-ricotta kind gives the good nation of Italy a bad name.  

Although the cheesecake didn’t need any bijoux at all, she served it with fresh berries and also strawberries pressed and sieved and stirred into a little jewel-colored sauce with kirsch.  I don’t really know what kirsch is, but perhaps more things should be cooked with this in the future.

As I am wont to do, when I really get going, I have focused here mostly on the food, but I hope not to have missed the central point.  A lot about France is distant and distinct.  Perfectly formed, specific and unique and not-to-be mistaken for anything else.  It is often proud and hard and closed in its beauty and its perfection, as opposed to the way that America is proud and strong and open.  When you gather around a table, pulled into the heart of a real French home, the hardness falls away and you are in the mushy warm heart of the baguette. 

The success of this meal could be mainly attributed to Judith’s masterful cooking or Frederick’s generous hand with the wine.  But the more crucial point was in the conversation, the threads of memory and extended family pulling back into relation with one another.  I loved meeting Judith and Frederick, but the real pleasure of the evening was watching this family that I know so well drawing another few lucky people into its large and warm embrace, and to see that warmth returned. 

At the end of the meal, we pulled out several cameras and everybody took turns being in the picture.  Of course one of the cameras malfunctioned (de rigeur at a family reunion) and of course one or more of us protested about being in the picture  (don’t we always.)  There was talk of more reunions, more dinners, more recipes, more time spent around the table.  

And of course, more of that good kind of cheesecake. 

The TVG Took My Baby Away

I am traveling over a hundred and fifty miles an hour through the French countryside.  Possibly faster.  The train is moving is so fast that whatever is directly next to the train (lightpoles?) blurs past like ghosts.  From my window seat, I can look out on a remarkable expanse of open and mostly cultivated space.  There are farms with rows and rows of trees, or occasionally a beat little stretch of warehouses or a solitary sad looking farmhouse.  Those lonely farmhouses make me wonder how sad their inhabitants were when the super-fast train line line was installed.  How sad they were, and how happy everybody else became when they got to ride such an awesome new train.

Just past those blurred lightpoles, there are rows of cedar trees or juniper trees, making a windbreak and marking the edge of each field.  There are big stands of aspen, with their leaves silver underneath.  Then, rising up around the bowl of the valley, are little low hills, with an ochre mountain town floating past in just a few seconds every few minutes.  Up ahead that must be Avignon; if the train stops there, I will be right.  Then, for three seconds, I see sheep; thirty or forty little tiny sheep there in a field, then they are gone.  And holy Moses, after only about 15 minutes, here we are at the Avignon TGV. 

And just as soon off again. There are windmills in the hills, directly next to the cooling towers of a Nuclear power plant.  These are nuclear facilities numbers two and three I have seen since leaving home this morning.  I remember that when I visited France as a teenager, my French father was extremely proud of France’s nuclear reactors.  But as I am much more used to my own nation’s habits of power generation and environmental degradation, I can’t help but find them creepy.  

Sure, back in the U.S. we blow up entire West Virginian hillsides to sift out the coal we burn to generate our electricity.  But here, ominous towers sit right within all of this incredible natural beauty, all of these rows of cedars and olives and grapes. They look down on the Mediterranean Sea, and on the beautiful hillside towns and the farmhouses and the fields.  It’s like leaving a grenade sitting right next to your newborn baby.  An incredibly useful grenade, and one that really never blows up because you’re so careful with it, of course, but still, a grenade. 

As I had expected, it does feel pretty damn strange to go this fast and not have the thing I am in take off into the air.  There is a little leaning feeling around the corners and I sort of can’t believe it could possibly be safe to travel this fast.  But then again, we did leave “safe” behind on purpose.  We chose instead something that would feel uncertain, but leave us the mental space to deal with that newness.  

It’s hard for me to say, anymore, what is safe, and what is dangerous.  Why are nuclear towers more inherently scary than global warming?  Why are cholesterol and alcohol and tobacco so vilified at home, and consumed in mass quantities here?  Parts of our lives have gotten a whole lot safer, while other new dangers have emerged. 

Similarly, so much ease has emerged alongside our brand new piles of difficulty.   We have, for example, made things much harder for our girls (more on that in a later post, when I can explain it better to myself and to you.)  But everyday life here – with no jobs, with no schedules, with no social obligations – is so much easier for Bill and for me.  We have only ourselves and the girls to manage, and drastically fewer responsibilities.  I can write for hours a day, and Bill is sleeping soundly for the first time in so many years.   We can spend the time we need to spend in order to eat well, to talk to one another, to get ourselves in synch with one another and with our girls.

To do so, we shucked jobs, houses, responsibilities, and obligations.  We took on a new language, landscape, location, and way of being in the world.  In the late spring, seeing all this coming, I was a whirlwind of loss, grasping on and mourning all the changes that were coming at me faster than a speeding train.  I could barely take them in as they sped past.  When people would say, “Oh, you must be so excited!” I would puzzle them with an ungrateful grimace.   I couldn’t see what was up ahead, only what I was leaving behind.  I was afraid, deeply afraid, of losing the world we had put so much into building.

But now perhaps I’m getting used to losing things, and even getting used to getting lost myself. So today when I got turned around on the way to the Aix-en-Provence TGV Gare, I found I could roll with it just fine.  We have put shed so many skins, and put ourselves through so much relative uncertainty that a few wrong turns through an office park don’t need to throw me anymore.

Diesel Liesel does mean to be helpful in these situations, but she can’t find the TGV Gare.  As a car, she tends to like to stick to the streets, and doesn’t take trains herself.  I would have to guess that this TGV station might be newer than she is, as her memory tends to be best for roads as they were way back in 2005.  I then couldn’t quite manage to follow the directions on my iphone, at least not once I got confused and the phone started directing me into the office park.  Having no sense of direction is my own personal disability; I am essentially as good as blind.

So I fell back on my strength: language.  Which meant speaking with actual people, in French.  Two kind and slow-speaking security guards appeared, then set me back on the right course.  Although I still have access only to frustratingly poor grammar when I speak French, I can follow everyday conversations with most of the people I encounter.  I have to ask them to slow down and repeat everything they are saying, but then I remember that back in New York, I do that all the time for other people straining to speak English.  After a little struggle, the words clear, and suddenly I am taking the second ronde-pointe and, who knew?  There are the signs they had promised me. There’s the station.  As Bill would say, not such a great approach to the basket, but two points nonetheless.

The Aix TGV Gare is in fact not that easy to find, as you have to believe that signs are taking you there even though they seem to be dragging you out into the woods to murder you.  It is located deep in the middle of nowhere, but a different middle of nowhere than our little town of Aups.  I am realizing that nowhere has many middles.  

I was impressed to discover that even though the roads had been built American-highway concrete-bunker style, with curbs and dividers and plenty of pay-parking, lots of people had just abandoned their Renaults and Peugeots along the sides of the roads, half on the curb and half on the road, where they didn’t belong and weren’t welcomed. In France, parking seems to be allowed everywhere it is not specifically disallowed.  I rented Liesel a nice paid space in which to wait for me for the few days I would be away. 

In the station, there were a lot of people standing around looking expectant and confused, and I wasn’t sure which platform would take me to Paris and which would whisk me at 200 m.p.h. to Nice or Barcelona or Hogwarts.  I followed my usual strategy, which is to walk around listening for people speaking or reading English.  The first man, an Australian reading the Herald Tribune and chatting adorably to his nine year old, seemed blissful in his total ignorance of the way the train worked.  The second woman was a pathetically baffled American tourist, and thus even more lost than I.   At least I am no longer a tourist, I told myself, somewhat convincingly. I live here.  I live here? 

I asked directions of a Security Guard, and he not only helped me figure out what train to take, but also brought me personally to exactly the right place to stand and wait for my car.  Perhaps I may have shown more than the typical level of Gallic friendliness, because he hung around and wouldn’t just leave me to wait in peace.  Before I could be freed to stand in my faux-reverie, I needed to hear the entire story of his educational history and emigration from Gambia, be asked lots of questions about America and New York and the English language, and be offered a little card with his full name and telephone number.  It is not likely that I will be calling John David Oglaba in the future.  I was a little freaked out by his way over-friendly approach, and couldn’t help wonder if he wanted a tip, or perhaps even a date.  Yet I was grateful for his help, and impressed with his tiny pretty handwriting. 

So once I found the right place to stand (under the big sign marked T, on Voie 4) there was my car, and there was my seat.  Facing frontwards, no less.  What luck!  Then the train started its long journey to take me away far away from my family for the first time since the middle of July.

During three months of always-togetherness, we have pestered and irritated one another on more occasions than I can count.  But we have also held together as tightly as we ever have since the girls were tiny babies, clinging together in love, in relief, in excitement, and often in fear.  The girls keep asking us to retell their birth stories, their baby stories, the stories of our travels and adventures together and apart.  We have become French in our insularity, in our insistence on staying together “tout la famille” all the time.  This was one of the biggest reasons that we came now, with the girls big enough to remember but not too big to stick close by.  We wanted to give ourselves the time and the space to fall out of love with the pursuit of various kinds of achievements, and back into love with one another. 

And now the TGV is putting kilometers between us like they are going out of style. I am thrilled to be going to Paris, to see my dear friend Jackie and her amazing mom, to check in with Jessica of the perfect tarts and excellent pitch, and Nick, master of tech and wine.  Yet I can’t believe how much I am missing Bill.  Missing Grace. Missing Abigail.  Missing being together.  A bientôt, sweet little family.  See you soon.

 

 

 

Bill's Hiking Adventure

Tonight, I caught up with international man of mystery Bill over a glass of Puligny Montrachet Grand Vin du Burgogne 2006 at our kitchen table. We had both had rough days. I had watched Grace devolve in front of my eyes into a puddle of viral misery. Bill had attended Parent Night at Abigail's class to learn the precise defition of "rote learning." Here in France, if you don't get it on the first worksheet, you get more worksheets. The good news, I guess, is that Abigail seems to dig the worksheets.

I really wanted to interview Bill about Parent Night, given my overwhelming interest in the subject. However, he refused to grant me an interview on that topic, intent on babbling about the Sommet de L'Homme.

Launa: OK, Bill, what was it you wanted to tell me about your adventure the other day?

Bill: Well, first of all, I think for my fans, who know me, they're going to be thinking that this is just another story of Bill defying death. They are going to think that this is another story of how, with enough under-planning and overconfidence, I can turn a trip to my backyard into a Trek to the Himalayas.

They have reason to think this.

My aunt once had to carry me off of Long's Peak over her shoulder. And once you and I, along with two of our best friends, were nearly killed by lightening on top of Mt. Washington. And I took you out into the deep wilderness during both Hurricane Bob AND Hurricane Andrew. And I went insane from altitude sickness and became lost on a 13.000 peak in the Rahwah Range. Oh, also I also ate an entire canister of stove gas by mistake.

However, this isn't going to be one of those stories.

(Deep sigh.)

I kind of wish it were.

Anyhow, so I hatched this plan based on some guidebooks and maps a friend back home had given me when he heard where I was going. He told me that the hiking near here was ABSOLUTELY MINDBLOWING AMAZING. That I couldn't be in a better place for bagging 6,000 or 7,000 foot peaks without lots of mountain climbing gear.

So there I was, driving past beautiful medieval village after beautiful medieval village, hopes high. But then the road would keep ending at the edge of a medieval town. And I would have to snake through it, and it would be 15 minutes before I could get out on the other side of it and start driving again.

In fact, it was kind of like driving up Route 100 for the length of VT. For the first hour and a half, you're thinking, "Beautiful! Pastoral! Cow. Farm. Church. Steeple." And then for the last half hour, you're thinking, "If I see another cow, I'm going to shoot myself. Right after I shoot the cow." Sometimes even beauty can tire you out.

(At this point, in the interview, Bill interrupted his storytelling to complain about the pace of my typing. Apparently I was slowing him down as badly as all those medieval villages, and he had places to go. And his fan base to reach.)

Bill: You're not really going to put in the part where I complain about your typing. Read back my last line.

Launa: "And his fan base to reach."

Bill: No, the line before that. Read back the line before that.

(We then had a nice "Whose on First?" moment before going back to Bill's story.)

Anyway, due to all of these medieval towns and all the peaks I was passing and not climbing, I started to have a sinking feeling about how quote MINDBLOWING AND AMAZING this hike was going to be.

Basically, it was pretty, but it felt like I was just taking a really long time just to drive to a notch, like Holyoke Notch, in a lame little series of foothills that really would have nothing to do with the Alps or the mountains that build up to the Massives Central. I started cursing myself for not just biting the bullet and driving to the Alps to find some 10,000 foot peaks. Just not those 13,000 foot ones. Altitude sickness.

And then I started thinking, just relax. Enjoy life for what it is. Appreciate the small things. There will probably be some beautiful flowers, or some other kind of boring stuff, to make up for my mistake of driving to pointless foothills rather than real mountains.

Launa: So when do we get to peaks, and bagging them? Or is this story all about driving? I have a lot of driving and grocery stores on the blog already. And stories about how when you make a mistake, you realize that it's really the little things that matter.

Bill: You're not doing an interview, you're just typing slowly and being difficult.

Launa: You're not telling a story. You're just talking and being difficult.

(Eyebrows were cocked in challenge and anticipation on both sides of the table.)

Bill: So as I was just driving up to this non-summit, I started thinking about how much I missed the White Mountains -- you don't drive to the highest elevation and walk around. In the Whites, you have to pay for your view in blood, sweat and tears, having hauled your sorry ass up the side of a waterfall.

And then I started thinking, honestly, that French people might just be kind of wussy in their hiking. And I am ashamed to say that the line from Willy, the Scottish School Janitor on The Simpsons popped into my head: "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys."

Launa: Bill, this blog is searchable by our new French friends. We can't put that in.

Bill: I didn't come up with the line. It was created by Matt Groening. I'm just saying it popped into my head in a moment of weakness and misunderstanding. I'm creating dramatic tension.

SO, I got to the trailhead, and it was a little cooler than I had imagined, but not much. There were sheep grazing, with tinkling bells, and I thought that was pretty cool. But the trail jut seemed like a road through low foothills. I wasn't even sure if a little walk was really worth my time, but I started off, deciding that when I got bored, I would head home.

Then, after forty minutes of walking, I came over a low ridge.

And the world dropped out from under me.

I felt like the Hobbit, looking at the Misty Mountains for the first time.

(I crinkled my nose in distaste at this simile, but wrote it down anyway.)

Bill: It turns out that what I had been walking on was a plateau pitched at a fairly gradual grade at the very edge, the very lip of the end of an enormous plateau. When I suddenly reached the edge, the ground dropped straight down. About 3,000 feet straight down.

This ridge line-- this extreme ridge line -- extended for MILES in either direction. I could see pretty much every mountain range in all of southern France from where I was standing.

Launa: So is that the end?

Bill: No! You're missing the most awesome part! I considered forming a religon. Based entirely on mountain worship. Then I started taking pictures.

Launa: You took pictures of your new religon?

Bill: Well, I realized I would need materials to get converts.

I really can't compare what I saw to any other mountain experience I have ever had. It was absolutely amazing. Expletive deleted.

Launa: Better than smootching with your wife?

Bill: My mother reads this blog.

OK, back to the Religious Experience I was having. The ENTIRE amazing ridge line that I could walk on for the next 4 hours if I wanted to, was tufted with the most beautiful soft blonde stubble of grass. I think I took about 1,000 pictures of it. You should put them on your blog. It looked like the little patch of grassland that is protected by a bored park ranger on the top of Algonquin. Except it extended 10 miles in either direction.

I had to lay down on the top of one of the many summits of this ridgeline and mediate for at least half an hour on the Worthiness of Mountains and the puny scale of humans in relation to them. But I ended my meditation with a panic attack when I thought I was getting altitude sickness. But it turned out fine. I think I was just falling asleep.

Launa: So here's my takeaway: the whole driving, and not having to climb the mountain part leaves you with a lot more time for religious experiences and lying down. What was the coolest part? The blonde grass?

Bill: You know, after all my complaining about driving rather than hiking, it turned out also that the road was also one of the coolest things about this hike. Literally four feet from the edge of the abyss was a two track road of sorts, with no guard rails. The road itself was amazing. Terrifying in parts, but amazing. I kept wondering what would happen if I met somebody else who was driving in the other direction.

Then I discovered, on my return hike, who used this road. The shepherd.

He has a white Renault van with a high top, and the way he shepherds is to drive all over the ridge with three dogs in the back. When he sees the sheep, he lets the dogs out and gives directions from inside the car.

Launa: Oh, so he's the one who let the dogs out. I'll tell the sports fans back home.

Bill: As I was walking back from my little bout of altitude anxiety, he stopped and talked to me, maybe because we were the only two people up there. He drove up in the white Reunault and asked if I were French. This is never my first question to people in the White Mountains.

Launa: Why would you think they were French?

Bill: Ha Ha. When I said I wasn't French, but that I understood him, he said, "I have lost my sheep and don't know where to find it."

I said, I can tell you that it was not on the Sommet de L'Homme, as I was up there for a long time and didn't see it. He was upset by this. The dogs started barking madly and he started swearing in French. Apparently there had been a report of a dead sheep. And part of being a shepherd is cleaning up the carcasses.

When I got back to my car, I saw just that, a dead sheep right by the trailhead. I wondered if I should just throw it in the trunk and bring it home to throw in the freezer, but then I saw the Renault zipping around and flagged down the Shepherd. I helped him with the dead sheep. Then I came home.

Launa: Please tell me that you actually know that you can't just eat dead animals that you find out in nature.

Bill: Really? Well then, good thing I saw the shepherd first. You should also put in that I got back right on time for the lasagne party.

Launa: Yup. Duly noted.

Bill: I still think it was too bad we weren't serving lamb.

Sommet de L'Homme

What Are You So Afraid Of? (or, Four Itineraries)

On Monday, I will drive myself to a train station, along roads I know, to a small city I’ve visited before.  This is Aups to Paris, itinerary #1: just the facts.  I will pick up a ticket I have reserved in advance, I will sit on a train for three hours, get off in another city I have visited several times, then take a cab to meet up with one of my oldest friends in a neighborhood where I have stayed before.  No big whoop.

But I could describe Monday’s trip in another way, Aups to Paris, itinerary #2: independent woman on a voyage of romance and luxury. In this version, I will drive my sleek new European car to the ancient town of Aix-en-Provence, then take one of the world’s fastest trains first class to Paris. (Yeah, that’s Paris, FRANCE.  That Paris.  The only city in the world that New Yorkers like better than New York.)  On board the train I will drink café au lait and read a David Foster Wallace novel when I am not enjoying a government-issued 20-minute reverie.  I will dress all in black with a stylish drapey sweater, and will not smile unnecessarily.  I’ll alight from the train and take a cab to a beautiful rented apartment in the Marais, then have dinner with one of my oldest and dearest friends and her charming family. Did I mention Tuesday’s incredible lunch reservation at Guy Savoy?  Pinch me, somebody, wouldja?

Written thus, the trip sounds romantic and luxurious and oh-my-god is this my real-life???!!  Even the most sophisticated travelers of the world don’t take Aix, Paris, the TGV or the Marais entirely lightly.  Even Eloise was simply loves Paris.

But here’s the truth, the awful truth about Monday.  This will be my first solo jaunt in Europe, aside from a few trips to Casino and the Intermarché.  Since I won’t have my family there to distract me, I’m actually borderline terrified.

So far, the four of us have acted as a little bubble as we have navigated the challenges we have set before ourselves.  Bill and I serve as a tag team to conquer the little parts of the world we visit, and we can rely on each other to turn to when things get confusing.  (We can also rely on each other to have someone to blame when we need to, but that’s another story.  In our family, when the going gets tough, the tough get unreasonably petulant.)

We also have the girls to hold us back enough so that we never do anything actually that challenging or particularly dangerous.  Even if your pair of children travel as well as ours do, travel with kids just isn’t about living close to the edge.  For example, you are less likely to find yourself in a seedy karaoke bar at 4 A.M. when you have kids to care for.  You have to keep everybody hydrated, and think about getting to bed on time, and make sure that you all eat regular meals.  Since you have to keep them out of trouble, you stay out of trouble.  Kids are ballast:  they slow you down, but they also keep you away from unnecessary forms of risk, however you personally define that.

As you might have divined by spending five or ten minutes with me, I tend to define risk rather broadly.  Which means that the real trip I am going to take will be neither the straightforward sally I described first, nor the romantic and fancy occasion I described second. 

Rather, it’s likely to be Aups to Paris itinerary #3: awfully worrisome for no good reason.  I’ve already worried that my bag will be too heavy and I will take too much stuff (I always do.)  Then I worry that I will get there and have only the wrong clothes, and will look neither chic nor sophisticated.  My drapey black sweater will have schmutz on it, and I will only notice when I’m halfway there.  I will panic at the tollbooth on the A8, worried that I don’t have the right change, even though I now know the exact amount of that toll, and have also been reassured that they take credit cards.   I will get to the station way too early, worried that I won’t find parking/be able to buy the ticket I reserved/find the right train.  When I find that I absolutely have to ask somebody something, I will worry over the right words.

When I am finally on the train, I will settle into my seat and worry about who is going to sit next to me.  Then I will self-consciously compose my face into that cheerlessly sophisticated new stare that I have mastered (the one that requires that I suck in my cheeks ever so slightly and make my eyes go limp and bored.)  When the train starts moving faster than a normal train, I will worry about that.  A lot.  I am of course choosing to take the Train Grand Vitesse – train of great speed – so that I get to Paris in four hours rather than eight, but the fact that I chose this fate will not prevent me from my mighty second thoughts when we work up to 200 miles per hour.  My stomach will lurch and I won’t be able to read, so I will feign a reverie. 

I’ll want to get a beverage, but before I let myself go, I will worry about how to find the café au lait car, and worry about leaving my bag in my seat.  The W.C. won’t work the way I’m used to, and they might be out of paper towels and then I will wipe my hands on my skirt and then worry about the skirt being all wet.  The whole trip on the train, I will worry about finding a cab.  While the cab is driving me to the apartment, I will be afraid that the driver is going to hit another car, or possibly kidnap me. 

It won’t be until I’m actually at the door of the apartment that I will be proud of myself and exhilarated by my achievement of successful solo travel.

But really, Launa, achievement?  This is when I must remind myself that some people take real risks when they travel.  Some people camel-trek through the Sahara, or smoke hookahs on the Orient express, or learn to ask for the W.C. in a land full of people who speak only in clicks. When they take a year off, Southern France just won’t do.  They go someplace like Cambodia or Somalia and teach people to dig latrines. 

Then again, some people never even really leave the familiar at all.  They stay in their paths, won’t try out a new idea or a new food or say hello to anyone who moved to town after they were born. 

If you line all of us upon a continuum, from the agorophobics to the astronauts, we all can think of somebody more adventurous and foolish and somebody else more steady and stodgy.

Bill likes to say that Abigail and I live “on a knife’s edge.”  We have powerful desires for stability and control, and equally powerful desires for novelty and stimulation. Getting the balance just right is hard, since there are times when we want to be cozy and crazy at the very same time.   To put it another way, I don’t always need the other three members of my family to pull me in different directions – sometimes I can make myself nuts all by my lonesome.

Or perhaps I can call myself lucky, in that I can get the thrill of the new so easily and that I occasionally still put myself in situations where I can let myself scramble and learn and feel.

When I first arrived here in France, everything felt so new.  The sky was an entirely new sort of blue.  The little snails that hung on to the grasses were new and endlessly fascinating.  I hadn’t ever seen the moon like I saw my way through that first cycle of wax and wane in Sillans-la-Cascade in late August.  Even the shopping carts were different, with the little slot that allowed you to essentially rent one for a euro, and then get the Euro back as a reward for being a responsible cart-returning member of the supermarket society.

So much of that newness was exciting, but because I am me, so much of it was just scary.  Asking for the W.C.:  scary.  Figuring out how to use the tollbooth:  scary.  First day of hunting season:  very, very scary.   Even though I was travelling with a trusty partner and lots of child-ballast, I could work up to low-level panic over a little stroll to buy baguettes.

So I am the kind of person who can work up a rush of fear and then the release of exhilaration over a shopping cart or a dining table faux-pas or possibly making a mistake at the butcher’s.  Perhaps this sort of intense and baseless fear is really my own personal brand of crazy.  I should patent it.

But I have to say that my fear of harmless things has made for a month and a half of really great living.  The anxiety somehow took everything simple to a new level, helping me to really pay attention to my surroundings in a new way.  But without the actual reality of dengue fever or camel-inflicted injuries.  Nothing like a little unreasonable fear to motivate you to learn something new and to put you face to face with the simple things of the world exactly as they are.

UPDATE: Dateline October 2^nd, 2009, 10:05 a..m.

Lest you think I’m totally exaggerating my own spazziness, I will tell you that even as I was writing this post, I made my own worst travel fears come true.  In my efforts to be a sophisticated traveler by using the French website for purchasing TGV tickets, I managed to buy a ticket on a TGV that is actually speeding to Paris at 400 km/hour right now, while I sit here in Aups going zero km per hour as usual.  I put in the right date on my first time through the website, but then backed up a screen to pick a better seat, and the computer forgot I was talking about lundi rather than vendredi.   So maybe I’ll just worry through today’s imaginary trip (I did, after all, buy a ticket, so I have a right to my sixty euros worth of anxiety this morning.)  Maybe that will meant that by Monday, when I actually board the train, (Aups to Paris itinerary #4) I might actually relax and enjoy the ride.  

Ten Things for the Tenth Month

It's October.  In response to another post I just read, and in honor of the start of the tenth month, here are ten true things about this year in France:

1. For me, it’s just mostly about being with my family and out of a city; anything French is either a bonus (amazing food) or just a minor pain (There aren't yoga studios on every corner.)

2. I didn’t get the combination of courage and timing to buy the meat at the real butcher’s until today.  The butcher was totally sweet, and I got housemade merguez and chicken.

3. Even though Bill and I aren’t working, the four of us still have tantrums.  I just have a whole lot fewer than I used to.  Girls are at the same rate as always, but I have a lot more patience to offer in helping them to cool down.  

4. The weather is so much more unbelievable than I had expected, with full sun streaming in the windows at least six days a week.  I will probably get pretty bummed out when this changes.

5. I love writing every single day as much as I love breathing, which may be why my posts are a very un-bloggish length.  They are so long that Bill gets bored reading them and has to be cajoled into doing so.

6. I am resigned to making very little progress on the French, now that I am survival level and can buy sausages and chicken without undue embarrassment.

7. The first sound that I hear in the morning is the bell in the town square ringing seven times.  Then the trickle of water spilling out of the pool into the stone trough underneath.  I like this way better than garbage trucks and guys screaming “Yo, Andre!” on 1^st street back home.

8. On Monday I will take my very first independent trip in Europe, TGV to Paris.  I’m sort of terrified – and not just that I will bring the wrong clothing.

9. I miss my friends precisely as much as I love being focused just on the four of us.  But I actually am in much better touch with my whole extended family.  Who knew?

10. I have no clear idea when we are leaving, or what comes next in our lives.

 

Some blogs I have been reading that you might enjoy: 

A Year of Kir (My friend Jessica, living in Paris for the year)

French for Awhile  (another little American family who have displaced themselves; just found this yesterday)

My Life's Journey (my old friend Gail's soul musings and photos)

So Many Exciting Things  (Toni always brings me back home) 

A Design So Vast (Lindsay's life unfolding itself with grace and w(h)it)