We´re Off To The Land Of Pottery And Strange Ice Cream

Monument to the priest Miguel Hidalgo who started the movement for the independence of Mexico

 The next blog entries after this one will come to you from our favorite place in Mexico.

Dolores Hidalgo, billed as the "birthplace of Mexican independence", is a quaint town of about 40,000 people, although it seems far smaller. Set between its more famous brethren cities, San Miguel de Allende, a mecca for American and European ex-expatriates, and Guanajuato, a city declared an historical site by the UNESCO and home to the world renowned cultural festival, the Cervantino, Dolores seems to have been left behind not only in the scramble for tourism dollars, but also in the mad rush toward "progress". Of course, all of the above suits me just fine.

We discovered this colorful town a couple of years ago when we decided to spend a few weeks touring central Mexico. Claudette had never been across the pond and she wanted to see for herself the many cities, towns, and natural wonders I had been describing in our conversations--you know, those rambles through nostalgia one embarks on when far away from what was once Home.

 So, a few years ago, we decided to do a road trip through central Mexico as a sort of exploratory venture in order to find a place where we might stay for a longer period of time. Claudette's request, on the later point, was that we find a small town that would give her a taste of what the "real" Mexico was like; she had no desire to stay in any of the well-known resorts and beach towns, or in any of the major cities. I traced out a route that would give her a sampling of small and large towns.

I had thought that perhaps among the smaller villages south of Puebla we might find something that would appeal to her. I also included a city such as Querétaro that, although it is large and prosperous with commerce and industry, it is still a very charming place and very liveable as large cities go.

Finally, I thought that she should see San Miguel de Allende, where a large ex-expatriate community lives in "authentic Mexican" splendor. From there, we could also explore the surrounding area which is known for its quaint and colorful towns: Guanajuato, Pástzcuaro, and Dolores Hidalgo, among others.

We arrived in Mexico City and stayed with my friend Armando and his wife Kim. I have known Armando for many years and he and his charming wife were a boon for us. Like true Mexicans, they were generous in their hospitality and very helpful in their advice and ideas.

The first surprise for Claudette was how charming and interesting Mexico City can be. She had the idea of a crowded, bustling, dangerous place. Instead, she found the neighborhood where our friends live to be peaceful and friendly, with a lovely park near-by and every service and convenience at hand.

She was amazed at the cleanliness and efficiency of the Mexico City Metro and delighted when we went to the "historical center" where on a Sunday the Alameda is filled with every kind of street vendor you can think of and the Zocalo, the main square, and the surrounding streets are like a country fair.

We stayed a week with our friends, then we left on our road trip. As one more of their many gracious gestures, our friends lent us a car so we could avoid the cost and hassle of renting one.

Our first stop was Puebla, a bustling metropolis of nearly two million people, known for its great food, unique tiles and crafts, and religious fervor. We stayed in a very traditional hotel in center city; it was very colorful with a center patio open to the sky and lots of flowers and leather covered chairs in its open corridors. The only annoying thing was that we had to keep our room door open so that the WiFi network would work and we could keep abreast of our email--and indispensable thing for us when we are on the road.

Like many cities and towns of central Mexico, center city in Puebla is a mixture of the old and the new.We found a whole market dedicated to computer products, software, and computer repairs. It came in handy when Claudette's computer went on the blink.

But, just a few blocks away, the Museum of Arts and Crafts was closed for "repairs"; a lone guard was sitting on a pile of crates. He informed us (or rather didn't inform us) that he knew not what sort of repairs were being done to the museum, when those repairs would be finished, or if the museum was likely to open in our lifetime.

"Its been closed for several years," he said. He knew exactly how long because he had been coming there to "watch over" the place for six and a half years. What he watched over I do not know because the museum was just a shell of a building with nothing inside but dust and piles of bricks.

Walking through the busy shopping area of downtown Puebla means having to wade through a cacophony of of music, vendors shouting, cars and trucks noisily vying for space in the crowded streets, and street vendors loudly hawking their wares.

It seems that every store has a huge loud speaker at its door blaring music. The young sales girls sway and sing to the music and the customers have to shout their questions at them.

We visited a few of the many churches, looked at the tile covered historical buildings, went to a couple of the wonderful restaurants the city has to offer, and then we went south looking for a quieter place to stay.

The towns to the south of Puebla are small, very beautiful, have perfect weather, but much to our dismay, are rather lacking in services--mainly Internet connectivity. We found this strange, believe it or not, because Mexico is one of the most wired countries on this planet. I have gone to some really out of the way places and have never failed to find at least an Internet café. I think that the lack of young people is these towns is the reason connectivity has been slow in reaching them. Most of the young in these towns go to large cities looking for jobs so their home towns become ghost towns where only the old remain.

Nevertheless, we were delighted and amused at the little towns and villages that we found. One had a huge pine tree growing through the roof of it church, another had a wooden kiosk, painted in bright colors and designed in the Russian style with elaborate carved wooden posts.

We left Puebla and headed toward Querétaro. On the way we went through a couple of cities (Pachuca, most notably) but Claudette was not taken with any of them. Outside Pachuca, though, we did stop at a place where a man was grilling chickens over mesquite wood. We has a marvelous meal there.

We stopped in Querétaro and found a very nice hotel mid-town. As soon as we were settled, off we went to explore the city.

Center city Querétaro is beautiful with its handsome cathedral all lit up and the arcades surrounding the large plaza very lively with outdoor restaurants and cafés.

The next day we took a tour on the tramway with car wheels that weaves through the narrow streets of the old town and winds up on the highest part of town which has a magnificent view of the city and of the famed aqueduct.

Nice as it was, Claudette pronounced Querétaro too big for her taste.

We finally reached San Miguel de Allende. This city too has been pronounced by the UNESCO as a patrimony of humanity. It is really nice, perhaps TOO nice. It clearly caters to the tourist trade and the many galleries, craft shops and so on, are expensive.

So, after a repairing round of cocktails, we pushed on to Dolores. We immediately loved it. We stayed at a hotel called "Casa Mía", a rustic but nevertheless interesting place that the owner has enhanced by buying up the doors and windows of old houses and installing them in the rooms of the hotel.

We liked Dolores so much that the following year we returned. At first we stayed in a house where out of town students were boarding. Our room was--how shall I put it---eclectic. It was a large bedroom, one side of which it was all windows that opened into a large balcony. But the bathroom was the unique feature of the place. It had a jacuzzi the size of a pool. It had been set up so high, that we had to literally climb into the thing to take a shower.

Luckily, we went into a hat shop where I wanted to buy a hat. Every man in town was wearing one (the land around Dolores is a farming and cattle growing region), so I waned one. The owner of the hat shop was a very friendly man (as are most of the people of the town). We asked him if he knew anyone who might rent us rooms in center ville.

He said he would consult with a "lady" that he knew might be agreeable to renting us rooms. Said lady turned out to be his wife.

Our landlord is head of a very traditionally Mexican family. They even have a chapel in the house where the family prays in the early morning before starting their day.

But the place was perfect. We had a separate apartment, with its own kitchen and a nice garden. It is just a few blocks from the main plaza. It is just perfectly situated. And from there, we went on to explore Dolores.

More on that in my next blog.

Permanent Amazement

French man amazed that the weather lady has announced snow on the Pyrenees

For all intents and purposes, winter has started in our region. Although we live in the warmest corner of France, nights have been a couple of degrees below zero and the days rainy and cold.

Now if I were living in a sub-Saharan country, a tropical Pacific island located somewhere south of Tahiti, or in the steamy jungles of southern Mexico, this kind of weather would be really unusual, but since we live near the Pyrenees, and these mountains are usually covered in snow during the winter, cold, wet weather is far from being strange in the area. It is even less so in the eastern part of France adjacent to the Alps where people find a snowmobile a more apt vehicle in the winter months than a car.

Typical autumn day in the Alps

Nevertheless, when the weather lady announces snow here in France, the news hounds go out in force to interview the amazed population. What? Snow? In the mountains? The item is treated as if snowflakes had been seen falling from the sky in Timbuktu.

Qu'est-ce que c'est ce truc blanc? 

Tuareg wondering what that white stuff is...

But this phenomena, that is, being astounded by something that happens every year like clock-work, is not reserved only for snow. Rain, wind, an unusual dry spell, or any other manifestation of the weather is treated as if this country had never seen anything other than spring like weather. As soon as a few drops of rain fall, out go the news crews to interview the ladies who have had to do the unbearable, that is, get the umbrella out of the closet and put on a raincoat.

Not only the French but modern society seems to have evolved into a bunch of wimps and complainers of just about anything. Farmers go on strike because the government won't give them aid under harsh drought conditions; then it rains, and farmers complain that the government wont' give them aid to cope with harsh wet conditions.

There was a guy on television the other day complaining of police harassment because he had been taken into custody after he had been stopped for going 160 kilometers per hour in a 90 kilometer per hour zone. Now, this was not the first time this roadrunner had been stopped for speeding: it was the TWELFTH time. AND he had already lost all of the points of his driver's license, for--guess what? SPEEDING! Yet, there he was on television, being given air time by some dunderhead with a microphone and a camera, so he could complain about police harassment.

I remember visiting the little village where my grandfather lived the first thirty years of his life. It was, by any modern standards, very simple and almost crude. He was 19 years old and his bride 17 when they built their two room house out of limestone slabs because there were no trees in the desert like land where the village was. They had children, raised crops, tended cattle and goats, and went about the daily business of making a living from the land with no government aid, and no subsidies from the state. Grandfather then built a plaza for the village, with the aid of the other men in the town, a school where he taught the children to read and write, and managed to run a general store so people could buy the basic necessities of life. He and the other men of the village braved the rushing waters of a near-by river to build a bridge that was still standing when I visited the village 60 years after the bridge had been built.

Throughout the 14 years of my life that I had the privilege of living with my grandfather before he died, I never heard him ONCE say he had had a hard life. In fact, he was one of the most serene, good-natured persons I have ever known.

The other day, I went to a store, which is a few blocks away, to buy bread. It was a nice summer afternoon, so I walked. When I got to the store, there was a man bitterly complaining to the store manager that the small parking lot of the store was full so he had to park half a block away.

The poor store manager listened to the old coot for fifteen minutes and the man was still talking and complaining when I went up to the cash register to pay for my bread. Unfortunately for him, he spoke with an accent that told me he was English. So, I said,

Me: Are you handicapped?

The man: (surprised at my question) No!

Me: Are you ill? Do you suffer from pain on your feet or legs?

The man: (getting annoyed at my questions) No, why?

Me: Think about this: your belly is so huge you probably can't see your shoes, your mouth rattles on so much you are probably wasting more energy than your car. Mister, you should be glad that there was no room in the parking lot because that half-block walk, and your prattling probably burned enough lard from your gut to give you another few days of life.

The man said something about me minding my own business but the store manager smiled and didn't charge me for the bread.

I don't like complainers. There are too many important things to worry about in life without worrying the small stuff, too.

A Change To My Biography

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
               ― J. D. Salinger "The Catcher in the Rye"

Change came to our house in the form of a hairy little beast.  It wasn't our choice. Claudette's son was going on a trip and he asked us to take care of his cat for a week. She has been here more than a year.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if WE have adopted IT or IT has adopted US! Whatever has happened, the routines of life have changed with her arrival.

Firstly, let me say that Lea, for that is the princess', name, is not an ordinary cat. Her long and varied life in animal shelters, and different houses have given her quirky, often bizarre habits. She gives new meaning to the phrase "jumpy as a cat" and is so shy with strangers that when we have visitors she will disappear for hours or until all those strange to our house have gone. She has a new litter box with the most up to date, scientifically proven, especially designed gravel and sand material--but, she refuses to use it and would rather go to the garden, even in the most cold, rainy days, and do her "business" there.

She has decided to eat just one type of food and Claudette, who seems to think that cats are like French people, and that they love variety and luxurious gourmet food, has brought her stuff made by the fanciest cat-food brands in the market--all of which Lea has proceeded to vomit as soon as she eats them. So, much to Claudette's chagrin, Lea will eat ONLY one type of dry, pellet-like cat food.

But, all of these little, strange habits are tolerable and I write them up to the legendary finickiness of cat as a species. Where things begin to get nasty is when she decides where SHE wants to take her naps, which are frequent and long.

It all started out fine when Lea first arrived. She was content to sleep on an old rug we threw down for her wherever we happened to be in the house. On warm summer days, she would climb up a palm tree in the garden and lie in the sun on top of the wash house.

She even took to sleeping in the garage, on top of a pile of old blankets or outside under the table where we eat on hot, summer days or nights.

But then, came winter. Now, before I go any further, let me say that I too am a creature of habits. Among my daily routine of teas, lunches, aperitifs, writing, reading, and watching films on TV, there is one that is especially dear to my heart: my nap after lunch.

I usually take said nap in my favorite corner of the living room sofa. That is until SHE decided she liked that corner, too!

Now, I have been relegated to the other corner of the sofa because Lea will not budge when I try to sit in the place I have sat for YEARS! We usually lay out her blanket on one side of the sofa, opposite of my side. She used to sleep there but lately she has taken to sleeping on MY side.

To add insult to injury, I woke up one day, went downstairs to have my tea, went into the study to turn on my computer and WHO was on my chair? LEA!

I was taken aback! I felt like saying what Bugs Bunny said to Yosemite Sam in a cartoon: "Of course, you know that this means war!

"That means she likes you," said Claudette whose motherly instincts make her a push-over for kids and pets.

"No," I protested, "it means she wants to prove she is top dog, er, top cat around here."

As if her affront of taking over all my favorite spots was not enough, when I got up from my chair after shooing her off, my bottom was covered with cat hairs. Augh!

I tried everything: menacing to sit on her when she was on my side of the sofa--she didn't move; placing her blanket on another chair--she ignored it.

It was not a fair fight because Lea had Claudette on her side. So, we came to a compromise: I get to sit on my favorite side of the sofa to take my naps, and LEA sits on my lap!

As time went on other things changed in the house: now there is more food in the pantry for the cat than for humans; we used to just get in the car and go when on vacation, now we have to think about care for Lea; now that we plan to go to Mexico for the winter, our biggest problem is not flight tickets or who is going to mind the house, but who is going to care for Lea.

The other day, thinking about these things, I said to Claudette: "We are now officially old folks with a cat! We can now form an association or club with all the little old ladies in the block who have cats and dogs!"

Back Again With A Brand New Rant

If I were a researcher in the mysteries of the human brain, I would dedicate my life's efforts to investigating (and perhaps reducing) the very selective memory of the female of the species.

I have always wondered, and many times have been miffed at, the fact that a woman can't remember where she has left the car keys, which she had in her hand a moment before, yet she can remember the look you gave a woman (whose dress was so low cut one could see her navel) several years before!

Every time my wife and I leave the house, we have to do a house-wide search for my wife's hand bag, her hat, sunglasses, the things we are taking with us (her luggage if we are going on a trip, the gift if we are going to someone's dinner party, etc). Yet, if someone mentions Madam X, my wife will rejoin, "You remember her. She was the one in the blue dress you much admired at that party five years ago!"

All of this serves as introduction to my most recent rant. My wife has helped me with my novels, not only in proofreading them, translating them into French, and generally helping to knock them into shape, but he has also given me constructive (that is, if you consider getting banged in the head constructive) criticism. Said criticism ofter develops into an argument.

Our latest disagreement (for those uncultured in the language of relationships among couples, a disagreement means you get the "ice" treatment, i. e. a glacial silence and generally being ignored, and that you have to eat frozen food or leftovers for a month) was over the name I gave one of my characters.

I will spare my three loyal readers the gory details of the spat (suffice it to mention that neighbors a block away were alarmed), but I will give you the gist of the argument: I named a character "Madame LePoint" and my wife thought that a rather uncouth (to use the polite form of the word) choice of spelling. She insisted it should be "Madame LaPoint". 

She would not hear my arguments that to change a character's name in a final draft, one has to change it in the list of characters for the proofreader to check, etc. Nor would she consent to look at a web page where it was clearly explained that the spelling of a name is up to the person that fills out the registration form at birth, and arguments of that nature. To all of these she replied as she usually does in every argument: NOT in France!

I argued that throughout history names change, deteriorate, are misspelled, and so on, therefore changing and evolving. "NOT in France!" was the answer to this and other arguments.

OK - flash forward three moths or so.

We were invited to lunch with my wife's former colleague and her husband. The conversation as well as the delicious lunch was moving right along when all of a sudden, out of the blue, like the proverbial thunderbolt, comes the question from my wife:

"What do you think, Clarisa (name changed to protect the innocent) is the proper spelling for a name: LaPoint? L-a-p-o-i-n-t or LePoint? L-EEE-p-o-i-n-t?"

Our hostess was taken aback. What did it mean, this question, and why did it pop up like a weasel out of its hole in the middle of a conversation.

"Well, I suppose..."

But, before she could answer, my wife jumped in to add, "HE says it does not matter and I say it is ridiculous to..."

"That is not true," I said, "I only argued that there is no "proper" spelling one's name and..."

Like a cinder that remains unquenched and flares up again into a roaring fire, the argument was on again.

Our host and hostess sat back and watched with amazement as we argued our old and much flogged points again.

Now back to my original question:

Why is it that something like that would remain embedded in a woman's brain, and would be as tightly held on to as a woman clenches in her fist a particularly good find in a Going-Out-Of-Business Sale?

Why can't women remember where they left the top of the jam jar but can remember a derisive word you said five years ago when she didn't understand your explanation of how the Stock Exchange works?

I have only one explanation and it can be summed up in one word: GRUDGE. For millions of years, women sat around the cave, grinding into paste the berries they picked, or whatever it is cave women did, and conversations included ruminating about how Ugh's wife had dissed the skin Mugh's wife had tanned or similar important issues. These millions of years of millions of similar squabbles developed a part of the brain where grudges are kept. In fact, it has been scientifically proven that a woman's grudge bearing part of the brain is three times as large as that of a man's! (At least that is what was stated in the very scientific magazine, General Auto Mechanics). This, of course, impinged on the growth of that part of the brain called the "Practicalis Olvidatus" or something like that, that stores practical information.

Hence, a woman can't remember something as simple as the Wave Equation, but she will remember to her dying day the fact that Rosie thought her Apple Crumble was "a bit too sweet".

We men cannot change that (although I am in favor of generalizing electric shock treatment as a possible cure). So, we should be careful around such "grudge bearing" creatures and watch carefully what we say and do. Next time Madam X comes along and her generosity is bursting out of her dress, do what I do, raise your glass as if inspecting the bottom of your drink for unwanted content: the thick bottom produces a usable reflection!

Seventh Reason I Came To France

It was the weather! Where I lived, northeastern Mexico, a nice day of summer was that in which the temperature did not go over 40 degrees Celsius. You can fry an egg on top of a bald man's head during some of the days of late July or August.

Here in southern France the weather is perfect...during 30 non-consecutive days of the year. The rest of the time, the days vary: some are like the weather in the movie "The Perfect Storm", others are like another movie: Kurozawa's "Dersu Uzala" (about a peasant living in Siberia, in case you missed it).

During the ENTIRE month of April, it rained! And it rained, and it rained, and it rained. I think there was a day when the sun came out...for an hour or two.

May was what nice people here call "unsettled". I call it a mess: one day of sun followed by three days of storms; then, two days of wind blowing the leaves off of our palm trees, followed by a day of hail and rain. But then one day of sun. And so forth.

June has started off well. Cool breeze and sunny outside right now. One is tempted to go to the beach but if you sit in the shade you feel cold and if you sit in the sun you get roasted. We'd better wait until July.

Perhaps the people in northeastern Mexico wish they could have some of our cool air. I wish I could bottle it and send it to them. We've had enough "cool air" to last us for a while.

I am turning this blog into a book!

Dear Blog Readers,

Both of you might have noticed that my blog entries have been less and less frequent. Well, the reason for that is two fold: I have had (some) translation work (i. e. my day job), and I am writing a book. As of today, my posts on this blog will be extracts or perhaps partial amounts of the material I plan to include in the book. As for previous posts, I am going to revise, expand, and renew them so that I can include them in my book. The title will be the same "I Married a French Woman and Other Horror Stories", and I plan to include some illustrations drawn by your truly.

Further information regarding where and when the book will be available so one or perhaps both of you can buy it, will be forthcoming once my publisher "Untreed Reads" has put it into Ebook form.

BTW, my second detective fiction, "The Minister's Secret", featuring the fearless Guillermo Lombardo, is due to be published this month. It will be available in my publisher¿s web site www.untreedreads.com as well as in Amazon and a gazillion other outlets. (Note to reader number one: if you do buy my book, be sure to buy it from my publisher's web site because they give me more royalties than those pirates at Amazon!).

Another bit of news is that "An Inconsequential Murder" was published in Spanish last month. "Un Asesinato Inconsecuente" is also out there via the same outlets. And, I am in negotiations with a French publisher (Oh, la, la, la, la! Ces cours m'errerdent! (Those things bore me stiff-)) and will soon be published in French as well.

In conclusion, I will soon post "Le Vide Grenier" (Literally Empty Barn but loosely translated as garage sale or yard sale). It is about my experiences and impressions of the recent attempt we made to rid ourselves of some of the thousands of useless, old items we have in various rooms and the garage of the house.

Right, so stay tuned. I will soon post it.

The 8th Reason I came to France

If the two of you who read my blog have been paying attention, you will know that I am counting down the reasons I came to France.

Reason number eight (8), is because of the Peace and Quiet, and the generally Civilized Behavior. Well, quoting the great Rolling Stones, "that is all over now".

You will remember that we, live in a street that is like a retirement community. Every other house seems to be occupied by (although time and illness have made it less and less so) a little old lady living alone. The loneliness that permeates the street like a fog in and of itself would be tragic enough but it is compounded by the fact that these ladies are, by definition, old, and hence give the street that feeling!

This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing: it keeps the "Saturday Night Fever" noise down to graveyard levels, which is something I like.

But, Nature is cruel and as in any other species, age, illness, and weather take their toll. In the last two or three years, we have lost four of our deal ladies: our next door neighbor, and three just across the road from us.

To compound the sadness of this decimation, their homes have been inherited by--ugh, you guessed it--out-of-towners! Sons and daughters, foreign to our fair city, uncaring of our customs, and most appallingly, indifferent to my need for Peace and Quiet!

Lest you think me a "grouchy old man" (I am admittedly a grouchy middle-aged man, not yet qualifying as old), I will justify my grievances with ample examples of the uncivilized behavior the inheritors have demonstrated:

Firstly, are our next door neighbors: the mother of the person who inherited the house next door was a lovely woman. She liked to invite us over for an aperitif, talk about books and the ballet, and discuss the latest painting exhibition we had attended in Paris. She was as quiet as a mouse wearing slippers as she went about her daily chores: never a fuss, never a bother. Alas, one day, as we returned from vacation, we found a policeman at her doorstep. He informed us she had passed away during the night, in her sleep, as quietly as she had lived.

Then (sigh), the inheritors got it into their head, since they live in Paris, to rent out the place to other Parisians, all of which are eager to come and crowd our beaches in the summer. Also, unfortunately, we live near a golf course, one of the oldest in France, so when the house is not let out in summer it is let out during autumn, spring, and even winter to avid golfers who will play a round even in the middle of a rain storm. Of course, all of the above love to carry on at night, either telling surfing stories or lying about how great a golf round they had. All this amply "arrosé" as they say here, with beer and/or liquor.

And so it goes now. In summer we have had a succession of eclectic tenants: surfers who play guitars (badly tuned and badly played) all night and barbecued questionable meat (they said it was rabbit, I say it was cat) in the front garden so the smoke could come into our open windows; in winter it is wealthy golfers who own gigantic SUVs that crowded the street and who drink and laugh all night. As an extra added attraction, in summer we get ladies who go off every day to the near-by beach dragging behind huge beach bags on wheels that sound as if a Sherman tank were passing by. Just to make sure we hear they going by, they yell at the gaggle of kids that run ahead of them shouting and arguing.

The next change in our street came via the death of a lady who lived directly in front of us. Her inheritors promptly sold the house to a sour faced fellow who decided to remodel the place and rent it out. As a token of his neighborly charm, he proceeded to rip out the front garden of the house and replace it with a slab of concrete. The remodeling was left to workmen who in the course of redoing the walls, replacing the windows and so forth, greeted us each morning with a cloud of dust and paint particles.

We had a couple of weeks of peace and quiet...until the next lady died. Her sons decided they were going to remodel the house (which is just two houses over from the lady described above), and they have been at it for months. I mean, this is a BIG remodeling job with workers there all day, using heavy equipment, and the street full of lorries, and huge dump trucks. The noise and dust is unbearable.

I amuse myself by fighting with the foreman, a sneaky fellow who refuses to be responsible for anything that happens. (I had a running argument with him about the scratches that some truck made to our car. The workers were very amused that I called him an irresponsible jackass and used all of the insulting words in French that I know to tell him off.)

The problem is that everyone in the country loves the south of France. That is not a surprise since we have lovely beaches, great weather, and beautiful country side. Not to mention the closeness of Spain!

I remember that when I came to France to look for a place to live, I stayed in Brittany, in western France, with a friend and his wife. Their house was nowhere near the popular seaside places or historical towns, such as Quimper. It was in Upper Brittany, where the woods are thick and stories of witches, goblins, and elves abound. Not the Romans, or the Germans, or anyone else has been able to dominate these descendants of Celts. And, modern life has not done much better either! Hence, the countryside is (sparsely) populated by hard working farmers and artist. These folks keep much to themselves. So, at night the quiet and the dark are impressive. If you like peace and quiet, that is the place to be.

(Sigh!) But, since we do not live in Brittany, we will have to grin and bear it until the work is done on all the houses, and some sort of peace returns to our street, that is, until the summer crowd arrives. But, this year we will get ours back: we plan to rent the house out to the Parisians, and leave town. We plan to enjoy a better sort of noise, or I should say sounds: Jazz in Marciac!

Of Socks and Bad Memory

I hope my three or four readers will forgive my lapses in posting but I have been quite busy writing a novel. I will post some of it here one of these days. But in the mean time, here is my rant about lost socks.

What is it with women and socks? They can't seem to get along, as pairs anyway. I have a box full of unmatched socks. If there is ever a fashion trend where men wear different colored socks on each foot, I am ready.

Since I was tired of wearing pairs of socks of almost matching colors (gray and somewhat gray, dark blue and black, and so on), we decided to stock up on socks when we were in Paris.

Up into the swirling commercial maelstrom of La Defense we went, and into a clothing store that had hundreds of socks (of my size, too!) for sale. We bought three packages of three pairs of socks each.

"That should last me the year," I said optimistically,

"At least the winter," said my wife ominously.

Back home, I proudly filled my socks hamper with my new pairs and rid myself of the unmatched fellows which I marched into the trash bin as if they were prisoners condemned to the firing squad.

Soon there was an occasion for me to wear formal shoes (most of the time I wander around the house in a pair of clogs), and in celebration of my newly acquired hosiery, I donned a fresh pair of dark blue socks to match my jeans.

Another occasion came up, a lunch at a friend's house, and again I whipped out a spanking new pair of dark brown socks to match my pants.

Having no further engagements, I reverted back to my clogs and entrusted my two pairs of sock to the wash bin.

A couple of days later, I was quietly reading in bed, waiting peacefully for Mr. Sandman to come and sprinkle its magic on me so I could have my afternoon siesta, when into the room came my wife bearing (Oh, horror of horrors!) two unmatched socks: a brown one and a dark blue one.

"Now it starts," exclaimed she showing me the unpaired hosiery.

"Oh, no it doesn't," I said springing out of bed like a la fireman upon hearing the alarm bell.

"Where are you going?" she asked, as if it were a mystery what my intentions were upon seeing the sadness of the uncoupled socks.

"I will not let this stand! It is an outrage that upon the first wash these socks should already have lost their partner. I will find the other socks even if I have to take your washing machine, your dryer and your washroom apart!"

Off I went to the washroom to inspect the suspect machinery. I looked in the washing machine: nothing! I looked in the dryer: nothing! I inspected every bit of the washroom's floor, the clothes line, the table, the baskets: nothing!Remembering I had once found a lonely sock cowering under the garden bench, I retraced my steps from the washroom to the house, inspecting bushes, pathway, the garden bench, the rose bush, the outside clothes line: nothing! It was a mystery where the two missing socks could have gone.

Frustrated and fuming I went back into the house.

"I can't believe it. I simply cannot believe it!"

"What can't you believe, dear?" asked my nonplussed wife.

"Those socks have been out of my possession for less than a week and already they are unmatched. How can that happen?"

"Oh, don't worry about them. They'll show up," she said.

She spoke about the socks as if they were wayward dogs or cats that had fled the house and wandered out into the street.

"There is nothing for it," I threatened, "I am going back to my scheme of not putting socks into the bin to be washed and putting them into a bag in my closet to be washed by hand by me under close supervision and if necessary, armed guard."

"Tu exagére," she said. "Look, these things happen."

"I know they happen. The problem is in this house they happen too often!"

"But, you have plenty of socks. Why do you worry?"

"I worry because I will soon have plenty of socks...that do not match!"

"Look, I have three pairs of gloves, rather, three gloves from different pairs, and I do not worry about it."

"Well, perhaps we can go about with unmatched socks and gloves and we can start a trend. Maybe we can go to a store and ask for one each of a pair of socks and thus ask for a 50% discount."

And on and on it went. I will not keep you, dear reader, in suspense and tell you that days later one of the socks appeared. It was ragged and shriveled and looked like one of those fellows that have been on a multiple day drinking binge. Perhaps it had. Jerry Seinfeld had a routine in which he said that perhaps socks conspired with each other to "break out" of a washer or dryer much like convicts break out of prison. Not my socks. I think mine just wander off for no apparent reason.

Anyway, all of the above is to explain a strange phenomena I have observed not only in our household but in other households as well. I call it the "Let's Loose As Many Objects As We Can In One Day Syndrome"; not a very scientific name but very descriptive of the symptoms.

Now, before any of you of my three readers start calling me a chauvinist pig or misogynist or some such, let me say that my reasoning is supported scientifically, especially by a recent book with a spectacularly long title: "Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life".

The authors, one Sandra Aamodt and a man with an unfortunate name, Sam Wang, tell us something we already know (that the brains of men and women are different) and a lot of funny stuff that we suspected but did not know if it had any scientific basis.

This is not a book review so I will just comment on the thing I have been ranting about: why women constantly loose the car keys, their bag, their glasses, pens, earrings, and many other things, AMONG THEM MY SOCKS!

It seems that women have very poor short term memory (Dear, where is my mobile phone?) and very good long-term memory (The woman: "Augh! That's the woman you were flirting with at the wedding reception for Joe and Janet!" The man: "What? Joe and Janet got married ten years ago!").

While men are the opposite: we have great short term memory (that's why we can put back together the car exhaust manifold in reverse order of how we took it apart) and very poor long term memory (that is why we can never remember anniversaries, birthdays, or other dates for that matter).

Women store things in memory based on sentiment, men store things based on facts. To me, this clearly explains why I have a drawer full of unmatched socks. My wife throws things in the washer and dryer and forgets to double check for pairs of socks because she can't be bothered to remember what it is she put in the machines in the first place. AND, she certainly has no emotional attachment to my socks, at least not as much as I do.

Perhaps if I ask her to darn our initials on my socks she will become fond of them and will not let them go astray. Although I would look rather silly and pretentious with monogrammed socks.

The Ninth Reason I Came To France

After a long hiatus due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays, and a visit to my son in Madrid, I am back in the saddle again, to mix an old metaphor, and ready to continue my countdown to the reasons I came to France.

Right, so, reason number 9: The Patrimony.

The French are very proud of what they call “Le Patrimoine” and what we in the New World would call “a mountain of old rocks”.

Now, I don't mean this to sound disparaging. The fact of the matter is that those old stones are piled together in very interesting ways: castles, public buildings, churches, uh, castles, bridges, and, uh, castles.

Here in southern France, you can find more old castles than new buildings, and they are amply supplemented by old mansions, and even old private homes.

It seems that every Thomas, Richard, et Herold (Tom, Dick, and Harry to the rest of us) who had a “titre de noblesse” found it compulsory to build a castle, and everyone who came into wealth, be it by his or her wits or, most commonly, by inheritance, found it necessary to build a HUGE house of 50 rooms of which only 10 were lived in.

All of these wealthy people and nobles rapidly found they could not keep up the maintenance of their follies, so they gave them up to the state. This is how the French came to own so much patrimony.

Of course, the state—notably cities such as Paris—have found that said piles of rocks can be turned into gold by the machinery of tourism. The french quickly discovered that people who have much less patrimony in their own countries, or who have a different kind of patrimony, love to come here and take pictures of french patrimony. Witness the mobs of the latest “nouveaux riches” of the world, the Chinese, who come to take photos of everything that even hints at being old: buildings, paintings, people. It's as if they have forgotten they have their own pile of old stones, the Great Wall. Or maybe they have tired of taking pictures of that.

In our neck of the woods, we have oodles of patrimony, mainly of the graceless castle and huge mansion variety. My wife has dragged me to two notable examples of each: the Chateau d'Uturbie,

and the house (if you can call it that) where Edmond Rostand lived, he of Cyrano de Bergerac fame.

The first is an old castle owned by the same family since the 14th Century, according to the slick website of the place.

http://www.chateaudurtubie.fr/urtubie/

It has had to suffer the indignity of hundreds of tourist tramping through its wooden floors as well as it being decked out with a pool and other “fun facilities” so that people can stay there and say they have stayed in a castle rather than in an old run-down hotel. Most of these old places are turned into reception halls for weddings and for business men to pretend to have meetings but who are really there to get drunk and have a good time.

We visited the castle on a summer day and we tramped through it following the woman who is a descendant of the family but who does not live there. She is smart enough to live in Biarritz in a comfortable apartment with all the modern facilities.

The mansion where Edmond Rostand lived has also followed suit. Although he made a pile of money from the play that depicted the long-nosed cavalier, he did not make enough to allow his heirs to keep up the place.

We dutifully tramped through those wooden staircases and teak-wood floors, my wife wondering what it must have been like to live in such a marvelous house and I wondering how in the hell they had kept the place warm in winter—answer: they didn't. The house was eventually “donated” to the city and is kept up by (you guessed it) paid visits by tourist and renting it out as a hotel and meeting place.

France, like the rest of Europe, has days when it celebrates its Patrimony, but even as the Minister of Culture admits, it is a hard sale: “Patrimoine : le mot renvoie vers l'immobilité apparente, l'hiératisme des vieilles pierres.” (Patrimony: the word refers to the apparent immobility, the hieratic of old stones.) In other words, when they talk about patrimony, what comes to mind is old stones: my feeling exactly.

The problem is, Patrimony is a good thing but when there is too much of it, it can become a problem. The French government has been quietly dumping some of the old castles and buildings mainly by selling them off to hotel chains. There is just so many old buildings you can turn into governmental offices. Just think of the cost of putting in central heating! Not to mention building maintenance.

But, if castles and old mansions are a problem, so is the patrimony on the other end of the scale: private houses. Here in France, few new houses are built. Most people live in homes that are passed on from generation to generation. Refurbished and repurposed but they are still old and frail.

The house we live in, for example, is 150 years old. The wooden timbers that make up the roof structure were being eaten into sawdust by wood worms. The town has a department that helps you economically to care for such buildings. They subsidised the treatment and reflooring of the upper stage of the house. Across the street, the children of an old lady inherited their mother's house. Instead of knocking it down and building something new (which is what would have happened in the US or in Mexico), they have gutted the inside to modernize it, but have kept the shell of the house they remember living in as kids. There is something to be said for keeping the traces of tradition and the memory of what was, but one wonders if everything and everyone should do it.

Anyway, that sense of history and love of the traditional is one reason one comes to France. If you come here, be sure to take plenty of pictures because with this crisis who know how much longer things will be around.