The Chain Gang or Digging for Dummies

Being a writer is harder than most people can imagine. And, I don't mean putting up with hundreds of rejections from agents and publishers, or the "horror" of the blank page (or screen), or the many things one has to learn about structure, form, character development, and so on, and never mind the hundreds of kibitzers and advice columnist who try to give you or sell you advice on how to write "something that will sell".

No, the most difficult part is convincing those close to you, i.e. your wife, that not everything you write is biographical; in other words, that what you write is not a copy of your life and that much of it is fiction, and that what you have told her about your life is true and not fiction. Am I making sense?

Perhaps an example will help you, dear reader, to understand what I mean.

When "we" decided to have a vegetable garden, I told the Growing Vegetables in Abundance Committee (my wife and her sister) that clearing those parts of the plot that had been alloted to us would be a difficult job.

"That land," I said, "has been fallow for a long time so the weeds and grass have put roots into the ground so deep that..."

"Ah, but we will 'elp you clear it," said my sister-in-law.

"Well, thank you, but it really is a tougher job than you think because when I cleared a piece of land in Mexico for gardening, I found you had to go really deep into the ground to..."

"But, here in France it is different," rebutted my wife.

"Weeds and grass are the same the world over; they..."

"And, anyway," she continued, "you have no experience gardening. You said so yourself."

"When did I say that?"

"You wrote it in a story, the one about Brittany."

"No! Wait a minute: that was not me. That is a character and he is bumbler and when he tries to help his friend in the garden he is a disaster, but that does not mean that I am..."

"But, of course its you, darling. He talks like you and looks like you."

"Looks like me?"

"I mean, the way you describe him; it is you!"

"Oh, I give up," I said throwing up my hands in a theatrical display of exasperation.

"So, don't worry about it," she assured me, "we will clear the plot and it will be ready for planting tomorrow."

Sure enough: the next day I went to the vegetable garden and found my wife and her sister sitting gingerly on the ground, as if on a picnic, using a little hand rake to "prettify" the soil.

"You see?" she exclaimed in triumph, "ready for you to plant."

Even from a distance I could see that they had only cut the grass leaves and weed stems. The ugly parts of those undestructible plants could still be seen staring up through the soil like the eyes of a half-buried corpse.

Saying nothing, I went to Monsieur Fournier's shed and grabbed a spade. Trampling over the ground my wife had nicely furrowed, I buried the spade deep into the sandy ground and turned over the soil.

"What are you doing?" asked my wife, alarmed. "You are ruining my work."

"Look," I said pointing to a huge tangle of grass and roots, "that is what has to be cleared, not just the surface things. If you leave those roots, they will shoot up among your planted stuff in no time. These vicious weeds will have your little bean plants for lunch."

"Tu exagére, comme toujours," she said and went away in a huff.

If you have seen the movie "Cool-Hand Luke", you will remember the scene when Paul Newman's character is made to dig a hole and then put the dirt back in during a whole day as punishment. Well, he had it easy.

I took bushels of roots, underground grass, rocks, and assorted nests of maggots, grubs, ants, and strange nodules that look like alien babies waiting to grow up and take over the planet.

As I dug and cleared, Monsieur Fournier would come around from time to time to ask, "Ca va?"

"Oh, yeah, boss, its OK," I said but I really felt like saying, "Thank you for letting me clear your land and allowing me to pay for the privilege." The man was a character straight out of Marcel Pagnol: the wily peasant who tricks the city guy not only into doing the peasant's work but also into paying for it.

After having cleared the plot-from-Hell, I planted some tomato seedlings and five squash plants. I fertilized and watered them and went home. I took a bath and sat down in the back garden to have a beer. I was exhausted.

"Ah, there you are," said my wife cheerfully.

"Yes, here I am--what's left of me."

"You are tired?" she asked in the tone of unbelief one uses to address a person who has just gotten up from taking a nap.

"I am exhausted."

"Yes, but it is the good kind of tired, no? The kind of tired one gets after having done a good job."

"There is no good kind of tired," I said testily. "That is hype invented by hucksters to get yuppies to go to gyms and pay for the right to get sweaty and tired when they could do the same thing for free by running in the streets."

"Oh, but listen: your work can't have been that hard. My sister and I had done most of the clearing before you came."

It was a good think I had left the spade in Jean de Florette's (i.e. Monsieur Fournier) shed. I abstined from any comment and downed another beer.

The next day came the crisis.

When we arrived at the garden and the female section of the Horn of Plenty Club saw my handy work, a furious argument started between my wife and her sister. When the storm had somewhat subsided. I asked my wife,

"What was all that about?"

"My sister is upset that you have taken up all the cleared ground with your plants."

I was flabbergasted. "She is wha..she said what? She is upset why?"

"You have taken up all the ground we cleared."

"You cleared? YOU cleared? Look, you scratched the surface and played around like a couple of kids in a sand box. I used the spade and the pickax for four hours to get roots the size and width of tree trunks out of the ground. Besides, this is just around nine square meters there are another 60 square meters, by my reckoning, to be cleared and used."

"Yes, but she had cleared this part. She does not like that part over there because it gets too little sun."

"Too little? If you will kindly turn around you will see that that part of the garden is in full sunlight."

"Yes, but in the late afternoon, the hedge makes it in shadow."

"Well, of course! And at night it will be made to be in the dark," I said contaminated by her strange sentence construction. "But, the point is..."

"That reminds me," she said cutting me off, "Monsieur Fournier asked me when you were going to cut the hedge."

"What? When I am going to cut what? If I am hearing right and not delusional, I think you are asking me when I am going to cut this kilometer long hedge."

"That is right. Monsieur Fournier says we are responsible for the hedge that borders our plot."

"Wait, wait, wait. Let me take you back to that day when WE decided not to pay for OUR hedge being cut, and WE decided to cut it ourselves because it was ugly and the cutting and maintaining was such a chore. Now I am expected to care for a hedge that is five times as long as ours was and to PAY for the privilege?"

"Why are you shouting? Stop shouting," she said.

"Have you noticed that he took for himself all that part of the garden that does NOT border on the hedge and WE got the parts that do?"

"Shsss! Monsieur Fournier will hear you."

"Oh, you mean Jean de Florette over there," I said gesturing toward Monsieur Fournier's house. "Well, I hope he does hear and that he understands English because it will be a cold day in Hell before I trim that anti-tank obstacle that is mistaken for a hedge."

"Augh, as usual: you are unkind, unneighborly, and uncaring. The poor man is unwell and he cannot do it himself."

"Why are you always volunteering me to help every old geezer that we come across."

I got another week of silence from my wife for that last remark. I ended up by cutting the damned hedge AND clearing up a piece of land where my sister-in-law planted a few tomato plants that soon were dry and forlorn from lack of care and watering.

Of course, I was blamed for the sad state of affairs of those plants since mine flourished and gave plentiful tomatoes while hers languished in the shade of the late afternoon.

The Garden of Delights... or is it Disputes?

Out of the darkness came, the seed catalog! This instrument of discord, this bearer of bad tidings arrived ever so innocently in the house, brought here by that N'er-do-well on a motorcycle, our local postman.

Of course, these catalogs are designed to entice and entangle; the photographs of luscious tomatoes, and bright green lettuce subtly suggest that if you just pop some of their wonder seeds into the ground, pour water over them once in a while, you will see equally delicious legumes sprouting out of the ground in no time. Then, you can buy one of their cute baskets ("Oh, c'est mignon!" said my wife when she saw one) and you can fill said basket until it looks like the proverbial horn of plenty.

"Oh, we must have a "potager" this summer!"

"What is that?" I asked fearing the worst.

"A vegetable garden, a vegetable garden, don't you know!" She always repeats things because she believes I have the same capacity of understanding and lack of concentration of a ten year old, like the ones she tried to badger into learning English when she was a teacher.

"Well, I suppose we could put in a couple of tomato plants in the back of our garden, and..."

"No, no, no! I mean a proper "potager" with room enough for beans, and tomatoes, and onions, and..."

"Wait, whoa there! Have you any idea how much work that involves? We've already a lot of things on our plate, what with the translating work, and fixing things around the house, and..."

"But, it will be good for you. You need the exercise."

"I need the exercise? I can't get you to walk a few blocks to the beach. Your idea of a stroll is walking from the car park to the nearest café on the Chambre d'Amour."

Ignoring my every word, she continues, "And, we will invite my sister to join us."

OMG! At that moment, I knew I was doomed. There have been very few cases, in the social history of France, where two French persons have agreed on anythings; and, as far as I understand, in the history of family relationships in this country there are NO recorded cases of any sort of agreement. I could see myself involved (or rather listening to) endless discussions on whether we should plant radishes or onions.

Have you, dear reader, ever watched French television for any length of time? If you have, you have noticed that one out of every three shows has a round table format for discussing something, anything. There is usually a host or moderator who fancies himself or herself, funnier than he or she is, and the round table is peopled by a funny guy, a funny woman, a sage, a movie or singing star, a morose, badly coiffed intellectual, and someone who is anonymous, says nothing and spends the show looking as he or she is wondering what he or she is doing there. This motley assemblage argues something (it is never quite clear what it is) for hours, comes to no conclusion, makes the host or hostess laugh a lot and say "funny" things, reaches no conclusion whatever but the audience in the background applauds as if it understood what the discussion was about, and the audience at home is invited to tune in the following week for more of the same.

A smaller version of that show was enacted two days later when we held the first joint meeting of the Vegetables Growers Association of Southwest France, or so it seemed that our meeting should have been titled from the way the female contingent of this Future Farmers Club discussed our plans. Of course, I played the part of the guy who says nothing and looks as if he doesn't know what he is doing there. But, the female contingent made grandiose plans, divided up the 75 square meters the ad said were for rent, and decided what we were going to do with the bounty we would surely recollect once the fruit of our labor was ripe for collecting. Of course, all of this was planned without us ever having set foot on the ground we were to rent.

But, our plans had been hatched firmly on the belief that said amount of land was as good as ours because my wife had spotted an ad posted in our local convenience store. It offered a piece of ground to be let as a garden. The owner was a retired man and the price was 35 Euros per month.

"Thirty five Euros," I exclaimed. "We could buy a ton of vegetables for 35 Euros and we wouldn't have to do any work."

"But, it is not the same thing. These will be better, more ripe, fresher. And we will have fun!"

"No, you will have fun. I will probably end up doing all the real work," I grumbled. "When are we going to see this patch of a gardener's paradise?"

"Tomorrow. I have made an appointment with Monsieur Fournier, the owner."

In the late afternoon of the next day, our "Garden Club" visited the proposed site of our future Garden of Delights. I had to admit that the location was just right, for it was just a five minute drive from our home. It was on one of our main avenues but so far back from the street that it was quiet and peaceful. There was a small, free, public parking lot near-by, and a roundabout with our favorite press shop, a bakery, a Nicolas wine seller, and my barber was just a half block away.

The lot itself was grand. It was a whole hectare with a large house in the middle. There was a front lawn with an old, beautiful, huge pine in front and a tool shed to one side. In back there was a large section of land, sloping toward the west, bordered by a very tall hedge. There was a large piece of land that was tilled and planted and another that was not.

It seemed ideal, except for one thing: the plot that was available for renting looked like the Sahara but overgrown with weeds. I was testing the soil, or I should say sand, by poking it with a stick, when the owner came out of his house.

"Bonjour," greeted the tall, thin man whose white hair, beard, and handle-bar mustache made him look the very picture of Don Quijote.

"Bonjour," we chimed.

My wife asked him if he was Monsieur Fournier and he said he was. My wife's sister approached and introduced herself and the three started a lively conversation that would have made any passer-by think the three were old friends.

While the female contingent of the Garden Club chatted amiably with our future landlord, I poked the soil with my stick and was unsettled to see that a small cloud of chalk-like dust rose with each poke. I also tried to pull out one of the huge, star-shaped weeds that was part of the green mat that covered the plot. I had to grab it with both hands and put my whole weight (all 110 kilos of it) behind my pull to get the thing to budge. The roots gave way with a moan a nefarious subject might emit under torture. Said roots were so long they might have been sucking water from a pond in Western Australia.

I put the weed back in its place and joined the chat group just as good-byes were being exchanged. We left and as we walked back to the car I said:

"I'm glad we got to see the thing before we committed ourselves because, I am telling you, that is one piece of..."

"What do you mean 'before we committed ourselves'. I have paid Monsieur Fournier the first month's rent. The plot is ours."

"You did what? No! Have you any idea what that soil is like? You have a better chance of growing vegetables on the beach in Anglet that in the plot. And, never mind that the thing is so overgrown with weeds you'll need a bulldozer and some explosives to clear it."

"Don't worry," she said, "we will help you."

"That's what I'm afraid of," I moaned.

Tomorrow: "The Garden of Delights" continues with "The Chain Gang or Digging for Dummies"

The 400 Euro Hedge Fund

No, this is not an investment advice column nor is this a rant about the recent worldwide economic meltdown. This is about us trying to get rid of the awful hedge that "adorned" the front of the house for nearly a decade.

Sometime ago, some huckster or other, sold half of Anglet, our community, on the idea of using a plant called Eleagnus x Ebbingei (and for which I use the Latin term "crap") for creating hedges rather than the tried and true fern and other pine related plants that grow happily in our sandy soil. Well, sooner or later all of these hedges looked like dry kindle wood, and their ugly, brown leaves provided as much adornment as last year's Christmas trees.

So, a decision was made (not by me): "We must get rid of the hedge!"

Our neighbor was getting rid of some pesky bushes that had invaded half her garden so we called over the two swarthy men who were doing the cutting and digging out of the bush's roots.

The lead fellow, a guy with chest and arms so hairy he seemed to be wearing a chinchilla coat under his shirt, rubbed his chin (which could easily be used as sandpaper) and scratched his head (the only part of his body that had little hair), then hunched down to look at the trunks of the plants.

He sighed, and huffed, and puffed, and then pronounced, "Je pense que ce sera un boulot difficile." I have always found that a better translation for "difficile", when speaking to local workers, is "expensive".

My wife argued that it could not be that difficult since I had been cutting the hedge for years with just a pair of rusty clippers and the man laughed and argued back that clippers would hardly do the job on those thick trunks.

The difficulty was argued against by my wife and restated by the swarthy guy for half and hour; at the end of that time the man's final statement came down on us like the sentence from a judge known for his free use of capital punishment: "800 Euros."

"What? That is outrageous!" I yelled. The swarthy man did not understand English but he understood the red of my face and the loudness of my voice. Nevertheless, he shrugged his shoulders in a take-it-or-leave-it gesture. We left it.

After the two worthies left, my wife said, "There's nothing for it: WE will have to do it ourselves." Of course, I immediately understood that the "WE" meant me.

This was not the first time I had been "we'd" into a lousy job. Sometime ago, my wife got the idea that we should have a "potager", a vegetable garden. I will tell you in another blog entry how THAT turned out.

Anyway, my wife's idea, and I will not dispute that it was a good idea (it is not the conception of her ideas but rather the execution of them with which I have a problem) was that we would save at least 400 Euros if we went and bought the proper tools and rented something in which to carry the corpse of our hedge to its ignoble end in the local "déchetèrie", as the city dump is called.

Well, the wheels started to come off the cart, as they say, when we looked into the price of renting even the most modest vehicle during the three or four days that I estimated would take me to cut down that wall of infested shrubbery we called our hedge.

Since we were left with an unwheeled cart, the only thing we now had going for us was the donkey, i.e. me! My first plan of attack was to douse the whole thing with petrol and set fire to it but that was overruled by my wif as impractical since a wall of fire was sure to alarm the neighbors who would call the fire department, who, in turn would probably put out the fire. These "pompiers" are a nuisance sometimes.

Plan B: I would cut the thing into pieces, put said pieces in bags, and cart resulting bags to the dump. OK, that would only take a couple of months. Maybe I would be done before our guests arrived (we rent the house in summer, yet another theme for a blog entry!).

Thus it began: I cut a large branch, using my branch cutter, from the first bush. A cloud of pollen, dust, virus spores, insects, spider web, and sundry dispersible miniatures spread over the front of the house, driving away any breathable air and filling my throat and lungs with that lethal concoction.

Fifteen minutes later, after my coughing spell had ceased, and I had expelled a kilo of pollen, dust, and grime from my lungs, I surveyed the tangled mess of branches and leaves that lay before me and thought "There's no way I am going to get that tumbling tumble-weed into a bag and then into the car."

Plan C was hatched: I began to cut the branches and leave stems into smaller portions, putting them into a bag which would make it easier to transport the resulting garbage. Then the world's reigning queen of kibitzers came out of the house:

"Mais, what are you doing?"

"I am cutting the thing down into pieces so I can put the stuff into bags."

"But, it will take you forever! Just cut them so they fit into the car!"

"No, because then we will have a car full of pollen, and dirt, and virus spores, not to mention the fact that it will be impossible to see behind me through a forest of shrubs.

"But, in that case you should..."

"No, no, no," I said cutting her short, "here is the deal: you are inside, enjoying the cool of the house, sitting nice and clean before your computer while you answer email or shop for shoes; I am out here in the broiling sun, cutting the hedge-from-Hell into manageable pieces, and contemplating umpteenth trips to the déchetèrie to get rid of the stuff. So, guess who has the right to decide how this is going to be done?"

She went off pouting but she went off.

Two days later, I had cut off all of the branches and leafy stems, and had deposited them in the recycling bin at the déchetèrie. Now what was left to do was dig out the thick, huge trunks and their roots.

Not a few neighbors stopped by, leaned over the fence and seeing what was in store for me proceeded to give me advice on how to deal with the problem. Fortunately, most of the advice was given in French so I just gingerly smiled, nodded, said "oui" or "d'accord" a couple of times, and just ignored it because one, I did not understand most of what was said.; and two, I would have ignored it even if I had understood it, so all things considered, I was acting pretty much on my own recognizance.

Pick ax and iron bar in hand, I managed to pry the damned trunks loose but now the roots held them in place. I went inside the house and announced, "I need an ax!"

My wife looked at me with alarm and surprise, probably thinking that sunstroke was the instigator of my demand and maybe wondering if she was not the intended victim.

"Why do you want that?"

"I need to chop off the roots," I said with some desperation.

Off we went to Castorama, where they have everything you can think of, except what you are looking for at the time. No axes. We tried a regular hardware store and there we found what I wanted: a real hand ax. Not the wimpy kind boy scouts use to chop kindling but the robust kind with which you could fell an ox if you hit it square between the horns; and the way I was feeling, I could have done so, had an ox got in my way as we drove back home.

I chopped and pick-axed and manhandled the trunks and roots out of the ground and into the boot of the car. A half dozen trips to the déchetèrie later, I sat down, exhausted and thirsty, and downed a couple of liters of lemonade.

My wife came out of the house, looked at the ground cleared of all the hedge and said, "Ah, now if you just level the soil I can plant some flowers."

It was a good thing my arms were too tired to lift up the ax.

Sunday is Market Day, or why mud encrusted carrots taste so good

Ah, Sunday! Church bells ringing softly in the distance, the song of birds unsullied by the usual hustle and bustle of a workday. But, the morning's quiet is soon broken by the whir and rumble of motor cars as our neighbors rush off to "The Market".

Most towns and villages in France have a designated "market day" when traveling stores and local producers (in theory) bring their products to us poor, underprivileged town folk who make do, the rest of the week, with what is offered in the giant supermarket chains and the local price gougers otherwise known as "convenience stores".

If you live in a small town or village, market day is pretty close to what is once was, that is, under a creaking assemblage of roof planks and wooden columns erected in the Thirteenth Century and optimistically called "Les Halles", local farmers bring unskinned dead rabbits, trussed up chickens with some feathers still clinging to their carcass, a potent brand of firewater brewed by a man with hooded eyes and a perpetually red nose, vegetables and fruits from people's gardens, and are joined there, of course, by the ubiquitous traveling shops, those amazing vans that transform from a rolling vehicle into a shop with awning, glass counter, and all in a matter of minutes.

But, since we don't live in Hicksville-sur-whatever, and our community is plagued with middle class and upper middle class snobs who go to market wearing designer clothes and sunglasses, and toting grocery bags and baskets bought at the Louis Vuitton store in Paris, our "traditional French market" offers shoes made in Spain, delicacies from Morocco, Indian food, and all sorts of cheap goods from China.

Ah, but the butchers and cheese vendors are from France, non? Well, I think they are although the cheese guy keeps addressing my wife as "signora" and his Saint-Nectaire cheese tastes suspiciously like Gouda.

But, the stars of the show are the vegetable and fruit vendors. Nowadays, everything is labeled "bio", which apparently means that the dirt is left on the produce and the prices are doubled. But, our yuppie and snobbish neighbors love this stuff. To them, buying "bio" is buying the salt of the Earth and from the look of the mud encrusted carrots, that is exactly what they are buying: earth.

So, off we go around eleven o'clock, optimistically thinking that the crowd would have thinned by that hour only to find that most people have indeed done their shopping but have stayed to enjoy half a dozen oysters and a plastic cup of thin white wine (for the price of a three course meal anywhere else) at the fish monger's stall.

We drive around for half and hour, cruising the near-by streets looking for a place to park. When we find one we rush to the market because by that time some stalls are starting to close down. So, we throw dirt covered vegetables, dusty fruit, a morsel of fake Saint-Nectaire, and some Moroccan pastry into our sack, and we head for the stand that sells roasted chicken.

What is left at that hour is a "free range chicken", which means that the bird was so old it died of heart disease and cholesterol-choked arteries since chickens hardly ever get triple-bypass surgery. We take the forlorn roasted oldster home with us only to find that ranging free has given the chicken muscles like hemp rope, and that it tastes like cardboard soaked in chicken fat. I end up boiling the thing to make it edible.

But, the fun starts when I empty our sack of garden variety soil that has some vegetables and fruit among it. My first impulse is to dump the whole mess into the kitchen sink in order to wash off the dirt and grime. But, ignorant of the ways of preserving the taste of French legumes, I am stopped dead on my tracks by my wife's voice:

"What are you doing?"

"I, I, am going to wash the things we bought," I stammer.

"No, no, no; WE in France never wash the vegetables!"

I am taken aback by the royal "we" she has thrown at me. She makes it sound like "défense de lavage de légumes" was a royal decree by Louis the Umpteenth or somebody.

"But, the things will rot if we don't wash them," I say defensively.

"Not at all," she assures me.

"Why would you not want to wash them? There is all kinds of bacteria in the soil. I can almost hear the mother bacteria saying, 'Á table' to the bacteria kids."

"If you wash them they loose their flavor."

"Yeah, their flavor of dirt."

"Vegetables must be left like that. Everybody knows that."

"Everybody in France, maybe; the rest of the world thinks that getting rid of dirt where cows might have pooped or insects laid eggs is a good idea."

"Tu exagères," she pooh-poohs. "Put them in the frigo; you will see."

I did indeed see: in two days the tomatoes looked like stewed prunes and the you could tie knots with the celery sticks. I won't even mention what the limp carrots looked like.

"Good God! " I said in my best I-am-alarmed voice. "Have you seen what the gooey mess the vegetables have become?"

"There is something wrong with the frigo," she says.

"What? There's nothing wrong with the refrigerator. No, I am talking about the produce we bought last Sunday. It is rotting!"

"I think the vegetables spoiled because the frigo is not right."

"The frigo is perfect. Look the stuff in the freezer: sold as a rock. Look at the milk, the soup from last October, the left-overs from last Christmas' dinner; they are in perfect condition. But the damned vegetables look like compost."

"I think you should adjust the temperature of the produce drawers. That is the problem."

At that point, I give up. I thought of suggesting that we "adjust" the temperature of the produce drawers to that of water's boiling point but sarcasm never seems to work in our arguments.

Tomorrow: The 400 Euro Hedge Fund

About that French bread...

The reader should understand that when I rant about anything, I am not targeting any individual in particular but rather that heterogeneous mob of eccentric designers, stubborn fools, magnificent cooks, patient queue-ers, riotous strikers, lackadaisical workers, obsessed teachers, avant garde philosophers, extravagant artist, sexual miscreants, nude bathers, belligerent patriots, prideful peasants, inspired clothes designers, clever technologist, prolific writers, incessant talkers, and just plain all-around pains in the derrière collectively known as "The French".

But this diverse assemblage of inheritors of Roman order and Gaulist misdemeanor, rather than put me off living here makes it far more interesting than I could have imagined, for there seems to be in the French character as much capacity for deep, intellectual contemplation as there is for irrational behavior. It makes for interesting conversations as well as diversity in the eight o'clock news.

And, if that was not enough to justify my living here, there is the land itself. I love its tree-lined country roads, its châteaux rising up midst the grape vines, the aromas that waft from the charcuteries, the little side streets in Paris with used-book shops, and the yacht-choked marinas of Nice and Cannes, the quiet charm of the many country villages, and the fact that no matter how small the town you can always find a press shop to buy a newspaper and a café in which to read it. I love the fields in summer covered with sunflowers and white with snow in winter. The towns of the Pyrenees and Alps that come alive for a few months in the coldest part of the year and the beach side towns that do the same when the hot winds of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic finally arrive.

I love the fact that people are so proud of their towns and villages that they find something about them to celebrate and flaunt. It could be as simple as garlic or it could be as sophisticated as Jazz or Graphic Arts but every village and town seems to have a festival at one time or another.

This brings me neatly to today's subject: bread. May the 16th is St. Honores Day, the patron saint of bakers or boulangers, as they are known here. It marks the start of the "Fete du Pain" a week long celebration of the art of making bread.

Most people that come to France for short stays go away repeating the well-worn praises of French bread. And well they should because there is a lot to praise. But, when you have been around this country you come to realize that there is more to bread making here, than putting out fluffy croissants and crusty baguettes.

This country that is now called France has been cobbled together from dozens of fife domes, duke domes, kingdoms, and what have you, each with different customs, languages, traditions, and food, a fact that applies especially to bread.

The stuff they eat in the north is different from what is considered good bread in the south, or east, or west. But one things is certain: you won't catch a true French person eating at dinner the wimpy stuff tourists consider "French bread".

It is no surprise that people in France do not have the bad teeth so common to residents of the UK, and the reason, I believe is the bread they eat. Not for a true French person is that despicable "baguette ordinaire" but rather an aromatic sponge, covered with brown leather lovingly called, "pain de champagne", or country bread.

Centuries of eating this perfect substitute for a mill stone have weeded out those genes incapable of producing teeth that can bite the head off of a nail. Those marvelous choppers you see in a 90 year old woman are white, in spite of the strong coffee and smoking, just as the teeth of a beaver are kept in prime condition from biting into all that wood.

But, this affection that the French have for patent-leather bread crust has given us two other marvelous institutions: the pocket knife and dunking.

Anyone familiar with French farm life or French movies has witnessed the following scene: the farmer comes in from a hard day of milking cows, tilling fields, and drinking wine, and he sits down at the rough, wooden table to have dinner. The wife takes a pot the size of a small bathtub from the fireplace and places it on the table. In the pot there is the entire produce of a small vegetable garden and one or two lambs. The farmer spies a brown mound at the center of the table, he grabs it and places the thing under his arm (go give it more flavor and to hold it steady) and the takes out a "pocket" knife the size of his forearm and open a blade that would scare a Spanish gypsy into abandoning a knife fight.

With his shiny blade he cuts a slice comparable to a surfboard and puts the remainder of the mound back on the table. Meanwhile, the wife has ladled enough vegetables and meat onto the farmer's plate to fill the stand he usually sets up in the town's market on Sundays. So, now he takes the surfboard and dunks the end into the steaming soup, bites off the sodden part, then proceeds to tear of chunks of the surfboard to throw into the soup to give it some body, you see.

Although the habit of cutting bread with these sabers disguised as pocket knives is now mostly confined to the countryside, dunking is not. My wife is not beyond carefully spreading butter and jam on a piece of bread and then dunking the whole thing in her coffee.

The first time I saw this spectacle, I stared, blinked, and then asked, "Why do you do that?" With impeccable French rhetorical flair she answered, "Why do I do what?"

Dunking extends way beyond the breakfast or dinner tables, too. People will dunk cookies and biscuits into wine, fruit into liquors, and, according to my wife, sugar cubes into port or cognac to give to children--in the old days, apparently it is discouraged now.

But, going back to bread: as you may know, the French eat their meals backward, that is, they have their salad and cheese after the main courses, not before as we tend to do in the Americas. And so, there is a variety of breads that accompany each dish. Small slices of baguette are toasted for the foie gras and champagne served as an appetizer, thinly sliced, yellow crusted bread with the soup and a dark thing that looks like mahogany wood served with the cheese. But, no matter what the bread served, I have to do away with the crust because to me it feels like I am chewing and old car fan belt. My wife "harumps" at this in such a way that I sense she is saying, "You'll never be French!".

Finally, I will tell you that when we were in Mexico, I showed my wife the small, fluffy breads we call "French bread".

"What are these for?" she said handling the bread as if it were a piece of useless crockery.

"Well, people have them at dinner," I said.

"Ah, bon?" she answered skeptically.

"Yes, we stuff them with anything: you know, ham, cheese, beans, or fried eggs."

"What a silly notion," she said laughing, "they are so soft they must come apart!"

I didn't know what to say to that. Perhaps she was right.

Tomorrow: why one must never wash vegetables.

The Volunteer

Synopsis: My wife volunteers me to keep a 90 year old man, who is suffering from terminal diarrhea, company while his wife recovers in a mental hospital...from the pressure of keeping her husband company!

We have a friend, you see; she is the daughter of an old man from whom I rented a "penti" (that is what they call a small bungalow or cottage in Brittany) when I spent nearly three months there some years ago. In point of fact, it was just before I met my present wife, the "French Woman" who gives title to this blog.

Anyway, while I was renting said penti I happened to mention to Mr. Kapic (obviously not his last name but changed to protect his innocence and to keep me out of legal troubles) that I would be going to Biarritz after my sojourn in Brittany.

"Ah!," he exclaimed, "I have a daughter who lives there." (I am transcribing the conversation in English as I imagine it happened because it was conducted in Mr. Kapic's excellent French and my gibberish that pretended to be that language.)

"Ah!" I replied and nodded my head as if I had understood a word he said.

"You must meet her. She speaks Spanish," he remarked and I understood that she was Spanish and wondered if Monsieur Kapic had had some sort of amorous adventure in Spain when he was young.

"Oui, oui," I replied enthusiastically while totally unaware of what it was I had agreed to.

The next two days were uneventful so I felt safe that I had not agreed to chop wood for a year or something of that nature, until one night, there was a knock on the door.

Thinking it might be Monsieur Kapic who was brining extra blankets since the night was "not fittin' for neither man nor beast", to quote W. C. Fields, I cheerfully opened the door to find a thin, blond woman, wrapped in an imitation leopard skin coat standing there.

"Buenas noches," she said in heavily accented Spanish.

"Buenas noches," I replied in equally heavily accented Spanish although I am a native Spanish speaker but this accented language thing can be very contagious.

She explained in a mixture of Spanish and French that she was Mr. Kapic's daughter and that he had explained that I was Mexican and that, as a means of alleviating my homesickness, she had brought me the music soundtrack from the movie "Frieda", which was being shown in France at the time. At least, I think that is what she said.

I thanked her for her kind gesture but did not invite her in. She said a few words which were probably something such as "I hope you enjoy it, you ungrateful jerk", and bidding me good night, she left.

I have sometimes wondered why I did not invite her into the house. I think I was tired of having to improvise conversations and guess what the other person was saying. Anyway, that was that, but when I left Brittany for Biarritz, Mr. Kapic gave me his daughter's phone number and begged me to call her when I got to Biarritz.

A few days after I had arrived in Biarritz, I told my hostess (and future wife (more on that in another blog)) the story of Mr. Kapic's daughter and of the fact that I still had her CD with me.

Claudette (probably thinking that there might be someone who might take me off her hands for a day or two) encouraged me to call her. I did and Francine, Monsieur Kapic's daughter, agreed to meet me for lunch. When she came to pick me up, I asked Claudette to come along, not because I thought it would be fun but rather because I was afraid of being stuck with speaking pidgin French-Español all afternoon.

As it turned out, I didn't have to speak at all! They found they had so much in common that they jabbered away during the entire lunch and I just sat there staring out into the near-by beach and enjoyed the waves...of bikini-clad women and girls.

To make a long story short, Francine and Claudette became such pals that Francine became a constant visitor to Claudette's house.

Fast forward to many years later: Claudette and I are married and Francine is one of our closest friends. She is a fixture in our dinner parties, she brings flowers every time she visits, she was a witness at our wedding.

Once in a while we ask her about her father and the health of her mother. She complains that they are getting old and have the usual health problems of very old people: he is 92 and her mother is 90. (I should start a blog on the longevity of the French who can't seem to manage to eat themselves to death as Americans of Mexicans manage to do.)

One day she calls and tells Claudette that Madame Kapic is in hospital with severe Alzheimer's and Monsieur Kapic is home but suffering from acute diarrhea, having had eaten some spoiled food.

"He has to wear diapers," Claudette sobs after she hangs up. "And Francine says he has no one to look after him."

"No one to look after him? He has two daughters and two sons-in-law, not to mention the estranged ex-husbands of the daughters who, according to Francine, got on famously with the old man1"

"Yes, but they are all busy and in Paris." There was an ominous pause, then she said, "I told her that you would be willing to go to Brittany and take charge of him."

"You did what?" I yelled jumping so high out of my chair that I nearly hit the roof.

"I told her that you were willing to go up there and take care of him."

"But, but," I blurted, "are you insane? What in the world made you think I am qualified to take care of an old man with terminal diarrhea? And, more to the point, what in the world made you think that, even in my most delusional moments, I would WANT to take care of him?"

"Augh! You are so ungrateful. After all he did for you!"

"Did for me? He was my landlord! He rented me a ramshackle little house at an exorbitant price! 400 Euros a week! That is like some apartments in Paris, for God's sake."

"You said you were very happy there!"

"I was happy, happy and cold because he charged me extra for the heating!"

"Well, at any rate, it is settled--even if you are so heartless!"

"No, no, no, no, not settled. There is no settled! You have to get me on a plane, train, or car to get me to Brittany, and I refuse to board any of the above! You will have to hog-tie me and ship me off via Federal Express if you want to get me there."

"I am sure that Francine will not take this kindly. It is the last time I tell anyone that you are a caring person."

"Heck, don't worry about that. I am willing to put a banner in front of the house, "Unkind person living here. Do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come asking for ridiculous favors."

Claudette didn't speak to me for a week. Ah, it was bliss.

OK, so I haven't been here for a while. Well, the reason was I was writing a novel: "The Minister's Secret" if you must know. It will soon be published as an ebook by Untreed Reads.

Now for the subject at hand: my having married a French woman.

Why is that a problem? It is not! It is just that every day I find myself mystified by the goings on in that woman's mind. I sometime sit and wonder: "How could anyone reach such a confused and utterly unfounded decision?"

I wonder if the French brain is not wired backwards because they seem to find first order logic incomprehensible.

Here is an example. I call it "The Six Hour Visit".

Ok, so me and my wife are sitting at home, watching the 13:00 news (notice I use 24 hour clocks like all Europeans). The doorbell rings. It is an old chum of hers. I will call her Ivonne.

Ivonne used to be beautiful, even sexy. But, now she is a fat, nervous, man-hating, tub of white flesh that on a given day, and some beers in my belly I might still find "doable".

But, that is not the problem. The problem with Ivonne is that every time she comes over she goes into a diatribe of six hours, drinks a gallon or two of tea and stays for half a day, during which she recounts the latest episodes of her life, her loves, her dreams, and her ailments, especially thrilling was a very detailed description of her massage therapy which bordered on illicit sex.

I have to scurry away to my studio, put on earplugs, and try to concentrate on my writing, but to no avail because through it all, through windows, concrete, and thick wooden doors comes the voice of Ivonne, droning, incessant, unrelenting, crying, scolding, nagging, cursing, condemning, wishing the world would end so she could be put out of her misery.

After she finally leaves, I come back into the house, feeling as if I am walking into one of those bombed-out buildings where a suicide bomber has blown himself up.

"My God," I say, "I thought she would never leave."

"Me, too," says my wife, but she sounds as if she really doesn't mean it.

"How can you stand it?" I say. "It must be a nightmare for you."

"Yes, it is."

"So, why don't you do something about it? Cut her off some way."

"It is terrible."

"Can you not just tell her you have something to do? You know, say you have an appointment with the doctor or something?"

"Oh, it was terrible. I suffer."

"Yes, that is what I mean. Don't you get angry, you know, and wish she would leave. Just be honest and tell her so."

"Ah, it was insufferable."

"Yes, we have established that. I am talking about doing something about it."

"I could not stand it one more minute."

At this point, I get the idea that my wife is agreeing with me in order to disagree with me. She agrees the thing was terrible. But, that's it!

"Listen, stop agreeing with me! I want you to do something about it.!

"So, you would like me to disagree with you? If I do so then I won't do anything about it."

Now I am really confused. She is not being clever. This is how her French mind works. It is turned around.

"Stop agreeing with me but agree with me that you have to do something about it."

"Yes, it is terrible," she repeats.

"Stop saying that!!" I scream.

"What? You don't think it is terrible? You should have to listen to her for six hours."

"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Just say that you will do something about it!"

"Why are you shouting? You are getting to be like her."

"Augh" , I scream and pull a tuft of hair from my head.

"Hmph!" she says and walks away.

The next day she is dressing up, putting on her best dress, and jewelry.

"Where are you going?"

"I am going to Ivonne's house for tea."

"But, but, but..."

"Well, you can't expect her to come here after all the shouting you did and the way you talked about her..."

At that point I scurry away to my studio and drink that last half of the bottle of 10 year old Scotch I had been saving for a rainy day.