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.