POD in France

Nick in Time

2012-02-07T23:12:00.000+01:00

It all happened so fast, one moment I knew what the plan was and the next it was all entirely different. I was feeling healthy, ready to finish this project and move in and start that chapter, but paff! In the blink of an eye I'd chewed up my hand.

Now a month has passed, and I'm nervous about the eventual utility of one of my most for-granted tools, in time I imagine I will forget the incident, save for a new level of safety deep set into my bones, but I fear a long road between that day and this one, and I will forever have several nasty reminders of that January day in Bordeaux France.

I have three fingers free and two bandaged, one with a brosse, a temporary pin, sticking out of the end of my naked ring finger, and it's wanting wear. My middle finger to its right has a healing ligament not quite ready for prime time. The pain is now a dull one which I can easily forget about. As the surviving nerves seek new connections there are occasional sparks of pain which depart as quickly as they arrive, but they do announce themselves upon arrival!

It's the nick in time that weighs on me now, impossibly, a month has passed, I feel like I have made only one meal in those days, painted one door (with one hand) and washed my hair only once! None of that is true, but it feels like that. I have been reading too much, and thinking too much, taking too much time.... I am ready for action and waiting for my left hand to catch up! There has been an odd nick in time, where has it gone? Four fucking weeks!?

I was so angry then, the first minutes passed where all I could do was curse my fate, mad at my measure of stupidity. I must have been doing something wrong, but what? it scarily confounds me to this day. I have worked on that type of machine for 30 years! I was mad as hell, I thought I had just destroyed several fingers, luck is a lady and its not as bad as I feared then, what I remember is a lot of swearing, no pain somehow, the body is amazing, then fear! I thought I was alone, I thought I might bleed out, the phone in my pocket needed two hands to operate, with no Siri to call, I did not know what to do. Then I remembered my guardian neighbors, and then the paramedics were there. With my hand in theirs, I could call my unflapable wife and release all my earthly responsibilities onto her. After a 20 minute tour over all the bumps Bordeaux has to offer, and 20 minutes waiting for the emergency room to accept me (it was probably only 5), I started to get shaky and cold and medicated, in that order. I was in a hospital which miraculously specialized exclusively in traumatic hand injuries!

I don't recall the moment of the accident, nor a few of the drug obscurred moments that followed, but some of the other bookmarks are there and seem impossibly long ago! Is this the mental dopamine affect ? Is there some time-warppind anti-boredom enzyme that compresses the time following a trauma? If you told me I was going to sit on this couch for 28 days, read 5 books, watch 4 movies, and take naps half the days, I'd say no, in fact I did say no, I said I'd give it two weeks and be back at it. So is convalescence becoming laziness?, or was this injury so serious?? I think the truth is I was overly optimistic.... becoming realistic.... next stop pessimistic. I must be careful here, avoid the pink elephants, get well soon and put this behind me.

I have spent a few hours over the last week in my chantier, our next home, and between the tools left where they fell, the splatters on the new sheetrock behind the saw, and the shear volume of the remaining work, it was a physically chilling tableau. I need to get lost in my work again, too much reflection is bad for anything other than a mirror. I have a week of one handed work, so time to move onto it, the left hand might just get bored and regenerate faster!

What have i learned? Work slower, wear protection, watch more movies!?

Link to knight with circular saw,
Visit my NEXT saw here: Saw Stop

What else have I learned:
Its hard to type with 1 hand and a pinkie

Tremadol is a nice drug

I need to get help more often

I need to slow down and enjoy my days (not these days, but normal days)

Physical therapy isn't for pussies

Opposable thumbs are wonderful inventions, I'm so glad I have two!

Thumbs up

4 reasons not to do what I do...

2012-01-13T16:15:00.000+01:00

I worked hard...I achieved...I pursued a professional life as an architect.

Then I discovered the joy of making things

and then of making the things I was making

and then I “progressed” to digging the ditch

so that I could make the things I was making

from the ground up....

Perhaps its a journey to the center and now,

as I type with my remaining 6 fingers

I am wondering if it will be a round trip?

The other 4 fingers will return to something

close enough to normal. I have time.

I find great satisfaction in my independence,

my ability to do it all

but in the same way

that I might criticize an otherwise great restaurant

which has decided to “make their own bread”

Why do I sacrifice my fingers

on the self-created altar of self-sufficiency?

Or my back?

Or my health?

Perhaps with this latest insult I may evolve yet!?

Thanks

2011-11-27T22:51:00.000+01:00

Thanksgiving in France is an unknown, much like Bastille Day might be in the USA, the French have heard of it, but it’s just another Thursday, kids have school, parents work, stores are open and “black Friday” has no meaning. American expatriates typically celebrate this rare secular holiday on the following weekend, combining it with the French tradition of a Sunday meal, and we like to invite a few frenchmen just for the comic relief as we watch thier tentative turns at the various unknown dishes.

The French do step up, they embrace what is perhaps, some of the best of what America has to offer. It’s a holiday about the harvest and about food, two things very close to the average frenchman’s life. Fresh wine and seasonal vegetables, and a more direct connection to America’s historical roots than most of what we spread around the world.

Thanksgiving is one of our best export items, even if it is based on a myth about pilgrims sharing a table with indians who would have killed us off if they had known what we had in store for them! But we can revise that history and focus on the shared aspects and the fresh food, and community of the event, it may in fact have been the first thing that was as good as sliced bread!

Thanks New Yorker

It is always a challenge to set the Thanksgiving table, The turkeys are never bigger than 7 pounds, cranberries are frozen and one is lucky to find even that, pecans don’t exist as a native plant, and they compete with the french national nut, the walnut, so those are tough to source as well, but somehow America does Sweet Potatoes really well! Here there is only one version and it's closer to white than a good Jewell or Hernandez from America! Seating plans are more important too, there is never a haphazard "sit anywhere". In France there are relationships, senority, titles, hair-pulling etiquette, and faux pas , or false steps, that are somehow more important in this oldest of worlds. The forethought usually pays off, if only in hindsight to us naive Americans, as like minds are often seated together and conversations seeded in clever ways.

But we Americans in France are an adaptable, if stubborn group, especially at Thanksgiving, we decorate with autumn leaves, we share recipes, we wave flags, sing, make toasts and even dance on tables!

It's reassuring that we can somehow make new traditions in new places that rival, or at least serve to remind us of those we miss “stateside”

Time Passages

2011-10-19T23:36:00.000+02:00

We said a goodbye to Martel this week. After so many goodbyes there, this one was surprisingly poignant as we handed over keys to that life. Point Finale.

We have left behind many homes, moved onto others, re-scripted our lives down the street or over oceans, but there was a profound difference on this shift.

We bundled up our stuff, taped a few too many boxes, and said goodbye to pieces of wood and plaster more painful to leave behind than some of the friends. Certainly it was a culmination, it wasn’t really the stone sink in the powder-room, or the tile frieze in the bathroom, nor the massive beams or the stone niches, it was simply the last straw. Saying goodbye to this home was saying goodbye to those friends, saying goodbye to that town, the town which raised our only child into adolescence. These were the streets he learned to ride a bike on, here is where he learned to throw a snowball and had his first kiss. This is the town that taught me how to speak french and to cook a bourginon, and this is the life I joined 8 years ago, this is where I fell in love with a second country. This is where Oscar doubled his age and left many marks on many doorjambs.

Patricia and I supported each other as we kissed that home over to the next family, and turned our back like we’d just buried a good friend. This “serial dwelling” has a price, and it just demanded payment.

It would be sad if we weren’t doing this adventure as a team, and if the next spin wasn’t already proving to be such a rich one. Pass go, collect your deposit, splash some water on your face.

I felt the beat of my mind go

Drifting into time passages

A long way down

So we did our nomadic thing and rented a truck....I like to think that I remember each move, but never well enough to avoid the next one. This move to Bordeaux was an interesting one by nature of the altitude; 4th floor without an elevator We rented a “monte charge” (lift load) which for a pile of euros, does the heavy lifting. Its really just a large ladder with a mechanized sled that carried all of our Frenchly possessions UP and the accumulated piles of renovation debris DOWN. This took an impossible task and made it simply difficult. It was a solid days work for us with our team of local friends. 3 tons of debris came down and then to the dump. 15 cubic yards! But now I have a clear project site and I can restart with something of a clean canvas.

The years run too short and the days too fast

Theres the team, plus Patricia with the camera

It is hard to imagine that we are in our ninth year here in France, after tricking ourselves into a 5 year adventure, it just keeps getting better. The years have flown by like the cartoon calendar in the wind. There have been slow and lonely minutes, but the challenges of doing life in a new place has always kept it interesting. When the pictures on our computer start to scroll through its randomized library, it seems like the fast years become a wonderfully pixilated slow motion parade of incredible days with incredible friends, I’m sure those will continue.

Hear the echoes and feel...

The new project is advancing now, there are days where I spin in circles wondering what to do next; wire a few outlets, plaster a wall, repair a window, sweep-up...repeat. The catharsis of getting rid of the 100 boxes of debris on the wall was great, but now I need to wrap up the small tasks and get back on the critical path. I will bought some antique doors today and I can soon order the plaster blocks to start building the remaining walls around them. Then the new ceilings can be built and the radiant heat installed, then the Venetian plaster, the stone refinishing, the floors, the bath and kitchen..... It’s just a puzzle of distraction.

It's just a game that you play

Old Bordelaise doors

I had a great experience today buying those doors above, I stumbled upon this small salvage yard, neat piles of stone and arched windows and spiral iron stairs that would have pleased Gustav himself! Greeted by Erik, a ferronier (blacksmith), then introduced to the purveyor of the salvage bits, Eric, and his son who I think was Daniel, but they could have been talking about me. They each had their own shipping container in different corners of the yard, each with a different personality. Anyhow, Eric had these doors and they will work splendidly once refinished and reglazed. When I came back later to pick them up and strap them onto the roof of our red Mazda, they were all eating lunch among the trees in the back of the lot and I was given a glass of wine and a piece of pipe to sit on while they wrapped up this daily ritual (cheese, baguette, pouches of tobacco, red wine and coffee), and I was part of it and somehow I felt IN my element. There was also a Natalie there who was someone’s fiancee, but I’m unclear if that person was present. She was a glass cutter/artist who is going to teach me how to cut circles for those windows. We shared our stories, complaints about french politics and support for Occupy Wall Street, which has given the french a shadow of encouragement for there allies across the pond. It just seemed so random and easy! All in service to this latest renovation.

It will become a great apartment and I think we will really enjoy living there. We have gotten used to such grandeur in Martel and here in our year of living tangentially (renting), the change will be nice, and I’m building closets everywhere, and trying to think through the details and not miss opportunities for something better. It takes a conscious effort to step back and rethink an idea, but when I do, or someone else does for me, it invariably gets better.

Well the picture is changing

This is the view of our new neighborhood

Our hope is that this new life in this new town will be an attraction to all, friends and buyers alike. That if we want to rent, sell or attract visitors, we will find it an easy effort. The real estate in France is as depressed as it is in the US, but there are always exceptions and pockets of outlyers. Bordeaux is one of those, in a moment of huge growth, while most of Europe is digging in. Its almost time to start looking for the next project

and the music's loud

I wore this vinyl out in 1978

Thanks Al

Newness

2011-10-19T23:11:00.000+02:00

Bordeaux is no longer NEW, we have been here for one year, but NEWNESS abounds!

Oscar has started his 9th year in what you call the 9th grade (here its troisieme) and here its the last year of middle school and it’s not new. He is in the senior class of this middle school, 3 classes below him and high school ahead, but its not new. When we moved to France he was the new kid in kindergarten, three years later he jumped a class and became the new kid in 6th grade, then once more into the fire, we moved him into a new school last year, so he gets this one year away from newness, this one year of familiarity, this one year of belonging.

A friends wedding in Bordeaux...that's Pat on the left

But intimacy with ones life is not imperative, change is good, and unfamiliarity breeds strength, at least that has been our recipe for these past 9 years, a near decade of change. Perhaps the years of change in Oscar’s life, our lives, is the winter wood and the years of stability, where we find it, is the summer wood. Growing tall through the seasons.

This feels like our year of becoming Bordelais, we have walked most of the streets and can usually find our ways home. We are in transition still, between one Bordeaux home and another, but its all in our own back yard, so it seems like a year of stability. We are in contract on our last Martel home. Last week we were there moving that life into a box and preparing its transport to this new life, it felt like closure. That home was great, and for the first time in 9 years we felt the sting of closure.

Its kind of like the transition from that Martel life to this Bordeaux life has taken a year, and its just sinking in, so this newness has been a gradual one, come into focus only here at the end.

Susan and 19 of her loved ones

We changed our franco-american life this year and ventured home for the summer. Bordeaux is an easier city to leave in the summer, as that’s what half of the population seems to do. In Martel, everyone arrived for the summers, and it was a hard season to miss. We spent the month of August travelling, 3 weeks in the Bay Area taking care of our home there, trying to convince the tenants that we care about them. One week in Columbia eating brisket and reconnecting with the close and extensive family there and another week beach hopping in Costa Rica to celebrate my mom’s birthday.

Oscar wanted ths Miami Beach T-bird for his own....good taste!

Our return has brought us back to the newness of france with new eyes and new perspective. Again like the winter wood, the chance to step away and return brings much of the contrast between our franco-american lives into sharper focus. The faces are different, the energy is different, but this may have as much to do with the patterns we have and return to in America, where we are sons and daughters and pieces of an entirely different puzzle. We are pieces in a large web, surrounded by friends and family which create an order. While in France, there is an order, perhaps greater of a different shade, but the daily order of our lives is one defined by ourselves, it is more what we make it and less where we fit into a more complicated society?? Our friendships in France are all new and shallow of root, exciting, as new friendships are, but compared to the handfull of friends we have had for 20 or 30 years....

#1 Progress?

2011-07-12T23:25:00.000+02:00

Whenever we start a project like this...there are the doubters...there are the enthusiasts....and there are the folks who just run and hide. Depending on the hour, and the prevailing winds I can be any and all of those!

This is the view down the cross street from #1.
The Gros Cloche is just around the bend

The work at this point is lonely and dirty, mostly removing what we don't want and cleaning the slate for what we will create. Like most old homes, this one had a warren of small rooms which we will open up and create a more open living space.

This will be the main room. I am standing in the food prep area
on a mocked up counter.

As we develop the plans for this project we have realized that we are creating a home with a grand kitchen, no living room, no dining room, but rather a grand cuisene that will include a couch and a dining room table. Just semantics? or a profound shift in the way we live?

This is the view from the "prep area". There are two windows on each side of this grand room, and on a hot day there is a nice breeze from East to West.

The home is on an interesting street, there seems to always be something to watch, and I have already lost hours to sitting in the window watching the theater below.

This is the master bedroom window, and it has the best view, long and down the cross street.

So far my days have been typically varied, rough electrical, some plumbing, lots of demolition; sometimes clean and sometimes in a cloud of centuries old dust. The begining of a project like this one often has me sitting on a box of torn out something....overwhelmed, and wondering what to do next. I often make lists so that as one task wraps up I have something to move onto without losing my hardfought inertia. Its tough when everything needs to be done, and the scheduling seems to prevent anything from happening. Soon we will move onto larger tasks as I get some new walls built.

Another coffee break?!

The building has 7 apartments and we are the top floor for most of ours. This has opened the possibility to, first climb onto the roof!, and second, to use the as yet unused attic space. The views from the roof are great, all of the ancient rooftops bouncing along under the church spires.

Bordeaux's main catherdral, Pey Berland, in the distance.

I wondered here if Pat knew what was on the other side of the chimney?

Here is where we cut out the ceiling which will become a mezzanine in Oscar's room, with access to attic storage and perhaps somehow a roof terrace, but that's unlikely.

This home is not nearly as old as Martel was. Bordeaux was a roman city way back when, and the foundations of this building start tospeak to that history, but this building in its current state dates from the 18th century. Over the centuries, in Martel, there were all sorts of modifications, arches, windows, fireplaces... Here in #1 there are few items of character like that, so we will try to hilight the ones we have.

This is the old fireplace flue. I am trying to devine a manner to reuse it for a kitchen barbecue.

A pillar in the grand room (kitchen)

The Bordeaux Stone is a lovely warm amber colored limestone, very strong in compression, but like butter in its density. In fact there is an entire new set of tools for finishing the stones, it is a stone you can almost sand smooth and you can drive a nail into it to hang a picture. Just when I was starting to understand the stones in Martel!

boxes of demolition

So far the biggest obstacle is the removal of material. I have about 8 cubic meters of plaster and brick that I need to get rid of..... I'm still working on a solution that does not include carrying boxes down 63 winding stairs to the street. And I'm hoping that I can get the new materials delivered through the window on a crane.

Master bedroom headboard

I can call this image The End. At the very farthest point in this home is the master bedroom, and the long trapezoid of a plan ends in this narrow 10 foot windowless stone wall it will make a splendid headboard and a fitting END.

Notes On A Napkin

2011-06-16T23:13:00.000+02:00

I feel like the big decisions in our lives are made for us....and its the small stuff we sweat!

We feel that we lucked into our life in Martel, and have again here in Bordeaux.

Schools,
Neighborhoods,
Restaurants and Bars.

Private terraces with noisy neighbors,
Cultural mixes,
Safety in numbers.

We keep working the numbers
Notes on a napkin
validating
rationalizing
just excuses, our game continues!

The big items in our enterprise are the varagies of the currency markets and the pastimes of the politicians, and while these affect our projects bottom lines, they recieve far less attention than the locations of the closets or the finishes on the countertops. The truly important stuff is out of our control, but the fun stuff we still get to do. We made more money on the exchange rate flux than we ever did on the improvements of the first house. We lost more money to the taxes on the third house, than the profits warranted, and the second house was a good idea until the American speculators took down the economy (it will sell eventually!).

Even still... we have entered the shell game of real estate again! Today we closed on an apartment here in Bordeaux, and we are getting excited.

It’s a nice place and a good project and in a few many months it will even be a nice home. The only regret will be moving from the ease of our apartment and the greatness of this current neighborhood. We have certainly enjoyed this year of tenancy, someone else to fix the roof leaks and someone else to pay the cable bill, but it was temporary, if one year can be called temporary. And honestly we are moving only a 10 minute walk to the other side of the centreville.

This is where we have lived this year

Our new apartment is about 850 square feet and nothing at all square. The place starts out at 25 feet and runs along past the living room/kitchen, two bedrooms and into the bathroom ending up at about ten feet, forming a trapezoid we have named Number One for its address: #1 rue des Boucheries (road of the butchers).

First look at #1
(click on it to see it bigger)

There are five large windows on the East, pulling in the morning sun and two on the West into a courtyard giving us a cross breeze. We need to renovate everything, as is our style: plumbing, electric, heat, and all the finishes. We will insulate, replace windows, expose stone walls, try to uncover some of the 18^th century, and hope to have this principally done by November.

The view from #1

The first question we asked was why? Why this one? We looked at a hundred, visited perhaps a dozen, and somehow this one, with no sewer connection, rose to the top. (The sewer has since been installed, if not yet connected).

The Recipe:

Location, price, location, character, location, scope….. which isn’t really fair, because we were only looking in the heart of the center of Bordeaux, so if we remove the constraint of location,… we are left with price, character and scope. This project had the criteria of being something we could afford while we wait for our house in Martel to sell, something that had the “Bordelaise character” that we are here for, and something which needed neither too little nor too much work to fit into this one man renovation show we put on every few years. Not to discount the group aspect of our projects. Patricia and Oscar become les vrai ouvriers, strapping on whatever tool belts the job needs. Oscar is starting to see joy in the results and Patricia is always there to take on the few tasks I refuse.

The view of #1
Our apartment is the 3rd level in this photo

Price, Character, Scope
Number One has the trifecta. It was kind of a goldilocks moment where the three criteria came together and despite the 63 limestone steps to our front door, we’ve found a winner!

The roof had been redone and the stone façade had been ravaled (renovated) to the tune of 65000 euros, and all someone else’s money (the previous owner and the condo association). There are seven units in the building, and our ownership will be about 11% of the whole. We will expose some giant beans and some giant stones, we’ll make one room as big as we can and two normal bedrooms and a big Salle de Bain.

First why Bordeaux: I am going to skip the booster club explanation of why we moved to Bordeaux, it is a great city! Here I am going to try to address the bussiness decision to move to Bordeaux, not that it was, but there is a directive we must keep in mind, if we want to keep this three ring cirque in the air, there needs to be a business plan that looses less money than the other options. This bussiness plan is what we call the Notes on a Napkin, usually a cocktail napkin, tinted with red wine, but its where we make are finest fortunate mistakes.

So why Bordeaux? While most of Europe seems to be in the grips of the same crisis that has the US by the tail, there are centers of commerce and esprit that are seemingly immune to this. Paris real estate prices flattened out for a year, but are once again inching into the stratosphere, and Bordeaux is just 2.5 hours away from Paris. Bordeaux is almost like a single Parisien arrondisement, beautiful, full of style and it feels contained. Bordeaux is emerging from a long slumber; the city is waking up to realize its own beauty and cultural wealth. As it stretches its arms everyone wants to claim it as home. Being from here is a badge of honor, those that stood by their city when it was dark and dirty are now standing proud and returning to the centerville in droves. While the city is growing fast, with housing developments in town and blanketing the perimeter, there is definite cache to living in the center, "Bordeaux meme". The center is small, and can’t grow, so there is a supply and demand quotient strongly in favor of an appartment “in town”, making this a good moment to be buying into that market.

The crossroads of our world

Why only the center of Old Bordeaux:

I have noticed a trend in the real estate offices to accentuate their in town lisitngs. There are several agencies which have taken the names J’abite en ville (I live in town), Maison de ville (Town house), Loft (loft), Urban Immo (real estate).... There is a real pride to living IN town, and there's no room for creating new units. They are building huge quantities of housing in several directions radiating out from Bordeaux, and the sales pitch is always about how its "only 20 minutes from the centre". Everyone wants to be in the center, there just isn't the stock, so we feel the market here is way more than stable.

Much of the Centerville is closed to traffic. The Mayor, Alain Juppe, has a vision of a modern substantially car-free city. It is visionary and proving a success. He has made it difficult to own a car in the center of town, expensive to park, and slow to enter and exit. The result is a town that is easy to live in, if you are resigned to a bike or your feet! In addition, Bordeaux was given Unesco protection making changes to the exterior of any building very controlled, and guarantees a protected urban environment into the future.

Map of the center of Bordeaux showing #1

Runner-ups

As we looked at real estate around the center, the appeal of an industrial space was clear. We tried to find a garage to renovate, something large and empty, but these sold in the first wave of speculation and what is on the market now is too far out of town, too expensive, and always a bit scary about what might be left IN the ground by the previous industrial tenant.

Nice space, too far out of the city

Bad space, no light, low ceiling

The appeal of a yard or terrasse. The first question: “is there a garden? even better a terrasse?" Life in Bordeaux is URBAN, there are wonderful parks, but private outdoor space is a premium and worth alot. We were priced out of this market.

On the Auction Block, lacking charm; just like everything else on this street

Nice garden, too expensive

Picking a micro neighborhood. There are sections of Bordeaux that are too pioneer still, better bets for the long term, with higher potential, but when shopping for a home as well as an investment, one must pick a neighborhood that one wants to live in NOW. We love the area we have been living in, and the next concentric circle is too dense and expensive and then the next is just right, more residential, while still having the balance of restaurants and stores and street life. Our Goldilocks moment.

Fancy, lifeless neighborhood, $$$$

Light and access; everyone wants a view of the river, and windows on two sides, and southern exposure. Most of the terrasses and yards in the center of town have no privacy as all the neighbors share the same access to light.

This one pushed the limits of "fixer upper"

Classic Bordeaux vs urban funkiness, it would be nice to have found a noble second floor appartment, with 16 foot ceilings and deep crown moulding, but those neighborhoods are not so interesting, no street life, too far to shopping and no restaurants outside the window.

One huge space, great windows, but just on one side, busy street

At #1 we can walk in a few minutes to our favorite farmers market, the antique store section of town, 2 hardware stores, the rivers edge, playgrounds, trams, good schools, great boulangeries, hip bars and wonderful restaurants! It will be a rewarding next home.....

Oh and theres a guest room with a fireplace!

Small things

2011-03-30T23:22:00.002+02:00

In-flight back to France
...
11 hours is the transition between my two worlds.
Two cultures that for the most part overlap, complementing each other in us, changing the people we are, making me wonder where it will all end up??

Oscar and I fly between two homes.
...
While in California, Seth and Stephanie had a dinner party, a normal and remarkable collection of friends which made me comfortable with their lives and perhaps a bit uncomfortable with mine, but that's a different story.

The story I want to tell started with this dinner party and an"only in Berkeley" discussion on local eating, just dinner conversation, but well informed: omnivorous dilemmas, and farmers markets. The conversation moved through Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, Michele Obama and Walmart, from organics and French traditions to eating locally. All of the above was seated at the table, well at least people who could speak to all of the above. There were very few degrees of separation seated here. The table was as culturally diverse as the Moroccan fare Seth had prepared, and the California wines were some of the best I've ever had. It was a window into the lives of others, and I felt a part of the family that I was. It was a wonderful night....

At the end of the meal, the conversation ebbed from the boutique California vineyards into French foie gras. There was as much curiosity as there was controversy over the non-PC creation of the incredible comestible, and I think we misread the crowd. Stephanie quickly opened a jar of foie and toasted the baguette and then, as if a foul smell had entered the room, everyone decided to leave (!?).
This was a moment of foodies colliding with a politically correct California zeitgeist, and a surprising turn of events. It just happened so fast, and we poor conscience-less who remained had to do to ourselves what had been done to the goose...lucky for me we were few because the jar was none too large!
But the point is not the clash, but the sweet spot; the flow of words between minds that don't exactly overlap but that come from a pretty small pond of cultural diversity. I only notice this because it's a rare part of my current life. While I can have conversations in French, and I have tumbled upon likemindedness, it still seems a rare synchronous moment that falls my way. I feel like I miss that and need that and must find that.
...
The Vines of St EmilionThese days of blogging meld together. When I started typing I was on a plane between continents, feeling the time zones flow through me, and the smooth textures of foie gras and thick wines not far from my lips. Now weeks later, I am rolling through the back yards of France between Bordeaux and Martel. I'm on my way back to work for one of the few paying jobs I have, and to polish up the little house to get it ready for the market. The view from here (a train window) has always been one of my favorites. I recall two cross country train trips in the US, one East to West and another North to South, and the unique opportunity to see into peoples lives. The trains tend to pass between two "wrong sides" with the least fortunate homes backing up to the tracks, but as I type I am passing through Bordeaux grape vines just starting to bud out! St. Emilion vines to be precise!! Much more controlled but no less interesting than the kudzu of the South and the Rockies of the West of the United States. But again to return to the point, rolling along looking into peoples lives I see activity, some neglected, some mere intentions, like a grown over stack of lumber, or a lawn mower lost in tall grass, but activity. I shouldn't complain as I roll towards tasks and lament the family that continues without me for another week in Bordeaux, but I do... complain. This is all "making hay where the sun shines".
...

idle tower building in San Francisco

Looking upon other peoples activity and stewing over my own idleness has been interesting. I feel like I am looking into a void which I have not been able to understand until now. I'm not there, but I can see it from here, I think it comes from a lack of activity. I am wired for a high level of greatly insignificant work. I need to be busy making things, not great things, but things that coalesce into great things...melting chocolate, plastering a wall, sanding wood....these are the things I need, and without this there is an empty space. So let's get busy!

We have found a new project. We are trying to buy it and if everything comes together as it should, we will own 900sf of a 300 year old stone apartment in the center of Bordeaux by June.
We have been looking for the past six months and then this property caught my eye. We are calling it St. Paul for the neighborhood it's in. It needs a kitchen and a bathroom and entirely new plumbing and electrical, but it's relatively small and having cut our teeth on rougher pastures, this one should fit in nicely. It's on the fourth floor in a fun part of town, more lively than the luxury we have grown used to in our current apartment, but when it's finished it should be great. Small things, great sums. We will make some of the walls natural stone, and the tall ceilings will get radiant heat, we'll fit in a luxury bathroom and a new idea of a kitchen. It will be small by American standards, but ample for the French, and perhaps a cinderella's slipper for us.

We are the 5 windows on the third level, there is one more level at the street with a wedding gown store in it.

...
I'm determined to make this kitchen different, to recognize it's importance in our modern culture and let it drive the design of this refurbished apartment. So far it's just an idea, and certainly we have all lived in our kitchens for years, and opened them into our dining rooms and even our living rooms. In this house the area shared by the kitchen and the living room and the dining room will be 300sf, so some poetry is going to need to happen.
...
The apartment will be closer to Oscar's school and much closer to the farmers market we like, but understand, Bordeaux is a small city. The walk from our current apartment on one side of the centre ville, to the new one on the other side of the centre ville is only ten minutes! Everything is close. Oscar thinks he is looking forward to the project as much as I am, but the truth is, I NEED this. We tried to make the investment decision on empirical data, but in the end, the largest words on the cocktail napkin looked something like "Dan needs this".
Now as the idea settles in and we start our pattern of getting excited, this all feels wonderfully familiar, the anticipation is like adrenaline for my soul, the kinks in my back working themselves out in preparation for the challenges of fourth floor work. It's my antidote, not inexpensive, but effective and better than the options.
I would include more photos, but when I first showed Patricia the photos, she said "no way", only to fall encouragingly towards the project (our new next home) when she first visited it. So I will share images and stories once I have more favorable views. But the important answer here, is YES, it does have a guest room!
...

The Bordeaux FairAt the Bordeaux fair, they zip your kid into a plastic ball and then he gets hyped running around dry in a small pool! and there is how much oxygen in there?Meanwhile, as that rolling stone sheds it's moss, we are starting to appreciate where we are. Bordeaux is waking up to the spring in the air. Oscar is in spring training with his baseball team, Le Pessac Panthers, the festivals are starting and the weekends are getting busy. I am waking up.

This is how Bordeaux makes me feel!

Great Expectations

2011-02-16T09:21:00.000+01:00

Every day starts and ends with expectations, some great, and some small, some met, some postponed, others lost forever, swept under the rug to be vacuumed up another day.

I am in California tending to our house. I start these days with lists, itemizing my hours and achievements before they arrive, quite content to defer them over to the back of the sheet and someones tomorrow. It's encouraging to cross off tasks, feeling usefull and busy, but things change, things "come-up" and expectations change. The lists are half for scheduling purposes and a larger half for remembrance sake, there are so many details to keep track of and I'm firing on only the lesser half of my cylinders (the better half having remained in France). I have scraps of paper sticking out of every pocket, by the end of the day, what with saved reciepts and pulped memories, I resemble a scarecrow with half a brain. But there are expectations to fulfill and this show must go on! My progress has been steady, and the end is in sight, but there remain a few tasks to manage before I can contemplate my return to where my heart is on this Valentines week.

Back there in quieter days, there were expectations in other forms, daily sorts of things which measure a day.... will my back be stiff when I roll out of bed? will lunch be as good as yesterday? will there be any letters to read in my inbox? will sleep be as sweet as the night before? Small things which add up to a day, the silver lining of a day, the beat. Our new life there has brought a new package of challenges and rewards, most of which we are still defining, so its still difficult to even know what our expectations are, only that the city itself has exceeded them, the rest is up to us.

This homecoming to America has been sweet, thousands of miles disappear in an embrace, time zones fall by the way-side and friendships nurtured over decades shine brightly through the fog of distance. Here the expectations run at a cross current, where you expect change, there isn't any, friendships are somehow locked in the moment you put them on the shelf. Distance perhaps makes the heart grow fonder, but it does not really change anything. I feel as the friends I share tonight are simply distilled versions of the friends I shared eight years ago, same, stronger, reinforced perhaps by the extra rings around our middles. Aging is a wonderful thing in this way, we may have had expectations in our youth, but the trajectory was set, and we grow in that direction, better and better, every year. This has been a silver lining of a surprise; I never expected my friendships to grow in my absence, but like the weeds underfoot, they have exceeded their pots, sought the soil...everything grows!

There are lessons to learn, parenting and partnering, stuff you might find in a book or hear from a friend, but lessons that need to be earned just the same.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus and adolescents are from a nearby solar system that worship an entirely different star. Oscar turned 13 this week, incredible from where I sit, which is too far away this evening, some 9 time zones removed. The expectations of a parent are perhaps the greatest of them all, until it becomes the expectations of a child. You want him to be so much more and then just enough, and then at least, and half the time he exceeds your fears and hopes and shames you with your petty concerns. We have been trying to understand the French grading system. A scale of 20 and an average of 14 and coefficients of difficulty and no curve! Oscar has moved into a much more rigorous grade at a much more rigorous school, his grades are challenging him for the first time in is life, as school starts to become more interesting and intellectual. He's reading difficult matter, and writing and needing to analyze; using his brain for more than recording, for synthisizing! Our american expectations revolve around the letters ABC&D, and while an american average is a C, a french average is a 14... not a 10!?... so we are learning the system, Oscar's learning it the hard way as he gets good grades. I think his expectations of school changed this year, from something he could do as one part of a multi-task, to something which is multi-tasking all on its own.

Our 8th Christmas re-wrote the recipe. We stayed in Europe this year, missing our annual trip to the US (although I am here/there now). The expectations that come with such an annualized event are like dye in the blood stream, you really notice the difference from christmas past and it makes you start to think of Christmas future. It makes you reflect in a George Baily sort of way, seeing the value in a moment, and one takes stock in their place in all this. We expect certain things, like carrots for the reindeer and an orange in our stocking, but we need to grow here and there and let the current take us and rewrite parts of the story as we go. In the end we were together as a family and that was enough.

We expect things of each other, the support and the criticism to keep us in the game; expectations that your partner is there to back you up and take over when you have a headache or just don't get it.... expectations that your kid will in fact wander in before dark, or at least call. The trust that you are all moving in the same direction. But perhaps it's the unexpected gestures that define the limits, or the lack thereof. The impact of the unexpected, a coffee, an assumed responsibility, cleaning the bathroom (how terrible is that?!), a note, an extra smile.

Reading between the lines....I miss my family

We have done these times apart before, they always work out, but they always seem too long. The wonderful part is the love of friends and family that I slide back into so obviously! Now that the houses are all fixed and the paint all refreshed, I can start thinking about what I'm missing, in all my homes, about what my expectations are how I can so wonderfully exceed them!

Changing time zones

2011-01-20T17:27:00.000+01:00

The world spins under my feet and I wake up somewhere old and new. I am in flux, having taken to the air to make a few visits and tend to some "defferred maintenance" on our houses in California, and each few days surround me in another set of sheets and another loving place I call home. I am today arriving in California, charged with a laundry-list of marching orders, renovations to tend to and friendships to renovate. I'm ready.

Everything feels familiar, like putting on an old shoe, formed to one's foot from the years of service, instant comfort and a receptacle for my dry socks. I have a pair of boots like this, stored on a high shelf in brother Seth's garage, there is anxiety every year that they will:
1. be there
2. fit
and 3. have enough sole to support me through the assignment.
But like my brother and his family, they do all that in style and comfort, and instantly too. A few borrowed tshirts and Seth's Carhart's (that might consider me their master by now) and I can travel light and commune at the same time.

But the familiarity runs deeper, this is a path that wanted wear and I oblige, this has been an annual migration for me with the same friendly ponds and rooftops, and there is a part of me that needs the annuality of it to maintain the imprint. I am slightly afraid that if I skipped a year my boots might not be there, but of course they would. It is just an excuse to maintain the thread that makes us Californians, Americans, Bains and McGowans.

The importance of the face time, the snuggle, the correct image of a home, the held hand, cannot be overestimated, it's priceless, and it's why we sign up for the change and the separation from those we love, to spread ourselves thinly over the homes that create us.

It's nice to be home, the one I left, the one I'm at and the one I'm flying towards.

Daniel

Pretty Faces

2011-01-02T00:02:00.000+01:00

As the year turns into another I find myself under par. I’m pretty upbeat as a rule, so under par is still OK, but it feels kind of like wearing wet socks and I’m not used to it. Wet socks are as hard to put on as they are to take off, and my solution is usually to simply wear them around for a few days and then find them dry all of a sudden...and then the sun comes out. I think it was all wrapped up in the close of a solid vacation, and the comfort of our own bed, and the search to re-establish a daily pattern.

Blogging helps, a bit of introspection and overdue synthesis.

Instead of our annual trip home to The States for Christmas, we took a cruise.

9 days on the Louis Majesty, out of Marseilles, through Morocco and Spain and finishing up in Genova, Italy. It was a very nice ship with a very mediocre itinerary.

Our port calls were too short and the weather was too cold. This temperate corner of the Mediterranean was victim to the same weather that shut down London and Paris over the holidays, before continuing onto New York and the Eastern sea board. My shorts stayed packed and every shirt I brought was layered up into my standard uniform when we ventured out, and this was Africa!?

However, the cities were wonderful to visit, Tangier and Casablanca in Morocco and then Malaga and Barcelona in Spain. The two pairs are so different, it was like an essay exam: “compare and contrast the African and European continents”. One cannot claim to have seen either continent from visiting any two cities, and those two African cities are perhaps the most european there are, but the contrast was stark. Morocco seems to have had it’s day, I shy from talking about an entire country this way, but we’re just making flash card observations here. There was fabulous architecture in every direction, and at every scale, but it was wanting a makeover. Like pretty faces, with smeared makeup. The beauty was easy to see, but the impoverished condition of the roads, sidewalks, and buildings were too obvious by their contradiction. Similarly most of it’s better half were concealed under their ħijābs, obscuring the beauty there was. Similar to to the inner beauty of the mosques and courtyards which turn a discrete or tired, face to the street, the glimpses of the pale olive skin and the happy faces flashing through the alley’s of the old towns were of a happy people.

A short sail across the Straits of Gibraltar, and the beauty was european, that is the make up was impeccable, even if the underlying facades were less sublime. Europe is clean, smooth, highly functional, mature. Morocco is dirty, contradictory, coarse, exotic, expecting. Both have pretty faces, responding to different tastes and sensibilities.

I understand I am comparing December in a Muslim nation to Christmas in the christmas light capital of europe (4,000,000 lights this year).

And I’m comparing the gargantuan Mosque Hassan II to the recently completed interior of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, so the comparison continues to be unfair, but it’s where I was and what we had on hand. It was our first view into the northern face of Africa, and it deserves a view deeper into the heart, into the deserts and plains, into the countries that don’t live in the shadow of Europe. We’ll make that a New Years resolution, not to judge a continent by it’s pretty face.

After 48 hours, we are Europeans again, or at least Americans pretending to be Europeans.

There is such beauty in Spain, the mountains and the beaches, the verdant parks and the innovative architecture. It was Christmas eve, but I think they know how to have a good time any afternoon of the week. We tried hard to absorb the local colors, eat the local foods and drink the vernacular beverages. Turron in Malaga, gelato in Genova (despite the cold), strong ristretto expresso, Basil drenched pizza, Iberian Ham, mint tea and powdered biscuits, tagines of lamb, strange sausages and bottled water everywhere.

Back home in our swiftly adopted Bordeaux, the streets continue to teem with beautiful people and familiar patterns. We are left wondering if this pace will ever slow, will the shoppers ebb? will the weather ever get bad enough to keep people home. It’s this intense level of activity and people that has dried my socks. We live at what we imagine to be the crossroads of the world, and is in fact the crossroads of Bordeaux. If you google “Bordeaux, France”, the push pin is 2 blocks from our home, but I’d argue it should be even closer.

We live mostly sheltered from these teeming masses yearning to stroll, behind a solid door, two flights of stone stairs and double glazed windows, but when we step outside, they are there, pretty faces, smiling at this moment in time, and cheering me up.

Happy New Year

Dreaming of Friends

2010-11-09T23:35:00.000+01:00

As the dawn crept into my sleep, I fought for my minutes, some dreams, and some lives are too good to wake up from!

I was at my Architecture School class reunion, 23 years in the future, today. There were name tags, there was a loved one, there were best friends, there was even an impossibly tall brunette that never really existed and her name tag proclaimed "MOM", but she wasn't. She reminded me of Number Six from Battlestar Galactica. Beautiful!

I saw future versions of forgotten people, acquaintances, with whom I have entirely lost contact, grown into their mature faces, for better, but mostly worse. I felt as if I had just come across their facebook photos, but I hadn't, I'd invented the effects of 23 years! There were friends that are still close, and faces that I know well, and such camaraderie as I am missing here and now.

We were in a professor's house, and damn, it's all slipping away as I type…. What's with dreams and that gossamer quality? For me it's as if it only ever existed in my peripheral vision, and if I turn my head to look it evaporates, like a smile from a pretty face on the train. Well…it was a nice dream anyhow, I stayed in bed willing it to continue, but the light took it away, and my brain overflowing with inaccurate translations of useless French expressions, swept it out the door, leaving only an image of a tall brunette!

Now, after a cup of coffee, it has the residual effect of making me miss my friends, they were there in the depths of my conscious for a reason, it must be time to reach out.

We are building a new network here in Bordeaux, we continue to move cautiously, but have fun as well. We have a few people we see often, but the POD has certainly refocused with this move to the city. The process certainly makes us appreciate what we don't have, what we have put into storage, and perhaps that which we have elevated from daily relationships to an elite and seldom shared level….too seldom.

Dreams are wonderful, supposedly residue from the day, and apparently a clear reflection of what's important in the mind of the dreamer. I often have such clear…brilliant…ideas that never, in fact, stand up to the light of day.

But it's a nice way to visit!

Bordeaux

2010-10-04T14:07:00.001+02:00

Photos of our apartment in Bordeaux

First it's our Living room, with a parlor off to the side and three windows and tiny balconies over the street. The picture just shows one of the doors, and hints at the primary color paint scheme of theowner.

Then we jump upstairs to the main bedroom, opening onto a private and usually quiet terrasse on the back of the house.

This is the guest room, a work in progress, currently showing a twin be, but we have queen technology!

This is Oscar's room, sort of up in the attic, but not really. Oscar has become quite an airplane fan.

At least the bathroom is white, not to mention big and bright!

This is the dining room, three shades of bright yellow!

Kitchen, tiny, but we are already making it work.

This is the terrasse

We love the terrasse, it gives us some outdoor space to BarBQ, and lots of air and light. The plants, for the most part, came with the place, as did all the furniture in the house. There was so much "personal stuff " in the house that we spent a couple of days putting things in boxes and hiding it all behind that yellow curtain in the guest room photo above. We removed all his personal photos and papers and have been enjoying the process of "consolidating his wine holdings". Some fun, but mostly overaged whites. The location is unbeatable, really so very central and yet on a quiet corner. We like it here and will try to call this home for a year or so while we look for our next investment opportunity (fixerupper),

Oscar is doing well at school, Pat's moving fast towards starting an english language tutoring business and I am waiting for clients to find me. We are happy here.

Hand Holding

2010-09-09T10:57:00.000+02:00

Hand Holding

Oscar still holds my hand.

I may be reading too much into it, or too little, but it is sublime when it happens!

We are getting acquainted with city life and all the complexity. The noises and challenges, the treasures and beauties, and the contradictions and opportunities that greet us at each bend in the streets. Sometimes you have to keep your head down, and sometimes you must remind yourself to keep your eyes up! There are enough restaurants to feed us and drain our pockets for years, there are secret parks and new views, free museums and boutiques, expensive enough to break the back of any shopper, and so many kilometers of bike paths to challenge our selles and souls. All this is currently overwhelming, as we try to reinvent ourselves for this new template. It will arrive, but for the moment there is a lot of handholding going on. This village takes a family!

View down to the street

I think it’s the thrill and challenge of the new environment that makes us (Oscar) reach out for a handhold, too much going on and not enough words to do any better than a firm grip. We spent a day in the Atlantic surf along the coast, romping in the waves and holding tight to each other. There is nothing like the force of nature to make one want to cling tight.

While in my mind Oscar is a young man at 12 years old, the pounding surf brought out the kid in both of us, and once I coaxed him into too big waves, we discovered the warmth of holding a hand in the cold water as the swells lifted us off our feet and upside down. We held tight, providing reassurance, but at one point a seventh wave stripped the grip and as I waited to find UP and resurface, 12 years and too many movies flashed in front of my closed eyes, but then 2 meters away there was a tumbled Oscar, tired of the waves, but not traumatized by the brief separation like his dad.

Dining room to living room

It was me who led him into the waves of the real world, and somehow my job was to get him through the currents and back to shore, at least this time. I wanted him to push himself into the bigger waves and the rewards of the risk, but I was scared with the depth between the swells. Joy, pleasure, pain and a salty residue. Life is a smorgasbord, and in this moment Bordeaux is our buffet, and we can share it while holding hands.

View from the balcony

Patricia is my handhold. She continues to let me grow while supporting me always. In speaking French it is easy for one partner to become the speaker, and the other to become the dumb and dumber. I try not to succumb to the temptation of Patricia’s better language skills and she gives me room to try and to progress, however slowly. It’s important that, while holding my hand, she let’s me make all the necessary mistakes!

I watched a couple of Martel neighbors last month, walking quietly, holding hands, and it seemed so important. I found out later they had been walking to dinner to celebrate their 30^th wedding anniversary, and they seemed to be so comfortable in the handholding, it struck me. Holding hands seems a quiet statement, both hands are complicit, it takes two. People who aren’t happy with each other don’t hold hands! It’s like whistling, people who aren’t happy, don’t whistle!

So I take Oscar’s desire to stroll through the big scary streets of Bordeaux, holding his dad’s hand, as a tacit desire not to be separated, and somehow a statement of affection and trust. I write about it here to immortalize it, because I’m certain it’s not going to last!

And holding Patricia’s hand.… well that’s just what best friends do.

Terrasse

We have been in Bordeaux for a week, we have been profiting from the late summer weather and a pause in our lives without English students or houses to renovate. The apartment we have stumbled upon will serve us well. We have been busy nesting, and building shelves, deep cleaning, rearranging the furniture, and repairing that which escaped the light touch of the landlord. We have a guest room, and a dining room big enough to receive you, and more museums than you can shake a stick at!

Grand Theatre at sunrise

We like it here!

Pattern recognition

2010-08-23T22:57:00.003+02:00

As I understand it humans are uniquely good at recognizing patterns. What takes a room full of computers days to do, a human can do with their subconscious in moments. Scanning an assembly line for defects, searching the sky for new stars, finding faces in a crowd, recognizing patterns. So why are we surprised by the regular twists and turns in our lives? The choices that break or make the pattern?

Patricia supporting the celtic pattern language in the local dolmens.

We are moving again…no surprise. There is anxiety, stress, loss, and unbridled excitement…once again! Rearranging the big furniture in our lives could be called a pattern with plenty of surprising turns. Just a few months ago we were planning a summer holiday, and within hours we were all of a sudden resolved to move cities, plans changed and everything has aligned to make it easy. Now in 7 days we will be Bordelais! It seems that we went from being very content with our patterns here in Martel, to NEEDING a change, and forcing it upon ourselves. When I examine our history, our average is apparently a move every three years….so we should have seen it coming!

Summer traditions bring the same pattern to the life of our ever changing Oscar. All the French kids spend the summer with grandparents and away on vacations, and we haven’t learned that pattern yet. Every summer as Oscar’s friends disappear, his pattern is to circle his wagons and focus inward on the POD. We love the return to the threesome, after a year of taking a backseat to school chums, and we are surprised he never seems to be bored. His summer is again one of solo activities peppered with family. As I type he is in London, getting into mischief with his grandmum. Bordeaux is a big and interesting city, with dynamic places and interesting kids, so we are hoping Oscar finds interesting friends ands grows smoothly into this urban lifestyle.

Patricia and Oscar at a rugby match

The plan for our three year moving schedule (now that I can reflect and recognize it) has been to buy a house, improve it, and sell it. A nice pattern that has worked swimmingly four times over the years and twice in France, but repeating the pattern again is proving a bit more challenging. The real estate market here has stuttered to a halt, most profoundly in our price range. Our house has been for sale for too long at too low a price and with far too few interested lookers. With this in mind we have decided to remove it from the market and try the waters next year. We will have some friends stay here for the next year, making it easy to leave it without leaving it empty. Our little project is 80% done, but we are nervous about how long that last 20% could take. We will continue to work on it in the autumn and hopefully have it to sell this winter. We are moving onto the finishes and are still enjoying the process.

We spent our first night in Bordeaux last week. It was a trial run to do reconnaissance on the apartment and make lists for the pending move. All went well, the streets were calm, the air moves through the house, no ghosts and nice morning light. Now we will spend the next 7 days finishing projects and preparing the move. The apartment we are moving into comes entirely furnished, but we’ll need shelves, saucepans and slipcovers. We’ll need to rearrange the furniture, hang some art and grease some hinges. The list looks long, but we’ll be ready.
The location is wonderful, on a quiet street between to major pedestrian shopping streets. There are restaurants around the corner, fancy clothes shopping and the best gelato in town. Most importantly, we have a guest room!

Bandas

2010-07-11T17:50:00.001+02:00

It feels like a heat wave and Martel is "en fete"! This weekend is the annual battle of the bands, known as Bandas, where our tiny town is overrun by marching bands and the throngs of fanatics. Everyone drinks beer or white wine coolers and thumps around enjoying (some more, some less) the songs and antics of the Spanish-Basque music (think marching band). It started around 8pm last night and finished 24 hours later. They all stop around 3 am to sleep a bit and then restart for the church mass. Soon we will join them for the trophy portion of the weekend.

Click here for someone else's video of Bandas

We have Ed's son Jordan and his two kids, Faye and Dashiell, sharing it with us, so Oscar has playmates, as do Patricia and I.

By day we watch the kids and the Tour de France and by night we compare parenting notes and watch the World Cup Soccer matches . Oscar and Faye have grown up together since their beginnings, sharing daycare, then preschool, and a lot of co-parenting all the way. They were our neighbors and friends in Oakland and while we now we see them only once a year, the ease at which they (and we) get along is inspiring.

Old friends are priceless and Faye is Oscar's oldest!

Fete's like this are seen through different eyes this summer, it's hard to think of events like these as last opportunities, but they are and there will be new ones populating our days in Bordeaux soon enough. For now we live in the moment, enjoy the heat and the friendships that surround us and try not to worry, or even focus on, the hurdles in the future.... They'll come, we'll jump, and I'll write about it.

Transitions

2010-06-08T10:09:00.039+02:00

I recently stumbled upon a life expectancy calculator…. After answering a few questions that a family doctor would be too courteous to ask, I found out I have another 38 years to play with! The good news is that Pat has the same 38 years. Must be the Pilates!

Somehow this knowledge sticks with me, like the musical refrains that get stuck in my head in every quiet moment. I’ve been keeping track, and letting it play upon my thoughts. Time for a change.

Martel was always a 5 year plan for us, and today marks the first day of our 8th year. So as not to go too far past our own expiration date, we have been casting about, thinking of the future. Loading the scales with friendships and favorites, fortunes and fallacies, wondering and wandering, and trying hard to open our hearts and our eyes wide.

We have come to the conclusion that we are not ready to leave France, that this project is still working well, but that we need to find a way to transition into a new mode to continue to live this life. The first part was the decision to continue France. The desire to repatriate is as a magnet deep in the crust of our American life. The strings that connect us home are fortunately elastic, and seem to still have their “stretch”. We feel that home is there, but here too. Different versions of home, one deep, the other broad…. So we made a decision … that home for the next few years is going to be Bordeaux!

Bordeaux has been as a mistress since we first discovered it on a hot summer day 8 years ago with Rob and Audrey. It has been our perpetual escape to culture and diversity, two hours away, less French than Martel, more European and Cosmopolitan like San Francisco, it whistles where Martel hums. Bordeaux is certainly urban and challenging in contrast to the comfortable and mellow of Martel. But, we like its energy.

The decision to choose Martel seven years ago was uninformed luck, the new choice of Bordeaux is a more thought out decision. We traveled widely in the southwestern corner of France and found many appealing options in cities like Montpellier, Ceret, & Bayonne, but the combinations that came together in Bordeaux kept resurfacing as the clear choice. There is a middle school in Bordeaux which has an American Section and this was the final straw. They have a philosophy of teaching half the day in an American style, reading American literature, studying American History, sitting in circles and learning ideas more than practices. The school is public, half the teachers in this section are Americans, the students are all bilingual and half of them are French. They strive to teach “bi-culturalism, thru bi-lingualism”. Our thought is that by finding this program we can foster Oscar’s American side and advance his English skills without necessarily needing to return to America, and that fits into our plan at this moment. Oscar was accepted into the school just last week! So we’ll be packing our bags in August for the beginning of school the first week of September.

College Alain Fournier

It feels like springtime in our family with new things popping out of the soil, planting new patches, and the sad reminders of how green our garden has been here. Martel has been great. It was really ideal to move into a small town, to be able to learn French on such a compact slate, to learn French ways with such a small cast of characters, to be accepted by most of the community so quickly. While we think we are ready for a change, figuring out how to say goodbye is not obvious. We have discovered great friends here. Having the luxury to do these moves by choice is a rose with thorns!

As we make this transition into our new part of France, we have also become a bit more officially French. Pat has started a business as a Formatrice des Langues (language teacher) and I am officially a Createur which I can’t really translate better than that. I do not officially practice architecture in France, so I am more of what we might call a designer. I have a business now which enables me to “create and execute concepts”. So now we have the right to make money, pay taxes, and fill out endless scads of paperwork! We shall see how this transition unfolds, but it comes with the privileges of French healthcare, and a greater investment into the society. Perhaps they’ll let us vote someday.

I’ll share more about Bordeaux in the future, but Ceil Miller Bouchet from the Washington Post wrote a wonderful picture of it you can read here.Click Here

So we are making lists and emptying closets, visiting the caves and the castles that we are afraid we’ll soon be missing, filling our calendars with last lunches and last suppers, and steeling ourselves from the second thoughts, the cold feet and the eventual regrets. It has been a great life here for the past 7 years. We arrived on this evening, June 8th, in 2003, into a France crisp from the beginning of a disastrous heat wave. It has been mild going ever since. We are looking forward to this summer, and even the moving process. We have found an apartment to rent in Bordeaux which is in the center of downtown on a pedestrian street. It comes furnished and wired, and should be really easy to slide into. We will arrive with our clothes, some books, and our tempurpedic mattress, and leave our home in Martel furnished at least until it sells. This will give us a home to return to on school holidays and weekends while we wait for the real estate market to improve.

Bordeaux is 30 minutes from the Atlantic, 2 hours from Spain, and 3 hours from Paris on the high-speed train, of with there are no less than 12 per day. There are 20 farmers markets in the city and 231,344 residents (1 million in the metro area). There seems to be a café or restaurant for about every third person, and more culture than we will know what to do with. Pat has already made contacts for teaching English, and I am growing fonder of their soft yellow stones and Bordelaise architecture every day.

We intend to find a new project in Bordeaux, an apartment or a home that needs us, hopefully in the center of the city, and hopefully a pile of stones in need of a fresh eye and elbow grease. The only certainty is that it will have a guest room!

Breaking rules and Breaking news

2010-04-25T22:44:00.003+02:00

We have learned our way around the French and their customs. Long meals, attentive salutations, and a regimented social order. While we had a barrier breaking meal with the local clergy (see previous post) which moved us to a more intimate footing, all is not simple. With the normal French citizenry, once you have been introduced with a handshake, and a glass of wine, you are on what we call kissing status, and the protocol is to kiss the cheeks (twice) every time you say hello and goodbye until the end of time. So about a week after our dinner with the priests, Pat encountered one of the young priests on the streets of Martel and directly planted a kiss on each cherubic cheek….much to his dismay! She quickly realized she had just gone somewhere new,... turned scarlet... and learned that we aren’t supposed to kiss the priests! Who knew!?

But that was in the winter, March, and now it’s Spring, April, and we have sunburns to prove it. After a long enough winter, the sun caught us unaware, and a day at a rugby match and then the next in the garden has us all looking healthy if not a bit stupid.

The Rugby match was the last game of the season for 6^th ranked Brive team, the team for which Pat teaches beginning French to a pair of foreign players, and we lost, but it was a good game. The Garden affair was a long French lunch in the sun, the type of lunch that the French would just assume conclude, hours and hours later, with dinner, for which we have finally learned how to pace ourselves and enjoy.

For both events we were in shorts, plenty of water, sunglasses, but still it was an early reminder of the summer heat in our near future…..but some like it hot, as do we, when we are safely inside our cool 12th century pile of stone.

Our pile of stone is by the way for sale. We have had it on the market for a few months and we are still waiting for the world to beat its path through our 300 year old walnut doors! The market for renovated homes in the Southwest of France is a bit saturated, and the buyers seem to be waiting for some economic indicators that we don’t know about. So think of us if you know someone who knows someone!

http://www.bainrealestate.com/listing-detail.php?id=10232

Meanwhile our guestroom is stilled owned by us and still available to you. This spring will bring my Dad and Debbie, two nieces, my pal Ed, and then my mom, but that leaves us rather available now that the ashes have cleared from the skies.

Pod on bikes in Bordeaux with friend Jean Dwight

Other breaking news…our fifteenth year as Mr. and Mrs.!

15 years on the 15^th, that only happens once I think, or at least it’s supposed to only happen once, that one’s number of years match the date. So we celebrated with a trip to Bordeaux. Over a nice dinner we looked deep into each others eyes, and smiled at the pleasure and ease and excitement that we continue to provide each other. We toasted the past 15 years and then rode our bikes home from a fine restaurant to toast the next 15.

Three priests

2010-02-19T22:33:00.000+01:00

Three Priests walk into a ancient presbetery…. And the jokes abound

We had a dinner party and invited Pere Phillip from the church across the street. Then we had the idea to also invite the young priest from Rocamador at the same time, and a few friends in common to fill the table. Then Pere Phillip showed up with a young seminarian and the party was set!

Starting, in French tradition, with cocktails and snacks and an opportunity for everyone to get acquainted, we moved to the table at about 9 pm. Everything was great, good food, fun company, polite stories, even Oscar was present and engaged (one never knows at this age). As the wine continued to flow and everyone got more comfortable with the mix, Oscar left the room…somewhere around the cheese course and the conversations got amusing. Have you ever wondered what clergy talked about behind closed doors??

The subject of callings came and passed, miraculous moments in everyone’s lives, then first times… it seemed a favorite was first funerals… one who couldn’t recall the name of the deceased…..another where a surviving sister kept farting during the priests most important words, throughout the funeral. Complaints about cold churches and tiny congregations, the needy parishioners in the summer, one quote about a host wafer and lipstick (“look out Jesus…wet-paint”) and the funny papal experiences and even a story about a napkin stuck in the priests zipper during a wedding!!

I don’t mean to say there was any disrespect, or lack of decorum, but there was a fair amount of peeking behind the curtain going on. While I would have called two of these men friends before dinner, now I feel they are a bit closer, as if they had let their collars down (although they hadn’t) they revealed they are just like anyone else, another profession, but one with humor and joy and faults and triumphs just the same.

As I write this I think of the clergy I have known in my life, and of course they are normal people! I have sat in pews with them but I have also been friends outside of their churches and temples….I’m not certain of the difference, somehow the clergy
in France seems a bit further removed from the people. Walking about town in long black robes, always in stiff collars, perhaps it’s the particular youth of the local priests, perhaps it has more to do with my expectations of all things French?? Another stereotype smashed on the medieval cobbles of Martel!

The dinner was fun, a terrine of carrots and broccoli, beef bourguignon inspired by a recent viewing of Julia and Julie, 3 soft cheeses followed, and then a 4th in the form of a lemon cheesecake recipe gleaned off the web. Coffee and house-made chocolates to finish. If I had been frencher, I would have followed with eau de vie, but there were too many long drives ahead of our guests so I sat on my hands at that point, but kept my elbows above the table (another French politeness).

I slept restlessly, dreaming that I had given food poisoning to 3 priests and how would that look to St Peter!? But I awoke, as usual, to the church bells and the sunshine, and the certainty that all’s well except a sink full of dishes.

Making Snow

2010-02-07T11:36:00.004+01:00

Oscar is 12 today, a landmark that places him “closer to a teenager than not”. In France the word “teenager” is yet another American import, teens are more aptly called adolescents or ados, and according to Oscar that starts now.

I think it started during this last year and we are in near full swing on this birthday. We still get glimpses into his fading infancy, he still likes company on his bike ride to school and he still likes to be cuddled to sleep… but it’s fading. Whenever he has friends coming over he will remove his peluche (stuffed animal) known as Avi from his bed to ours, along with admonitions to take care of him. The next evening Avi has mysteriously flown back to Oscar’s bed, it’s wonderful! When his adolescent friends aren’t watching, he can be as sweet as a puppy dog’s tail, otherwise he leans towards the snips and the snails.

The windows for parenting are becoming narrower each year, in proportion to the time he spends with us versus his friends, making the few opportunities more and more important to get right! I liken it to building a snowman, in full knowledge that someday he will come to life, “happy birthday” said Frosty and the rest was fable-ous. Our task: steering a field of snow into a round ball, a more or less even sphere. It’s a small challenge; avoiding the dirty snow, exposing each side to the better forces of nature, larger and larger, stopping to appreciate the scene, to warm the hands and balance the expectations. Discovering the carrots and the coals, and stacking the balls in the right way and in the right place.

I’m reaching with this analogy, but it’s snowing everywhere today so it seems apt. All we do as parents is push that ball around until it’s large enough to stand up on it’s own, give him a scarf and a hat and hope for good weather. We continue to straighten him out and push his nose back in from time to time, but this man is greatly made at this tender early adolescence.

The other snowball, that I have learned from our 12 year old, is a lesson of impact. Oscar lobs issues at us, which appear large and frozen and painful, but when they land they are minor flurries of a soft, uncomfortable, cold ball of primarily frozen air. He presents a disappointment as such a huge problem, insurmountable and grave. Like being asked to put on a jacket, or to miss a birthday party, or study harder for a test….and moments before he has convinced me to reverse and accommodate, the moment passes and the air is sunny on the other side of said snowball. What seemed serious on one side was a mere nothing on the other. Every time, I brace for the impact…. that seldom arrives. I have as much to learn as he does. I suppose I am in the adolescence of my parenthood!Another snowball: the boys wanted the girls invited to sleepover too! Oscar lobed repeated snowballs over this one, and once we drew the line, it was passed like a flurry, but here they are at 10:30 bidding the girls adieu....everything got much quieter after that.

We parents hid out in the kitchen, banished perhaps, but with the lights off so we could spy, and quietly dance to the very loud pop music in the other room. We snuck in to snap pictures before being yanked back to our doghouse in the kitchen, by an ever shortening chain. We did get to cook the pizzas….and serve the birthday cake….and watch half a dozen birthday presents get opened, mostly way cooler t-shirts than we would ever buy! And Oscar’s recurring girlfriend gave him cologne! The Ados danced to internet radio, square danced to Cotton Eyed Joe! and did a sort of seated conga line that they all seem to know from birth.

They passed an inordinate amount of time bustling around in two’s and three’s consoling each other about who likes who, and who’s dancing with whom, it seemed at some point in the evening each girl had a turn at crying and each boy had a turn at wondering what it was he had done wrong. But every time, they would all be dancing and laughing again within moments…such drama!

Celebrating 12 years of parenthood we quietly sat for our dinner of (my first) terrine de foie gras, a cold salmon salad and chevre tarts while the ados danced, we drank wine while they spilled “coca”, we covered our ears while they all misunderstood Bad Romance with their cute French accents…we looking like huge dorks if any of the kids had been watching us! All part and parcel of raising an adolescent I suppose.

12 kids last night….

5 sleepoverers….till 2 am!

12 years old, and a sweet smart kid…we are all happy!

In case you havn't gotten a good enough image, here's a video moment from the party:

Writing Stories

2010-01-22T22:32:00.010+01:00

Two guys talking in a bar, one says “number 46” and the other laughs.Seth's new FAT CITY Snowball stand in Albany

This is half what going home has become for me, the other half is laying the foundation for the next stories.

There is such a comfort in a story retold, when one guy can say to the next “number 46” and in that moment refer to a shared time, place, meal, sunset…, thousands of unspoken words, that shared memory which defines a history.

I think the word story, comes from the French word histoire. Every story creates our history, and there is so much pleasure in a story retold. I used to marvel that Oscar wanted to hear the same stories over and over again, I felt a need to tell them differently, but that elicited complaints and a demand for the same details, the same books, the same movies, comfort food for the senses.

Our camping car tour of the Pyrenees with Audrey

I spent the past 7 weeks away from one home and visiting several others. In a decision directed by the high cost of airfare, I stretched a Christmas trip into a tour of the US and touched every base I could work into a single American Airlines itinerary.

Connecticut, California, Missouri & Louisiana, all perpetual homes in my life, all teeming with family and full of the familiar. I descended the jetway and recognized the smell of the air. I exit the airport and the quality of the light takes me back to a “number 46”, an entire package of senses lands upon me more impressive than any jet-lag. The journey to the next home, all part of the story, everything familiar in a language of its own. Familiar billboards, a Dunkin Donuts I stopped into once 25 years ago, an exit ramp I once took by mistake, a train I once missed, a force pulling me down one road and onto another, a memory reinforced by the sights, smells, sounds, flavors, and patterns. Falling asleep in a “guestroom”, to the familiar sounds of a home revisited, the specific timber of a closing door, a rattling window, a coffee maker, memories that you didn’t know you had, but you realize these are the stories that connect you to the rest of your world. This is what makes an extra-ordinary bed feel like home.

“How does it feel to be back?” well it feels like home. Instantly comfortable, surrounded by familiarity, right place, different time zone. The brain changes track adeptly, finding familiarity in the strangest places. George Clooney in “Up in the Air” finds his stories in Airport Hiltons and the cheap sushi of the Admirals club, always the same, dependable and extraneous. Then he goes home to his buried past, interestingly defining his future, flying around the country pushing people out of their comfort zones. Nice movie, uncertain ending….not MY story but perhaps it gave mine some definition.

McGowan Family New Years in Columbia

I found a joy in hearing the same family tales again and again, embellished, inflated, better understood, feeling like home. Each re-telling adds perhaps another ring around the trunk, rooting the words further into my foundation. These stories are perhaps the definition of “home” more than the art and furniture. Perhaps “home is where the stories are”

Traveling is a mix of repeating stories and forming new ones. Reinforced with photos, each adventure finds it’s way into our lore. Half “remember when’s” and “did I tell you’s”. Hot tub’s in the Pyrenees, floods in Arles, a cold beach, or a funny face, each is it’s own “number 46” a few words referring to huge shared events.

Oscar and his cousins Isa, Peeps and Willo

The other half is creating new stories, imprinting new images onto our lives, meeting children and partners new to the mix, sleeping in new guest beds, in new homes, adding to the history. My life is something like half over, it’s hard to think of my glass as only half full, it’s hard to conceive that I’ve got that many more stories in my future…but the math proves it, right?

Oscar’s memories are an interesting mix of fact and photo and stories of others. He loves to hear me retell the story of what happened a few years past, this one or that. He remembers the stories now, not the event. Some of these are photographic memories, that is he remembers the photo as if he remembered the event, but it’s almost the same. The photo just retells the story from another perspective, it’s like re-telling the same joke, it reinforces the memory.

Patricia and Oscar with brother Mark, and his Donna and Ben

It is so important to re-visit the same story from time to time, reinforcing, defining, substantiating. Moose Tracks, Nan King, Mac & Cheese, BBQ, Sushi Boats…..Food is a story so wonderful to revisit, all the senses chewed together, the company, the flavors, the noise, it’s a mnemonic device certain to remain intact for a very long time. There is a reason I ate 4 roast beef po-boys in New Orleans, I found great pleasure in revisiting that story, securing the details away until I can return and eat 4 more.

Home is where the stories are, and my stories are with me. Here with my son, almost 12, my wife of almost 15 years, a life in France for more than 6 years, and the next stop unknown but certainly reinforced and defined by all the stories till now. The family grows, the stories become more complicated and more important.

“Number 47”…..laughs follow

Dan's mom Susan and his newest niece Josephine

Remember, you can click on any of the pictures and they will open large in a new window

Brick House

2009-10-09T19:26:00.010+02:00

I have taken to the European method of building interior walls of brick and plaster. Where I was born and raised with 2x4's and sheetrock, I have seen the light, and I've gone towards it. It's part of an entire built ethos of durability, I think, the French regard a building as something which lasts for centuries, and therefore should be built solid enough to get them there. But even those times are changing and construction a-la-mode is just as often sheetrock and metal studs, and here I am, once again, learning a disappearing craft.

I've decided to document the brick-wall building on the top floor of our project house, it's typical of the system and there was a place to put the camera out of harms way. These pictures are taken looking towards an existing stone wall that we will re-point and leave as stone. The walls I am building will enclose a large closet on the left, with a bunch of winter storage, and the bathroom across to the right. The stairs descend in the foreground.

The first step is to move the bricks up two flights of stairs, then to erect some boards to define the ends and set them in plumb and level. These boards are temporary but eliminate the need to constantly be checking and correcting with a spirit level. They are clamped to a piece of wood which will support a rolling door in the oh so distant future.

The bricks are 1.5 inches thick and are terra cotta just like an american clay brick. They can be stacked with a cement mortar or with a plaster mortar. I prefer the plaster because it sets in about 10 minutes and is strong enough to build upon in about 20 minutes. I can build up three courses and in the time it takes to trim a few bricks and mix up another batch of mortar, the wall is set enough to continue the process.

The bricks are offset to each other to provide strength, and can be used either horizontally or vertically as the situation dictates. The bricks are hollow, with channels running through them to make them economical, lightweight and allow for electrical wires to run through them. Here you can see the outlet down low and the switch at waist height, the plastic conduit is threaded into the wall as you build each course.

The center section completed, I remove the framework and continue to work on the small side wallsA keen eye will see that I had to move the electrical outlet to the left so the door wouldn't hit a plugged in cord as it slid open (oops!) and the yellow double switch box has been installed in the small wall on the right.Then the plaster. The rough coat of plaster (the 1st coat) is the same product as the mortar. It is a product that sets in about 15 minutes, so one needs to work fast. They used to sell slower setting plasters but they realized I was getting too comfortable and decide to change the rules. By the time I get good at this I suspect they will change the product again, and eventually we'll be using "buckets of mud" like in the U.S.. This first layer of plaster goes on quickly and rough, about 1/4" thick with plenty of high and low points. From here we will choose some colors and start applying tinted plaster heading towards the eventual finish. One more layer of rough plaster and then 3 layers of a fine plaster and eventually a soap and oil finish we call Venetian Plaster.I'll update this next month when we get around to the finishes.

Rentree

2009-09-04T09:14:00.004+02:00

Back to school 2009/10

That's Oscar on the left, and typical copain Francais, Alexi on the right.

This is from yesterday, the first morning of 7th grade (5eme en francais).

The summer felt long and deep, we stayed close to home and received cousins upon cousins, friends upon friends, and even a few strangers. By not traveling we seemed to stretch the 2 month pause into something that actually felt like a two month pause, we worked, watched movies, luxuriated in the gentle weather, drank our mint patch into submission (mojitos) and talked endlessly about the quality of home grown tomatoes.

By the time it was over, Oscar was ready for a return to the patterns of school, asking that we 'help him get back on schedule', asking for a few early nights and mornings to return to a scholastic rythm. After a summer of eating cereal out of the box at 11am, he's back to demanding his limited menu of hot cooked breakfasts "American Style". I need to get back in the practice myself:

San Fransisco Potatoes
Pancakes
Grilled Ham and Cheese
Waffles
Oatmeal
Crepes
Scambled Eggs
or the favorite "Egg McOscar" (bacon, egg, cheese, lettuce on an english muffin).

His classes this year include: Physics, Math, History, Geography, English, Latin, French and Spanish (plus art, gym and music)! It sounds exhausting, but we'll see how many of those classes are real, how could an 11 year old take physics and latin??? All I remember from 7th grade is softball, machine shop and getting beaten up by Douglas Fairbanks! He'll continue to come home for lunch everyday, he's begging to stop playing the piano (we are discussing a horn of some shape or another). And he is hanging up his basketball shoes for a tennis racket! Change is good, right?

Walls are forming at the project house, along with a few doors, some outlets and some plumbing.... We'll keep you posted.

A New Window

2009-08-31T23:01:00.006+02:00

Emboldened by the new doorway we built in, and countless niches, we decide to add a window in the main shower room of our project house. The stone wall is about two feet thick, and built in the standard practice of building two parallel walls and filling the middle in with rubble.
The window we wanted to add in was small so there was little threat of collapse and no great need for interim support. We built the window at eye level and in the form of an arrow slit for defending a medieval castle. The window is about 30" tall and about 6" wide at the exterior opening while being about 20" wide on the interior.

The process, which seems easy and obvious by now, is first to choose a location that makes use of the existing stones. Locate a large stone already in the wall to be the header and another for a sill, that sort of thing. Then with a large diamond blade, cut the inward tapering vertical lines to a depth of about 4".

With a hammer and a chisel (pneumatic in this image), you carefully remove stones cutting and chiseling deeper and deeper until you reach the exterior.

Here, the top stones are supported temporarily with wood, while the sides are cut and chiseled clean and straight.

Oscar, always ready to work, but quickly bored with the slow pace, got the glory job of removing the last stones and "creating" the window. I wonder if this kind of stuff will pay off when he's a famous architect?

I then lightly braced the two sides with plumb boards and cemented the edges and sides. I could have made these side stones perfect and left them exposed, but that would have turned a 1 day project into a 1 week project, and besides now I can plaster the sides in a white luminous plaster and reflect much more light inward than the stones ever would have allowed. These boards came down the next morning.This is the finished window, awaiting a tile wall on the interior and plaster on the insides of the opening....or maybe mirrored tiles...hmmm?

Here is the window from the exterior, hardly noticable from the street, yet a profound effect on the forming shower.

The window is in the background, and Oscar is locked in till his chores are done!

Momentum

2009-08-06T23:35:00.001+02:00

Our minds are in motion and are tending to stay that way.

Momentum is an interesting thing. I can change my mind like the wind, but put it in motion and I’m too often lost down that rabbit hole.

I ponder momentum as I start a renovation, searching for a straight line to measure off of. I have found I can spend as much time trying to find a worthy starting point as doing the job itself. The art of renovating a centuries old stone building is curious, the momentum of a half a centimeter can cause a drain to run backwards or a stair riser to become a trip hazard, and once a bad decision is made it can in fact be “cast in stone”. Spirit levels (the tool with the air bubble in a glass chamber) are relatively modern and levelity was not a great concern in the middle ages. Town planning was rare and buildings were built until they ran into an obstacle and were rarely square or plumb. I’m sure that ancient builders used plumb bobs or pendulums, but it didn’t seem to mater much that stuff was square. It all adds up to a conundrum of consequence. It helps that this latest project doesn’t even pretend to be square, it is an obvious trapezoid. The rez de chausse (street level) has a dirt floor and I suppose the animals that lived there never complained about the lack of right angles. Once you climb up to the etage (second level) the walls appear straight and the ceiling even appeared level, until I put my new laser level on the high corner and thought for certain I hadn’t set it incorrectly until I verified the degree of slope….8”! Once I had jacked up the beams so that the ends were all back in the same plane, I realized that century old oak beams develop a decent sag just from their own weight, so there was still more shimming to do. All along I’m questioning the value of “level”??? These buildings never had rolling office chairs to think about. So I am changing the momentum, and creating another of my own invention. But this is momentum with a small “m”.

An object at rest stays at rest…

Oscar selling his old books, boxes and bikes at the town flea market

Momentum is more important as we grope for a healthy trajectory in parenting. Once that line in the sand is drawn, it’s a difficult enterprise to cross it. I mean Oscar is smarter than I am in so many ways, but he’s looking to us for lessons and limits (even though he would never admit it). When those lessons dissolve between us, it’s a shift that sees the seawall eroded a measure. The problem is when the momentum of a poorly established limit is stronger than the lesson, and it’s a downhill slope. I often hear the echo of a yes or a no long into the cold dark night of a bad decision, and the puzzlement over changing one’s mind rings louder and louder as the decision moves further away. I favor the nurture argument over the nature, and that makes me even more anxious about the trajectory we are “responsible” for. There is plenty of momentum in the mind of a 47 year old parent, and it is often necessary to reverse a bit and find the flexibility of an 11 year old. It takes a lot longer to re-route a person going 47 than one going 11. Oscar can get over an over-zealous parent much quicker than we can let the same conflict pass.
Every relationship has it’s own momentum. I carry pieces of my parents and grandparents with me everywhere, little change, but a lot of inertia. I watch the patterns being established between Oscar and his parentals and wonder how far they will carry him?

An object in motion stays in motion…

Another momentum.

We are often given credit for our decision to move from our comfortable lives in California to an unknown life in France, but that decision came easy, made like most of our big decisions, on the back of a napkin. The difficult part was the inertia of that life, it was like pulling a plant out of the sand, some of the roots went deep, drinking and sustaining, and others were already growing on the surface noticing the sunlight and searching for soil. The fact that our lives were “at rest” was something we could bluff our way around, by telling ourselves it was a five year “temporary” plan, we cheated Newton’s law and before we noticed it we were here and setting roots all over again, storing passive energy into inertia for another day, another move. We spend a lot of idle time talking about where our future is heading, we think we can direct it a little, and we are trying to define the issues. So far, trying to prove Newton wrong has worked well for us, we’ll see where that takes us!

Oscar’s wearing jewelry (a chain)
Daniel’s wearing glasses (reading)
And Pat’s wearing French fashion.
Summer is all around us, tourists, houseguests and open windows…

Good momentum!

Lists

2009-06-30T00:17:00.001+02:00

A friend told me the other day that we were “on his list”.
For good or bad!? I pressed on….apparently we were on his list in an inner circle sort of way. It was a pleasant surprise and it made me start to imagine what I would do if I were to “have a list”. He cleared matters up and expressed that he didn’t have a real list, and that admission to the list was comprised of being good enough friends that we wouldn’t ask each other “why we moved to France". I was proud to be on his list, but now I am dying to know “why he moved to France”??

I have been thinking about lists since then, lists of places I’d like to visit, places I’d like to live, people I’d like to invite for dinner. Fun to think about, and much easier than one’s “bucket-list”. Favorite movies, colors, books, foods….it’s a worm hole.

I made a list

I drew a pea pod on a sheet of paper and started writing names down of people we know here in France. The closer to the pea, the closer to pod. I erased a lot and moved some people in a ½ an inch and others out an inch, and then I started writing all the French speakers on the bottom and all the English speakers on the top. It was an exercise. It showed me that there was a halo around the pea pod, empty space, it made me think of the billboards with the word “available” advertising itself. But I’d rather think of the halo as the reserved area, the VIP lounge of our lives, the area that is already full with names, written in white, because they don’t need to be written, they are simply known.

I burned the list

I think I’ll start over with …

What I’d like for dinner:

I’m done with lists.

Today is the first day of summer vacation here in Martel. Oscar has been running rough-shod over Martel, water balloons, squirt guns, bicycles…. He plans to stay up late and eat only candy for the next 66 days!

Pat is in Carcassonne with her choir group singing and eating cassoulet for two days. Me, I’m trying to figure out how to make “summer” feel different from the rest of the year, besides the heat and the incredibly long days. I finished re-roofing our project house. I managed to do almost all of the work without ever having to climb ON the roof; my friend Ed and I worked from the attic floor on ladders as we moved up the slopes and then just a bit of monkey work as I climbed in from the peak on the last few tiles. I installed my first Velux skylight, built a new chimney (see the photo at the top) and did a bit of gutter work as well. I am left with a new appreciation of these systems which have evolved over hundreds of years. Born of necessity and performed in the beginning by farmers and itinerant craftsmen, they are now very compartmentalized professions. A roofer in France does not do gutters, and a framer does not build walls! They all seem to be impressed that I can touch upon several trades, what they don’t see is me scratching my head, looking over the rooftops to see how the neighbors did their ridges and valleys. At the end of the day I am hot, tired and wondering if THIS is why I went to college?

I made a roof.

I’m done with roofs!

Oscar finished the year with good grades, A’s and a couple of B’s. He moves onto the French equivalent of 7th grade next year. Moving to the next grade is a bit different here; everyone asks if Oscar ‘will be advancing of not?’ It seems a strange question, but they seem to handle it differently here. While being “held-back” is a terrible thing in the US, full of negative connotations and self esteem challenging hurdles, here in France it seems incredibly more common and while negative, it can have a positive spin. I suppose it is the opposite of that problem we seem to have in US public schools where everyone passes and becomes the next years problem, here, one just “re-doubles”, it sounds like a backgammon game! However I wonder how many kids are dis-proportionally older by the end of high school?

French schools are better than American schools.

The public school system here is still strong and very democratic, there are private schools, but they are not very expensive and not worlds apart in quality like the majority of the schools in urban America. They have their faults, poor infrastructure, absent teachers with no money for substitutes, but where they shine is their cafeterias and their secondary education. France has a complicated system which has most High School students choosing a professional path as they enter the 10th grade. One can go to a culinary high school, or a furniture making high school, or even a circus high school (one of France’s most popular). There is a majority that continue onto a general college-prep high school and then toward university, but the system offers a plethora of choices for the students who want to do two or three year programs and move straight into a trade. This system seems to avoid the idea of “high school dropouts” because everyone continues through to some sort of certificate or diploma. I imagine that most of the people that continue onto low level jobs have completed two or three years of high school with some specific training for that job, and voila, a career is made!

Oscar continues to think he will be an historian with a second choice of architecture, I’ll keep you posted. Thankfully he has abandoned his aspirations to be a food critic reviewing different kinds of pasta. He is off to Camp for the first time in our lives. One week in the Pyrenees, swinging from trees, shooting arrows and hurtling down dry ski slopes in a go-kart!! Will we all survive? He’s growing up!

Summer rolls on, and us with it’s rhythms and rhymes.

Speaking Frankly

2009-05-28T22:06:00.000+02:00

I have been playing with pasting together images in my camera. There is a lot of distortion
but it let's me get close to capturing the size of our main room.

The last project in our second house was the entry courtyard. The door to thestret is through the arch to the right.
The recreated fountain is in the middle, firewood storage under the stair, and then up the stairs to the garden and the front door.
This area has been a work zone for all the years we have been here, so it's great to have it finished, it's a nice transition zone from the
street into the calm cool of the house.

Progress

I have hit one of those linguistic thresholds, talking to Pat in French. I mean I’ve always done this a little, the too sweet après vous mademoiselle from our courting days, the whispered oui-oui’s that followed and then the language students habitual practicing. But all of a sudden I have noticed a few lines worked into daily conversation. Words spoken without reflection or any special intent. Just responses on an unconscious level, which may demonstrate the occasional French thought in my very American head, maybe even a chain of thoughts!! It’s nice.

We are both getting better at our French. I am still speaking out of tense and seldom in plurals, but we are both carrying conversations and that feels wonderful. I’d say that a glass or two of wine helps loosen the tongue, but I think the reality is it dulls the senses and we just think we are models of fluency.

Oscar speaks so fluently, that he can read out-loud, something written in French and speak it in English. It’s like having built in subtitles! Strange it must be to be better at something than your parents at such an early age! We know he will someday bury us under some certain knowledge but to start passing us at 11!? He continues to devour his history, straight A’s and an unending appetite for anything about WW2. He seems headed for some future in the field, but he’s young and this will all ebb and flow with time, there’s still talk of becoming an architect which puts a smile on my face. At least I can still help him with math homework!

The French are free-er with their opinions than Americans. We continue to collect opinions from interested parties, how to trim a grape vine, what was the architectural purpose of some feature of our home, how to cook the mysterious white asparagus, when to get a haircut….Seldom do we, ambassadors of everything American, hazard such similar opinions towards the locals, but we are getting better at it. It’s really a social thing, much like talking of the weather or politics, and we need to grow into it. My father once explained to me that it can be polite to accept something offered, even if you don’t particularly want what’s being proffered, and I realize the opposite is true as well, that it might just be a social politeness to offer something for acceptance!? I was walking past a neighbor trying to prune a climbing rose, she gave me a plaintiff look begging support, so I stepped in it. Firstly it was too late in the season to be pruning a rose, so I was doomed, but I pressed on and the result was a haircut only a mother could love. The spindly spindle of a rose struggled for a month and just today I noticed it had been replaced by a fine and healthy specimen straight from the nursery, which already looks like a rose by another name. Point is I offered an opinion, and became a bit more French in the doing so.

Pat befriended a craftsman working on our church and the next thing we know were getting his opinion of some of the features in our living room. It seems this man is something of an “antiquities repairman” who has created a niche business repairing ancient stone and plasterwork. His opinion of ours was that we “must” stabilize and repair the 12th century plaster (which has been fine for the past 1000 years so why now??) and that the cabinet built into the wall was a “piscine” for storing the communion wafers, wine and incense. I wonder about all this too, but we know the room was at one point a chapel, so why not? Our research turned up a “piscine” as a baptismal font, but we still like the idea of a sacred strongbox as home to our computer.

Work continues on the project house, we are both working hard at it, sneaking back home trying to avoid the social aspects of a stroll across town looking like miners, covered with cobwebs and dirt, looking very unlike the people we usually are. Next week, weather permitting, we will replace the roof. That is to say we will remove the 200 year old terra cotta tiles, straighten out the wood charpentes (heavy timber trusses) and then put the same tiles back on. This will let us add some insulation and in the end we’ll have a roof good for another 100 years. I have never done this before, but I’ve been watching the locals at it and I hope I’ve absorbed enough of their methodology to not make too much of a mess of it.. I’ll report how it goes….

Springtime in Martel!

A String of Saturdays

2009-05-03T11:02:00.001+02:00

We are changing gears, the last few details of house number 2 are coming into focus.

RD2 is done!

Our attention is moving up the street to number 3.
The house currently known as Maison Louise

At RD2 We have installed the remaining pieces of trim, the storage areas have been addressed.

The courtyard cleaned up, repointed and the old fountain recreated (awaiting fish or plants).

Number 2 will soon officially be for sale and we will see what it feels like to live in a house that is “finished” for a while….

Serial Dwelling…for all it’s charms and discomforts.

It’s difficult to imagine living in number 3, it’s small, less than half the size of our current palace, less than a quarter the size if you include the storage areas. But I have always believed that one expands or contracts their lives to fit their space. I don’t expect it to be easy, but once done I look forward to the simplicity of 750 square feet. In our minds we are already working out the left behinds:
Ping-pong table
Armoires
Half our clothes
Dining room table
Couch
Half our books
Half our chairs
Guest Room! (you have been warned!)
Clothes Dryer
Lawn Mower
All the crap in the attic!
Sort of a global meltdown of spring cleaning…

It is perhaps a bit harder to move each time. As we get better with renovating homes, each one is a bit more comfortable, a bit more in-tune with us, and a bit more quality. It is hard to imagine ever outdoing this one, with it’s stone history, warm floors, and plaster walls, but I’m optimistic. It makes me wonder what my “last house” will be like, not to mention the where and the when??? Hopping around Martel is one thing, but anything else will require Styrofoam.

Incredulous that we ever thought ourselves “country mice”, we thrive on what little urban lifestyle we get here. The days that we walk to market or stumble home from a two bottle dinner, the occasional movie in the town hall and the slow-to-change art exhibits, all please us in reducing our carbon footprint as we can “live local”. However we continue to ponder life in a bigger city, the likes of Bordeaux or Montpelier or perennially Oakland. Change will happen, but slowly. It is certainly the wrong time in the economy to be selling a project, but we shouldn’t let the market dictate our paths…right?

Meanwhile, we continue.

Oscar excels in a school we are growing tired of. He enjoys it but we sense the limitations of a small town school. But he gets good grades and he is stimulated, and that is everything.

Patricia teaches English to those who care, and runs our simple lives (made complicated by living in a foreign country).

I am usually up to my elbows in mortar, saw dust, or just plain dirt.

Somehow everyone around us seems to think we are always hard at work!? Since we ignore the local customs of not working during the traditional lunch hour, or on weekends, we are assumed to always be working! Everyday is in fact a workday, I don’t start early and I often go late, fortunately I love the work, so everyday is like a Saturday. The joke in the family is that I never know what day it is, because they are all the same for me, luckily they more resemble a Saturday than a Monday.

The village is filling with tourists, the garden is filling with flowers, and our lives continue to overflow in a great way.

April in Paris...

2009-04-26T11:14:00.003+02:00

We recently returned from spring break. One week in Paris chasing 2 eleven year olds and a second week storming the beaches of Normandie.

It may not sound like the ideal way to celebrate 14 years of marriage, but we took Oscar and his friend Tony to Paris to tour the parks and children’s museums and to cross paths with Oscar’s cousins from California. It was a change of method for us, as we have spent our lives mainly as adult tourists, doing whatever we wanted and recently dragging an only child around wherever we wanted to go. Traveling with two boys however was a different story, which involved a faster pace, more snacks, and much less time for reflection and it seemed everywhere we went a ball was involved.
It was Tony’s first time to Paris, so we hit a bunch of A-list sites, Tour Eiffel, Louvre, Versailles, Pont Neuf, Notre Dame, and the Arc de Triumph. For Pat and I, it was a new view of each of these, always welcome, but the attention span of an 11 year old is truly a thing of wonder, incredibly long on one hand and a mere figment on the other.

The silver lining was that they entertained each other much of the time and we could stroll like young lovers in a new Paris, forgetting about them entirely for minutes at a time….

We left Paris after a week and went of to explore Normandie. Oscar had researched the 26 WW2 D-Day museums, and selected the 22 he wanted to go to! Incredibly, he stuck to it and would have gone to all of them if I hadn’t used my parental veto and insisted on a few hours for sitting in a cafe or playing in the sand!?!? The history of the landings in Normandie is amazing, and the sacrifice of so many to give their lives for a foreign land and cause is inspiring to say the least. The endless rows of headstones perfectly aligned in the war cemeteries is a sobering sight, as poignant for our past as it is concerning for our future.

Every beach, battle and bunker needs to be remembered for what passed there, and almost each one has a memorial or museum to guard that memory. For me, each was another personal mission, commemorating a cog in the war machine with someone’s collection of the tools of war. The message is neither hopeful nor subtle but rather humiliating proof of our baser instincts as a species, which we have proved over and over again yesterday and today. I was done after about 5 of these museums and took to sitting on the beach reading while I waited for the historians in the family to read and re-read a history I feel I know well enough. Pat read every plaque (I think in English and then in French) and Oscar and Tony ran from diorama to diorama and tank to landing craft with incredible speed and absorption. We continually got frustrated at the speed with which they coursed through these expensive museums, only to be amazed at the knowledge they picked up and the observations they made, smashing the rules of quality v. quantity as we went.

It was fun to travel with Oscar's friend along and change the dynamic, but I think it left us all wanting for the consolidated POD again, just a glimpse of the inevitable future as friends replace parents and our boy grows up.

Normandie was lovely, we had nice weather, really enjoyed the architecture, and were happiest upon returning to our peaceful existence in Martel!

Arch building 101

2009-03-19T22:24:00.003+01:00

This should have been a class in architecture school, it seems somehow that to call yourself an “Architect” you should have to build an arch, no? But then there are so many things we must master virtually in our lives, and now we have I-Beams, so why would one need ever to build an arch? Why indeed? I have just worded my way into a corner….hmmm? now I’m wondering why I am living the life of a 15th century mason, and blogging about it too?

We have started to work on our third French project, a very small house, again in the center of this tiny town of Martel that we call home. We have named this project “Maison Louise” and we laugh as we go about trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. This house was probably built in the 15th century (still checking) and probably had a sow living on the ground floor. There was probably a single room on the next floor, and an attic for drying tobacco. It has a small garden with a larger public area surrounding it, and has some beautiful, but simple, stonework. There are windows on 3 sides, and it’s location is close to the town center, yet hidden on a dead end alley, the Impasse du Pourtanel.

We are planning to make the ground floor (pigs room) the kitchen and living room, and then a bedroom and bathroom on each of the next two floors. The top floor is currently an attic, but a spacious one which will have skylights on the North, East and South sides. The challenges of this project will be the efficiency of space, finding room for storage, coats, water heaters, and trash cans, this one may satisfy my constant desire to live on a boat.
This is a progression showing the evolution of the new doorway we have been working on. It was a small window when we started, we opened it roughly to have a way to get dit out of the inside where we lowered the floor by one step. Then I created the arch, then the sides and just yesterday installed the new doors. Today I put the shutters on.

You can click on these images to get a larger clearer version.

The first order of business is the “gros travaux”, the large works, demolishing the interior walls, removing plaster from a few stone walls, and creating whatever openings we want in the 70cm (2.5 ft) thick walls. We wanted to open an existing window on the East wall to access the garden and bring light into the home, but there were 3 tons of stone in the way. I scratched my head for weeks and lost enough sleep to trying to figure out the method for creating such an opening, until I asked for help. There is a deep wealth of knowledge around us in the traditions of the local craftspeople, as long as what you are looking for is a traditional solution. It seems that the same two roads have been taken for centuries, mostly one employs an expert, someone who does one thing well, and that’s all they do. The mason makes the arch, and the menusier makes the door, I suppose they argue over who is supposed to install the door… until it’s time to have an apero’. The other approach is what the English call DIY (do it yourself) and I’m not too certain if this happened too often in France. I wonder what the peasant farmer did in the 15th century when he needed an arch built? I think they probably did without, until the mason needed a pig??

My approach in our life here is to do it myself. I have always enjoyed working alone, the pursuit of the solution to something I didn’t understand and the particular thrill of mastering a new skill. In the beginning, it was easier to do it myself than to figure out how to ask for help, but it has evolved into a keen desire to find competency down new roads. SO, back to the local craftspeople. I was given the advice that the best way to create an opening in a “Pierre Seche” (dry stone) wall (no cement, just mud), was to allez delicatment (do it delicately). I created a

This is the interior half of the arch under construction, double click on the image to see it more clearly. You can see here the far left and right sides have been re-built, the horizontal stones in the center are still in place supporting the wall above and there is a void to the left of center waiting to be filled in with arching stones.

plywood template, with the form of the arch on it, and attached it to the inside of the wall in the location of the eventual opening. I then proceeded to remove the stones above the template creating a hole about 60 x 30cm (24” x 12”) and about 40cm (18”) deep, half the thickness of the wall. I then made an arching bed of sand and started to layout 5 or 6 of the stones in the arch. Once I had the stones selected, I removed them and then put them back in with a lime mortar. “Rinse and Repeat”. The next day I would do the same procedure until the entire arch was built on the inside half of the wall, some 25 or so stones. Then the same procedure on the exterior, lining the exterior arch up with the interior arch to create one single structure. I let this all dry for a week, then I removed the stones underneath. That was the fun part…..I had built an arch! Now I had to do what turned out to be the more exacting work of building the two sides of the arch. This part had to be cut stones, with a door frame and an angle cut into the stones, plumb, and level despite nothing else being plumb nor level. I learned this as I went, and if one looks closely, they’ll see the progression of my (lack of) skill.

I wore out a few tools, smashed a few fingers, but it’s done and looks great. The arch was inspiring enough to lead to creating a few elements inside in the thickness of the wall, a niche for keys and mail, another for firewood, and another closing the centuries, a niche planned for a book shelf (flat screen t.v.). It’s fun creating these elements and adding character to an otherwise simple building, but I need to stop and move on.

This is a niche we created in the corner to the left of the new door. It is intended for firewood storage for the small woodstove we are planning to install immediately to the right of this niche. I was so pleased with the big arch I decided to echo it here. This is about 30" tall, 24" wide and 16" deep.

Again, if you click on the image it will open in a new window and be easier to see.

Soon we’ll put some shutter’s on the new doors, close them and return to house number two to finish out the punch-list there.

It has been such a wonderful experience living in this amazing thousand year old home, the spaces are gracious, the in-floor heating incredibly comfortable, a fun kitchen and my best bathroom so far. I do wonder what the next chapter will be? We would all happily stay, but my feet are getting itchy, and Oscar needs a new pair of shoes!

Dog days of winter

2009-02-12T21:52:00.003+01:00

It's amazing what can come up on a gentle winter morning.... We are in a frustrating weather pattern, every morning dawns sunny and full of hope. We spring (OK... grown and limp) out of bed with great expectations only to find that after a cup of coffee the sky has turned somber and checking email is all I have the energy to do. But then Oscar is off to school and Pat takes the excuse to head out into the crisp (cold) morning to accompany him on bike, until Oscar catches sight of other kids and then he pleads for the autonomy we are waiting for to continue on alone. He pedals off to school, and Pat pedals off to do laps around the country side for her exercise regime. Back home, on my third cup of coffee (small cups), I am dressed for labor and tuning up the internet to watch yesterdays Daily Show with John Stewart. I stretch for 10 minutes while laughing at yesterdays headlines and try to get out of the house before Pat gets home.

But not monday...

Instead I get a phone call from Pat asking for a ride as her brakes have broken and she has been bitten by a dog!!! She is fine. She was out on her normal route, and for the first time a large Rottweiler was there too. She kept her cool, didn't fall, but the wound was ugly enough. A large bruise and two small holes! She's on antibiotics and the dog is being "observed" by the vet.

There is a saying that "French people like their children and they love their dogs", so you can imagine the original conclusion that everyone comes to when they hear this story. It usually starts with "he's such a gentle dog" and after a few minutes might approach concern or apology in the dog owners case. They get over it, we get over it, and now everyone's on good terms, but it was a process.

It's a narrow road we bike down with our lives in France, never quite certain how any French habitue might interpret our actions. We have been approved for our ten year residency permits, which doesn't mean we are here for ten more years, but rather that we no longer need to plead for the right to stay here every year. And we got our latest building permit approved in record time, allowing us to add a few skylights and replace a few windows.

So for the week we are up, two acceptances of our existence and one reminder of whose territory we are on anyway.

Zeitgeist

2009-02-07T09:11:00.001+01:00

One Word * 25 Things * Compare * Hot or Not ???

What is the value of Facebook in our lives?

I met some 20 year olds last year that explained that they don’t email anymore, they just I.M. on Facebook. I dismissed it as weird and generational, but as the page turns I have just sent my mother a video message via facebook!! What’s up? It was easier than typing and I got to show her my new haircut. But now here’s the obvious problem….can anyone now go and watch my clumsy 15 second ‘letter to mom’ and then comment on my haircut?? Is there any privacy on Facebook? How many of us turn our webcams away when we aren’t positive they aren’t beaming our quiet moments to the world??

Today it’s all the rage, perhaps I am a year (or generation) late in arriving, but all of a sudden I am considering making Facebook my home page. Everyday I’m learning 25 things I didn’t know about people I didn’t know. Once in a while there is something insightful, something I’m embarrassed to know, or an item worth repeating, but for the most part it’s drivel, but we’d all freeze up when asked for just three things, wouldn’t we? What about One Word? At least that one only takes a few minutes.

This is all the chain mail of our times, less postage, but oh so more prevalent, at least we are all equipped with an “ignore” option.

I am nonetheless enjoying Facebook, but I still don’t understand it. I don’t know what is front porch and what is bedroom. I’m not sure I can have a private conversation anywhere, if you are my “friend” do you have the backstage pass? It feels like an email until someone you barely know comments on it. As a replacement to email, it solves a problem that we never had, it let’s the message become even shorter. Do you know what Twitter is? I tried it during the inauguration but my post was too long, on Twitter you are limited to grammatically incorrect phrases of less than 140 words?!? The idea is a potent substance to character ratio, but I was challenged to find any substance there. WTF, is about as efficient as I can get. I’m not sure that we, as a literary people, need the less is more approach to communication; it certainly hasn’t done much for the past 8 years.

I think of myself as one of few words (as I ramble on about fewer words) and remember being taught by my dad to reduce each idea and sentence to as few words as possible. He was teaching me to write, efficiently and to captivate. Keeping sentences “short enough” is an interesting challenge and the virtual stationary of Facebook and Twitter is helping reduce our vocabulary to grunts and groans that can be hammered out on the incredibly un-clumsy face of an iphone.

But you (as Max Tivoli would say) dear reader, if you are still with me, enjoy this shrinking world as much as I do. We don’t wait for the postman to ring twice, we just check email, several times a day in my case. Time zones are crushed into the ether, I love you’s and what am I doing right now’s, thrown around the world in the time it takes to ‘right-click’. We all speak some sort of shorthand, lol’s, IMHO, and smiley faces, intending to communicate complicated emotions.

I don’t imagine “emoticon” is in the dictionary yet, but we all know one when we see one, and we all save keystrokes by speaking in the rhythm of our times. I’m not complaining exactly, and I just might make my home page Facebook yet. I feel a self imposed lack of privacy, but I live on another continent than most of you, so a lack of privacy is OK for now. “Social Networking” is a wonderful tool. I have found lost friends, buried within my “contacts” folder, I have been reconnected with people truly dear to me, I have missed heartbeats at being contacted by friends I remember only from darkened rooms, and foreign climes. Instantly I have access to every public thought they have shared, every picture posted, and I now know who their friends are. I have pictures of their children and I know what movies they like…ROTF….profoundly reconnected…who could complain? These are distant voices from previous lives, residing in evolved bodies… new datelines….so much spilt milk…so much lemonade…so many apps to reconnect us without postage…or lost regrets.

Suddenly we’ve been provided a tool which excuses the missed connections and unintentional absences we used to think of as inevitable. Like so much else, I’m glad I am old enough to have missed this in my turbulent adolescence, imagine the intensity of high school with Facebook!? Compare would have killed me! Perhaps we could explain this as “efficient socializing” but I’m happy to belong to an époque of slow food and proper sentence structure. Blogging is barely an old fashioned medium, only when compared to tweeting and poking, and it’s archival value is unknown. We try to find a place for each level of communication, we seldom call, we almost never write, emails have, however, drawn us all closer. I.M. and Facebook therefore have put us into the same room. I wonder if it’s all a fleeting thing. By the time I figure out how to make it my homepage, it’ll be yesterdays tech and we’ll all be marveling at the next tulip craze!

In the meantime… if I send you anything you wish you didn’t know, poke me!

Today's links:

The funny truth about Facebook: Click Here

Travel: 36 hours

Fantasy travel: Click here and Scroll to page 3

Photography: Berthamag.com

Efficient surfing: veryshortlist.com

Oz

2009-01-24T18:23:00.007+01:00

Yes we did it!

Now the world breaths a sigh of relief while we wait with optimistic hearts to see what tricks this newest man behind the curtain has at his disposal.

Everyone here talks about what an amazing load of misfortune this new president has on his plate, but I am inspired by the general optimism that shines through. It seems that even Obama's detractors have high hopes, the silver lining to the Bush era.

We had an inaugural ball here in Martel. Some of our French friends took the occasion to declare our house an unofficial American Consulate, and insisted that we should start issuing visas and proclaming stuff! We were about 50 strong, a handful of Americans in the crowd, mostly French, but a nice international crowd. Everyone attentively watching the ceremonies (6 pm in Martel) and drinking Obamatini's! Lot's of raucous shouting, and lot's of congratulatory repartie.

We watched the un-ending parade on the big screen into the night, we watched the ever attentive Obama's wave to every American who passed by, then they went onto the Balls while we slept.

We felt very connected to America, very proud to represent her in our adopted land, and a part of the new spirit that's been planted, let's see what grows!

Thanks to our friends Jack and Martine, who don't appear in any of the photos, because I borrowed the pictures from their blog about us:

Click here for their Rancho Escargot Blog

Obamatini

2009-01-19T14:59:00.002+01:00

We are planning an inaugural ball for tomorrow evening. We have a responsibility, living in France and representing America, so we will be hosting an inaugural ball. 30 French people coming by to share our optimism in a new president with mountains to climb and secret cellars to fill in. Optimism is a rare coin in these darkening days, but it is the coin of the global realm. It's our here and now, but the future doesn't even belong to us, time to pay up! We'll be serving French chocolates with red, white and blue decorations. American chocolate chip cookies, French endives with a South American Salsa, French pruneaux with southern bacon, Italian foccacia, Greek tapenade, English bread sticks and a new martini coined The Obamatini: Russian Vodka, Spanish Curaçao, French lemonade and a mid-east pomegranate ice cube. Vive la revolution!

Decalage

2009-01-09T22:56:00.006+01:00

The easiest part of travelling is the transitional nightmare aptly called decalage or jet lag. On a voyage across friends and family it obscures the emotional pain , conveniently replacing it with sleep deprivation, temporal confusion and an acidic caffeinated buzz, oh and bad food!

A simple set of flights, somehow cruising at 800kph over the still frozen ice fields, takes an entire day, and then one arrives tomorrow, and needs to speak a different language. Traffic signs change, the food is different, and everyone you love seems somewhere else.

We used drugs, Melatonin, for the jet lag, trying to further confuse our corps into submission, and it seemed to be a good thing. Sleep continues a bit interrupted,even now, as wakeful spells continue to surprise me, my body is here at GMT+1, while my brain travels the globe rearranging the connections and the constant relationships.

It could be worse, imagine the Bangladeshi and the New Foundlanders their wacky time zones are 30 minutes off of their neighbors!? Click here. All we have to worry ourselves with is wondering where we live today and where we'll live tomorrow.

It seemed to be a theme of this trip for us, the question of where we live today and where we will live tomorrow. We spent hours looking at schools and pondering neighborhoods, and wondering when and where our adventure is going. Bordeaux, Paris, California? Soon, Later, or even Later?

A vast unknown of global proportions!

Travel is difficult. We unpack into every “home” we rest in, trying to “live” there for the moment, trying to stretch-to-fit every locale. We literally fill the drawers and closets with our stuff so as to trick our minds into belonging there. Days pass, and we walk in the shoes of a new home, only to move into another too soon, but it works, and keeps us there, and keeps us connected to the smells and sounds and souls who reside there longer than we do.

Travel is easy. We may be far away most of the time, but we are home instantly wherever we go. Friends and family grow and change, but there is a slot for us, a small space we get to park and tie up, new plants and paint, the occasional new kid, but the underlying structure of our old lives is a comfortable constant. Mere minutes and we are back where we were, comfortably a part of your lives.

The only hard part is the wonderful part as well, the goodbyes. The mood changes, the drives to the airport, the words unspoken, the value of another hug, the terror of being asked to move ones car at the airport, and the relief that the good bye is truncated in the name of 911. We have chosen a life that moves us too far from almost anyone who reads this, and the goodbyes are where we get to see this and own it. But this too is the sublime moment where the sadness marks the value, and the invisible becomes visible. Whatever place in the heart chokes us, it’s an amazing moment where we fully appreciate the connections that we are stretching, not so much to there limit, as that we are stretching these relationships to surround us, as an invisible protective layer that we will wear until the next time we can unpack into your lives. This packing and unpacking is the best and the worst part of this adventure, we’ll let you know if that ever changes!

And a Happy New Year!

Thanksgiving and extra maps

2008-11-26T21:10:00.004+01:00

We decided to simplify my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, by celebrating one day early and by not inviting anyone. A huge success! Somehow removing what little pressure there is associated with this day of days made it one of the best yet. We did invite a few, Linda and her two grown kids and Oscar's friend Tony (he represented the french indians to our american pilgrims). We cooked a large turkey breast and I stuck two large chicken legs on the sides so it even looked Rockwellian. I was surprised when I unwrapped the chicken legs, as the butcher had sold me two right legs, so my faux turkey looked as confused as possible with one leg trotting off in either direction. Tasty if not ambidextrous!

Dried cranberry sauce (no fresh available)

Smashed potatoes

Pumpkin soup

Roasted roots

and a Pecan (walnut) pie

worth writing home about.

So I'm writing home...and wishing you were here to make it a real turkey event!

Against my rules, I have two shout outs, both gleaned from NPR:

A bunch of smart people got together a couple of years ago and started making "corrected maps" that show the "real world". Population maps, poverty maps, malaria maps, export & import maps, and below the very timely population corrected red state/blue state map. Warning, this kept me busy for an hour!

Click here for incredible maps

This is a revised map, in which the size of the states has been altered to reflect each state's population, and therefore its election clout.

Another link; again a map. The Lincoln museum created an animated map/timeline of the civil war. It's an amazing 4 minute video with a timeline and a casualty counter for that war of wars.

Click here for a 4 minute video about the civil war

Other worlds

2008-11-21T14:42:00.002+01:00

A last minute opportunity that aligned with a school vacation sent us scrambling to the Mediterranean and onto a cruise ship for a whirlwind 11 day trip into deepest touristdumb!

The reality of cruising was such an unreality, we checked our passports at the door and were issued plastic id cards that identified us as non-nationals, we were now “fun-ship citizens”. Thank the stars that this cruise had an incredible itinerary including Italy, Greece and Turkey, for otherwise it was too domestic and too foreign at the same time. The crew was thoroughly of this world, European, Americas and Asian, and felt like they outnumbered the passengers who were mostly entirely Americans, with a smattering of Canadians, Europeans, and a few Australians. It felt like America on the high seas, far, however, from anything we’d call home.

We embarked with trepidation and fear, anticipation and suspicion, embarrassment and excitement. After 9 ports, as many hot tubs, 5000 calories per day, and the company of some 3200 fellow passengers, we disembarked pleased and plump with relief and sadness, already thinking about how hard it will be to return to more normal traveling of solitude and uncertainty, where adventure is replaced by comfort, and the search for sustenance becomes an absurd exercise in restraint.

We expected to enjoy the destinations, and we expected to tolerate the means. In fact the destinations took some tolerating (hordes) and the means (the ship) was too comfortable not to have an affair with. Cruising life, as the name connotes, is easy, one is fed, pampered, entertained, fed some more, and gently rocked to sleep every night. There are foreign, exotic faces offering every hospitality at every turn. It is easy to be a gracious guest in such an environment, you have already paid for everything, and every gesture is given genuine and forgiving, without the mantle of tipping or interpreting motivations.

We have been spoiled, I don’t think I will easily get Oscar on another vacation that doesn’t include a “life-boat-drill”. Pat, who went along skeptically is already asking about European River cruises. The problem is to maintain a ”traveler” attitude and not slip too far into the “tourist” column. There is something very ugly about the giant ship overtaking the quaint Greek seaport, the image of 30 tour busses lined up and 50 taxis trying to make their weeks wage on the “boatload” of tourists that haven’t learned a kalimera, or a yassas between them! The ports try hard not to be ruined by the influx and we try hard to find a backstreet experience. In Naples, we tumbled into a doll factory selling tiny orphaned terra cotta heads deemed too twisted to warrant a body, but finding a comfortable home on my mantle. In Mamaris we found a quiet neighborhood where, drawing stares, we fumbled our way through Turkish coffees and Baklavas. In Istanbul we found a small mosque with a hidden entry where we were quickly overtaken by a call to prayer. We quietly slid out the secret door and landed in the belt buckle district of old Istanbul. In Athens we found quiet streets wrapping around under the Acropolis, and in Rome we rode city busses making loops around the Coliseum late into the night. Being a “traveler” is work, but not being a “tourist” is even harder. How are you supposed to take the road less traveled when you approach something like the Grand Bazaar?

Despite the hordes, there were wonders of the world to absorb. The remains of the city of Ephesus was a singularity for me. I was able to open my eyes wide enough not only to imagine the Greek municipality as it was more then 2000 years ago, but to not see the tourists clamoring through it like ants checking off items from their personal bucket lists. It was such a marvelous excavation site, restored to a point where one could imagine togas on all the tourists and gods and goddesses in every niche. It is primarily a long street, perhaps a mile in length, that crossed an important Greek, then Roman, city. They have restored pieces along the pathway, a library, an amphitheater, homes, a water source, but the amazing thing for me was the sense of the street life that had been brought back, this was a street worn through centuries, and you could feel the life and the culture through your shoes, emanating from the stones that never lose their voices.

In Athens it was a one act play, I had been to Athens 25 years ago. I spent a short week there, contemplating the Acropolis as an architectural student might, which apparently meant more about bars and coffee shops as I never made it up to nor through the Propylaea and into the Acropolis itself. So for me it was a moment of completion, not a protection of the gods so much as a fulfillment of a purpose, and a nod to my grandfather who paid for the first trip only to be confounded by my missing the punch line. The Acropolis is such a punch line! It is a monument created ahead of it’s time, as much an homage to the minds that built it as to the gods that it called to. It is easy, scrambling over the rocks, to be transported so far, far away, to a different time where the world was even more confused about politics, commerce and voting rights than it is today.

The other ports of call were stellar, and only escape mention in the shadow of the ones above. There was a bit of “ruin burn-out” with so many prime examples on the tour. Pompeii was overwhelming in it’s size and condition, complete homes! Pisa’s basilica and tower, uplifting despite the tricks of gravity and the torrents of rain! The Pantheon in Rome has to be the finest way-old building in the world, it shows how little we have progressed in architecture over the eons.

It was a wonderful manner for our small team of three to vacation. Oscar quickly earned free range as a citizen of this small-country sized ship, coming and going as he pleased, bouncing between new friends, favorite crew, and familiar family. We all wandered about our giant floating living room of a vacation, snacking, being entertained and marveling at the worlds over the railings. Our last day on the ship was November 5^th, we woke up to the moment where the election was called for our Barack Obama. The clouds spread, the sun shone through, and like in America, people were looking into your eyes again. Perhaps to determine whether we were sharing in the victory, or the defeat, but nonetheless in the eyes, and that was a palpable difference even on vacation! While perhaps more than 50% of the passengers were pulling for the wrong guy, I have since read that Barack has an approval rating in the 70’s, only two weeks after adding “elect” to his title. That is the first poll number I have been happy to read in this over polled universe. Therein is the mandate! The world entire seems to be embracing our Barack, it all made the perfect conclusion to a rarefied vacation.

Cruising is not for everyone, nor for anyone too often, but it is perhaps perfect for us, every 5 or so years! We found this one so inexpensive we couldn’t resist, I think it’ll be a while till another one comes along.

Interested in photos: click here

A moment to our transitory lives…. We lost a close friend this week, to a well fought cancer…. Tom stands as a hero to making one’s life a wonderful adventure…. His grace in these last few years will stay with me forever!....Today I’m appreciating absolutely everything….Thanks for reading.

Diminishing Returns

2008-09-20T17:01:00.000+02:00

An Oscar tale

Our budding adolescent is in a balancing act I can only barely remember the flavor of. Not yet the man-child, he is between a boy who wants to be accompanied through life and an individual who wants to, at least, arrive alone. Pat and Oscar leave for school together most mornings and as is her role, she returns alone. The diminishing return is the duration to which they walk together.

First day….school yard
Second day….school gate
Third day…. within sight of school
Second week….buddies ring the bell and Oscar leaves with surrogates

There are mornings now where Oscar wakes up, gets dressed and is downstairs an hour before his parents. New behavior! (kinda cool!). He is striving for independence, but not all at once. Last month he put a DO NOT ENTER sign on his door, strangely in French, even though he was obviously talking to his American us. We tried to respect the sign, and him, and honor the right, but it wasn’t working, so I explained that we didn’t have the right to give such messages to each other, blah, blah, blah and that I would always knock, blah, blah, blah….but there wasn’t a room in our lives that was truly off limits to each other. Somehow that logic worked and we have moved on. We are very nervous that around each corner we are going to encounter a surly wild thing of an adolescent who roars his terrible roars and gnashes his terrible teeth so far he only rolls his terrible eyes, but the rest has gotta be out there. The tenderest moments are the moments before sleep and if I get up early enough to accompany the drowsy morning minutes, where sweetness trumps computer games and hugs are the currency of the realm.

What I do remember from age 10, is having a burning desire for a “best friend”. I remember Clyde, and Marco and then Jeff, Debbie, Tony, Denise, Tom and finally finding Pat. That need for a best friend runs very strong in our family. Oscar hasn’t owned it yet, but he is a very gregarious soul, very much in need of his relationships and very much wanting one to hang his coat upon, other than mum and dad, which is more like dropping your coat and knowing that they will pick it up before he does. I think it takes a huge amount of something (?) to be alone, some of us are better at it than others, like Oscar, I define myself through my relationships.

Parenting is such an unknown, if there had been Operating Instructions, I’m sure I would have left them in the box anyhow! The game of an only child is vastly different from the playing field both Pat and I grew up on. More of a balancing act of being there, but not too there, of being a team of three balanced with being a team of two (parents) with a goal of one. We are fortunate to have a balanced kid and the means to guide him.

Telling moments: when asked if he dreams in French or English, he responded that he didn’t know but that when he talks to his stuffed animal, he speaks in French. And now, while he wants some independence, he still walks past his bathroom in the middle of the night, across our room and finds the sleepy comfort of our cold tiled bathroom for a midnight pee.

He’s growing up fast…. still a puppy, but with big paws!

Gross

2008-09-02T21:59:00.000+02:00

Gross = 144 = Fat

Somehow I have always loved the idea of gross. It’s a funny number, it’s not ten, or 33.3, or even pi, its 144? A dozen dozen. And what’s a dozen? Why is there such a unit as twelve?It apparently comes from the French word for twelve, douze, and it seems it might have something to do with the number of lunar cycles per year, but mostly it’s a funny, if convenient, number, that has a grand part in our everyday lives. I recently had to explain to Oscar the concept of “a baker’s dozen” which makes so little sense in this land of boulangeries. Can you imagine growing up without doughnuts as an everyday part of your life!?

But I am off the point.

As magic as the number may be, the word gros, means fat in francaise, and I’m starting to notice some of it around here. It’s been a wonderful summer full of big meals and fois gras and even my doctor made the observation as he gave me a physical. I figure that it was an early call to action, but I have company. We spent a day at the town pool in the next town and I felt that the populace was putting it on! Fat French folks! This it seems is new, perhaps it was an ugly coincidence, perhaps it is too many crepes or not enough red wine, or more a reflection on Parisian tourists in the South of France?? Personally, I can eat more salads, but what will this culture, as a whole, be able to do? It’s a change, like so many, that indicate France going down the wrong path….next it’ll be the 35 hour work week! (oh wait, Sarkozy did away with that last month).

Someone famously spoke “let them eat cake” and see where it has gotten them!

Today was “rentree”, the word that means summer is over and it’s time to put the lawn furniture away and get back to work and school. All of France returned to the classroom today and for Oscar it was a milestone. He has entered sixieme, sixth grade in America, and it involves a new school on the other side of town. He will no longer have one teacher, but rather different teachers for each subject. He will have a class in English twice a week and Occitan, the language that preceded French in this part of France, and francaise, math, geo/history, plus a computer class and an art class.

He was nervous this morning, but came home a happy kid, which makes for happy parents.

Pat resumed her formal French studies today, and I continue to rebuild the front doors, beautiful walnut doors that had so much weather on the bottoms that I am changing out the wood on the lower fourth. Life returning to normal!?

Tourists

2008-08-06T11:02:00.012+02:00

A vacation from a vacation must be, by definition, work, right?

Well here’s a work story. One day after the end of school, we packed our bags and headed east, joining family for our summer vacation in Croatia, Bosnia, Vienna and Hungary. The vacation was a mix of beaches and museums, old towns and new food. Lavender couches, cherry soup, foreign liquors and hot sun. As always, it was fabulous to be away and it’s great to be home!

The smooth stones of time and the pocked stones of conflict.
We are a land-based family. As probably so are you, but we seem to have a near aversion to water. We like our water in bottles and pipes. We are city poeple and are a wee bit out of our element when we change into our maillot de bains. It took us a few hours of watching the locals to figure out just how and where to swim, but once whetted…. we were happy as fish in a small pond. Our standard operating procedure, in an over-touristed town, is to wiggle through the masses and attempt to find the true experiences. Inevitably we discover we are not alone, sometimes surrounded by Lets-Go toting brethren, and hopefully by a few un-jaded locals.

Dubrovnik, at the southern tip of Croatia, is like an island, securely on the mainland but facing the clear Adriatic. Surrounded by medieval walls that once protected it from the sea which now frame it for the sea. Unfortunately it is a bit too much of a destination these days. The cruise ships have found it and populate it every day from sun-up to sun-set. The limestone streets first worn by Venetian traders, then by Karadzic’s bombs are now polished daily by thousands of cruise enthusiasts following bouncing umbrella’s from one Kodak moment to the next.

Dubrovnic as seen from the terrace of our apartment.

We tried to get through the must see moments of the town early in the morning, and then escape to the outskirts where we found small restaurants and “private” beaches to pass the hottest parts of the day with the locals. I like being "a local"; I try to impersonate the locals when I am a tourist and I have tried to be one in as many places as possible…. serial dwelling. There is so much to be said for being of a place. I remember when I had lived in California for 7 years, someone declared me a “local” as I had lived there longer than the average person. I had great pride in being a Californian, as I did in being a local of the French quarter in New Orleans, and now in Martel. The more touristed a town the quicker one can claim the title. The title for those in Dubrovnik comes with more stripes than most. The Serbian-Croatian war in the very recent 90’s reigned fear down upon the very heads of the locals, they were trapped within their own walls, stubbornly holding onto their lives and their heritage. We met a taxi driver that ran food up the hill to the defending soldiers when he was Oscar’s age. I don’t think I had ever met anyone who had been shot at!

Now the locals are in servitude to the tourists. It is almost all that remains of their economy, and the ages old relationship is on the surface there. They need us for 75% of their jobs, and we need them for everything we do there, except swimming. We found a café pinched between the sea and the town, it was clinging to the rocks, outside of the medieval walls. There was a place for drinks, and a place to swim in the surf, and in between the two there were spots carved out of the rocky beach with chairs and umbrellas and “privat” signs defending the spot. We were told by the café owner that “we could sit there but that it was an area for the locals”…and well???.... we sat. This would be akin to roping off a section of a public beach and saying that it is only for the people that live on the beach. No one owns the beach, right? This should be public and well, being able to spell “privat” does not entitle you to something which belongs to everyone. We were a massive group of 10 (don't try this at home), and while half of us were in the sea at any given time, we were still a massive group. One local fisherman came and happily shared the space with us for an hour, making small talk about the species of fish and such, but as the day grew late and the locals all started to appear, we were challenged by several children, who seemed to know only one word in English: “private”. Our new friend, the fisherman, chastised them for their rudeness, and encouraged us to hold our ground. The 12 year old sized kids promptly leapt from the stone cliffs next to our hideout. We thought this precipice was so high as to only provide a view, but they seemed quite used to flying the 40 or so feet into the clear blue sea. We had stood our ground, planted our flag, (sent the locals off a cliff) and so we could now leave pretending it was our choice to do so.

The event made me start thinking about being a local. Especially in an environment overwhelmed by tourists. The locals surrender so much, their lives are ruined/improved by the influx of others, and what can they hold onto? A café the tourists don’t (yet) know about? A shortcut through the crowds? The quietude of mornings? A private beach? I begrudge them these things, I search for them to create my own experience, these secrets that create a place. Search and Destroy: Tourism in the World. Fortunately, the world is large and many of these places are endowed with an incredible built or natural environment that will continue to bear the immense weight of us non-locals. The limestone streets will get even smoother, the surrounding mountain tops even more rugged and the coastlines will continue to meander, flashing their beautiful eyes at people like me.

When I am a foreign tourist, being the antithesis of local, I am finely tuned into the traveling brethren. I listen for English spoken here and am ready to make relationships where they don’t belong. Sitting at a cafe in Budapest, I am drawn to the next table of American or French voices, kindred spirits? long lost relatives? new best friends? Strangely, as stated above, I am in this new place to feel it, to be lost in it, to be as a local, but then my reflex is to make connections with others like me, other tourists! We share restaurant stories, museum ideas, transit passes, and the occasonal email address. Somehow making familiar connections in far away places grounds me. It’s not what I am looking for, but it’s often what I find. We cross oceans to find new experiences, then we cross the street to re-touch the familiar.

Surfing the world like an old man in the waves.
I sat on the edge of the storm-tossed Adriatic on our last day, watching a man in his 80’s (a local) being tossed against the rocks by the 3 meter waves. Amazingly he just floated there, rolling into the rocks and away, lightly pushing off of them with his feet when he drifted too close. He was so in his element, so unfazed by the danger and the power that moved him, I was fascinated. I imagine this old man probably grew up swimming in this cove, making waves in his youth and surfing them effortlessly now, floating through the tortured history of his city, the wars, the communist era, the tourists, and whatever is next. The waves pulled him back, up and forward again and again. I watched with the fascination of an accident or a miracle about to happen. As time passed, the old man left unscathed and before quitting the cove, I took his place in the waves to again experience something local. It was far more miracle than the hazard I thought I had been watching, the immense surf, and the unique form of the rocky coast held me gently. With the exception of the breaking waves from behind and the recoiling spray in front, it was like floating in a watery rocking chair that had been there for a thousand years! I can still close my eyes and go back there.

Bosnia and tortured civilizations

We left the hot beach weather to the swimmers and drove inland 3 hours to another world entirely, Bosnia. While Croatia had been christian for most of it's history, Bosnia was at the crossroads of the Byzantine, Ottoman and Austria-Hungarian empires and has an overlapping religious culture to show for it. Christian, Muslim and Orthodox continue to share the city, sometimes peacefully, and sometimes, as in the 1990's, not so peacefully, and even today they seem ready to forcibly protect their beliefs. It was an interesting sight to see an immense Christian cross dominating the hill above Mostar, a town that held at least a dozen mosques and minarets that we could see. We toured one of the mosques, built in the 16th century and we climbed it's minaret, from there we could see this ancient city and the rugged mountains around it. We were in the very center of Mostar and all around us we were looking at the desruction from a war 13 years ago like it could have been yesterday! Parts have been rebuilt but much remains awaiting attention. It was strange being a tourist in an area that had so recently been a war zone. The pain and suffering the people of this town had witnessed was hard to imagine even when seeing some of the damage, and now we were here sightseeing as if their lives were on display. We climbed, contemplated and crossed the famous bridge built in the 1500's that connected the two sides of the city and was then symbolically and strategically destroyed in the war. Now a Unesco World Heritage Site, it was rebuilt after the war from stones recuperated from the floor of the river 100 feet below. It was a moving experience and another reminder of how fortunate we are to have been born in the time and place that we were...

Human Soup
After Mostar, we returned to the Croatia coast and spent another fabulous few days in the sun. Then, we returned to civilization. As I have said before, we are city mice and we had been away too long. We had several wonderful days in Vienna, full of museums, restaurants and window shopping. We toured buildings and even went to an outdoor music event, Peter and the Wolf, on a giant outdoor screen in front of the Rathause, Vienna’s Gothic city hall. Thousands of young Austrians eating dinner, drinking wine and watching a Russian version of the fable, followed by the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas performing the Rites of Spring. It was a sublime moment, food framed by music framed by fable, framed by an incomparable setting, in a superlative city! An exclamation mark to our stay in Vienna, we left for Budapest the next day.

Budapest was a smorgasbord. It is a grand city, which suffered greatly under the attention and neglect of the Nazi regime and then the Soviets. Years and years of a crumbling society, punished by political winds and weak leaders in the face of crippling occupations. The architecture is grand and wonderful, varied and coherent. The buildings are mostly huge brick monsters with deep layers of plaster creating one interesting composition after another. Almost every building seems to occupy the entire block and possess at its core a grand courtyard with balconies all around creating exterior corridors.

Every surface is decorated with arches, or iron work, or murals, mostly falling apart, but still feeling alive and poised for resurrection. Every building seems a celebration, nothing seems to be background, all in competition for greatness. All together the city is tired and awaiting a rebirth, which somehow seems imminent.

Budapest has a thermal source, water bubbling forth at something short of boiling, which is shared by the cities many bath houses. There are two grand ones that remain, both palaces to the art of bathing. Hundreds of Budapesters share the flow with the tourists in a multitude of pools ranging from freezing to boiling and from quiet to raucous, aerobics classes, swimming classes, massages, and a 100 year old wave pool that is more like falling into a racing river full of warm bodies and fast moving water. Everyone is colliding and bouncing off of each other like so many fish in a simmering bouillabaisse! Incredible.

There is something very different about Eastern Europe, it is the origin of so much of America, and yet remains so exotic and pure. We are used to the diversity of America, our melting pot, while so many places in the world are so homogeneous that they are fascinating to us. We watch the people, we recognize ourselves in them, we soak in their environment and with luck, we return home different.

Love to all of you, Daniel Pat and Oscar

Maple Syrup

2008-07-04T17:59:00.003+02:00

The nice thing about an only child is you can raise him on Maple Syrup. There’s nothing wrong with Log Cabin, I turned out alright, if you consider a penchant for fois gras and butter cream frosting healthy. But when there is just one mouth to feed, one can afford Maple Syrup.
Actually we can afford Oscar’s gourmand tendencies easily enough; he apparently has some sort of French speed governor built in. Unlike me, or most other kids, he hoards his goods. Oscar still has Halloween candy, he still has M&M’s his birthday party, and it took him all week to finish a tiramisu! I’m not sure where this comes from, it may be French…. it may be Californian…. it may be the child of stupid-thrifty parentage???? He continues to be happy with second hand clothing and penny candy, library books and adaptive reuse. Someday soon he may start insisting on new clothes, or a cell phone, but for now we are the blissful parents of a happy 10 year old.

Today is the last day of school for this Franco-American, suitably on Independence Day! Oscar is finished with primary school and starts at college next year, the confusing name for what America calls middle school. It’s a big deal here, a larger school and a new format. The college is here in town, walking distance from home and we are all excited about the change. He finished the year with excellent marks and a nice comment about his appetite for learning. We have seen some of the strange effects of his having skipped a grade, while he did well academically, he is the youngest and in some ways that comes apparent from time to time. The biggest problem was inserting himself into the older class and their lukewarm acceptance. Next year their class will be mixed with several other schools and we expect all these lines to blur further. The process has perhaps given him some important social skills.

Otherwise he is walking the line between sweet kid and surly adolescent, unsure on how to respect his parents and be a cool kid at the same time. I’m dreadfully afraid it’s karmic payback time and what the next few years could bring. Oscar is entering what were dark years in my childhood. Fortunately half of his genetic makeup comes from Pat so we should be alright.

Madame McBain was honored at the end of the school year. The other teachers gave her some gifts, the parents gave her a rounding ovation, and the kids were all appreciative and happy to try out their English hello’s. She shined and continues to do wonders for our status in this tiny town. Next year she hopes to get involved at the college and perhaps start an “English club”.

Every step we make gives us new entrees into the community here. After five years we are more comfortable with our status and able to speak more English with friends. Everyone speaks some English, it seems like many were waiting for us to establish some command of their language before they were comfortable enough to try ours. Every few weeks someone else talks to Pat about helping them with their English. Every new door gives us an entrée into another level of society here, Oscar’s school, Pat’s teaching, or my new door.

The door came out well, getting compliments, beckoning visitors and still slamming behind them. The arch is way out of level so the door is too, causing it to pick up speed as it closes…..solutions pending.

Summer starts for us today; we are off to the beach!

knock-knock

2008-06-28T22:57:00.000+02:00

The new front door is done! Well almost, we are still searching for the poignee, the door knob, which by means of a metal rod will operate the latch. There is a lock, and it has been oiled with used cooking oil (as the locals do it). Somehow in the photo it looks awfully low, but it's really high enough that it feels comfortable to walk through.

We are basking in the approving "chapeaus" from the neighboors, and the continued surprise from friends who never quite got the idea of the described "new door made from old floorboards". The wood is 100 year old Walnut, the frame is 1000 year old stone,..... PINCH ME!

Tool Challenged

2008-06-10T23:03:00.000+02:00

We are still working on the A is for Arch project.
Being thwarted at every turn with poor quality tools. Here's the deal, for some reason, France is awash in cheap Chinese tools.
There mustn't be any tariffs on imported tools, as there must be in America. In France one can actually buy power tools at the
grocery store, 8 euro grinders and drills and 30 euro demolition hammers and vacuums. These tools are not made very well, but they always come with a 1 year warranty which is about double the life of the average tool for a guy like me, so if you play your cards right you can string one cheap tool along for a long time. Now, cheap tools are not much fun to work with, I have always been a strong believer in quality tools, but I already own all these tools in California, and the French tools that would 'last a lifetime' won't function on the 110 volt American system so I have no desire to drop the big euros. The Europeans do make great tools, AEG, Bosch, Festool.... but those tools are twice the price of quality tools in the US. The core of the problem is that there are no tools in the middle range, just cheap and way expensive! So I buy the cheap tools and have already replaced them time and time again.

This week it was the Demolition Hammer, the small grinder (I cut the cord, oops!) the large grinder and then the table saw. Only the table saw is still under it's warranty, but when you return a tool or electronic device to a store here in France, they try to fix it! In America, they replace it and your only out the lost hours of standing in line at Home Depot, here they send it out for repair, and half of the time they actually repair it! The rest of the time, you just wait three to six weeks while they get HQ to authorize the replacement. It is so very frustrating to be mid project and so gravely tool-challenged.

But despite the stumbles the A is for Arch project moves forward. Here the door is in place (behind the plywood barrier that keeps the tourists from marching in). It is made of inch thick, 100 year old walnut boards recuperated from the attic floor, very pretty and VERY heavy. The challenge that awaits is how to hinge it, the stone arch is not plumb, I wonder if it ever was? I will start by hanging it tight to the arch and out of level and then try to compensate with offset hinges, it's just a theory but it should work. There is nothing like reopening a stone arch to create a buzz on the street, everyone wants to talk about it. Between the Chinese tools and the French tourists, we might get done by Christmas!

A is for Arch

2008-05-29T21:10:00.004+02:00

One might suppose to have started with a project like this, but we are closer to finishing with it. When we bought this house 3 years ago, we quickly realized that the stoned in arch should become the front door. We applied for permission to "re-open" the arch and it is now the last project on our building permit.

The arch was filled with 2 feet of stone 6 feet high and 7 feet wide, I'm figuring 7 tons, supported by the ache in my back and the sore spot on my hand from missing the chisel too many times. Strangely all the stones in the arch had been destroyed by repeated freezing, moisture settled into the stone and, over the centuries, the occasional deep freezes would split the stones into rubble which stayed intact, like so many things in medieval France, by gravity alone.

Tomorrow I will start rerouting the water main and then I can start rebuilding the doors.

New projects

2008-05-24T11:41:00.003+02:00

We have started into one of our single largest
details, opening the new entrance onto the street. Three years we got permission to reopen the 13th century arch on the street.

In the 17th century (give or take a hundred years), they started taxing property
owners on the size and nature of the openings in their buildings. Openings = Wealth. A street-arch meant business and the high tax led to the majority of the arches being filled in to avoid the taxes. Centuries later, with new tax methods, we are rediscovering our past, and reopening the arch. This Arch, long ago, was the interface between the merchant who owned our house and the customers in the streets.

For us it will become the front door and relegate the walnut doors I had made with my dad 3 years ago, to the "garage" doors they were meant to be. We are looking forward to finally taking this step. It involves re-routing the drain line, the water main, electrical switches, doorbells, mailbox, and about 2 tons of stone. Oscar was very excited to participate, tearing apart an old stone wall is lots of fun, he even wrote out a schedule:

practice guitar --- 10 minutes
snack
Work - Work - Work!
snack

The whole work/play thing is still unfolding. For me there is little difference (perhaps having to do only with whether I drink my wine during or after). My work is play, it is still what I want to do on my weekends and a sore back or smashed finger is the smudge on my apron that marks my accomplishment. For Oscar this is still forming. "Play" is a game, it comes in a box or employs a toy. When he is in his fort however that is "work", things are being made, mostly defensive structures for my eventual attack! but it's work. I remember well my father trying to instill a joy of such work in me. We would spend summers in the "family fort", an actual log cabin in the Connecticut woods. What I remember first is the lists he would make before he left for work. Only years later did I realize that he thought he was leaving a menu of fun things to do all day, at the time I saw it as an unrealistic challenge to my summer vacation!

You rebel against your parents
and then...... you become them.

Now I am trying to remember whatever was coursing through my ten year old mind and take heed. I want Oscar to find that Joy of Work, to find pleasure in craft but I'm not entirely certain of how to affect it.

We installed a marquis over our front door, a glass canopy to
keep the rain out. I used a piece of 1/2" tempered glass which appropriately disappears on
the exterior and does an amazing reappearing act every sunny day around 5 pm, with a shifting
prismatic effect that brings life to the white stone walls and anyone who happens into our home.
Somehow it's such a new-age touch in such an old place that it boggles the mind.

To un-boggle the mind, I wanted to share a radio program, This American Life, which is one of the most heralded programs on NPR, with a reputation for "stories about why everyone else is so interesting". I have been listening for 10 years and it just gets better. Last weeks (1 hour) program was a very entertaining, and illuminating set of stories that go a long way towards describing the boggling loan cum credit crisis story gripping the planet. This is easy listening! Funny, entertaining and like the shifting prism in our home, illuminating in a spectral manner!

Click HERE for the show and let me know if you like it.