bear – ingn 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
Something happened inside my head this morning that I need to shut down real fast.
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I’m still working on the jet lag. The first morning I found myself awake very early, and wrote a blog post on my phone from bed just to give myself something to do. This morning, I slept mostly through until about 5:30, a good sign.
As I lay dozing a bit and thinking over the things still undone and scattered about the house—so many Have-To-Dos—I found myself numbering and I have to write a blog post about something among them.
No! Bad Erin! Bad! Bad!
I would like to write because I want to write. I do not have to do this. Even if it is an activity that develops better with a certain amount of discipline, the big picture needs to be that the discipline is in service of skills that in turn serve self-development (or self-maintenance) that I sincerely desire.
Attaching the sense of self-worth to the short-term question of why I will write today is completely backwards.
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I called that thought out and sent it away, got up, drank my coffee, sat a while in contemplation, consulted my to-do list (which does not have “write a blog post every day or you’re a loser” on it), started on laundry and putting away school supplies. Now here I am, resting and digesting my lunch, choosing to spend it writing instead of, oh, deleting emails or looking up recipes I might make for dinner. The latter alternatives would be useful, the last one might be mildly entertaining (I enjoy reading recipes), but the writing is right now a bit more satisfying. Even though I haven’t a great deal of import to say.
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Some day Mark and I will be retired and will have, jointly, more leisure time to use and perhaps to enjoy. Obviously leisure time can be directed outwards, to service of various kinds, and I expect some of ours will. But I expect we’ll want to spend some of it on and for ourselves and each other, and I don’t much like to say that we’ll deserve it, but let’s say that I don’t know of any significant objections to our grateful enjoyment of some of our resources of time, strength, treasure as we live our lives as older persons.
I feel like it might be important for me to deeply come to know the difference between using time on what feel like obligations, and using it on what feel like opportunities (for growth, connection, or enjoyment). All this being distinct from wasting the time—spending it poorly: in numbly disconnecting, in nurturing hostility or resentment, in undermining or neglecting the real duties that remain.
Being honest with myself about why I want (or don’t want) to spend time on something, whether I have to (or don’t have to) do it, strikes me as an important foundation for the interior experience of that time—independently of how I eventually decide to spend it.
I’m being bad. It’s 3:43 in the morning, and yesterday I was awake for twenty-four hours, but the body keeps the time seven hours later.
I am somehow both really sleepyheaded, and very awake.
Airport photo: JFK around 5:15 pm Eastern, yesterday
We had a medical emergency aboard our last flight yesterday. The patient walked past our row to the back of the plane, I supposed to use the bathroom, and I remember thinking that she didn’t look well: something in the gait. A little while later all our in-flight movies were interrupted by a crewmember requesting assistance from any physicians, nurses, or EMTs who might be on the flight. Three or four people, all women, hurried back, suddenly transformed from rumpled passengers in comfortable clothing to alert professionals; one had the window seat next to Mark, so he and Leo had to quickly get out and let her by.
I’d never noticed before, but there is a secret pair of audio jacks overhead of a seat in the middle of the plane—row 24 in this A220-100—which allows the crew to connect a Medical Headset with a very long yellow cord that can go from there all the way to the back. We were in that row, and the flight attendant enlisted Mark’s help in getting it connected since the jack was right over his head. One of the medically trained passengers took it and put it on with the crew’s help before heading back. The crew member followed, draping the cord over the back of Leo’s seat and into the aisle.
I supposed the Medical Headset allowed the passenger attending the patient to speak directly to the flight deck and maybe even to a paramedic team waiting on the ground, but of course I don’t know.
All this happened when according to our in-flight seatback screens, we were about 45 minutes out from arrival. But the pilot announced that he’d been granted landing priority, and we were on the ground only about 15 minutes later. We all remained in our seats while paramedics came on, and shortly after while they helped the patient, who, I was relieved to see, could walk gingerly, move off the plane. When they let us off a few moments later, and we made our way to the gate exit, we saw that she was seated in an airport wheelchair, being attended to, looking frail but alert. So, let’s hope she’ll be all right.
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Simon and I entertained ourselves on the way to baggage claim by thinking of things we’d be glad to have again back in the States. He’d been very happy to find a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos for his layover snack, and now we listed other things: soft pretzels, yellow mustard, baked macaroni and cheese.
Signs you’ve landed in Minnesota: Caribou Coffee, LeeAnn Chin
Milo met us at the house and helped us carry in our suitcases. It was around 9 pm, and Simon (who is a child of routine) immediately disappeared upstairs and started getting ready for bed. The rest of us stayed up until a normal bedtime of ten-ish, although I slipped upstairs to change out of the clothes I’d been in for so long: what had been at 6 AM France time a soft and comfy cotton jersey knit set and the relaxed sleep bra were now digging sweatily into my flesh. I put on a flowy sleep dress, came down to get a mango LaCroix, and said my good nights.
Not before watering my two plants (in self-watering pots that last 30 days) and setting up a pot of coffee for the morning.
It will brew in one hour. I guess I’ll stay in bed till then.
I write this from (checks in-flight screen) 33,000 feet, 1,638 miles from Geneva and 2306 miles from NYC.
All dressed up for the transatlantic flight with my important accessories, such as my wrap with the zipper pocket and my footrest that hangs from the tray table
Yesterday, our last day, I first walked into town to buy more coffee pods and a selection of pastries (Simon asked for a baguette of his own instead). Then we asked the kids where they wanted to eat for lunch and dinner.
Leo chose the Indian restaurant for lunch. I told the waiter that Indian food in France wasn’t spicy enough, and he brought me a little dish of a hot-chili condiment to stir into my chana masala. Perfection! We also ordered cheese naan, and that was interesting—we expected a stuffing like paneer, but instead it was something unctuous and mild. French cheese? Do not know.
Leo returned his rental bicycle, and we all agreed to consider renting a bicycle for Leo on future trips to anywhere he could conceivably use it to get around.
Mark took another hike. I cleaned out the fridge. We opened a bottle of wine we still had in the fridge and drank it. We all packed almost all our stuff, Mark weighing the bags on a portable luggage scale and moving things about as needed to keep under the weight limits.
For dinner Simon chose the mead place, L’Hydromel, with the American-style smashburgers and fries on the menu. Funny, isn’t it, that our last two meals in France should be food of a sort we can easily get at home? But let me tell you, my double smash cheeseburger was good. As were its fries and salad. It would have been completely at home at our favorite bar-and-grill places in Minneapolis. Sometimes a burger is what hits the spot.
I did have a glass of mead. Theirs is excellent and it is harder to find in the twin cities.
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Now that I am actually on the plane, especially since there will be a second plane, I am eager to get home. Milo has put food in our fridge: milk, yogurt, cheese, deli meat, and (he added) some cold fried chicken. I still have about 12 hours to go before stumbling into our house, and the thought of my own bed entices me.
Driving to Geneva this morning was a little hair-raising, just because we had to do a weird maneuver where we returned the rental car in the French sector of the airport, but needed to depart from Switzerland. Geneva is a weird city, a major city in a little arm or tentacle of Switzerland that protrudes into France, surrounded by French border. Switzerland isn’t EU, so it’s like a real border; it is in the Schengen area, so you can drive across easily, but customs is necessary for some cargo; the infrastructure of checkpoints and fencing is still around.
The Geneva airport runways are just barely inside Switzerland; leave the runway in an emergency landing and you might well skid to a stop in French fields. The airport terminal buildings are all physically located in Switzerland too. But they’ve worked out some kind of deal with France: there is a “French Sector” of the Geneva airport that functions as a little sealed-off bit of France. It has a rental car return, which was crucial for us as we rented the SUV in Nice and had to return it in France, or at least in “France.”
At least from the direction we were driving, we entered the Switzerland peninsula first (sailing through the first customs point), then executed a series of sharp turns that took us under the runways, back up into France, through another customs point, then back going the opposite direction on the same road under the runway—now in a sort of tunnel of barbed-wire fence. It was really giving West Berlin, as the road was physically in Switzerland but legally, I guess, French.
Mark maneuvered the SUV beast into a car return slot. I picked up the courtesy phone and figured out in Franglais where to return the key. We walked in… Mark checked us in with his phone so we’d have boarding passes (we’d read that you needed them in hand to do what we were about to do)… and we followed signs to a door marked Toute Sortie Definitive and just walked out of France.
I guess the main reason that Geneva has the French sector is that the airport is a major hub, so lots of people fly from French cities to other French cities by connecting through Geneva. The sealed-off French sector allows these passengers to get off their plane, find their gate, and get on the next plane without having to go through Swiss customs or passport control. While we were eating sandwiches in the airport bar before our flight, we could watch passengers crossing over our head in a sort of glass tunnel that I am pretty sure was “France.”
Something to tell MJ about, to file away under “interesting examples of commercial/civic interior architecture.”
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Not much else to report, although this has been a pleasant way to kill some time on the flight. I wonder if I can keep this up at home? Probably not every day; writing will be competing with exercise for my morning motivation and energy.
I wonder what I’ll write about? I’m not sure.
I let blogging slide in part because the stuff that was occupying my mind for a while there was largely stuff I didn’t want to put out into the public, and I also had this sense that I needed to be more careful with my half-formed thoughts.
It isn’t prudent, I think now, to test and refine them by exposing them publicly and seeing what reactions and replies come back from just anyone. Someone might shame you and call you out for them, of course, and maybe you don’t want to do that for some thoughts you are not committed to because they’re still developing. Or you might go viral, which is its own problem if you don’t particularly want to, even if you get a really positive response.
But I think the most important reason to be a little more cautious about just throwing stuff out there is that you might inadvertently be thoughtless, careless. You might feed the disinformation machine, if you toss off some theory about who did what to whom, or repeat something that sounded plausible, without really checking. You might perform a clinical analysis of the right and wrong thing to do in a difficult situation—but you might forget to think about the real people who face such situations, and fail either to couch your discussion with appropriate sensitivity and humility, or to consider whether you ought to consult some of them before opining, or whether you ought to opine at all (perhaps it’d be better to elevate a variety of other people’s words). You might tell a story that rightfully belongs to someone else, betray a trust, give away too much.
I once years ago wrote a blog post about a local news article that mentioned a local couple I didn’t know personally. I literally don’t remember what the story was about. One day, multiple years after I’d written the post, a person mentioned in the story contacted me and asked if I would please take it down, because my blog post was one of the first hits when someone googled their name. I did take it down, because I didn’t have any emotional investment in this one-off post about local news. They hadn’t done anything wrong or shameful, certainly nothing that deserved exposure, they were just tired of the post showing up in search results. Even the original newspaper article didn’t show up anymore.
I’ve never forgotten that, just because it was a reminder that things we write that are just another day of content to us, even innocuous-seeming content, might actually bother someone and feel like a problem to them. This isn’t an argument not to write posts that are reasonably critical of public figures—that can be important speech in a country where discussion is the best way to find consensus—but it is a reminder that it is always important to remember the real people you’re writing about, and the real people who will read what you say and maybe take it to heart; and decide what’s worth saying in the light of all those people. Could be an argument for or against hitting publish. But it isn’t good to forget that the people matter.
So I hope to find a balance, be true, even biting if necessary, but not careless. That seemed really hard for a while. I might be ready to try again.
Chances are good you won’t wake up tomorrow to a new post from me. I have been doing most of this travel blogging mid-morning, and tomorrow morning we load up our luggage in that beast of an SUV and drive to the Geneva airport. We’re supposed to return it in the French sector and then walk into Switzerland, if they let us do it that way.
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Let’s quickly summarize yesterday!
Yesterday morning, Mark went on a solo hike up towards the Aiguille de Midi, then across to the Cascade de Dard. He texted me some pictures.
Buvette along the hike, where Mark rewarded himself with a beer
I might have enjoyed that hike too, but (a) I needed to stay back to keep an eye on a kid who wasn’t feeling great and (b) everyone needs some alone time, so good for Mark for taking some.
What I did instead was nap. I dozed on and off and surfed the web on and off until about 2, and it felt really good. Sleep has been tricky for me and I needed to catch up on it.
After Mark got back I walked in town to the bookstore. This bookstore has a sizable English-language selection, so it is unsurprising that there should be a group of Americans there discussing their trip and looking at guide books. I was browsing regular French stuff, since how often do I get to do that, nearby. One of the American men said to one of the American women something like “what should I do with this?” and she answered hin in French, jokingly, “Stick it in your ass,” then looked at me, embarrassed, and apologized to me in French. Then she had to explain the joke in English to her friend or husband or whatever.
I didn’t say anything, preferring to amuse myself by letting them think I was a native, but now I kind of wish I’d made a “pardon my French” wisecrack.
Anyway, I picked out three very small paperbacks to add to my Francophone library. When I came out it was pouring rain again. I wrapped my books tightly in the sac en plastique from the shop and trudged back, stopping for a cappuccino under an awning.
In the evening we took Simon… bowling!
One of the hotels here advertised itself especially to families. It has two swings (the seats are made of snowboards) in the lobby. The hotel bar and restaurant is located in, well, a big rec room. There’s a board game library, a playroom for smaller kids, a foosball table, a touchable relief model of the Mont Blanc massif, a few pinball machines and an arcade game, and: two mini bowling lanes.
You buy tokens at the bar and put them in the slot, two per player, up to five players. The scoring software seems to be American-made with American bowling-alley rules; the main difference, a thirty-second shot clock for each throw. The ball is small, like a large grapefruit size with no holes, so you roll it underhand at the pins. The pins are also smaller and suspended independently on strings or cables. So instead of the usual pinsetter machine, an unseen tensioner pulls the strings to lift all the dangling pins up at the end of the first throw, and then sets down just the unstruck pins for your second try.
The lane is shorter too, as is the approach, so it took some getting used to, but the smaller ball was a lot easier and more natural to throw than a normal bowling ball. The three of us were more equalized than usual, although Mark still won.
Next to us in the other lane, we chatted with some folks from Ireland: a dad about 70 years old and three grown sons, plus a fifth man who may have been local. They weren’t familiar with the American scoring, so we explained, e.g., how you get extra points after a strike or spare. The family had just completed the hiking tour of Mont Blanc, a hut-to-hut hike that circles the massif. One of the young men lives in town, so we asked what it was like. He said it takes some getting used to, and that the buses and trains don’t run very conveniently outside high season. I think he said some things that made Mark more confident about perhaps planning a ski-only trip here in the near future (not with us, with the good skiers).
We ordered a beer for us (good beer from the brewpub near our rental) and an Orangina and some chicken fingers for Simon. Simon declared the chicken the best he’d had in France and made it known that he’d like to stay in this hotel someday.
After three rounds of bowling we headed back, left Simon at the house, and then went back out in the rain for dinner.
We considered the menu at a rather upscale place but I didn’t feel up to it, being kind of sore and crampy. I wanted either something light or something comfort-foody. I could have destroyed a bowl of mashed potatoes, I think, but a salad sounded good too.
We wound up at a new place where I drank champagne and had a trout “carpaccio” that was very like lox, with a crunchy toast that was very like a big bagel chip, and an ice-cream-scoop-sized blob of whipped herbed crème fraîche that played the role of cream cheese. (It was better, though, in a melt-in-your-mouth sort of way.) I followed it with a salad that wasn’t light at all. Good, though. And another glass of champagne.
Mark had classic French onion soup and a pesto ravioli. He didn’t drink anything since he had had most of the beer at the bowling place. So we didn’t get quite as amused with each other as we had the night before with the 92 centiliters of Côtes du Rhone. But we still had a good time.
Our school load is real but simplified enough here that I’ve been able to work with Simon in the morning and Leo in the late afternoon. And yesterday was the last workday! So when it was over I packed up all the schoolbooks into the rolling carry-ons.
Also some extra books we picked up on the way.
Mark wasn’t quite done with work but there were no more meetings, so I talked him into putting some of the work off till tomorrow so we could have another evening out. The kids opted to stay in, so first Mark put on his raincoat and rain pants and went to fetch pizza for them while I did some pre-packing.
Mainly, that was to lay out my clothes for the next three days, and to pack nearly everything else. I checked with the kids on their clean-clothes status; Leo had just done his laundry, but Simon needed to do a load of wash. He gathered it up for me and I put it into the combo washer-dryer along with a few odd things of mine.
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A side note.
Did I overpack? Not really, although I underestimated the hot weather/cold weather ratio. We did have both, but a lot more of it was hot. Autumn blew into the mountains only a couple of days ago. I also overestimated how often I’d need to dress up, so to speak. I expected to need at least one kind of dressy outfit in Menton, it being the Riviera and all. But it turned out to be pretty casual. Tees and sundresses and gauzy cotton pants everywhere. I did already know that Chamonix is the kind of place where people wear performance fleece and approach shoes out to dinner.
So, like, this purple wool dress is about as dressed up as I get here. With the turquoise puffy, very appropriate for around here. I happen to have a scarf that has both turquoise and purple in it. It makes me feel pulled-together.
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After Mark returned and the kids got their pizza, I put on my raincoat and we went out into the wet evening.
The mountains were entirely hidden by clouds (“socked in,” Mark said), and the light was fading, but the restaurants that were still open glowed in the mist. We walked almost to the other end of town before turning around. It was a pleasant walk even with the rain. Occasionally we stopped and looked at a menu board, but we both were thinking specifically of getting beef carpaccio, and we ended up at the same place Mark had fetched the pizza from.
Simon and I had had lunch there in the first week. The pizza is good, and it has a familiar, family-Italian-restaurant vibe. The interior is paneled with knotty pine, giving it an ambiance I associate with the north woods of Minnesota, and the dessert menu is printed on the placemats.
We ordered to share, a lettuce-and-tomato salad and a smallish beef carpaccio, topped with artichokes, oil, parmesan, and lemon, that came with a side of hot crispy fries.
(American Italian restaurants take note: Carpaccio with a side of fries needs to become a thing.)
We also ordered a 46-cL pitcher of red wine. Why 46, we wondered? The choices were 25, 46, and 100. (FYI, 75 cL is a bottle.) It was a pretty stoneware pitcher. After we’d drunk most of it, with a little still in our glasses, the next time the waiter came by I asked him why. He indicated that he had no idea and that it might have been 44 or 47 and it didn’t matter. I joked “en tout cas, le vrai problème, c’est qu’il est vide,” and turned the pitcher over to demonstrate its emptiness, which caused him to take it away and bring us another one. We decided not to object.
We considered dessert but Mark wanted more real food so we just got another carpaccio-and-fries instead. This is pretty normal behavior for us, fries for dessert. And at the end of the meal when the waiter came back I told him that it was lucky the pitchers were 46 cL because it turned out that 92 cL was the precise amount of wine we had needed to drink. Four-twenty-twelve!
I tipped the waiter well on the credit card machine because he had complimented my French and had read my mind about the wine. Back we went, still in the rain. A little darker now.
Time is running out! Need to pack in a few more experiences before Ieave.
Like breakfast out by myself! I walked in the drizzle all over, contemplating le saumon fumé et ses toasts or les pancakes avec le sirop d’érable or les oeufs grillés but decided that I could get smoked salmon, maple syrup pancakes, or fried eggs at home.
What is a little harder to get is a whole damn basket of two types of bread and a croissant, plus a little buffet of jams. butter, and chocolate sauce, plus a rosy freshly-juiced “detox aux légumes,” plus a double espresso with a teeny madeleine nestled in the spoon.
The price was 14€, for your reference, although I ended up ordering a second double espresso. (Yes, I got a second teeny madeleine.) And the juice, which was fairly beet-forward, was sweet and cold. I asked for a little sack to take home the croissant.
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It is day 23, and today (after I get home from breakfast) is the last work day. We worked yesterday too. Tomorrow is the last really free day, then a day that includes packing and cleaning up, then travel.
I think I am ready to come home. Maybe it’s the drizzly rain that will prevail for the rest of the week—we can’t even see the mountains for the clouds! Maybe I’ve just been, well, satisfied with the time we’ve had.
Are the remaining three days wasted on me? I don’t think so. They also serve a purpose.
Ever been annoyed when you can’t get all the toothpaste, or, say, anchovy paste, out of the tube? Or because of the design of, say, deodorant sticks that you turn to send more to the top, there’s always a bit that won’t come out. If you removed the “extra” there would still be something clinging to the package. So the wasted bits serve the function of letting the valuable stuff flow freely.
These last three days are the start of the transition back to the home life. This morning I composed a grocery list to send to Milo (our college senior who lives in our city) so he can put a few things in our fridge for when we stumble in at midnight. I sent a message to my virtual lifting coach asking for a workout week designed to ease me back in. Later I will RSVP Simon to the next Scout meeting on Monday. When it gets late enough to call the pediatrician, I will make appointments for flu and COVID shots sometime next week.
Today I’ll do some school with the boys, and after I’ve finished I’ll write a detailed note to myself for the week after next, so I remember where we left off. (I’ve planned a week of recovery just in case we need it.)
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If I didn’t have these last three days, now that I’m starting to think eagerly about seeing our friends, sipping coffee in my own chair, getting back to swimming and lifting, making macaroni and cheese or nachos—well, all these tasks would just shift back into the part of the trip where I didn’t want to think about going home.
So the timing is good after all.
And now that I have waxed philosophical, I guess I’ll eat this last madeleine, pay for my breakfast, and head back through the rain to my to-do list.
We’re leaving in four days. We aren’t going to finish it all. And we can’t take it all home. (Mark has said he will take responsibility for packing food items home and declaring it.) What have we bought?
Dry goods first. We have:
Cereal. The favorite brands of cereal that we can get here but not at home are Chocapic, which is vaguely like Cocoa Puffs only darker and petal-shaped; and Fitness, which is a flaky cereal that comes in chocolate or fruit flavors. We haven’t seen the fruit Fitness and are sad about it. We’ve also bought Cookie Crisp and something that’s very much like Cocoa Krispies.
Pasta. I’ve got some leftover Barilla tagliatelle from the time I made chicken noodle soup. It is, essentially, an egg noodle.
Ketchup. We just might finish off our second bottle before we leave. They have Heinz here. The kids approve.
Honey. Lavender honey. I’ve mostly put it in salad dressing, but I’ve also stirred it into yogurt and made peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
Peanut butter and Nutella. I think we’ll finish off the Nutella.
Nespresso pods. Last time, I seriously considered buying a Nespresso machine for at home. The only thing that stopped me was the packaging waste inherent in the Nespresso pods (and, uh, the fact that I already have a functional drip coffeemaker, and a French press, and an Aeropress, and a portable thingy that makes one cup at a time). Nespresso is much better than Keurig. I don’t even know why Keurig exists, to be honest.
Wine. Pretty sure we’ll finish this off before we go.
Bottles of mineral water. I am seriously going to miss the French mineral water situation. On the one hand, it’s kind of funny how many kinds there are. I have read French articles online in which, with a straight face, they write that you should drink several different kinds of mineral water in rotation (like having five vegetables and fruits per day) in order to make sure you get adequate amounts of all the different minerals you might need. But I am telling you they all taste different and I could seriously get behind the concept of having different mineral waters for different occasions, or possibly cravings.
Herbs and spices. I bought cumin, granulated garlic, bay leaves, and thyme to put in my cooking here. I am going to have to leave them in the kitchen, which already has a lot of abandoned herbs and spices.
Dijon mustard. Like the honey, mostly in salad dressing. Note: Last time I brought French’s mustard with me for Simon. I didn’t need to, as it was in the grocery store here. This time I didn’t bring it, and there wasn’t any. Simon has coped, but he would have been a lot happier with yellow American mustard.
Square crustless sliced white bread. The Harry’s brand is about as close to American sliced white bread as you get. Labeled “100 percent mie” means that there is no crust. Simon adores it. It is slightly denser and tastier than, say, Wonder bread.. I admit to having made a couple of sandwiches on it with French mayonnaise and Italian mortadella. It tastes like the best baloney sandwich ever.
Couscous. Simon is rather fond of plain couscous with butter, and it’s about as easy a thing to make as possible (5 min soak in boiling water), so we made sure to buy it on our very first trip to the grocery store. We haven’t come close to finishing the box.
Cookies. You know the “Le Petit Ecolier” cookies you can get in the regular grocery store at home? They look like a little chocolate rectangle in a picture frame of bland rectangular cookie? Well, they come in dark chocolate here, and Mark adores them. I don’t quite get it.
Now, the refrigerator.
Milk. Milk here is largely shelf-stable, but you must refrigerate it after you open it. It’s basically here for the cereal. I think there will be a lot left over when we leave.
Butter. Two kinds. Demi-sel, which is like normal salted butter in the U. S. except ten thousand times better, eat-it-with-a-spoon better. And a kind that has salt crystals in it that make it crunchy. I am actually angry that American butter doesn’t come close to this stuff.
Blueberries. Fruit takes some getting used to. It’s all perfectly ripe within 1-2 days of buying it from the store. This is okay with melons (oh goodness the melons are so good) as if you stick them in the fridge they stay good for a while. Berries, well, you need to eat them right away. I bought a tub of blueberries-blackberries-raspberries yesterday and didn’t get to them, and they were perfect yesterday and a big fuzzy mold ball today. Really, if you need ripe fruit today you have to buy it today. So we’ve wasted some fruit. But on the plus side, we’ve had some really good fruit when we’ve bought it correctly.
Bagged salad. This is basically the same as at home, maybe tending to be a little more on the bitter-greens side, which is fine with me.
Sliced rosette de Lyon salami and sliced English cheddar. This is for Simon, who is content to eat salami-and-cheddar sandwiches on the crustless white bread at any meal.
Jambon de serrano, etc. This is for Mark and me. We don’t get tired of it.
A cheese I bought that was a little too stinky for me to comfortably eat. I love cheese, but I have a limit to how much really ripe stuff I can eat at once. This one was Morbier and I was attracted to it because it had a pretty ash layer like Humboldt Fog. But it was fairly strong. I ate some but I won’t finish it.
Way too many marmalades and jellies. The strawberry went to the kids’ PB&Js and into tubs of plain yogurt. There’s some orange and lemon marmalades from Menton (famous for citrus) that I think we haven’t opened yet? Those might come home with us. Also I bought Mark a pistachio-and-sugar spread that hasn’t been opened and I do hope it comes home.
Capers and olives. Had to! We were in Provence! Won’t eat them all in time though.
Several pizza boxes with partial leftover pizzas. Both towns we have stayed in were near the border with Italy. Lots of pizza to be had. Lots of pizza leftovers.
Yogurt. We might finish the yogurt. Simon doesn’t normally even like yogurt and he has been polishing off French strawberry yogurt. Much like the butter, it’s hard to describe how much better the stuff is than what we can get at home. Especially the plain stuff. And the related stuff like fromage frais and skyr. I love it too.
Lardons. I bought lardons just today to make pasta with. Every French grocery store has convenient little packages of, essentially, raw bacon already chopped into little matchsticks. Perfect for sautéing in olive oil, then adding minced onion and canned tomatoes for spaghetti all’amatriciana. Or cooking with cream and butter and adding crozet pasta and cheese for a rich Savoyarde specialty.
Marinara sauce. For emergencies with the kids.
Old El Paso salsa. Old El Paso is the face of Mexican food in France. They have total market saturation. Leo’s Swiss friend saw the jar on the counter and said swooningly, “That’s my favorite stuff.” We tried to explain Old El Paso’s place in the hierarchy of Mexican-American cuisine and I do not think they believed us.
Prune juice. To improve someone’s regularity. No more details needed, I trust.
Much more food has passed through the kitchen but only for a couple of hours on its way into a meal: some chicken thighs and celery for soup, spaghetti and canned or jarred tomatoes for sauce, cod and lemons and potatoes for a buttery baked dish that used about half the capers as well. Also, a great deal more charcuterie and cookies. But we won’t need to worry about getting rid of those things in a few days because they did not last long enough to keep.
Cooking in a pristine rental kitchen (especially one as well-appointed as this one) is lots of fun. But I will be glad to get back to a kitchen where the jar of cumin lasts for several meals instead of just one.
Just a really quick note here to say that—I think—my stuff has all been migrated? Correctly? I’ve checked a couple of old posts, and it does seem that the images are pointing to the WordPress media library instead of to my old T***P*d website. Fingers crossed!
There’s definitely going to be some weirdnesses. (I can NOT complain.) For example, my media library is kind of a mess, because every single image was imported on the same day. Also, I don’t have my front page very well designed yet, and I don’t have links (even dead ones) to an archive, or to an “About the Author” type page, or anything like that.
Those cosmetic things, and structural things, will come in time.
For now, I just want to send a HUGE shout out to the people at WordPress. I had to make a number of decisions very rapidly, such as “where to go” and “what plan to buy,” and I am very, very happy that I paid for a higher-tier subscription that came with seriously good customer support. I cannot even IMAGINE what it must have been like behind the scenes, because I cannot be the only person who was unceremoniously dumped out of T***P*d with only about five weeks to get everything moved over.
I might, however, be the only person with an almost-twenty-year-old-blog who wasn’t able to get to her home computer at all for four of those five weeks.
Anyway, what I wound up doing was turning the import process over to the WP people. Developers, I guess, had to tweak their import tools to make it all work, if not make a brand new import tool from scratch. THANK YOU WORDPRESS.
I’m also going to add here: the customer service was FRIENDLY and MOSTLY HUMAN and VERY SUPPORTIVE. (Yeah, there’s a chatbot some of the time, but it’s a pretty good chatbot. Tech support is one of the good uses of chatbots.) If you, too, need to move your blog from a sinking service provider, I highly recommend WordPress.
This is the end of this unscheduled announcement. Stay tuned while I actually learn to use the design tools and make my blog look and feel a little bit more familiar and, I hope, a lot more user friendly. (That might have to wait till October.)
That was me this morning. I think I figured out the sleep difference here. I have shifted my sleep patterns, but somehow I’ve acquired the ability to go back to sleep after being awakened at 4:30 a.m. French time, by, say, the sounds of a teenager tiptoeing downstairs to get on Discord with his D&D group on US Central Time.
And again back to sleep after responding to texts from the college freshman at 6:45 a.m. French time, about how it’s hard to get fed without your own kitchen, and hopefully next year an application for one of the on-campus studio apartments will be successful, and maybe the smoothie blender arriving from Amazon next week will help.
And again back to sleep after the phone beeps to tell me that Simon’s smartwatch has been removed from its charger (gotta turn that particular notification off, I guess, but I never noticed it at home because by then I was already awake).
+ + +
Yesterday we wanted to go up into the mountains to hike around. We googled a few “easy/family hikes,” then spread out the Chamonix Valley topo/hiking map on the table to look at some of the candidates.
It was the last day of the season for the La Flégère gondola, and none of us remembered ever taking that one before. There were several trails leading off from there, including one that would be a challenge for us but not impossible. 3 km out and 600 m climb to Lac Blanc, then back. We told the kids we would turn around if it felt like too much.
Up in the gondola.
The gondolas are used for skiing during the winter and seat ten people. Despite the pleasant Sunday morning weather, it seemed uncrowded, although the parking lot was already full. The ride was, I think, less than ten minutes.
We had to go down before going up. This is pretty normal for a ski gondola. You want to go down from it to get anywhere.
This is what hiking trail signage looks like in the area. I don’t know if it’s the same all over France or not.
The trail signs correspond pretty exactly to the trails marked on our map. We began our climb.
Bilberries!
But the beginning of the trail had a lot of the steepness, and it was too tiring for the kids. So we hiked just past a little restaurant on the side of the hill and opened up our picnic.
Mark had fetched ham-and-butter, salami-and-butter, and “tandoori” sandwiches from the bakery, along with some pastries for Leo, who doesn’t like sandwiches.
The tandoori sandwich seemed to have replaced my favorite sandwich. (That would be tuna, with sliced egg and tomato, on a soft bread.) I’m guessing that they need to have one sandwich on hand that isn’t pork, much as a U.S. sandwich place would have a vegetarian option. (Vegetarian options exist reasonably commonly but are not ubiquitous here, and you have to read the fine print as they sometimes contain anchovies or even tuna anyway.)
The new sandwich, though, was really good, and I will try to replicate it at home. It contained sliced, probably poached, chicken in a mayonnaise sauce that was palely colored and lightly scented with curry; some salad greens that still retained some crispness; and what seemed to be cold, roasted tomatoes. They might have been what we’d call “sun-dried” tomatoes in the U.S.; they were concentrated in flavor and a bit salty; but they were juicier and not shriveled, so I’m going to go with oven-roasted. The sandwich loaf was a softer-crusted type, with poppy seeds. I expect that a good-quality poppy-seed kaiser roll would be the most easily found equivalent at home. Like the tuna sandwich, this one requires a softer crust than the ham and salami sandwiches do; you wouldn’t want to use something chewy like a bagel. The pasty insides would just squirt out when you tried to bite. No, this is a bread soft enough that you can share the sandwich just by tearing it into halves, thirds, or quarters with your hands. Perfect for a picnic!
After eating we started back down, enjoying the views. The boys did a little scrambling on piles of rock.
Then back up to the lift, where the boys rested and Mark and I looked around. I bought Simon a Haribo ice-cream push up; he reported that it had gummy bears frozen into it.
We observed that besides the hikes, you can access a via ferrata (definitely not my kind of thing) and a sort of roped-up alpine travel trail. I would enjoy neither, but maybe on some future trip it could be an outing for Mark and a braver, grown subset of our offspring.
Back down the gondola into town. There’s a golf course there that we sailed over as we came down. I don’t golf, but I bet it’s a really beautiful backdrop to play.
Mark went for a hike/run up this trail, not all the way.
I sat on the back deck, sunken below the yard, on my phone, listening to the river roaring a few yards away, and the train coming by every once in a while. Watching clouds come boiling down from the Mont Blanc side into town. Eventually it started to rain, so I came in (and texted Mark about the weather; up in the opposite foothills, Mark prepared to turn back).
For dinner, we suited up and went to fetch pizza. The brewpub closest to us, which claims to have pepperoni, wouldn’t open its kitchen for 45 minutes, so we walked an extra half kilometer or so to the next closest pizza place and carried it back in a reusable plastic bag.
This was a good pizza, the “Catalan,” with slabs of chorizo, green peppers, tomatoes, and olives. We had it with a bottle of bubbly, not champagne but Crémant de Bourgogne. Yum.
The kids didn’t like their pizza margarita though, so later (after I collapsed into bed) Mark went to get McDonald’s for them again.
Requests for McDonald’s have been increasing in frequency the longer we are away from home. And honestly, I get it.
I got the philosophy off my chest first, now a few items from yesterday. For the sake of remembering it all.
There’s a little alpine coaster on the edge of the other end of town in a tiny amusement park. The kids wanted to go so we drove over there and bought them six rides to share. We’ve been here before, with smaller kids who rode the smaller rides. Remember Oscar and Leo playing on those bumper cars? We remember.
Then we headed back. Mark went to buy McDonald’s for the kids, who I guess were craving it, and I went to the grocery store for some dinner items. After we met back at the rental and I unloaded groceries, Mark and I slipped out for a quick lunch together. Crêpe for me (buckwheat, with spinach, emmenthal, cream, and an egg); omelette for Mark; draft Breton cider to share.
We picked up a baguette and I sent Mark back with it; he had an appointment to pick up a rental bike for Leo. I stayed in town and did a little shopping. I needed a hooded fleece jacket and a pair of new approach shoes.
Foreshadowing: these are my new shoes, on their inaugural trek the next day
Leo had fun riding the bike around town for a while. Then we got in the car and went to the anticipatory Mass to free up our Sunday morning. It’s all one parish here in the valley, the parish of St. Bernard (yes, that St. Bernard), but there is a church in each little town. Five p.m. Saturday was in Vallorcine, a twenty-five-minute drive away.
At Our Lady of the Assumption.
We could hear the bells as we walked up the hill—not church bells, but cow bells. Saw some belled cows up close in fact.
Inside, it was several degrees cooler, and I put on my sweater. Mass was simple and quite short, singing but with cantor only, no music. A good cantor, a well-made song sheet. Easy to follow along.
The priest was a clear speaker as well. I could skim the main points from the homily without much difficulty, even if I could not catch all the details. Money: it doesn’t make you smarter, it doesn’t make you kinder. It can hide spiritual malaise. Jesus was the friend to the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the exploited. We must ask ourselves: what should we do with our goods? Why do we have goods? We have those goods so that we can share them.
Simon was restless and whimpering on the hard pew (no kneelers; I saw no one kneel except for brief genuflections) so we slipped out a little early, right after Communion, for the sake of the folks around us, and settled him down outside in the sun on the porch before descending to our beast of a car.
I made an easy dinner. Pasta for the boys, with butter on the noodles and an optional tomato-basil sauce; blueberries and baguette. Simon adores buttered noodles and wouldn’t stop raving about what a great meal I’d made.
I don’t know what to tell you, kid. It’s the French butter doing all the work here.
For Mark and me I made, from memory, a stovetop-to-oven dish that’s especially tasty when you have good bread. You fry up sliced garlic in a generous amount of olive oil, then just before it burns stir in tomato paste (watch the spatter), a couple of cans’ worth of drained white beans, a bit of hot water (I used the kids’ pasta water), salt and pepper. Top with mozzarella cheese (any kind) and bake at 475°F till melty and bubbly. Scoop up with that good bread. Or whatever. Remember not to burn your mouth.
We also had some olives and a little pâté, and some dressed greens from a bag, and a bottle of Bordeaux.
MJ called us from lunchtime at college and we got to hear a little about how things were going, as we yawned in our pajamas. That was a good voice to hear and face to see, at the end of a good day. A Saturday for the books.
This morning I woke up for the first time in, oh, three weeks with a slight, but familiar, sense of dread. It took me a minute to figure out that the dread was about: In four days we have to pack all this stuff into our suitcases. It is the dread of unfinished business, something that I almost always have, and that I’ve been able to do without since we made it into the first rental apartment.
The unfinished business of packing in a few days is a relatively small business; we can probably do it in a couple of hours of focused work. But it is also a sort of a cork in a bottle, behind which (imagine a cartoon bottle, vibrating gently) is all the other unfinished business. Some is unpleasant, some is neutral, much is actually pleasant and satisfying business, but it’s all stuff that has to be done. And it’s not that I want to live without the stuff for the rest of my life, but it has been lovely to live without most of the has-to-be-done of it all for a couple of weeks.
+ + +
On each of our trips I have learned a little something to take back, something to make my life marginally better even if in only a little way.
Our first trip was really the first time I went climbing on rock, and while it didn’t turn into a huge lifestyle change for me, it is something I enjoy doing once in a while, and I’m glad I know something now, in a tactile way, about this thing that Mark and my older kids really love to do.
I also learned that the small luxury of drinking fizzy water instead of plain tap water was something I wanted to have all the time. A funny, small thing to take home, and one that you know, costs a little money, but it’s a lot of pleasure for not that much. Also I am pretty sure I drink more water this way, so maybe it is good for me.
That’s just to give you a couple of examples.
+ + +
I would like to take home with me this time some sense of the lifting of the weight of the have-to-do-it. I do not know how I can do this, given that, uh, I still have to do the things.
I am used to that sense of weight bearing down on me, a little red timer ticking away invisibly just out of my peripheral vision, or a host of those timers, never letting me quite relax and rest. Not only am I used to it, the urgency, the open loops turning in my head: I am dependent on it. I believe, deep down, that if I wasn’t thinking about all the things I have to do all the time, I wouldn’t do them. At least not in time to prevent something awful.
+ + +
Something about being here for long enough, possibly the distance, possibly the impotence that distance brings, has lifted the weight. There’s still a lot of stuff that I have to do when I get back. But I am somewhere else and I cannot do it now, and somehow I have mentally shelved it all, or at least stuffed it in the bottle behind packing on Thursday. And yet I’m not worried I’ll lose the threads when I need to pick them up.
I wonder if there’s an attitude shift I can possibly make that will keep me on a journey even after I’m home. Hmm?
I had a migraine this morning, so I stayed in bed through my, er, usual writing time. That makes it sound like a habit!
A brief summary of yesterday (Friday):
• Mark went up to the top with a guide/pilot to try to fly from up there
• He did get to go out onto the ridge, which he described to me in frankly terrifying terms but that he pronounced as “fun” and “the real experience”
• Unfortunately the weather was unusually windy there, even though at other altitudes it was perfectly fine (in fact people were steadily parapenting from higher up off Mont Blanc) and even though the forecast had been good. The pilot/guide, who was not psycho, told Mark, “I do not understand the weather. And when I do not understand the weather, I do not fly.” He was going to not charge Mark at all, but seeing as “deciding when to not do a thing” is a key function of a mountain guide, Mark paid him some money and bought them coffee and pie at the restaurant.
• After lunch we took the boys climbing for a couple of hours at Les Gaillands, which might be the best beginner’s rock wall in the world.
• I put on my climbing shoes for the first time in a while. I don’t remember when was the last time I climbed on rock.
My brain stem is out of practice at tolerating heights. All I did was climb up about 10-15 feet, maybe a little more at Mark’s direction, and work for a while at desensitizing myself to the feel of the rope, the harness, the feet flat on the wall. I took deep breaths. I let go of the rope and let my hands dangle behind me. I concentrated on the muscles of my calves, lower back, shoulders, releasing the tension one by one. I flexed my knees and bounced gently.
In a moment, I’d ask Mark to let out rope for me to walk backwards down the wall. I reflected how with these exercises, I was working a little bit to trust—not so much with my mind but with my body, my reflexes—the rope and the anchor and the harness. I wasn’t working hard to trust Mark. He wasn’t going to drop me. Not even a little bit. I mean, later he would let out rope so I could come down, and there’s always a little startling jolt when it begins, and I’d have to mentally prep for that. But he wasn’t going do it till I was ready, and I mknew that all the way down in my bones. Or brain stem.
I thought about the Discourse going around right now about grooms smashing wedding cake in the brides’ faces after saying they wouldn’t. I thought: Glad I didn’t marry That Kind of Dude. Because it isn’t too hard to imagine there being folks out there who might drop you a little, for fun.
+ + +
After that, while Mark cleaned up the anchor, I walked with the boys down to the little outdoor buvette, concession stand. They had sodas and fries. I had a glass of cider.
We hiked back up, I dug our wedding rings out of the backpack and we put them back on, and then back to the rental.
+ + +
I was resting on the couch and Mark brought me a glass of wine to decide on the next procedure. What happened next is that he went and fetched McDonald’s for the kids, so that we could go out for a dinner date. We wound up walking all over town, chatting, ending up at a restaurant we’d had a great meal at eight years ago.
And you know what, it was really delicious and a good time and a pleasant walk. But I did not take any pictures, so you’ll have to trust me.
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