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].
Here’s what we did yesterday though: lunch in Italy. We’re only two train stops from Ventimiglia.
Leo was tired and sore from lots of walking, so he stayed home. Simon and Mark and I went, and wandered purposefully until we found a restaurant that was already open at 11:30 and had both pasta and pizza.
Began with fries for Simon and a carpaccio of three fish. It was supposed to be tuna, smoked salmon, and swordfish, but they gave us a thinly sliced terrine of octopus instead of swordfish. I had to practice liking the tentacles. But the fish was good.
Trofie alla genovese for me: pesto, potatoes, haricots. Also two glasses of chilled white wine.
A trouty sort of fish for Mark. Perfectly chargrilled.
Simon filled up on fries so Mark ate some of his pizza and then we got a box.
After this Simon was completely exhausted so we got back on the train and returned to the apartment without even getting gelato.
There’s this SNL skit in which Adam Sandler plays a tour guide for “Romano Tours.” (If you are in the US, google it, because I am forbidden by the National Broadcasting Corporation to see any clips from here.) But I did find a transcript! **
People love us. But, every so often, a customer leaves a review that they were disappointed or didn’t have as much fun as they thought. So here at Romano tours, we always remind our customers, if you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay? Do you understand? That makes sense? Our tours will take you to the most beautiful places on Earth. [Cut to video clip of Amalfi coast] Hike to cliffs off the Amalfi coast. Fish with the nets in Sorrento. [Cut to video clip of a woman yoga posturing] Do this, I don’t know.
[Cut to Joe] But remember, you’re still going to be you on vacation. If you are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before. Just in a new place. Does that make sense? There’s a lot a vacation can do. Help you unwind. See some different looking squirrels. But it cannot fix deeper issues like how you behave in group settings or your general baseline mood. That’s a job for incremental lifestyle changes sustained over time.
[‘Can’ and ‘Cannot’ chart appears in the screen]
I want to be very clear about what we can do for you. We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. We can take you to the Italian Rivera. We cannot make you feel comfortable in a bathing suit. We can provide the zip line. We cannot give you the ability to say Whee and mean it. You’re not your sister.
Ahem.
So, one of the things we wanted to do with this trip was have it not be a month of pure vacation. Mark is working remotely for much of it anyway, and we are doing school, so in one sense we wanted to just move our regular life and relationships to a prettier setting.
Since I couldn’t bring my house, which functions as a permanent three-dimensional to-do list that I wake up in every morning, I am free of a lot of ordinary “work stressors” here. But other than that I am still me and we are still us.
I still need a block of alone time every day. So far I have gotten this mostly when Mark takes Simon and Leo to the beach to frolic in the waves. I have stayed in the apartment each time: napping, doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen while listening to podcasts. Or I have gone grocery shopping in town, happy to not have help even though it means I have to carry it all back.
And then. There are a lot of activities we could be doing out there, or I could. I could take the train to Nice for an afternoon and see one of several art exhibits, or walk along the Promenade des Anglais. I really thought I was going to do that before I got here. I thought we would take a shuttle up into the hills and make the boys take an educational tour of a citrus grove, picnic included. Doesn’t it sound fun? And we fully intended to go to Monaco for the day, see the aquarium in the oceanographic museum and maybe the big royal automobile collection.
But just as most days in Minnesota I do not go to the art museums in my own hometown nor drive into the countryside to tour excellent Wisconsin dairy farms, here I just kind of want to sit down and relax into a routine. Eat, shop, cook, wander around, buy gelato, take a nap when I am tired, do schoolwork with the kids in the weekday morning, swap the dishwasher, go to the wine store and ask what I should pair with the dinner I plan to make.
Look. I had this idea that I would embrace French petit déjeuner: coffee and a little bread and marmalade, maybe a cup of really good yogurt; or every few days I would go out to a café and get a pastry and a cappuccino. And I have done those things!
Early morning countertop. The green coffee bag is the caffeine one here.
But do you want to know what I had for breakfast this morning? While my drip coffee was brewing I opened the fridge and found the leftover second half of a fat spicy meat wrap that Leo bought himself at the Kebab Berlinois around the corner. It is reminiscent of a Chipotle burrito only with thinly shaved, mildly spiced gyro-like meat and an oniony purple-cabbage slaw, and I think some tahini with the faintest perfume of a capsicum variety. Cold and ever do slightly soggy from twelve hours in the fridge.
What ho! A leftover hoagie!
And just as I would have at home, that is what I had for breakfast, right out of the wrapper.
+ + +
Church in an hour. And hey—today is Bl. Carlo and Bl. Pier Giorgio’s big day! We love BPG around here and consequently we are going to be stumbling through our dinnertime litany for the next few weeks.
______
** Sorry the excerpt is so long. Still learning the WordPress mobile app. The quote block won’t let me abridge it.
In fact, we hardly left the apartment yesterday before evening. Mark hadn’t had any pastries at all yet, so he went for an almond-filled and a coffee in the morning, and then fired up the old laptop and got to work.
Leo had had a poor night of sleep, so after some consultation we sent him back to his hammock with an extra blanket against the beautifully frigid air conditioner and turned out the lights.
I worked closely with Simon for a few hours, completing a day’s worth of history reading, English mechanics practice, and science workbook. Then I went for a little walk outside to see if I could find out why they were shutting down the street and putting up a long row of tented booths, each with two folding chairs and a table on it.
First I discovered what they do with your motorcycle when you park it where it says No Parking Today.
Then I went into the tourist office nearby, sniffed a couple of candles scented with the region’s special agricultural product (lemons), picked up a city tourist map, and asked “Qu’est-ce que se passe dehors avec toutes les tentes?”
The answer is that it was a municipal activity fair, and all the local sports clubs and dance schools would have brochures and a place to sign up, and there would be performances and the like. Sensible, on the first Saturday of the school year, So, nothing for us, but it might be interesting to see.
I returned and with Mark ate a lunch of leftovers. We woke Leo and made him eat something. Then school again: I read aloud to both boys then set Simon on math while I worked with Leo on geometric constructions and French review.
About five pm I took the boys to find a cheeseburger and fries, then took them back; and they stayed in the apartment while Mark and I ventured out.
+ + +
There had been a little burst of anxiety from the direction of the children at the French-fry stand: one spilled his drink on the other, the other got upset. I worried they’d need to text us for intervention while we were out. Accordingly it took me a long time of strolling through the town looking for a bar to sit at, and then changing our minds and looking for a restaurant, before I could quite release myself from feeling high-strung. Mark soothed me, pointing out that the worst that would happen would be that I would sit at a seaside bar with a drink while he would jog two minutes back to the apartment to solve any problems. Perspective restored, I accepted this outcome and chose a restaurant. And I immediately ordered a spritz Hugo for medicinal purposes.
I don’t do a lot of needing a stiff drink and the Hugo isn’t exactly stiff but after downing it I did feel I could breathe more deeply. And order food.
moules frites
Mark had a cut of beef with roast potatoes. It looked pretty good but I concentrated on my mussels. I think it was good that it gave me something to occupy my hands. They are the unshelled pistachios of the sea.
Et j’aurai besoin d’une verre de vin blanc avec cela. The waiter offered me Sauvignon Blanc or Côte de Provence and I picked the latter.
Okay, I’m calming down. The sea, the sky, the food, the wine.
I thought I would want to do more, take the train to Nice, visit a lemon orchard, see an art exhibit. All I want to do is lie around, walk around, eat, shop, cook. Get gelato. Do it all again.
I took a picture of this sign because it’s an example in the wild of a change in the everyday rules of French grammar since I learned them in high school.
You know, probably, that French is a gendered language, and a binary one: it has no neuter gender (unlike German or Latin) and it has no neuter pronoun for objects (unlike English). Every noun has a specified gender, masculine or feminine, with which you must use the agreeing articles and adjectives. Sometimes, say with nouns naming animals or a person’s job, there are masculine and feminine forms distinctly pronounced and spelled. Even if the two noun forms are identical, because of the articles and adjectives and perhaps because of sheer mental habit, you wouldn’t say “oh, that word isn’t gendered,” the way English speakers would say “pilot” is not gendered, nor “flight attendant,” but “steward/stewardess” is. You would say, “oh, the masculine form is the same as the feminine form.”
(Obviously there are a lot of little details that complicate this grammar and make it frustrating or fun, depending on how you feel about languages, like the fact that une personne is feminine even if the person in mind is a dude, and the creation—spontaneous or systematic, I am not sure—in recent decades of distinct feminine forms of professional nouns like avocate (lawyer, with an e) that didn’t exist before. I don’t want this post to take forever so I better stop. I’ve been reading this really interesting book (French edition) that gets into some of these. Anyway.)
So one of the rules we had back in the late 80s and early 90s was that if you were referring to a group of people, only if the group was entirely made up of girls and women could you use the feminine pronoun (elles) for them nor could you use a feminine noun referring to their class (such as employées). As soon as an evidently male person joins, the group receives the stamp of masculinity: ils sont tous employés, one e, in their class, their adjective or participle, in their they pronoun.
That’s what we learned, and any French placement test was guaranteed to include a question designed to catch if you remembered this fact, probably by having a question about three teachers or something who all have female-presenting names or who are pictured wearing dresses. Because the all-feminine group functions almost like an exception.
But something that I haven’t learned from a rule book but that I have been noticing here and there for years as I occasionally read French news articles or listen to French podcasts (not as often as I wish I had, it’s too much concentration needed while driving): increasingly, describing mixed groups of people by doubling nouns and pronouns.
And here is an example I saw in the wild: not clients (meaning customers-in-general, using the standard masculine form) but clientes et clients (meaning female customers and male customers).
Even on a small chalkboard with not a lot of extra space!
+ + +
I freely admit the following is an amateur take and welcome correctiom from experts….
This is not what English speakers have done as our language has moved (starting from before I was born) to adopt changes perceived by many as more inclusive and modern. In some cases we’ve done the opposite.
Here’s one way we do it in English. You take a word like chairman or fireman that sort of embodied the assumption that the role was almost entirely filled by men. Occasionally you might see chairwoman but we have largely moved to gender-neutral terms, some of them crafted for the purpose: chairperson, firefighter, postal carrier, flight attendant, Congressional representative, etc. And I still see these new words sometimes being coined: instead of the feminine-gendered seamstress you now sometimes see sewist, which I think I only saw for the first time a couple of years ago (replacing some wordier, less precise options like textile artist). I wonder about which words get the -person treatment and which don’t. I don’t see an obvious pattern. Some sound clunky to me and some don’t.
Another thing we have done in English is the exact opposite of the French evolution. Where one word came in masculine and feminine forms (e.g., actor and actress) some style standards are to eliminate the feminine form (everybody’s an actor). Oddly enough sometimes this has been followed by a second substitution (waiter/waitress to waiter to server) —maybe because the first change didn’t stick?
At any rate, we are definitely not saying actors and actresses every time we discuss Hollywood. You don’t see that double construction except in a few formulaic and possibly fading expressions (Ladies and gentlemen) and when you need to emphasize something (boys and girls perform similarly on this test).
+ + +
I think this is very interesting, nonjudgmentally, and perhaps a glimpse into the interior workings of French as compared to English. It seems to me that there are two linguistic (that is to say, mechanical, not sociopolitical) features of French relative to English that may explain some of the different approaches.
First, English is habitually pithy. English takes fewer words to say things than French does: compare the thickness of your favorite translated novel in trade paperback version to that of the original. I suspect that lengthier phrases just do not sound as lengthy in French whereas they make English speakers itch. Doubling the length of a noun phrase may just fit more comfortably and seem more natural.
The other is that English speakers, having most of our nouns be genderless, including many nouns for people and professions, can easily come to view our handful of gendered people-nouns as exceptions to the rule. English mostly does not have gender. The normal nouns for people are objectively genderless even if the class is male- or female-dominated and thus connotes one or the other: teacher, nurse, lawyer, electrician, engineer, laborer, garment worker; and also customer, boss, consumer, traveler, student, patient, retiree, and many more. The nouns that expressly segregate the genders for no functional reason (like waiter/waitress) are unusual. For language learners they represent a list that “just has to be memorized.” Reducing these doubles to the less-marked counterpart—always the masculine, that’s where the sociopolitical analysis creeps in—is linguistically simple. It makes English grammar more uniform, not less.
One of my goals in French learning is to grasp better and to get more current on how these rules are evolving, because they are not evolving in a way that is predictably parallel to how English is evolving. I don’t, for example, have much knowledge at all of how expressions that in English we call “nonbinary” are coming to exist (or not) in colloquial French, with its structure that’s far more inherently binary than English (itself far more inherently binary than some other languages that I have never studied). I need to do more reading.
Okay, that’s the end of my writing time. More travelogue later!
Wednesday we worked, Thursday we didn’t. (Friday we’ll work again).
Leo had heard me mention that I had picked up ingredients for pasta all’amatriciana, all of which keep, for an emergency dinner. He wanted it sooner, he said. Could I make it tonight? Okay, I said, I’ll just buy salad stuff today.
Off to the municipal market!
Entrance to le marché des HallesMore on this sign later.
I observed the produce vendor for a few minutes and then took my little basket and selected a salad-sized lettuce, a carrot, three tiny cucumbers, an onion, a yellow tomato, two plums and a peach, a nectarine, and a melon. A few minutes in line and then my turn at the scale. Each item was weighed then put into little waxy-paper sacks, the tomato with the plums and the peach with the nectarines. I noticed that the berries were in tubs in a fridge behind the counter, to be asked for and not handled; so was a big tub of already-torn mixed salad greens to be doled out on request.
Produce basket
I wandered around the hall looking for perhaps a jar of mustard or some olives, remembering the pretty little marinated olives from the wine bar last night. I did find an olive counter but it didn’t take credit cards unless I paid enough for half a kilo. I found a sushi bar where you could buy little boxes of fresh sushi, like the grocery store ones at home, but made in front of you. I found a wine bar where people were drinking prosecco in flutes, across from the Italian meat vendor with his mortadella and salame. I found a vendor with a giant bin of potatoes and a smaller bin of sweet potatoes.
Potatoes next time, I decided. Fish and potatoes, with capers and lemon.
There was a grocery next door where I found mustard—I just got the store brand, trusting it would be pungent and adequate for salad dressing—and instead of olives, a jar of tapenade. I’d already bought a baguette when I went out for pastry and espresso earlier.
Meanwhile, Mark had taken Simon to the toy store. Simon is, at eleven, rather a collector and connoisseur of stuffed animals, and he had been promised one small “stuffie” from each of the two towns of our trip. He chose a soft brown rabbit with quilt scraps for a tail.
+ + +
We had had a minor electrical problem the evening before—the power had tripped, Mark had located and reset the breaker, but much later in the evening when the apartment got hot, we realized that the air conditioner hadn’t come back on. I composed a text to the property manager, in which I learned lots of new French words like the ones for “circuit breaker” and “to flip a switch” and “compressor.” She came over and showed me the controls and adjusted them. In fact we had a whole conversation about the split-system air conditioner operation, which of the two units outside might connect to which one inside, and how to determine if each was working, a comversation which Mark could only watch helplessly. Anyway, despite her telling me that the a/c wasn’t something she knew much about and saying she would contact the owner to send someone to look at it, whatever she did to the controls got it working again. It has been pleasantly chilly ever since.
+ + +
Leo had been planning our lunch all this time. He announced we were going to have sushi at a specific seaside restaurant to the west.
We walked through the city, taking notes about nearby pastry shops and wine bars, and especially a counter-service place that advertised tacos, “sandwishes,” bbq and tex-mex. “I’ve had so much Americanized Italian and Chinese food,” Leo said, “I want to try Frenchified American food!” But we pressed on to sushi.
I told Leo how to say “Nous sommes quatre” and sent him in to get a table. Simon was a little sulky—sushi’s not his favorite—so we promised him that if he didn’t manage to eat enough we’d find something else for him afterwards. He perked up, especially when we discovered they had those Japanese Ramune sodas on the menu, the kind sealed with a glass marble inside, and in his favorite flavor (fraise).
We studied the menu for about thirty seconds before Leo decided that we had to get the BIG SUSHI BOAT and it being immediately clear that this would simplify the ordering process, we agreed.
Le bateau de sushi pour 3 personnes
Simom liked the dragon figurehead, reached out and rotated it to face him. It was all very much like what we would have at home, and very good. Legitimately the best mackerel sashimi I’d ever had. Also rice and skewered meatballs and chicken and miso and cabbage salad.
The one unusual exception: cheese. One of the skewers was marinated beef wrapped around a mild white cheese, mozzarella-esque, and grilled till the cheese was all melted. It was yummy but not something I’d seen in a sushi restaurant before. Also, this restaurant sold salmon avocado poke bowls—with chunks of soft, washed-rind cheese wheel on top.
“Frenchified Japanese food has French cheese in it,” Leo observed.
Anyway, Simon was happy about the chicken meatballs and rice, so he also was fed and happy when we left.
+ + +
Mark took the boys to buy an inflatable ring toy (jouet flottant) which they filled for him with a compresseur (see, new vocab!) and then to the beach. I stayed in the apartment for some quiet alone time, and ran a couple loads of laundry, and texted with MJ to hear how the second week of college was going.
+ + +
Mark and I started dinner with some limoncello from one of the many lemon-products boutiques, and the tapenade and a little cheese, while my sauce gently cooked on the stovetop. When we ran out of limoncello we opened the Côtes de Provence I had been recommended at the wine store, and I made the vinaigrette for the salad with mustard and a spoonful of lavender honey, and plated it all up. The apartment dishes are these ridiculously large squares, but they actually work pretty well for plating.
We sat around and drank wine, then ran the dishwasher, then went out for ice cream and a walk in the very comfortable evening.
Mark planned on a full eight-hour workday Wednesday. We work when Mark works, I told the kids. “The way we’ll think about it,” I said to Leo as we were walking uphill trying to get some sunshine, “is that each day has three parts. Morning, afternoon, evening. On days that Dad works he’ll work for two of those parts. And we will too.”
We won’t work for eight solid hours of course, homeschooling simply doesn’t take that long, especially when you have expressly planned to only work half time. It did mean that on Wednesday, for example, Leo did geometry in the morning (while Mark paged through some mandatory training modules) and French in the afternoon (while Mark zoomed into morning meetings).
Our apartment bedroom has a nice little table which I yielded entirely to Mark for a desk.
Mark at work.
I started the day (after a lot of coffee) reading aloud from the novel we’re in the middle of, on my Kindle. That’s how we wake up and get ourselves im the mood, so to speak.
Simon can do his Beast Academy math workbook pages independently, so I set him on that and sat down with Leo to go over the first couple lessons in the Geometry book. Leo’s the first one I’ve used Art of Problem Solving with, so I want to pay attention to the approach, but the first lessons in any geometry book are highly predictable: this is why we need to learn a lot of specialized vocabulary and notation; this is a point, a line, a plane; this is a locus.
Not too stressful there, and when Leo finished the exercises in the first two short lessons, I released him for the morning. He went out to walk around. (Phys ed! Geography!) I turned to Simon and read aloud to him from a history book—we are just starting the Civil War volume of Joy Hakim’s ten-volume History of US, to which Simon is quite attentive and so it works well as a cozy sort of way of entering systematically into U.S. history in elementary school. I believe I can access my Prime Video library here, so we might put on Ken Burns later this month.
After that I made Simon start his new science module, expressly chosen for the trip because it consists of one workbook and almost no experiments (basically, a human anatomy worktext). These are exactly the same reasons why Simon is not exactly enamored of it. Oh well, can’t pack the chemistry lab in the suitcase.
Mark took a long lunch break and we met Leo at a creperie. The kids got sweet ones, Mark got le Savoyarde which means lots of cheese and ham, I got l’Azûrienne which meant tapenade, tomatoes, and chèvre.
L’Azûrienne. Nutella in the background
Mark still feels a little off from the jet lag but I am definitely getting my appetite back.
Leo had walked all the way to the other, more fashionable end of town, past the marina and the sand beach. He showed us lots of pictures of winding narrow stairs and pedestrian ways, hemmed in with pastel walls and dotted with flowers. He wanted to walk more later. (And we did!)
But first back to the apartment for 1) a nap and 2) French-from-a-textbook. I’m afraid the beginning of French II is a little boring as it starts with some review material, such as quizzes on numbers and time-telling, to find out where practice is needed. So that part wasn’t very fun. Especially since the wholly necessary nap pushed the schoolwork to later in the day than Leo is accustomed to doing it at home. But Mark was working till 6 pm… and, like I said, we work when Mark works.
We ended the day by leaving Leo in charge for a bit while Mark and I went out for a drink, and then I fetched pizzas.
Leo wasn’t in a pizza mood, so he ventured out separately to Kebab Berlinois and brought back some kind of wrap? in a Chipotle-quality flour tortilla, which is to say a better tortilla than I expected. The effect was of thinly sliced, mild gyro-type meat, with lettuce and a lot of onions. He thought it was a little bland and regretted bot asking for spicy sauce; I had a few bites and it was one of those things that tastes better and better as you go. If I had had one of these right when I got off the plane it would have totally hit the spot.
Anyway, yesterday being a workday made it less fun, but it was pretty good for a workday if you ask me.
The first full day after having slept, we designated as a rest and orientation day. The only really important task was to make sure everyone could maintain blood sugar, body temperature, levels of serotonin, and personal hygiene.
1. 5 a.m. I popped awake with one thought: obtain and demolish the half-sandwich Mark had stowed in the fridge. I obeyed and then slept four more hours.
2. 9:30 a.m. Kids awake already, so I am deprived of obligatory two hours drinking coffee in silence. Cognitive issues, also lack of coffee, led to struggle with the drip coffeemaker. Gave up and used off-brand Nespresso pod to make bad espresso while Mark figured it out.
3. 11 a.m. I head out with a shopping list of toiletries. First I find a bakery-café that will still sell me a Formule Petit-Déj, and I eat an apple chausson. It comes in a wicker basket and I get pastry flakes all over my black dress. The double espresso is better than aparment Nespresso. I write yesterday’s blog post and put up a picture.
4. 1 p.m. We all go out to lunch immediately after I return from the store with shaving cream and shampoo and deodorant and paper towels and better coffee. I am flustered and tired and my brain is not working, and I misunderstand my family’s intention to walk around looking for a place, and I march up and ask for a table at the first restaurant we hit when we get to the beach. Before we know it we are seated at the seaside and Leo is explaining to me that the plan was to walk around choosing one, whereas I had gotten the impression that (a) everyone needed to eat sooner and (b) they had already preselected this particular restaurant by internet search. Oops!
Fortunately the sea breeze is lovely, the umbrellas are perfectly shady, and the restaurant has pizza which both boys demolish eagerly, as well as really good frites.
Leo using a knife and fork on pizza.Simon, happy.
The boys say the pizza tastes like the English muffin pizzas I made using tomato paste, when they were little.
I have the salad with goat cheese toasts and proscuitto and honey. Mark, duck breast and fries. I say I can’t possibly eat it all because my appetite is all screwed up but I slowly and gradually plow through it. And I force myself to drink lots and lots of water, which I know I need after the travel day.
Hungrier than I thought
4. 4 p.m. Mark returns from the beach with children and I return from shopping again with vegetables and limoncello. (After lunch and a nap I had paged through Provençal recipes and settled on a “light vegetable soup”). We open the limoncello before it is quite cold enough and drink some, then we have glasses of leftover red wine. Then Mark takes Leo shopping for a wallet and I begin chopping vegetables.
Vegetables, parmesan, herbs, a jar of French-made pesto with walnuts.
The onions, leek, celery, carrots, zucchini, potato, and green beans are all finally in little tiny dice when I discover that I can’t figure out how to operate the electric cooktop. We poke at it for a while, discuss whether it is induction or infrared, search fruitlessly for a manual, google without the help of the model number, drink more wine, break a wine glass and clean it up, and finally Mark finds a YouTube video and learns how to defeat the cooktop’s child lock. I am delighted to open a cabinet and find a food processor, which my recipe requires but I had resolved to do without.
Meanwhile, Simon makes himself a sandwich of rosette de Lyon on “Harry’s Extra Moelleux Pain de Mie Nature” and is very pleased with it. And Leo goes into town and comes back with apricot preserves and is very pleased with them.
Salami and sliced white bread for Simon
5. 7 p.m. I have sautéed lardons of smoked bacon in olive oil, followed by the hard vegetables and then the soft vegetables, then added water and a potato (1/4 of it in a chunk and 3/4 of it in small dice) and a parmesan rind and thyme and bay leaf and pepper and salt. I have simmered, then added two ripe whole tomatoes, and then retrieved them and peeled them before puréeing them with the soft potato chunk and a bit of brothy vegetables and added them back to the soup. I have removed the parmesan rind and bay leaves and added white beans, red wine vinegar, and half a jar of pesto.
Soupe au pistou.
We eat it with chilled Macon-Villages white wine, marinated olives, a bowl of blueberries and a bowl of greengage plums, a package of jambon de Bayonne, and chunks of baguette spread with ordinary French grocery store butter, which is to say it is amazing butter.
Somehow without having to work hard at it we manage to sit at the table for almost two hours leisurely enjoying our food and wine. I have to go lie down on the couch for a while though, while Mark and Leo do the dishes.
6. 9 p.m. We go out in search of gelato (look, we are right on the border, all the glace is Italian-style, I’m calling it gelato). I fail to take any pictures, but trust me, we found it. Leo orders the ice cream except for mine. Mark declares his cone (one scoop of chocolate, one of coconut) the best so far. I have a serviceable but melty scoop of banane. Simon has a lemon sorbetto that tastes exactly like a tart lemon drop, which he declares perfect; Leo has that plus coconut. We walk back along the roaring stony beach, put the cooled soup away, and that ends our rest day. We have indeed been fed.
Yesterday is a bit of a blur. I mean Sunday and yesterday—blurred together, all into one.
None of us slept much on the plane. I watched Interstellar on and off, interspersed with crossword puzzles. Arrival and passport control at Nice-Côte d’Azur went smoothly, all our luggage came too. Ten minutes’ confusion about how to buy tickets for the tram to the train station, no problem buying train tickets to Menton, no problem walking to and letting ourselves into the AirBnb.
A marriage note!
I’ll get used to it, I always do, but as soon as the plane lands outside the English-speaking world (cue dolly zoom) a certain set of roles suddenly reverses. Normally, when we are traveling with the kids, by unspoken agreement and long habit, I manage children and Mark deals with car rental counters, ticket-buying, lost luggage offices, hotel maintenance complaints, etc. Generally, having conversations with the hostile bureaucracy of commerce.
But we are in France, and I speak French well enough, and now all of that is my job! And I know it is my job but every single time when I first hear him say “Stand over here and wait with me, your mom’s going to go buy the train tickets” I am suddenly gobsmacked.
I mean, I can buy the tickets, it’s not a problem, but the switch takes time to reset in my brain.
+ + +
We rested, went out to get pastries, came back, I went grocery shopping for milk and cereal and jambon serrano and cheese and baguette and wine and fruit and yogurt. We rested, then hauled the kids up and outside to catch afternoon sun, bribing them with ice cream. I distributed medication doses carefully at predetermined times in accordance with a spreadsheet I had made before leaving. We went back, ate the dinner, drank the wine, went out for more ice cream. Back again, melatonin for all, and finally the long sleep.
We assigned Leo to order ice cream with his one year of high school French. I stayed outside and waited on a bench so I wouldn’t be tempted to jump in and rescue him. He did fine. He’s pleasantly surprised at how well he can understand things.
OK, my chausson de pommes and double espresso are gone now. I need to go buy a month’s worth of shampoo and shaving cream. Catch you later.
Do not assign any weight whatsoever to how people feel about the city, the room, the food, and/or whose idea even WAS it to come on this trip anyhow, until everyone has had a chance to sleep several hours in a row.
In other words, remember that it is just the jet lag speaking.
Signed, someone who has been almost entirely awake for 24 hours now and just walked back from a grocery store.
I never sleep well the night before a trip. Yesterday evening, too, I made the mistake of having a couple glasses of wine while hanging out with Mark and our college-senior son. So it isn’t surprising that I woke at 2:45 am and only dozed after that. Now it’s 6:30 and I am drinking coffee. Perhaps later I can pretend that the early waking was a preëmptive jet-lag strategy. Perhaps it means I will easily sleep on a plane later today.
+ + +
Our local adult son has house-sitting duty, so that part isn’t it. Our new college freshman is installed at school and sounds great on the phone, so that part isn’t it. Our oldest, launched—no unusual concerns there. Our two youngest have proved themselves competent travelers in three recent less involved trips. So why am I feeling anxious this morning?
I think there are a few things going on here.
For one thing, this is the first major family trip that’s only this smaller part of our family: we are traveling as a family of four, not seven. Other than a weeklong trip to Boston in autumn 2019 without our oldest, all our longer trips have involved all our kids. It’s strange to be so few, and also, I’m used to having extra adults and older teens around to help with things.
For another, we have fewer activities planned. Mark has to work some of the time. The boys have schoolwork, with a loose goal for how much to do each day. I have pre-arranged but not pre-scheduled one adventurous activity; I have one side trip in mind; Mark has an idea about a grand day out for himself. But that’s it. This particular trip, we are intentionally embracing the possibility that we will not do very much vacation-y stuff. We are intentionally remaining flexible, open, unscheduled. Which is very much not how I roll.
I guess there’s also all the ordinary travel-day jitters. I know we checked and double checked, but do we really have all the passports? I know I counted out all the medications, but am I absolutely sure I counted out enough? I know Uber is normal and works but will the Uber really show up? I know it’s in the hands of the airline but will we make our connection? I know we have seats assigned together but will the airline switch them at the last minute and put the kids elsewhere? Look, none of those concerns will be soothed until we’re all actually buckled in on the big plane.
At which point (I know from experience) this last part of the fretting will evaporate completely. It’s possible that when it does, it will take the other frets away with it, and I will sink into my seat and truly relax.
A week ago we delivered our third child to the college dorm out of state for freshman year. This particular kiddo, unlike numbers 1 and 2, graduated from a public high school, and was emancipated from family dinners some time ago for health reasons. So we are all somewhat accustomed to a house with one fewer person in it, a dinner table with one fewer place setting, than we might expect.
It still feels a little extra quiet, a little more roomy. Mark and I designed this house for a large family to live compactly: four not-enormous bedrooms, two and a half baths, a playroom with climbing walls in the basement, a game room in the attic. The schoolroom had four little matching desks. The seven of us made it a little crowded there for the four years leading up to the oldest’s moving out. Now we are a Normal-Sized family of four, and there is plenty of room for everyone. The four little desks are long gone. I stacked the extra dining chair off to the side.
I’m excited for the newest College Kid. There was a string of struggles getting all the necessary accommodations for a disability that gives on-campus student life some significant extra challenges. So I am not at all sad, just relieved that in the end most of it came together for a good start, and ready to turn my attention to the next phase: just two kids at home, one middle schooler, one high schooler, both learning outside a school.
The schoolroom now, with no little desks in sight.
So I have some hope that I might be able to pick up blogging a little bit in the next month or so. Right now I am sitting in my rocking chair doing something I never thought I would ever want to do: writing a blog post with my thumbs on my phone. I am practicing, you see. For the next month or so.
+ + +
We started school at the beginning of August, but we only did half-school. The 10th grader started chemistry, civics (uffda), and a bit of English. The 6th grader worked sort of loosely on everything, with a little extra art. That was nice, a slow entry into the year, and we got just as far as I hoped we would in a month. Half-school makes it easy.
In September, since we have already done half a month’s worth of school, we will do the other half (at least we will try). We will set aside the chemistry and civics, and the 10th grader will start geometry and French II. The 6th grader will buckle down a little less loosely to math and English and history and science.
But we won’t be doing it at home. Those books are currently distributed among several suitcases. We’re about to try something totally new: taking school somewhere else. And also, taking only two of our kids, the oldest three off living their own lives (okay, two of them are doing it on our dime, but still) in places where they have keys and we don’t.
TypePad has announced it will be shutting down at the end of September.
I've managed to get most of the stuff migrated to WordPress. It's messy and barebones for now, and all my internal links are currently broken, but here it is: http://bearingblog.com
Good thing I already had that domain name ready to go!
bearing blog 