Hrumph Traveling Again: This Time to France

Intro

Like our trip to Italy, Isabelle and Christian, our Paris friends, were going to play a prominent role in our vacation. We were traveling to Marseille in France and would recover there from our jet lag for two days. Then our plan was to meet Isabelle and Christian in Buis-les-Baronnie at a rented villa in the Luberon Mountains with a view of Mont Ventoux.Isabelle and Christian spent two years in Nashville while Christian was completing a fellowship in Cardiology. Isabelle was trained as a psychologist in France. While in the U. S. she attended to her children, Thomas then 6 and Charlotte then age 2 ½. I hooked up with her by a request from Hans Strupp, who she sought out when she arrived in Nashville. I invited her to be a member of our peer support group and to supervise me on a case. During her time in Nashville, we met weekly. She observed my work through a one-way mirror with permission of the patient, and then we talked over lunch. We had both Christian and Isabelle over for dinner.We were excited to see them again, because of our previous connections, because of their kindness to us on our last trip and because we were so eager for the refuge of their company in a foreign land. Isabelle had a similar excitement about travel and new experiences as Marietta’s. Christian had a similar notion to mine that everywhere you are, you are still there. To Christian and me, this means we reserve the right to complain. Neither of us alone is a match for our wives high moral ground, but together we make a formidable team. My seeming composure was not without complications. As the time approached for us to fly to France, I was aware of a gloom descending over me. This feeling seemed familiar to me. It had many of the hallmarks of the dread I felt before our last foreign trip.I could recognize it in myself and I could recognize it in others. I was returning to Nashville from a psychology conference. A sixty something year old couple was in the security line with me. In line the husband was separated from the wife by about six people, “Come up here,” he said to her.  “How did you get back there? Why weren’t you right behind me? You never follow me like you are supposed to.”“I’m fine back here,” she replied. “You always rush off. I can’t keep up with you.”“Okay. I will come back with you,” he said.As he passed by me, I observed to him, “You must be traveling abroad.”“How did you know?” he asked.“My wife and I have that same argument when we are traveling overseas. There is something about leaving the country that makes me nervous.”“Oh we’re not nervous,” he said.“Oh you’re not?” his wife replied. “Why did you wake me up at five this morning to ask me if we had a rental car? How many times have you asked me to show you our tickets and passports? How many times have you asked me when we were coming back?”Yes, they had all the signs. The dread began to emerge in me one week before the takeoff. I called Marietta at the office. Lisa, her court officer answered, “You sound depressed David,” Lisa observed.“I suppose I am,” I replied, surprising myself with my frank self-disclosure.When Marietta got home that summer evening she joined me sitting on the front porch. “Lisa said you were depressed?” Marietta said with apparent interest in my reply.“Well I guess I am.”That was a significant difference from last time. Last time my fear and sadness at leaving was covered with anger, denial, innocence and heroism. I was the wonderful indulgent husband, who was suffering a trip to Italy out of my great love for my wife. She, of course, was expected to be grateful for my sacrifice and adore me for my willingness to endure this ordeal. If she didn’t my anger and irritability were at the ready to remind her how lucky she was to have a great hero like me, sacrificing for her pleasure and happiness.This time I knew I couldn’t get away with this posture, though I would have liked to. I was reduced to the naked truth.Yes, I was depressed.“Why,” Marietta asked.“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because our house is being remodeled and we don’t have running water in the kitchen. Dust covers everything. I have a cough from all the sawdust and powder from the laid and sanded wallboard mud. The roof leaks. For the last week and a half the contractor has been promising that the roofer, the plumber and the electrician would be here tomorrow. I count on it every time he says they will come. Each time they don’t I get disappointed. Perhaps those disappointments stack up. I don’t know.”And then I spoke the words Marietta did not want to hear, but suspected. “Then there is the trip.”“What about the trip? I thought you were excited this time?”“Well I am. I want to see the Tour de France route. That would be fun. I want to see Isabelle, Christian and Charlotte. But we don’t speak the language. How are we going to even rent a car or find the hotel? I know you have learned some French in the past three months, but last week we went to see that French movie, LaAuberge Espanol and we didn’t understand a word of French, either one of us. We were completely dependent on the subtitles. French was the only course I flunked in college. You, you are good at languages. You’ve been studying French everyday for three months. And you didn’t understand a word. I hate being so dependent and stupid. We will always be playing Blanche Dubois, dependent on the kindness of strangers, dependent dan les largesse de’etranger. Maybe I can remember a word or two and speak un peu, but I can’t comprenda un mot of French they say to me.”On Monday Marietta called me at work. “What’s the contractor’s number? I’m going to call him and give him a piece of my mind.”I gave her the number.She called back in a few minutes. “I really let him have it. I asked him if he had ever lived through a remodeling project, living in the house, while the work was going on around him. He said, ‘no.’ I told him it wasn’t easy and that my husband was getting depressed because of it and I won’t have that. He had better get those electricians and plumbers over there tomorrow.”And sure enough they came. The contractor claimed they had promised to come anyway, but they had been promising that for some time before “Judge Shipley” called.Though I was not particularly happy about playing the role of the damsel in distress and giving up the white house to Marietta, I was glad it worked. It was sort of like being stuck holding my wife’s purse and your young nephew asks you to pay for their ice cream they just bought and you discover money in her purse.I knew why she called the contractor. She couldn’t do anything about my depression and fear that was attached to the trip, but she could do something about the contractor. And she was terrified that I might again be reborn as a traveling curmudgeon in France. This was a preemptive strike, a condom intended to prevent and unwanted birth.I appreciated her efforts, but my fears remained. On the day of our departure there were moments of silly panic. “Where are the traveler’s checks? I put them right here on top. Why did you mess with my packing?” or “A friend told me that they hate Americans in Marseilles. They rob you and steal your car if it’s parked in one place for more than thirty minutes. Change our reservations now.”We made it to the airport without much arguing. I began missing my dog, Greco, before we ever left. The roof still leaked and the roofer was supposed to come that day. But we left.My father’s ghost hangs over me as I think about this trip. He was always threatened by foreign travel. As a college student, when I proposed a summer trip to Europe, my mother enthusiastically supported the notion. But the money had to come from my father and it never came. He was a conservative southern lawyer, afraid of the evil communists. I was a liberal college student and he was afraid I would get behind the iron curtain and never return.When he and my mother traveled abroad, he was the epitome of curmudgeonhood. I feel his fear in me. I love being the “go to guy” for people who need my expert help. I love being the master of my world, and in my office I feel that way sometimes. I am dependent on my patient’s dependency just as my father was dependent on his role as a prominent attorney in a small southern town. Pull either of us from these roots and fear emerges.I was optimistic that I had changed and might be spared from the inheritance of my father’s fear. Once at the airport, however, it found me again. Marietta and I were sitting at the gate. “When do we take the jetlag pills and where are the directions for taking them?” I asked.“I forget them. I think I left them in my purse,” she replied.I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was after all Marietta Shipley. Forgetting something, usually many things, on a trip is part of her definition of self. She had already confessed to forgetting the film, camera (she remembered the digital one) and her sunglasses. Those things didn’t bother me, but the jetlag pills. Jetlag was the reason we were going to France for three and a half weeks. It cost a lot of money to get there so we should make the best of it. Reason one. But reason two was we always pay a high price in jetlag both coming and going. I was hoping these jetlag herbal pills would lessen that cost and help us to recover more quickly from the trip. I was counting on it. Those jetlag pills were going to be my magic potion.“You forgot the jetlag pills? How could you forget those,” I said knowing perfectly well how she forgot them. Just like she forgets and leaves her purse in a restaurant, every other time we go out to eat. Just like she forgets to bring home the cups she takes with her in the car every morning to drink her coffee, etc. That’s how she forgot.“I’ve got some herbal pills that my Chinese acupuncture doctor gave me,” was her feeble reply.I don’t want to record the rest of my tantrum. Suffice it to say my father’s spirit lived on in me. This crisis resolved itself when Marietta found the jetlag pills in the St. Louis airport.Hooray for Marietta.Another ingredient that I was depending on for the trip was business class. For two years we spent money on the Citibank American Airlines credit card and we saved all our American frequent flier miles. Remodeling our house with the bank’s money and our credit cards as the intermediary helped. So we had enough miles to go to France in business class. My first time.As soon as I sat in my seat, I felt better. It was wide and the room in front between seats seemed enormous by my Southwest Airlines standards. Just after we sat down a woman offered us a choice of champagne or orange juice. Marietta and I took the orange juice. With the orange juice we took our first of six jetlag pills. As soon as all passengers were in their seats our server returned with four choices of wine and soft drinks. Marietta got a glass of French Bordeaux. I got a sprite remembering that alcohol was not good for jetlag.It was hard to avoid the alcohol though. I took a sip of Marietta’s wine. It was exceptionally good and the server returned several times with an offer to top off her glass.Then there was dinner. The choices were Filet Mignon with roasted red peppers and basil sauce with a potato tort bonded by manchego cheese and tomato with green beans and sliced caramelized onions; Lamb Chops with light oregano red wine jus, the same green beans and onions the same potato tort; Chicken Manchego presented on a bed of basmati rice, artichoke and wilted spinach, with the red pepper sauce that came with the roast beef; Cannelloni filled with cheese and spinach in a light cream tomato sauce. This course was followed by a cheese course of red Leicester cheese and Roquefort cheese with haute cuisine crackers, port and other wines. The dessert was a choice among vanilla ice cream with or without hot fudge or nuts, or butterscotch or seasonal berries or Grand Marnier fruit salad with Hagen-Das Mango Sorbet.These choices were designed for our liking by a panel of famous chefs. The only one we recognized was Alice Waters of Berkeley California’s Chez Paniesse. The wine consultant was Dr. Richard Vine. This seemed appropriate.The wine was better than the food. With excellent service and so much planning the meat tasted over cooked to us and the vegetables under cooked. The main event to business class for us was the extra attention paid to us by the stewards and stewardesses.We were offered the opportunity to purchase from an on board duty-free shop. We were offered our own DVD player with selection of movies. I chose to attempt sleep. Marietta watched the movie offered on the large screen in the front of the plane.What I had once thought to be an extra comfortable large seat suddenly became a very inadequate bed. On the floor in a plastic bag was a fine comfortable pillow and blanket. The chair extended further than normal. The seat had a lumbar support, but was not long enough for me to lie prone. I kept wanting to slide into a puddle. My back lost all support as soon as I turned to one side or another. It was seven-thirty P.M., CST, my Nashville, Tennessee time. It was 1:30 A.M. London time. I wanted to be sleepy but I wasn’t. I was patient. In time I began to relax.The plane was full. In our section of this Boeing 767 there were two seats together separated from two middle seats by aisles. The plane held 226 people. Our section held thirty-six of them, six rows, six people in a row. We sat in row four on the right side of the plane, the south side as we traveled east toward London. In the middle of our row sat a seventy-ish year old couple who choose DVD’s and a selection of movies. The husband obviously chose a comedy, because, as I began to relax into a semi trance almost sleep he would guffaw and I would be forced to begin my meditative journey toward sleep again. This kept happening until about 10:00 PM CST. I think he watched two movies, both comedies. Finally he became quiet. Sleep did come to me, but only for a couple of hours.I was awakened by the servers organizing our breakfast. It consisted of a bowl of milk and cornflakes, ten blueberries and a half of an apricot, a small Dannon strawberry yogurt, a choice of an English muffin or a croissant, a choice of orange or apple juice and a choice of coffee or tea.I grudgingly pushed myself out of my sleep and ate my breakfast and of course took my jet lag pill. Perhaps it was the placebo effect of the pill, but I did seem to be alert enough to face the next stage of the journey.We arrived in Manchester, England, exited the ship that gave us safe passage and special treatment and merged in the masses of airport travelers, losing whatever class distinction we once had. This is what I’m most afraid of, being nobody in a foreign land of long lines. We walked the airport maze, until we found our next queue. That was for security. It had all the same machines. They stopped our carry-on bag and they took out Marietta’s cuticle clippers. “These are my good ones,” Marietta exclaimed. The offered to ship them back to the states for 5 pounds or eight dollars. Marietta accepted their offer. This meant we had to wait for a supervisor and fill out some forms.I was so pleased when I answered Marietta’s question, “Do you mind waiting?” with “No I don’t.”And I meant that. We had three hours to kill here. We might as well spend some moments with the supervisor filling out forms. It wasn’t bad. It took maybe fifteen minutes. We then continued our walk through the maze of hallways looking for signs that said connecting flights next to an arrow that pointed the way. With a long walk and a bus ride to the North Terminal we emerged into the domestic terminal at Gatwick Airport.We knew no one there. No one knew us. We were hoping to blend into the crowd to avoid looking American and slipping past whatever anti-American feeling there would be in France. We wanted to look fresh.I’m not sure we accomplished our goal. I thought I could distinguish among the various nationalities. I don’t know what my cues were. The English men seemed to be wearing sport coats. Americans wore baseball caps. The young French males wore long sleeve cotton knit shirts without a collar. American’s clothes had more color. Young American girls wore pink. Older English women’s hair was blond and held tightly in place with hairspray. The French women wore long-sleeve, white blouses with buttons. They were similar to a man’s dress shirt, but much less ironed. The French men tended to have longer hair. French women often wore long diaphanous over blouses either tan or olive green. The twenty-something British woman wore a white blouse with a pointed collar underneath a long, loose, knit, black v-necked sweater. An oriental man wore a well-ironed, white, cotton short-sleeve, dress shirt with the bright red and gold logo of his golf course in Japan. A young woman with long dark hair and a cotton, knit, off-the-shoulder blouse looked Italian. These guesses are a Rorschach card into my prejudices and stereotypes. I’m not sure how accurate my assumptions were, but we were among these distinguishable travelers and we were falling deep into this crowd, not knowing how we were being perceived.Renting a car was no problem in Marseille. Well not exactly. The machines of renting a car were no different than in the airports in the U.S. The rental agent disturbed us when he gave us a list of do’s and don’ts composed especially for Marseille.Don’t park on the street. Lock the car. Drive with the car doors locked. Car thieves will open your door at a stoplight, force you out of your car and steal it, if your door is not locked. Park in supervised parking areas. Do not leave baggage and purses visible in your car seat or floor. Thieves will break windows to steal whatever they see in your car. The agents verbal instructions were, “I don’t mean to frighten you but drive straight to the hotel and take the bags out of the car first thing and you will be all right.” We got a Renault Scenic, four doors with a hatch back, a version of the Chrysler Neon. We followed the directions into Marseille from the airport. It was about thirty miles away. There were many opportunities to make wrong turns, but with luck and excellent instincts and navigation from Marietta, we made it to the city.Once downtown, the torture began. The streets were poorly marked. We made several wrong turns. As we were recovering from one of those we followed a car that we thought was making a U-turn across an opening in the median. But it wasn’t a median. It was a parking lot with only one exit, the one we came in. We found ourselves boxed in at the bottom of the lot with nothing to do but back out.That was the problem. The car was a stick-shift five speed. The reverse was left and up with a line under the R. I pushed the gear shift over as far left as I could, then up and the car went forward. A flower stand was on our right, cars were parked on the left, straight ahead were steel posts that formed a barrier that was wide enough to let people walk between them, but not wide enough for a car to pass.I pulled up the hand brake so that I couldn’t go forward further and began my experiments to discover reverse. I pushed pulled, jerked, shoved, yelled, did the same in the opposite direction thinking that the diagram was reversed or upside down. All this and the same result – no reverse only forward. Marietta tried. She also failed. Stuck and lost with people about becoming curious. Angry frustrated, frightened we began to consider leaving the car when Marietta discovered two steel posts in front of us on the left just wide-enough apart for us to try to get through. I slowly let the car drift downhill toward the posts on the left. My angle was bad. I waited for the constant flow of the cars in the street to stop before I began my attempt. Just as the cars stopped for the red light pedestrians began to move between my designated posts. One was a woman walking very slowly with crutches. I waited. It was frustrating. I was afraid that as soon as she was safely across the traffic flow would terminate my escape opportunity. Marietta was too. She jumped out of the car and ran into harm’s way. She put out her hand and stopped the traffic. I squeezed the car through the opening. The steel posts on the left nicked the left door. (I was glad I maxed out our insurance coverage.) I didn’t have enough room to turn onto the street. My car edged on to the opposite sidewalk then back into the street. Marietta jumped back in the car and we were off again. Lost but not stuck.When we found the hotel by accident, we drove in front and parked. As I began gathering my wallet from the dash, my sunglasses fell to the floor. I leaned down and discovered a plastic ring below the gearshift knob. I pushed and it went up. That was the key to reverse. Pull up the plastic ring below the gearshift knob, then shift into reverse. I was so excited to discover this that I tried it out three times and went backwards one foot each time.Though neither of us complained of jet lag, we slept that first night from 11:00 PM – 12:30 PM. That’s thirteen and a half hours. The length of sleep was one thing, but the depth of sleep was another. The maid knocked on our door numerous times. She finally got so exasperated with us that she came in spite of our protests, cleaned the bathroom and changed the towels while we slept on.Hotel De VilleThere were the tour buses full of people. We speculated that they were going to the Hotel De Ville. Signs all over town pointed out its direction. In the brochure we read that it was one of three buildings spared by the Germans in that part of town. They blew the rest up because the area was a haven for Jews and the resistance fighters. We wondered if the same thing would happen to these tourists that happened to us. When we arrived at the Hotel De Ville we learned that it was a police station and jail and that it was considered a person’s last stop before execution – “a la l’hotel de ville,” not a hotel. Our speculation about people and what they might be doing was a fun pastime and perhaps because we were not in our roles in Nashville where at restaurants attorneys would discover and fawn over Judge Shipley and my clients might see me or me them and neither of us know the etiquette of what to do outside in the real world. Here we were nobody, creating stories and speculating about what we could not possible know. Here, that was almost everything.When finally we did, slowly, one foot, then thirty seconds later a second foot, roll out of bed we were so stiff we could barely move. I did my full yoga routine and my back still hurt. Marietta, who hates to stretch, did some leg stretches as well to no avail.We were dressed and on our way looking for lunch by 2:45. Marseilles has a beautiful dock area surrounded by restaurants and that’s where we headed. We chose a restaurant on a corner sat down and I used the magic French words that Marietta taught me, “Je voudrais.” In French I ordered a coke for me and a Perrier for over lemon for Marietta and I “je voudraied” the menu. I got a Pepsi, Marietta go her Perrier, but no menu. It was past two and the kitchen would not open again until 6:00 PM.We drank up, paid up and found Le Sufferin two spots down to the left. Le Sufferin advertised full service til after midnight. We found a table. I ordered a ham and cheese omelet, Marietta a ham and cheese sandwich. My omelet was very light and good and Marietta’s sandwich was a notch above the American ham and cheese. The cheese was on the outside of the bread; the bread was toasted and better bread than Bunny Bread.Marietta seemed to be the one fascinated with the opposite sex this trip. There was the Hertz Rental Car attendant, “Movie star handsome.”“Oh,” I said. That’s all I said.“Tall, dark, jet black hair parted in the middle, thin with muscles.”Then there were the waiters at the restaurant.“Oh, isn’t he good looking. They are all good looking.”“Who are you talking about?” I wondered.“The waiters. That one in the crewneck shirt, he is short, but so well built. He looks like a dancer. Gene Kelly in a tight t-shirt. And the others are just as handsome.”“His shirt is not that tight,” I commented defending his decorum.Then on the street the next morning, “Look at him Jack Lalane. That old guy in the muscle shirt. What a flat stomach. David I hope you look that good at seventy-five.”“How do you know he is seventy-five?” I asked.“His body was twenty five,” she responded, “but his face, balding head and gray hair and hands, they were old.”“You really checked him out,” I said.“It was that tight shirt, big muscles and flat stomach that caught my attention first.”The weather here this year, 2003, is the hottest summer in France since 1976. For the last several days the temperature has been reported as 32° centigrade. In Fahrenheit Marietta tells me you multiply the centigrade temperature X 2 and add 30° to that number and you get the equivalent temperature in Fahrenheit degrees. That would be 32 X 2 = 64 + 30 = 94°.But I swear it is not anything like 94° in Nashville. The Nashville humidity magnifies temperature effects. My friend and contractor Mark Meinhart tells me Nashville is nothing compared to Houston. He lived there for forty years before he moved to Nashville. Just after he moved to Nashville Mark took his wife and family to play miniature golf. He saw something there when we looked at the lights that was remarkable. He pointed to the lights and called to his wife to look at them. She responded immediately, “no bugs.”“No,” meaning not any bugs could not have been an accurate observation, but perhaps there were much less bugs or a less dense swarm of bugs in Nashville then there was in Houston. Well in Marseilles, which is on the Mediterranean Sea, I wasn’t sweating in 96° heat. By 6:00 or 7:00 P.M. the air was very comfortable. The French complained about being uncomfortable in the heat, but like Mark in his reference to us about Houston, the French don’t know from heat discomfort. Nashville beats Marseilles and all of France for heat and humidity discomfort, according to the French we spoke with, by a country kilometer and Houston apparently beats France by a country mile according to Mark.The direct sun is hot in France and, for that, the houses and apartments have shutters. The apartment shutters pull down and roll up like the mechanism in a roll-top desk. In homes often the shutters are made of plastic with metal struts. They fold out in sections so that air can come in without letting in much light. A metal flange folds out to lock the shutters open, so that the wind can’t blow them shut.As I imagined, it is awkward trying to communicate without knowing the language. When I parked in the hotel garage in Marseille, I lost the ticket that stuck out like a tongue when I pushed the red button as I entered the garage. The hotel concierge called the garage attendant as we were leaving to tell him to let us out. As I listened to this conversation, I heard him say, “Parlez-vous l'anglais.” I said to him “deux jours” so that we would be charged for only our 2 day stay. He replied, “une jour” or one day. Clearly telling me to lie, so I will have to pay less.I remembered “perdu” or lost and “billet” for ticket. So I thought maybe I could swing it. We found our car and headed for the sortie (exit). When we got to the exit, a man motioned us to an exit. I shouted, “perdu billet.” He came over and said something, actually a lot of something. He motioned me out of the car. I asked Marietta if she would negotiate the ticket problem, while I stayed with our car full of luggage. I had forgotten to tell her about the “une jour.” Shortly she returned.“He told me to say twelve hours,” she said. “I told him we were her for two days, but he said twelve hours. He talked to his boss. He said twelve hours. That saved us twelve dollars. I offered him a tip of two Euros. He seemed insulted. I didn’t mean to insult him. He told me that in France this was ‘pas necessaire.’ But he took the two Euros.”Later, after we joined Christian and Isabelle, Christian explained, “the French consider work as a privilege. Service workers are well paid. Tips are not expected in restaurants. The welfare system in France is so good that work is done as a matter of pride, as much as for money. Peut etre, it was an insult to offer this homme a tip.” Not only did we not understand the language we couldn’t understand the difference between when we were being generous and when we were being insulting. When in Marseilles we merged into the crowds, as I had feared. The specter of losing one’s identity with so little competence was worse than the actual pain of it. As we walked along the streets, we were obviously tourists. We had a map and were constantly referring to it, looking around for street signs and arguing over where we were. This made us an easy mark for thieves we were told, but we were perdu (lost). What else could we do? We weren’t the only tourists, however. The other tourists were usually English or German. We were some of the few Americans.Anyway back to merging with the masses. I knew I had crossed an important threshold, when, on our last morning in Marseilles we sat by the dock in an outdoor restaurant and had petit dejeuner (or breakfast). As we ate our croissants and jam, we were completely inconspicuous and we could observe and comment on fellow restaurant patrons and the hundreds of passersby on the street, which we did. There was the man drinking a beer at 9:30 A.M., shirt unbuttoned. He was short of breath and was smoking. We wondered if he was long for this world. There were two young women parking their motor scooter. They had tattoos on their left shoulders. One had a nose ring. They were soon to become our servers.We left Marseilles safe and recovered from jetlag. We found ourselves traveling on the correct A-road toward Avignon. In France the A-roads are their interstates. N-roads are very good highways. D-roads are the smaller less traveled roads that are often not on the map. We stayed on the A-road for only as long as we had to, because Isabelle suggested a “route more scenic would be to exit the A-roads and move forward on the N-roads.” The A-road we took at 12:00 noon on July 12 was not very crowded. Our car had an engine this time instead of the one with a rubberband for an engine that I had last time. I drove about 120 km per hour which I guessed was about 70 mph and I was going just a bit faster than the traffic in the right lanes, but I was often passed by cars going faster. Traffic here didn’t have the racecar feel of the Italian autostrada.We exited to go to Gorda, a diversion recommended by Isabelle. The road was a windy N-road, taking us through a dry countryside reminiscent of Southern California. The drive was beautiful. Gorda was a small ancient village, built on the edges and sides of a U-shaped canyon with a gorgeous view of the surrounding territory. It was difficult to imagine why people would decide to build on the edge and sides of a cliff. This town was laid out using the walls of cliffs as the backs of buildings and the cliff ledges for roofs, much as the Navajo Indian cliff dwellings were designed.As we drove around a curve we spotted an outdoor restaurant hanging on the edge of a cliff. We stopped there. It was an exclusive hotel. It cost about three hundred dollars a night to stay there. The server sat us under an umbrella at a table that overlooked the canyon. The menu had two sections. One called “Entre” and other termed “la Plate.” The entre’s were melons and prosciutto, and various appetizer looking items. Le Plate contained dishes that looked more like a meal. We decided to order one entre and one la Plate to split. We ordered melon and prosciutto and duck rare and mashes pomme de terre (potatoes). As soon as our entre arrived we knew something was lost in translation. We got two melons and prosciutto that were plenty food for a lunch. We knew that meant we were getting two la Plats as well. “Garcon,” I spoke as soon as I realized this, surprising Marietta with my confidence. The server came over and understood my English and hand motions for splitting and soon brought us each a half serving of duck and mashed potatoes. The rare duck was “délicieux” in a cherry sauce with a small mound of cooked tarte yet, sweet cherries. The mashed potatoes were light clouds of whipped potatoes seasoned with just the right amount of salt. We ordered a boutille d’eau (bottle of water). We got a beautiful blue bottle with about sixteen ounces of water. We ordered another one not really understanding that each bottle was $6.50 and that the tap water, which they are obligated to bring us if asked, would have been fine. Our lunch was pleasant but paying $13.00 for Wattwiller water in an elegant bottle was one of our many blunders. Since the bottle was “so lovely,” we took it with us. We had surely paid for it.We drove on to our destination, Isabelle and Christian at un villa in Buis-les-Barronies.Pain CompagneThe drive included many D-roads and several wrong turns with fairly quick recovery and only a modicum of loud voices. The scenery was beautiful as Isabelle foretold, but we hadn’t seen the lavender fields Isabelle had promised.We arrived at our villa at about 4:30 P.M. We greeted Isabelle and Christian. They are Parisians and Peter Maille in his book A Year in Provence said that in Paris the greeting is one kiss on each cheek.  We greeted one another as Parisians do. Our villa was one half of a duplex, one story with a loft. We had our choice of a downstairs bedroom and bath or an upstairs bedroom and bath. We choose upstairs. We got settled in our room and were off to meet Charlotte (Isabelle and Christian’s 20-year-old daughter) and her friends who by chance were staying in the same village for vacation in a house nearby. Charlotte attends college in Reims. She will study in Boston for a year and a half at Northeastern University in an exchange program with Cesem, the University in Reims.It seems Charlotte has a boyfriend, Vincent, with whom she is living (as of last month); Vincent’s best friend from childhood is Guilliam who is dating Delphine. Delphine’s parents live in Buis-les-Baronnies. Her mother is the only nurse at the local hospital. She is divorced and dating a neighbor. We were invited for a drink and some hors d’oeuvre.As we arrive, Charlotte came out to meet us. There had been a wreck on the A-road from Paris. The road had been closed for hours. The Tour de France was traveling through Lyon. Charlotte’s party had to travel all night. They arrived at 8:00 A.M. and slept until 5:00 P.M. by the swimming pool attached to the house.Charlotte and her parents were clearly glad to see one another. And we were glad to see Charlotte again. Ah Charlotte, the beautiful talented sixteen-year-old who sang, The Rose, a cappella for us four years prior, was even more beautiful than before. Her eyes were bright, alive, and happy. Her enthusiastic spirit was the same as it was with a dash of maturity and sophistication added.I was smitten once again. Who was this Vincent, I wondered in my Archie Bunker protective voice. I can only imagine Christian’s struggle to let his daughter go.We were introduced to Vincent, Guilliam, Delphine, Delphine’s mother and boyfriend, two other girls Charlotte’s age and one other boyfriend. We caught up with Charlotte who kindly tended to us in English, while the conversation around us was French. Marietta was able to be a part of the French conversation. I was completely lost, unless someone was speaking English.The house was small. I’m not sure how all these people could sleep inside. In fact, I imagined that some would sleep outside. The swimming pool was about twenty by ten with the water streaming out of one end and pouring over the end, as if it flowed from the pool down the mountain. It was framed on three sides by a stone walk. On the unframed end the water poured into a collection area below. This allowed for leaves to flow out of the pool and made the pool easier to clean and the water was constantly being pumped through a filter system.The visit with Charlotte was much too short. One thing of note was Vincent and Guilliam’s apologetic comment for one of the girls we met, who had purple and pink spiked hair various piercings and tattoos. Imagining how she must look to us they described her as “une victime de la mod.” In English this means “fashion victim.” In contrast to her, these young people had no piercings, no tattoos, and their hair was natural, and conventionally cut.We drove from there to a local restaurant, where we had a beautiful presented and délicieux dinner. I had something akin to chicken that was not chicken, not quail, not pheasant, and not duck. I know because I asked, but I never understood what it was. Marietta and Isabelle had a fish that turned out to be trout served and deboned by two beautiful charming waitresses, supervised by the hostess – owner and chef, whom we imagined to be one of their mothers.Exhausted, we returned home about 11:00 PM to our bedroom, our stifling hot, no breeze at all bedroom. I had enough alcohol to drink that I fell asleep in a drunken stupor. Marietta was not so lucky. I woke in a couple of hours in a sweat, unable to return to sleep. With the help of Benadryl, I finally found sleep again. The breeze began at about 6:00 A.M. We slept until 10:00 A.M.Near this area around Nyons, there is a local legend about the breeze (le ventre). It always blows the same time daily. In 600 A.D. St. Césani d’ Arleo came to visit his cloistered nun sister (souer) in her convent de Saint Pierre. The heat was so stifling that her brother (son frere) went to the south coast of France to the Mediterranean Sea and brought back with him the breeze from the sea. He put it inside the ground near her convent. Every day in the summer the wind pours out of the hole “se tro” of Pantris at 10:00 P.M. until morning. In the winter it blows from 6:00 in the morning until 9:00 A.M.At breakfast (or petit dejeuner) Christian shared with us an important part of his French heritage. As we lingered over our yogurt, bread, jam and coffee, talking for more than an hour, Christian told us what his father told him, (and he perhaps was told this by his father). That is “you never get older sitting at the dinner table.” Comment dir on: “on ne vicillit pas ā table.”The weather reports keep getting worse. When we arrived this was the hottest period on record in France since 1976. Now Christian tells us that reports are that it is the hottest, driest, period on record, ever.Coming from the U. S., we are aware of having the coolest and wettest spring in a long time. Summer which usually comes in late May for us in Tennessee did not really come until July 1^st. It occurred to us that Tennessee had somehow stolen France’s normal weather.After eating our long petit dejeuner we lounged about the house, staying in the shade, shutting the windows exposed to the direct sun, happy for the breeze that blew through the house, blowing around papers and napkins. The breeze made the heat just bearable.Late in the day Isabelle proposed a ride in our window-shut, air-conditioned rental car to search for lavender fields. Christian stayed behind. He had two weeks of the Le Monde and some left over magazine that he wanted to read. Christian said, “I enjoy reading Le Monde. It presents material with the pros and cons around each issue. When reporting this way it does not comment. When it does, it often offers a third view. I like to read it and form my own opinion and I get the fact news from TV.”Just then on television came a news report about the high unemployment figures in the U.S. and how difficult it was for hungry, poor, U.S. citizens in need to get food. The program showed charitable organizations handing out food and running out of fresh vegetables.“The French press likes to demonstrate the failures of your social net and implicitly contrast the success of the French system. And I agree,” Christian said. “Perhaps our system is too indulgent and rewards not working while yours is too indifferent to the poor. The poor will hate the rich, if not taken care of. That is one of the reasons for the difference in the murder rate of our two countries. I agree that work is a privilege and it is my responsibility to help take care of those who don’t work. I just think we need to tinker with the level of tax and the amount of help a bit better in France.”Clearly the news and public events were important to Christian. He took his citizenship seriously and was happy with France’s position on wishing to wait for the atomic inspectors in Iraq to finish their job before war was considered, a position to which I was sympathetic as well.In France the Iraq war was a major issue along with genetic engineered foods. I saw a slogan on the back of T-shirt in Marseille that said, “America knows no limits,” written in English. Some French seem to believe that having limits and opponents to challenge ones ideas is a good thing and that the attitude of the U.S. to go it alone is arrogant and imperious and will come back to bite us in the butt. Perhaps they have a point.Isabelle, Marietta and I piled into the hot car and were off on our lavender quest. Reports were that the heat and drought had impacted the flowers. The purple lavender’s weren’t so purple and the smell of lavender perfume in the fields was hardly detectable. We drove east from Buis-les-Barronies up small mountains roads, following a river into the bowels of the Barronies Mountains.  Soon we spotted lavender fields and saw a tractor and two men with rakes working the lavender in the fields. Marietta and Isabelle got out to take pictures. I was too comfortable in the car and too shy, too aware of how good Marietta and Isabelle would be as a team without me.I was correct. Two men emerged with rakes they used to gather the lavender cut by the tractor. Soon the man on the tractor was posing for a picture. The two men were leaning on their rakes, talking to Marietta and Isabelle. Marietta was doing her part in spite of her language handicap.In a about fifteen minutes they returned reporting that the temperature outside was cooling and telling of their ability to disarm the men, distract them from their work and get the men to tell them about their fields. One told them they could only stand being in Paris for a day. Looking around the mountains and the purple lavender fields, one could understand why. The other offered to sell his fields and house to them and let them do the work.Hard work, it had to be. The fields were half brown dirt and half rock. It was amazing that anything grew here. Even though this year’s crop was a poor one, I could not miss the beautiful purple haze in the field or the aroma of lavender when the tractor cut a fresh row.We returned to the house and Christian had begun to plan dinner. He brought out some shish kabobs of steak, peppers and onions. He cooked some spaghetti and opened a fresh bottle of red wine. We sat down to a meal that began with the main course. This was followed by a salad of greens dressed in balsamic vinegar and olive oil from this region. This was followed by a dessert of fromage (cheese), goat cheese, blue cheese, chambray, swiss and “apricot,” nectarines and figs I picked from the tree in front of the house.At dinner we discussed plans for Isabelle and Christian to visit us and Charlotte in the United States. Christian began his negotiation by saying since I agreed to vacation with you (Isabelle) for two weeks so far from Paris this year, perhaps next year you will relent after my fifteen years of suggesting, that we go to my mother’s home only an hour from France.I had never seen Isabelle respond so strongly. “Hah! Go with you to your mother’s, where you will talk and joke with her. She will play the piano. You will read and work on your computer and who will go with me on a walk in the forest. I will have to go by myself, while you will be happy with your work and your mother. No. I won’t go. I must be at least 300 kilometers south of Paris for my summer vacation. I will go with you to your mother’s for the weekend, but not for my summer vacation.”Usually Isabelle defers to Christian but he had clearly found one of her limits. Her vacations were precious to her and she had a clear vision of what she needed.As her voice lowered, she said, “I need a change from my work. I need to be in nature and go on walks and hikes. I want to be away from crowds and familiar places. I need this change. It restores my soul.”Marietta and I were quiet, but this fight was very familiar to us. We bought a condo in Park City, Utah, on the agreement that we would pay for it in part by using it as our vacation destination for the extended future.That lasted from 1993 until 1999, when Marietta revolted with “I’m bored with Utah I want to go to Europe,” thus our first trip to visit Christian and Isabelle. Marietta was just as clear and tenacious as Isabella.I have an affinity for Christian. He is almost ten years younger than I. At forty-eight I was much like him. That was the year we bought our condo in Utah and I looked forward to vacationing every year in familiar territory. Each visit I hoped would allow us to sink further below the venire of the place, hoping to make friends there and perhaps create an identity for ourselves. We have made some inroads and have some Park City friends, but most of the time, when we go there, I write and Marietta goes alone on explorations of the area.I think my late forties were the height of my curmudgeondom. One of the requirements for being a curmudgeon is being unaware of it and having a great many reasons for it. Honesty was one. “I’m just being truthful about how I feel. I don’t want to go.” But I was not really being truthful, I was afraid to go.I treated myself as if I were the master of the world. When I was most depressed I would use newspapers and magazines as tools to support my imaginary importance. It was as if I were President and my opinion could shape the world. Therefore I needed to be briefed. Television news, Newsweek, Time and the New York Times were brought to my door to inform me so that I could develop a considered opinion about the issue of the day. I did this because…I don’t know why I did this. Perhaps to feed my ego to think that the world needed me to know.All I know that my depression was marked by my news addiction. As I got less depressed, I required less news. When I was more depressed, I seemed to consume more news. I don’t know if this is true for Christian, because he is an employee of the French government. What decisions the government makes may be part of his daily life. But this certainly isn’t true for me.Three things happened that helped me become aware of my curmudgeondom. One is my observations of the careers of colleagues in academe. They seemed to have career low points in their early fifties. This happens because of a confluence of a number of factors. A factor is one’s arrogance. At fifty you are near the height of your professional power. You are more likely to assume too much power at this point. Old mistakes begin to be exposed. Your flaws begin to show more easily. Another factor in this confluence is that this is the beginning of the time when the younger generation begins to assert itself. While you have been spending most of your adult life proving you are indispensable, they are showing you, perhaps for the first time, that you are not. Another factor in the confluence is the aging process. You become aware that you are not as strong physically or as quick mentally.This is different than the forties mid-life crisis. That was, for me, resignation to myself and my life. It had less to do with losing my professional cachet, than with giving up my dreams. It was more internal and personal. This fifties event seems to me to have moments of painful professional attacks that hit me at a time when I am not sure about myself.This, of course, is a humbling experience. It cast me back on to my dependence on Marietta for validation and confirmation. I have had two failed marriages. When Marietta burst into tears with me and Ellen at the restaurant before our 1999 trip and told me that she had hated our trip to Europe and was dreading the upcoming one, I was startled. Travel was one of those things we both proclaimed we would enjoy, when and if we retired and now Marietta seemed to be rejecting me too. I felt I had to do something about that. Thus, my quest to take on my complaining and rigidity, which had given structure to my aging maleness. I knew I needed to find defenses that were less onerous on her. This was then the second factor of the fifties fall after humility.But humility leads one to the third factor. Humility helped me become more open and more aware of the difficulties my character postures were creating for others. This openness and motivation to change lead me to this writing and to working on transforming myself from curmudgeon to something better.The power of the curmudgeon comes with editing and complaining about the plans of those around him. (I say him, though hers can play the role as well, because men seem to be champions at this role). Nothing is a good idea to a curmudgeon, especially when it comes to him going or doing something. He is nonplussed by everything. The only things that seem to interest him are his ideas. Hence, my writing on vacations. Hence, my writing now. This was my idea.The curmudgeon is correct to say that everywhere you go you are still there, but said in this context, it means that your character flaws are still there for those you love to suffer through. Perhaps, wherever you are, people wish you weren’t and you are accepted only because people are forced to accept you.This is not necessarily a strange or bad thought for the curmudgeon. In fact being tolerated, in spite of his ill-humor, is one way he proves he is loved or powerful. If it is love, however it is a love only a mother could have.The phrase, “pretty places are like breasts; once you have seen one you have seen two,” not only is an insult to femininity, it is an insult to pretty places and inadvertently to the speaker. It says that pretty places don’t have their unique qualities and that the speaker would not be able to recognize these qualities if he saw them.I must confess. Pretty places sometimes are like poems are to me. I often don’t get the point. They are often wasted on me.That night, after dinner, Marietta and I went for a walk to the village. We had some ice cream that wasn’t very good and then we walked back. As we climbed the hill toward home, we saw a red glow and smoke rising from below. The neighbors were out looking. They knew that the fire was the lavender plant at the edge of town. Lavender is processed in many ways. One of them is to press the dry lavender for its oil. That is what this plant did.The flames from the fire must have been fed by the oil. They leapt spectacularly above the trees, high above the skyline of the other buildings. The firemen seemed feeble in their attempts to contain it. (We heard the next day that usually water was pumped from the river to fight fires, but the river was so low that it didn’t have enough water to feed the water pumps.)Car lights popped on all over the city and headed for high ground for a better view of the fire. Several came to a parking spot just below us. We watched the fire, the firemen trying to contain it, the police and fire trucks blinking lights and directing traffic and the fire seeming to rage on, unaffected.The next day the fire still smoldered. Speculation was rife about town. This was the poorest year for a lavender crop in this region in memory. The fire occurred on July 14, French Independence Day or Bastille Day, right across from a gas station. It would be almost impossible to tell how it started. There was a fire in the same factory fifteen years earlier. Now in this town of 2000 locals, more than twenty jobs would be lost.We left Buis-les-Baronnies and the fire to explore the countryside some more in our air-conditioned car. We returned home and dressed for dinner at the restaurant, Auburge de Malquery. We walked down the hill t dinner. The tables in this restaurant sat under a grove of uillel trees. These trees have a blossom that is harvested in June that makes tea. There is a special honey (or miel) that bees make from these flowers, that has a unique taste that reminded me of cream and sugar. It left a particular aftertaste similar to Echinacea.We arrived late for our 9:00 reservation. (I should mention that here 9:00 P.M. was 2100 heures. Keeping military time creates a different image of the day as time creeps toward 24:00 heures.) Though we were thirty minutes late, there were plenty of choices for a table. We found one next to one of the ten large trees in this grove. The sun was just setting.The owner seated us and chatted with us about the recent fire. Isabelle was impertinent enough to ask him if the fire was the result of arson. He didn’t know. She wondered, if the fire fifteen years ago had been purposely started. He didn’t know. Did they collect insurance then? He thought so. Is there insurance this time? He expected so. What will happen to the workers? He didn’t know. Isabelle complained about the heat. He concurred it was the worst in years and that May and June were more reliably pleasant months in Provence. Isabelle told him about the legend of le ventre de Pantios and the wind reliably coming out of a hole in the ground each day at 5:00 P.M.He told us the legend of the creek that ran in front of the restaurant. It was the reason for the name of his restaurant. Auberge is an old name of a place to stop with one’s horse and have a good meal. Malguery is the word for fully cured. It seems that Buis-les-Baronnies was known for its medical care. People would come from all around to the hospital on this creek. When they crossed the creek to leave they were fully cured, hence, Malguery.The food we ate, was délicieux. Marietta had rare duck breast with well done ratatouille and green beans wrapped in bacon. The rest of us had a delicate white fish with the same vegetables. The local red wine was Syrah Barron le Frais, 2001. It was meant to be consumed shortly after if was bottled. It was fresh and light, easy on the tongue.The local July 14 celebration was in full swing just outside the restaurant in a small plaza. After dinner we joined the celebration. A band played rock and roll music that was a mixture of American 70’s and 80’s music and some French rock tunes that we weren’t familiar with. One tune was a French adaptation of This Land is Your Land, a sixties Pete Seeger tune. We joined Charlotte, Jean Pierre, Michline, Vincent, Delphine and Guilliam at a table in the town centre.Marietta gamely tried to engage Jean Pierre in conversation. He gamely tried to respond, until finally he insisted that Michline change seats with him and she tried to communicate with Marietta above the noise of the band.For a curmudgeon this presented a strong temptation to flee. Christian found a reason, when Charlotte needed him to write a prescription. Me, I was stuck. All ages were represented at the party. And old man on a respirator was there with his wife and a beer on his table. Young children bounced up and down in front of the band. Adolescents waved their arms and sang with the music and mature couples danced with well-practiced dance steps.One eighteen-year-old boy, in particular, caught my attention. He was the opposite of curmudgeon. He seemed to celebrate every beat of the music with his body. Sometimes he had a pretty girl, as a partner and sometimes not. His movements were fluid and graceful. His face beamed with delight.Part of me wanted to be him and part of me wanted to go home ASAP. Probably I thought, letting the music possess me, as the body had, was the antidote to curmudgeondom. But I imagined how silly it would look for me or me and Marietta to be lost in the music on the dance floor.I thought I would give it a try. I was afraid to go it alone, so I asked Marietta. Of course, she was game. So we two old fahrts began to shuffle about on the dance floor. We were doing all right, until Marietta decided she wanted to lead.Ladies, if you want to discourage a man from emerging from his curmudgeon defenses, insist on leading and dancing your dance instead of dancing one with which he is comfortable. Your man will close down like a morning-glory, when the sun sets. Or anyway, I will. And did. When Marietta broke rank from me, I felt lost and abandoned. I could only see the old and the fahrt in us dancing and all confidence in my poise and grace left me.Anyway, I think I did learn another lesson in fighting my curmudgeon impulses. Let the music take you or let the spirit of the setting and the people influence you. This is what performers invite you to do when they use the words “give it up for…” in cajoling applause from a crowd. Give up your defenses and let the spirit move you. I imagine the giant tectonic rocks pushing out the top of the Mount Saint-Julian, just above the town, creating the hogs back we can see from our apartment. There it is right in front of me as a write this. Let the powerful imagery of rock pushing through the earth enter my heart and speak to me. God, let my rigid tectonic plate move.What is this coming out from under my curmudgeon shell? It has no form yet. I don’t know whether it will be an improvement, a better set of postures or another set of calcified defenses. I want to dance and I want to hide.My mind tells me that times like these are the best of times, but my stomach tells me I’m about to faint. The music has moved me. Is this what it is like to allow the spirit to be free, to give it up and be influenced by my surroundings? Am I betraying the essence of who I am? Is this honest? Is this safe? Is this supposed to be fun? I didn’t have an answer.The next day we got up, early for us, 8:30, and went to the Marche in Vaison de la Roman. There, I became grounded in my dislikes. The crowds, the slow walking and looking that hurt my back.  The toting was bad, but not as bad as the standing, walking slow and standing some more. I didn’t like enduring Marietta’s driving and her not knowing that she had to put the clutch in to start the car when the car was in gear. In her defense she got up the difficult driveway to our house very gracefully, better than I have. It is hard for me to be a passenger with her at the wheel.The Marche moved me, but in the wrong way.  I was tired and quiet on the way back. I wondered what I had missed about the Marche. For many people this teeming mass of entrepreneurial energy was fascinating. There were chickens with their feet attached, pigeons, crabs, fresh fish, vegetables, pesto and other sauces, spices in small sacks tied with string, cloth goods, racks of clothes, cheeses, meats, especially sausages, melons and fruits, free tastes of everything.How could I not like this? Perhaps it is that I don’t have an agenda for going to the Marche like Isabelle and Marietta. These things are the raw materials for their production. Since I had just as soon go out to eat than bother to cook, I don’t appreciate what the Marche offers. I feel like a servant, beast of burden, a billfold, but enthusiasm and energy of this (according to Isabelle) extraordinary Marche does not enter my soul. I know the problem is with me, but I don’t know why it is a petit mourir to go to the la Marche.The night before, I had a dream. It was set in my hometown Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Carla Ray, my childhood, next-door neighbor, a year my junior, was setting up a restaurant in a gym there. Two workers were building a floor in a raised part of the building. She was very pleased with their craftsmanship. I worried about how she might cool the gym. She pointed to the windows that rimmed the top of the gym and told me that the tall ceiling and the breeze from the windows will cool the building.After returning from la Marche, we had supper at home and traveled to Vaison la Roman for a concert of Tango music and dance set in the ancient ruins of an outdoor Roman theatre. The theatre was exactly as you might imagine, rows of stones set in a semicircle, moving upward along the side of a hill. There were still a few original columns set at the top of the theatre.Prior to the show fifteen or so people, dressed mostly in black, came on the stage and spread themselves out so they took up the whole stage. One of them held the microphone, while another one held a written statement from which the man with the microphone read. The audience occasionally erupted in boos and opposing applause throughout the speech. Isabelle explained that this was a statement asserting their demands to the government that stage workers be considered artists and receive similar compensation from the government.Earlier we had watched the French President, Jacque Chirac, give his state of the Nation Address on July fourteenth. Afterwards, he was interviewed for two hours on French television. We watched for a time with Christian. During part of this interview he addressed the question concerning the stage technician’s strike that caused the cancellation of many of the festivals in the South of France this year. He said that the country should and does support the intermittent artist. They earn their yearly income in only two months a year, usually July and August. Chirac, according to Christian, said that the artist is the vision and imagination that defines a country’s identity. Therefore, the country must support them. The questions to be decided are whether or not the stage support staff can get work other times of the year and who should be given the status of artist.It was hard for me to imagine an American president acknowledging our country’s debt and dependence on our country’s art community or an American debate over whether to pay stage hands the same wage as actors.The concert was excellent. The dancers were elegant some athletic and acrobatic. Others were older and danced a slower more seductive, sophisticated dance. One couple consisted of an old man at least seventy and a gorgeous young woman. When they came on stage, the audience gasped in disgust, but as they danced a slow graceful and provocative tango, the audience warmed to their talent and poise. When they finished, the audience broke out in extraordinarily loud and long applause.The thought that we were sitting where people have sat for hundreds over a thousand years, in these very seats was overwhelming to me. The problem was my back. During a particularly compelling part of the concert, I forgot that my back hurt. Then the dance would be over and my pain would return and I began counting the numbers left to perform on the program to try to figure out how much time I had to suffer. Then the dancers would come out again and I would forget my discomfort. Oh my kingdom for a seat with a back.We returned home after midnight. The weather reports were that this was the night that a front would pass through. When we went to bed at 1:00 there was a small breeze typical of the preceding nights. Then about 4:00 AM the winds came and the windows and doors began banging in the house. The winds were so hard that they slowed down the electric fan. I awoke and closed some of the banging windows and doors and secured the ones I left open.I went back to sleep and dreamed Marietta and I were making love on the front porch of somebody else’s house. To get back to our car (the blue rental Renault we were driving in France) we had to walk through the house. We disturbed a dog and the man of the house. He glared us with anger. I feebly tried to offer an explanation. We escaped the house and got to the car. The scene in my dream changed. I was treating a couple. They were divorced and I was advising the man about how to get along with his difficult ex-wife for the sake of his children. The wife was a lesbian. I shifted tactics and began to wonder if he wanted to consider remarrying his ex-wife. Clearly, to him, that was a bad idea, but so was divorce a bad idea.Isabelle interpreted my two dreams. In the first one set, in Arkadelphia about my next door neighbor Carla Ray, she suggested that I was pleased with my new construction of my character. It was large well ventilated and the raised platform seemed to be well constructed. In the next dream I obviously felt exposed and embarrassed. I was wondering whether or not I could retreat back to my former self. Clearly that was not a good idea.The next day was dedicated to my return to curmudgeon. At the Marche in Vaison le Roman we tried to cash some of our travelers checks at a bank. “Non, no cash, pas cash depuis Euros.”“Where do we go?” I asked.Marietta translated, “Ow est la pour changer le cheque?”The bank tells responded, “Le Poste.” We were so pleased that we seemed to be negotiating our way so well.One of the antidotes that I proposed to curmudgeon was “je ne sais pas” or I don’t know. Not knowing, being curious and accepting help I thought would create a sense of wonder and magic. This would expel my demand for mastery (real or imagined) my denial of my incompetence and my arrogance. It would give me a humility that would make me more accessible.So we went to the Paste. It was closed, but that was d’acort (okay). We could go to the Poste tomorrow in Buis. So first thing I went down to the village center, found the Poste, waited in line, presented my checks. They understood me and I understood them. This was not the place. La banque. So I went to the bank. Again in a combination of French and English I understood them and they me. “Did I have an account there?” “No.” “Sorry we don’t cash these checks.” My “je ne sais pas” distressed damsel routine was wearing thin, but I thought I would go the Office of Tourisme. Surely they would tell me what to do. They did. Go to the place with the red sign. I found it. No, they did not cash traveler’s checks. Go to a bigger city, maybe there.I was totally flummoxed. The “je ne sais pas” strategy was totally overrated as a substitute for money and competence. Isabelle would come to the rescue later, I hoped, but for the moment it was difficult to be so ineffectively dependent. I felt like a fifty-year-old woman trying to hitch a ride in shorts and a halter-top. My version of damsel didn’t seem to be inspiring rescue. Perhaps I should have fainted.A warning to European travelers, since Euros have been the currency all over Europe, except in the U.K., don’t get travelers checks. Take your credit card and don’t forget your pin number, as I did. I found an automatic teller and somehow my credit card produced Euros for me.The next day I let go of my “je ne sais pas” strategy and took up another. I decided to take the challenge to shred my curmudgeon skin that says “once you have seen one pretty place you have seen two.” Meaning there is nothing different in one’s individual experience of pretty places. And I hope to find unique beauty and joy in a new setting.This day we were off on a circular trip to Nyon, going around Mont Venteux. A few miles outside Buis, we realized that I was supposed to bring my travelers checks. This realization almost ruined my appetite for the trip, but soon we came upon a valley of blue lavender, the likes of which we had not yet seen. The blue was not just an aura emerging from the ground, as we had seen before. It was bright blue in clear rows, like a series of velvet ribbons placed one beside the other with their soft threads waving in the breeze. Unlike the other dryer, fainter lavender fields, these fields had a clear unmistakable scent that filled the air around for miles. It is a scent like no other that has no other name but lavender. It is soft, sweet, blue and words I do not know.If one grew up here, this blue would have to become part of your blood. It poured into my soul, like the new green of spring sometimes does in my heart, hungry for life to emerge from the dead of winter. The blue was alive and dominant, framed by the brown tan earth that marked the rows. This earth was so rocky and dry, that nothing else would grow in these fields. This French farmer en Provence had used the sun and what little water he had, to its best advantage.If this were one’s childhood home, there would have to be something special about your essence if you knew this blue from birth. I feel that way about my hometown, Arkadelphia, Arkansas, the last role of a hill from the Ozark Mountains. These hills rolled from Northwest Arkansas as far south as they can reach and that’s Arkadelphia. It’s where the Caddo River meets the Ouchita River. Its streets were lined with 100 year old pin oaks, whose tops touched high above the streets, forming a sanctuary for its children, riding the streets all through the town on bicycles. I know what these giant trees did for me. I know what effect the ravines around the rivers had on my courage. I know what the expanse of timber and farmland, meeting the rolling hills at the edge of town, did for my imagination. We, who had the privilege of growing up there, have a special identity. There is something we know and understand about that place and each other that has no words.This must be true of the people that come from these lavender fields and this is the challenge. How is this beautiful place different from other beautiful places? What does it do, that is unique and special, to the souls of its people?This blue must teach the people, who grow up with it, some sense about color, tone and ambience. It must give them a special appreciation for how things smell. It must affect their tastes, how and what they eat and drink. It must give them a special appreciation for the incidental elements of daily living.There, I did it. I answered the challenge. I saw a pretty place. I looked for and found, what I thought must be unique about it and how it made its people special, different than me, with something special to give and teach me.I thought about the topography of Buis-les-Baronnies. Buis is the word for a small tree that looks something like the boxwood. Many of such trees dotted the hills around the town. Also large Plantan trees and Tuille trees shade the town streets. Fruit trees were everywhere around Buis, fig, apricot, cherry, and peach, walnut trees, as well. The town was cut out of the mountains by a small river that, in places, was small enough to jump across. The nearest mountain, Mount Saint-Julian, had an outcropping of giant rocks at the top that formed a hogback. These rocks seemed to reflect an enthusiasm and irrepressible strength that was not always appropriate, but must somehow be expressed. Large balltops of olive trees climbed the terraces of steep fields edging the village. All the land was used either by a road, a house, a tree, or a plant. Though this space received little more rainfall than a desert, nothing was wasted. (But that was true everywhere in Provence.) The river here, the hills emerging quickly from the river, the trees, the close surrounding mountains, the hogback of rocks pushing out of the Baronnies mountains right next to the town, these are what defined this town as unique. Energy, refuge, enough water but not too much must create a special human inhabitant with a joie de vivre that is rare. I saw it in Jean Pierre and in the boy at the dance. I saw it in the rudeness of the bank teller and the warmth that spilled out of Michline.As we left the valley of the lavender fields, we moved across a pass into a more expansive valley. It was greener. The mountains that surrounded it were much further from the center of the circle they formed. These hills rolled like the hills of southwest Arkansas, but they had mountains, which created vistas that I had never imagined as a boy. Not far from any point of this valley was an angle, an upgrade, that gave an onlooker a perspective that transcended the trees. The lines weren’t as steep as they were in Buis-les-Barronies. They were soft and round. The colors were greener, less harsh and desert like. Mont Venteux still formed a part of the distant skyline, but one who lived here must have had more room and perhaps more flexibility, perhaps more wealth and more opportunity. The churches seemed bigger to me, the castles grander.This challenge to see the unique beauty and strength of each place and imagine how that might affect the human spirit was interesting to me now. It kept my interest. I couldn’t seem to get Marietta and Isabelle into the puzzle I was trying to piece together; about the land, its texture, and its people. Perhaps it was too much work for them. Perhaps they would rather have their minds disengaged and simply absorb the land’s beauty, rather than justify or explain it, as I seemed to need to do.But whatever their needs, my curmudgeon spirit seemed to need a task. It is as if I must have something to examine and describe. If I do not have a positive task on which to focus, I will unleash my critical self in the form of sarcastic editorials, complaints and negative expressions about whatever. Taking on the challenge of differentiating among pretty places and their effects on its people seemed to be a great improvement over my negativity. But I’m not the one to ask. Later perhaps Marietta will offer an opinion. She after all is the expert on how my spirit affects others.Isabelle seemed to understand that there is something about the essence of a place when she told us how she and Christian decided to return to France after he completed his fellowship in Cardiology at Vanderbilt.“After the fellowship, Christian had several offers for work,” she said. “One in Nashville, one in Canada, one in Washington, D.C. and one in Paris. We chose to return to Paris where Christian would be paid much less, where it would take more than one year to find a job, where we would be required by finances to live in a dusty centuries old building that gave my son asthma and where we lived on the floor below Christian’s parents.“I wanted to return to Paris, not because of family. I enjoyed being free of those duties and ties and did not wish to live so near my in-laws. It was not because of friends because I had made many new friends in Nashville that I would be sad to leave. I wanted to return to Paris because of the age of things there. I missed the smell of stone streets, the old buildings, the plaster walls that dated back to Roman times. I really missed the weekly Marche and picking among all of the fresh vegetables, fruits and meats. I feel somehow better now, being in this place with this Marche and this way of life going back so many years.”This made sense to me. I had an option to remain in Palo Alto after my internship there, but I came back to Nashville, because everything in California seemed so impermanent. Nobody I knew was born there. Though it was the most beautiful climate I had ever lived in, it seemed to have no soul that I could tap into. I understood the green hills of Nashville, the tall trees, the azaleas in spring, the pink, red, orange, yellow maples in fall. People had roots there, roots I felt I could join. Isabelle’s roots were even deeper. Where I knew nothing in Arkadelphia much over 100 years old, she knew things attached to stories over 1,000 years old. She loved these places, things and their stories. They were part of her.I dreamed last night that Marietta was two-timing me. She preferred the other guy, the one she had been with before me. He called her on the phone and told her to meet him and they would make love in the phone booth. This conversation took place right in front of me. She hung up the phone and left me there. The end.Isabelle and I deduced that Marietta, in my dread, symbolized my feminine side. I currently preferred my old set of masculine defenses to the new ones I was developing.Two PositionsPerhaps the most interesting thing about this trip to me is the contrast of cultures between France and the U.S. as I reflect on the points of view of Isabelle and Christian. There are two positions currently of note to me. One has to do with Charlotte and the other with religion.The last time we were here, we observed how Isabelle and Christian were adjusting to their eighteen-year-old son, Thomas’ semi-public position to be sexually active with his serious girlfriend. The question then was why was it okay for them that their son brought his girlfriend to their house to spend the night with him.The answer was a pragmatic one, “Because, if we didn’t, he wouldn’t come here to sleep. He would go to her apartment, where they could sleep together. We want to see him as much as possible. Fortunately, our apartment is close to his school, so it’s convenient for them to be here.”Now Charlotte at nineteen presented a parallel question to her parents. “Can I move into an apartment with my first serious boyfriend, Vincent and two other roommates?”The answer was yes, but with more trauma and emotion. Charlotte has very good grades through her first two years of college and while the answer was yes, her father thought it was a mistake, but it was her choice to make and she would learn from it right or wrong. Here the decision was the same as before, but there seemed to be a bit more emotion from father to daughter.When Charlotte and her father were together, you could see why. Her eyes lit up in her conversations with her father (of which I could not understand a word). Christian’s curmudgeon exterior melted. A soft smile came to his face. His gestures were lively and animated. They both laughed together easily and a lot. I could understand Christian’s answers to Charlotte in this context.The second cultural observation had to do with religion. I talked about this on our last visit to France. Isabelle was fascinated by churches and abbeys. She seemed sympathetic to all things spiritual, but skeptical of people who tried to represent them. The official church seemed to her to be fake and hypocritical. The French, during the Huguenot period, experienced horrible civil wars. From the twenty-first century perspective religious dogma seem so silly to both her and Christian. Then there is the land, wealth and excess of the Catholic Church that seemed only to benefit its clergy and not the people.This skepticism seemed to be reflected in a local hardware storekeeper in Nyons. We had been searching for a transformer to use to for my camera’s battery charger. The hardware store keeper in Nyons said he had one, but he would have to get it. It would be there at 1400 heuras (2:00 PM).When we returned to pick it up, it was a giant box weighing fifteen pounds. Since buying this old contraption was cheaper than a camera with film we took it. While there, we asked him for directions to the cave out of which came “le ventre de Pantois.” Isabelle related the legend she had just read in the local guidebook. He said there is another legend and that was that a government minister brought the wind, not a catholic cleric.I wondered whether his was a revisionist story told after the French revolution, because of the anti-catholic spirit that has pervaded France since that time. Though I don’t claim to believe either story, we went to see this hole from which the wind blew. We found it where the guidebooks said it would be, 100 meters from a small church named Notre Dame.It was covered with a steel mesh gate because someone had died exploring the cave in the last twenty or so years. It was easy to believe that this hole appeared suddenly because there was a large crevice running along the mountain here that this cave was a part of. Perhaps the limestone of the strata of rock had dissolved and an earthquake or something occurred so that the rock split here. It was believable that a sudden geological event happened here years before. Whether or not it changed the wind, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. When we were there (2:00 P.M.) the wind was not blowing from the cave.Jean PierreJean Pierre is Michline’s boyfriend or significant other. He is a retired restaurateur, formerly from Paris. He is about 65-70 years old. Every time we saw him, he was wearing shorts, sandals and an opened necked shirt with a gold chain or he was wearing a bathing suit. Though we couldn’t understand him, nor he us, he was always smiling and friendly. He had his own house very near Michline’s but he helped her build her house and swimming pool. Michline’s children called him “Jempy.”He laughed easily and often. He came to the July 14^th dance in the town square with Michline and company. He bought us all drinks and he responded to Marietta’s attention kindly, but was clearly frustrated that they could not communicate better.When not talking, he was swaying with the music, singing with the crowds on songs that most of the audience seemed to know by heart. On one song he was so animated that he bounced his plastic chair and turned it in circles. I imagined Jean Pierre to be the prototype Frenchman who knew how to eat, drink, relax and enjoy life. He had a woman, but was not encumbered by marriage. He seemed to be warmly appreciated by her children and he seemed to love hosting them and us.MichlineMichline was a fifty-fiftyish nurse and mother. She was aglow with the children, who had come to share their summer vacation with their mother. She was solicitous of us and her children’s friends. She was dressed in ways that showed her ample cleavage to its best advantage. She moved with a “softique” rubenesque sensuality. She obviously appreciated Jean Pierre’s attention and he obviously was pleased to be with her.Her sensuality and earthiness seemed to be so natural for her. She seemed to take great pleasure in shopping for and feeding her suddenly enormous family which included herself, Jean Pierre, her two daughters, another girlfriend of her daughters, her daughter’s boyfriend, Guilliam and his friend Vincent and Vincent’s girlfriend, Charlotte and other assorted comers and goes.As I imagine her in her bathing suit, sitting at the large outdoor table under the portico, next to her swimming pool, I see her bringing an endless stream of wine and food, encouraging her brood to swim or come out of the pool and eat and drink. She standing beside her man, Jean Pierre, represented the typical, life-affirming French woman.Madame FachenerriOur neighbor, landlord and concierge, Madame Fachenerri invited us on a two and a half hour walk in the evening, after we returned from our trip to Nyon. While Christian declined, the three of us accepted.Marietta and Isabelle put some water in a thermos, cut some bread, cheese, picked some fruit from the table and packed deu sac ‘a dos (two day packs). I carried one, Isabelle the other. Madame Fachenerri had the same idea. She came walking below our balcony at about 8:00 P.M., saddled with her own sac ‘a dos. The sun still shone brightly, even though it was on its way toward sunset.Madame Fachenerri was a short round sixty-plus-year-old woman. The hike she proposed was straight up the hill in back of her (our) house. Our pace was slow but constant. We walked through the fields while Madame Fachenerri chattered constantly in French. Isabelle even had some difficulty understanding her rapid speech. Marietta said she understood about every third word. Me, I understood every tenth word, which was mari, meaning husband.She talked mostly about her husband. He was a lot like Christian she said. He wouldn’t want to go for a walk, either. Isabelle translated some of her chatter. Isabelle said she talked French like an Italian.We saw her husband in the house. He was always hooked to an oxygen machine. It seemed that his work as a contractor and stonemason, a profession he had had since he was ten years old, created so much dust that he now has emphysema.She and her husband, according to Isabelle, were much like Isabelle and Christian. She loved travel and nature walks. He only wanted to work. She loved music, dancing and swimming. He only wants to work. They have three sons. One lives in Bordeaux. He’s married to a doctor. He works part-time and takes care of their four children, while his wife works full-time. The other two sons live with her. One is married with two children. The other is single and recently jilted by his girlfriend of eight years with his best friend. She liked the girl, made her one of the family. The girl had good parents. She doesn’t blame the girl. She blames them both.They were building a house just below for one son and his family. The construction is at a standstill because her husband got sick. Also the house is not what her son and his wife want. They had planned to build a home for each of their children on their land. All plans seem to be put on the back burner since her husband’s illness. She told stories about her grandchildren and her friend in Paris and when she got married and how the olives were picked.At Christmas time the olive harvest is on in earnest. People pick olives by hand and put them in sacks, hanging around their necks or they use a special rake to shake and pull the olives down from the tree.As she talked, and Isabelle, bless her heart, listened and translated, we walked up through olive groves, then onto a gravel road by blackberry briars. We picked and ate a few blackberries. Each berry was small with only a few sacks of juice and pulp, but, oh, they were sweet. Then came apricot groves. Each of us ate several, perhaps ten. They were so sweet. Some were hard and dry, but even those were still sweet. The road was dotted with cherry trees filled with ripe, tart, red cherries, plum trees with fruit we couldn’t reach, dead or dying almond trees, walnut trees with not yet ripe, green, covered nuts.We reached the apex of our walk about 9:30. The sun set about the same time. We walked in twilight. The view of Buis from above and the vista of the surrounding mountains, including the 6,000-foot tall Mont Venteux and the hogback topped Mt. St. Julian were extraordinary from this perspective in this light. We returned home by 10:00 P.M., as the half moon rose over the mountain.The next day was so hot, 36º centigrade. By Marietta’s formulae that made it 104º Fahrenheit. We all stayed close to home. We closed the shutters at about 11:00 AM to capture as much cool as possible and to keep out the light. This worked pretty well. The dry 104º was hot, but not overwhelming, as it would have been in humid Nashville.To reward ourselves for surviving the hottest day on record in 2003, we drove 10 kilometers to Mollans at the restaurant Le St. Marc for dinner. The dinner was good except for the fish soup, which had the same fish base for the bouillabaisse we had in Milan. Marietta’s rabbit was excellent. It was a row of slices of rabbit meat wrapped in abricot with a walnut in the center of each slice. Christian and I had confit ‘a canard. Which was a leg of duck cooked in tuille meil (honey) sauce. The meat fell off the bone. Isabelle had a light white fish lore or bar (which they thought was the American version of bass).The problem we had was not with the food. It was with the flies. It seemed that even though the river is almost dry, the hills above Mollans have springs that provide water to the town. In addition to drinking water, these springs provide irrigation water and people are allowed at special times to open the watergates for their individual purposes. A neighbor of St. Marc’s left open the watergate and it flooded the grounds of the restaurant with over a foot of water this morning. The moisture attracted an unusual amount of flies and they were a bother.Mecca ColaOnce home from supper, about 11:00 P.M. we went straight to bed, because we had accepted the invitation from Madame Facchinerri to go with her on another walk, this time to the top of Mt. Saint Julian at 6:15 A.M., several kilometers away by car. We had to get back in time before church, because she wanted to attend mass, at 11:00.In the morning Isabelle severed as our alarm clock by turning on the loud dishwasher at 5:45. We rolled out of bed. The sun was well into the sky. At 6:15 Madame Facchinerri came out with her sac ‘a dos. (In French this means “sack attached to the bones,”) which as you recall is a backpack. We put some fruit and water in ours and off we went in two cars. We followed her up a mountain road and dropped off our car at the trails end. We piled in her car. The car radio was singing in French at high volume. She asked if we wanted music. Isabelle said no.Perhaps she regretted this decision, because Madame Facchinerri began talking and didn’t stop for remainder of the trip. Isabelle’s first defense was to fall to the rear to take pictures, but that didn’t work for long because Madame Facchinerri stopped to wait for her to catch up.I was absolutely of no use, because I could barely understand what she meant when she said “arretez-vous” meaning “stop” or “a droit” when she meant “to the right.” Marietta was little better.This trip, Isabelle translated several stories. There was the story of her schooling in Italy. She was born in 1940. Her father left and was not home for several years, because he was fighting for the Italian resistance. He was presumed dead. She was sent to the convent, because her mother could not support five children. The nuns educated her. She left there at sixteen and came to France.Another story had to do with her sister, who was getting married for the third time. It was going to work this time, because she has been with this man for fifteen years.Then there was the story of her son meeting his wife the stewardess, in a yoga class in Buis. They have two children now. She was recently pregnant, only because she wanted an excuse to avoid flights to China, where she might catch SARS.The last story was about a niece of a friend of hers, who had been sexually abused by the nieces’ maternal grandfather. The mother blamed her daughter for these events, causing a schism in the family, between the niece and the other children and the mother. Since Isabelle was a psychologist, Madame Facchinerri wondered if she could explain how a mother could blame her own child for this rather than protect her.Isabelle did her best to answer this complex and difficult question.“This happens to me all the time,” Isabelle said. “People just talk to me and tell me their stories, whether they know I am a psychologist or not.” I can testify to this. I too used Isabelle to tell my stories too.Mt. St. Julian trail was uphill for about five kilometers. It was cool at first and the air fresh. But even without the heat, we were sweating a bit. My shirt was damp, where my sac ‘a dos pressed against it. The trail moved around St. Julian from behind the perspective we saw from the house. The vegetation consisted of buis bushes and scrub pine. There were wild lavender, rosemary and thyme along the trail. The rocks sometimes had black lichen in their cracks.I apologize for my clichéd expression “the views were spectacular,” but they were. We were high above Buis. We could barely pick out our house below. The giant rock eruptions that formed Mt. Saint Julian’s hogback were not as sharp and as narrow as one imagined. Often people rock climbed the side of them and hikers could walk directly on top of what looked like a sharp edge from below, but upon closer inspection was a six foot wide flat surface. At one point someone had placed a small metal cross barely visible from our house on top of the center of the hogback. Every year in June when the Catholic Church celebrates Ascension, luminary candles were placed on top of the hogback.We returned home from this hike at 11:00 AM and immediately went back to bed for a nap. We slept until about 14:00. The day was hot. We stayed shuttered up again in our house.When we got up Christian was watching grand prix racing on TV. We began again our constant conversation.“I don’t understand what happened.” Christian said. “After World War II, America was the country that liberated Paris. Oh sure, they let Charles De Gaulle and the French troops go in first, but everybody knew it was the U.S. that saved us. But since that really short time ago, America has lost its image here. You only show the worst of America to us, your movies advertise you as a violent country. Your corporations bring the worst of your commercialism here. McDonald’s is a symbol for that. Our Minister of Agriculture organized the storming of a McDonalds in the countryside. They demolished it. Chirac commuted a part of his sentence. He was popular in France for doing that.“An Algerian businessman capitalized on American’s poor image by bottling a version of a Coke or Pepsi calling it Mecca Cola. This was marketed as an alternative cola to the American version and it is doing well.“I have a scientist colleague who hates America because of its violence and commercialism, its’ mean spirited racism and inadequate social net, its arrogant go-it-alone, historically-ignorant foreign policy. I tell him that is correct, but it is only half the story. I don’t understand why America does not export the good side too, the can-do spirit, the openness to change and new ideas, the freedom to express various points of view, your anti-bureaucratic self-reliant spirit. One has to go to America to see this side.”“In France,” Christian said, “we think about each purchase. We don’t just buy. We think, do we really need it, or not. We cannot afford impulse buying and we don’t want to. We have enough money for what we need. Many of us, who are well-educated, could be richer if we didn’t take care of those, who are not working. But we want to do this. We don’t want to live rich, while others are poor. Perhaps this is our guilt problem. Yours is about sex. Of course, powerful leaders of countries have mistresses. So what. We don’t get hung up on that. We get hung up on making money. If someone makes a lot of money, we assume he did something wrong. Where, in your country, you don’t do that. But if someone is with a woman other than his wife, you assume he is a bad lawyer or doctor or president, when that has nothing to do with his competence in his professional role.I was not able to offer much of a defense or apology. We were the consumers he talked about. Were re-modeling our house, spending the banks money for things we could absolutely do without.Marietta is a CurmudgeonFor the last two walks I noticed something about Marietta that I had never seen before. She was complaining. It is not that Marietta never complains. “You never throw away the yogurt cup, after you rinse it out,” or “when you wipe the counters, they are never clean,” or “when you take off your socks at night, you always leave in a pile on the floor.” These are typical complaints, but on a trip it is usually me that complains.“Oh do we have to go?” or “my back hurts,” or I become sarcastic, “one more pretty place. When will we run out of them?”On our first walk with Madame Facchinerri it was, “It will be dark before we get back. Are we sure we will know how to get back?” or “When does this trail ever start going downhill,” or “that apricot was too hard.”I knew I had made progress, when it was my voice I heard respond with the positive retort, “Oh, but even hard, they are so sweet straight off the tree.” When Marietta said ‘I wonder if Madame Facchinerri will ever stop talking,’ I heard out of my mouth, “I think she has interesting stories, though, don’t you?”We had changed roles. In couples I see, when progress is being made, one of the two in the couple is psychologically far ahead of the other. If and when the one behind catches up, the problems that the other one creates for the partnership emerge or sometime they change roles. Changing roles like this is a sign of growth and progress in a couple. I said nothing about this, but I was secretly proud that I was catching up.It was on the next walk that I became concerned. Again Marietta was tired. It was 5:45 when she got up after all. “Why can’t we just sleep,” were my usual words, but they came out of Marietta’s mouth. Then came the clincher. “Let’s stop and take that picture,” I suggested and her reply was, “Oh it’s just another pretty place let’s go on and get this over with.” This is when I knew something was wrong.The next day this dark mood continued. It was most obvious at the Flaminco concert that night at the roman theatre at Vasion la Roman. I had purchased a special theatre chair with a back so I was happy. We were late meeting Charlotte and her friends. I drove as fast as I could to get there, but I couldn’t make up any time. We parked. Isabelle and I jumped out of the car and began a fast walk toward the theatre that was about 400 meters ahead. We were half way there before I realized that Marietta was walking about 50 meters behind. And she was not trying to catch up. I knew she felt like we ran off and left her. We stopped and waited and went through the theatre gates with her. When I asked her about it she pointed to her swollen ankles. Her ankles sometimes swell for no apparent reason and she will take a diuretic and they stop swelling. But they are uncomfortable for a while.Once seated and inside it was, “I think I like music concerts better.” “The dancers were all right but I don’t like how that lead woman dancer seems to lord it over everybody else.”The worst came when Isabelle invited Charlotte and her friends over for lunch for Wednesday their last day here, “Oh, but it will be too hot then and we will be all closed up in the dark.” While that was true, Marietta knew it was the only time Charlotte gave her mother for such an occasion. Marietta seemed to be looking for a fight with Isabelle.This confirmed by fears. Marietta had become a curmudgeon, fully fledged and initiated. This gave me a view from both sides of the equation. I can see the elements. One is pain, for me it is often a hurt back, for Marietta it was feet. Another is fatigue. I used to carry a fifty-hour case load, which meant I worked a sixty to eighty hour week and I was tired all the time. On vacations, rest was my main agenda. Now I work a normal week and I feel mostly rested. Marietta on the other hand gets up every day at 6:00 AM and gets home from work about 7:30 PM after a long day of refereeing disputes. The last few days we have gone on long walks and Marietta has not had time to get in very good shape. She was tired. And I forget about the heat. We were not used to sleeping in such heat. At night it was often 85° when we went to bed at 11:00. And once asleep, much later, we clung to our precious sleep as long as we could.The next element is competition. This is something that Marietta doesn’t feel as often as I do. Somehow I programmed to take up any challenge. I feel competitive juices flowing in me constantly. I am not proud of this. These juices create contests that could and should be easily avoided. When we are walking and looking on vacation and Marietta sees an expensive pretty necklace, I feel challenged to buy it for her. When I immediately realize I can’t, I feel inadequate. For me, and I think for many other men, these competitive feelings and their companion feelings of inadequacy are a constant companion. They are, I think, a center stone for a curmudgeondom. As Marietta became to feel competitive with Isabelle, she had three important elements for becoming a curmudgeon. She was feeling pain, she was tired and she was feeling inadequate.I recognized these elements because they have been so much a part of my life. Marietta will soon get enough sleep. She will take her diuretic and her feet will be back to normal. She is one to accept a challenge, but she does not take the bait as easily as I. She will soon feel as good as and equal to, instead of the less than she was feeling that me and other men feel a lot of the time.For me, it was liberating to see these things come together to turn Marietta from an easy to be with, positive enthusiastic person into a difficult woman. In her experience, I see the things that have made me a difficult man.I see things that made my father a difficult man. As a boy, I was curious. I wanted to travel and see the world. I wondered about the World’s Seven Wonders. I wanted to be Tarzan in Africa.I would imagine my father was the same way. Oh, I knew he had a reputation for having a temper, even as a boy. He had a much greater problem with anger than I have had. But his difficult personality had all the elements above. He was allergic to everything. Often, he could not breathe through his nose. In the summer in the humidity of south Arkansas, he must have suffered terribly. His constant companion was a bottle of nose spray. He ordered them by the dozen.He was challenged to compete. His father, my grandfather, had a psychotic break, when he was a young man and my father became the sole support for his mother and three sisters. Somehow, he helped put his sisters through college and later had to support his mother and father and his wife and four children. He worked hard. He was never financially comfortable. And, of course, he was tired.All the elements were there in him. By the time he was my age he was at the tail end of his intense financial demands, but his character was formed. He hadn’t the means or the will to change. Though he did mellow, as he got older, he remained a curmudgeon until the end.Incroyable C’est DunqueToday we were going on a trip to the Plateau Colorado. It is not in the U.S. It is in the South of France near Rousiallan en Provence between the Plateua de Vancluse and the Montagne Du Luberon. According to Isabelle it is a magic place. “The place, where if you die there, it’s all right.”To encourage Christian to come and to reassure us she promised, “You won’t have to go up. It is flat because it is a plateau. And it is cool, high above sea level. You may even be cold and need a jacket.”Christian resisted. He said, “I know what going on a walk in the country is. There is a view. You look at it for about ten minutes and it is beautiful, but most of the time, you are hot looking down at your feet, so that you won’t sprain you ankle. It’s one hour looking down at your feet and the rock, until you get to the view, ten minutes of a pretty view and then one hour back looking down at your feet and the rock.”In this case the trip was to be an hour and a half in the car to the trailhead, another three hours and then an hour and a half back. We met Emanuel and Caroline, their two children Julie and Margurite and their Canadian friends Dean and Leslie and their two children Ryan and Megan. The children ranged in age from ten to sixteen.The trip was more or less or advertised except there was some uphill grade in the beginning. This was sheepherder territory. This land is used by shepherds even today. Every spring, shepherds walk their sheep down from this mountain toward the coast. There are special routes designated for this trek. In the fall, they herd their sheep back to the mountains. This migration is exactly the opposite of the migration of Elk in Yellowstone Park, for example. It makes sense because in the summer the mountains are dry and in the winter they receive most of their rainfall and the weather is so temperate that it rarely falls to far below freezing.The shepherds have old stone cribs that look like igloos and attached stone shelters for themselves. They are built with old Roman arch construction designs.The land was dry. The flowers that had been there for Isabelle two years ago were not there, but the views were, three hundred and sixty degree panoramas. On a very clear, low-humidity day, one can see the Alps from here, but not today. And we were grateful for the clouds.As we walked, Isabelle asked me to explain this word curmudgeon I kept using. As I explained this concept and suggested that men often suffered this condition more than women, Dean overheard our conversation. He said, “I’m the opposite of that I love to enjoy life.”Yet, when we stopped at the apex of our walk for a picnic, he began to complain, “This walk is too long. How far have we come,” shortly another complaint came. “I would rather be drinking a beer than this.” Or “Where is the air conditioner?” A curmudgeon among us, in denial perhaps?Dean, in spite of his curmudgeon spirit, was an excellent father. We saw his son walking in front of the “peloton” (the walking group) and he took that opportunity to walk with him, his arm around his son and his son’s arm around him. They laughed and talked together, as they walked for some time. His daughter Megan was equally attended to by her father. She wanted her turn to carry the sac ‘a dos and he saw to it that she had it. He teased her and kept her connected to the group. He encouraged his children’s physical play with one another. Clearly, Megan and Ryan were unusually close for a brother and sister at that age.Ryan was a typical energetic teenager. When we came upon one of the shepherd buildings, he climbed on top and began to throw stones. He was immediately chastised. He clearly meant no harm and barely understood the reprimand.This instinctive clash of generations, a group of late forty and fifty year olds wanting to respect and preserve history, as they faced their own aging and prospects of leaving the planet and the young adolescent saw history as confining and to be torn down to make way for the creations of a new generation.Emanuel, who was also a superb father, joined his daughters in a well rehearsed and choreographed line dance. He clearly had taken the time to learn this dance from his daughters. Megan, their cousin, joined in the line. Later he led his daughters in the Sound of Music’s “Do a Deer a female deer, Ra a drop of… etc.” We all sang along.Emanuel reminded me of my cousin Jerry Vestal. His face held a smile longer than any expression. He seemed always willing to join and be influenced to be a part of whatever. When Isabelle lost her watch, he organized the search and spent an hour or more looking, until they found it. His wife Caroline was a lot like he and Isabelle. They were both teachers in France. He taught what we call Junior High or Middle School children. She was a teacher of French as a second language. Their daughter Julie was about the same age as Charlotte was the last time we came. She had Charlotte’s same confidence and irrepressible spirit. Her exuberance crossed our language barrier and she had her turn playing with everybody there, even Marietta and me. And we appreciated it.Emanuel was proof that a man can be something other than a curmudgeon. I wish I had more time with him so that he could show me how he did it. His response to Isabelle’s distress at losing her watch taught me one thing. And that was that patience, at a difficult moment, announces to people that you are not a curmudgeon, that in fact you are willing to be influenced by, accept and understand someone’s feelings, other than you own. Later, I used this technique by picking up trash on the trail. I hoped that I could somehow get points for that, if not here on earth, perhaps in heaven or perhaps in my own head, as I attempted to redefine my character.CHRISTIAN'S DAYWe were exhausted on day thirteen of our trip. This was Tuesday after we went to the Plateau Colorado with Isabelle’s cousin and his family and friends and after we returned from the Flamingo concert at 1:30 AM. I got up at 9:00 A.M., earlier than I intended. Isabelle was already awake. She had been up since 7:00 AM. I ate my wonderful Dannon Peche (peach) yogurt, the likes of this tart creamy version of yogurt I have never eaten.Christian was up by 10:00 AM. This was early for him. I presumed this was, in part, because he was beginning to catch up on his attempts to stay the course, keep his integrity in difficult circumstances.Christian receives the ideas offered to him gracefully and considers how or whether or not he will participate. Marietta has more to offer than either I or Isabelle, because in her work, as judge, she offers ideas and solutions.Isabelle prepares lunch from the food we bought in Balon on the way home from the Colorado Plateau. I have never had a lunch like this one. “I try to cook in the Provence way,” she said. Slices of eggplant were cooked in butter and olive oil with salt and thyme for seasoning. Slivers of red pepper were cooked the same way. Zucchini squash was cut into long thin sticks and also cooked in butter and olive oil, with fresh lemons squeezed on top of the squash, soaking it in juice. With this we had a terrine au campagne that we bought in a world famous boucherie (butcher shop). This shop sends its products all over the world. The terrine we bought was a wonderful combination of “je ne sais pas.” Even Christian and Isabelle said “je ne sais pas” to this terrine. But it was wonderful with a multi-grained French bread and slices of the traditional baguettes.The butcher shop had its own postcard with a picture of the butcher standing behind the counter with sausages dangling around him hanging from the ceiling. The words on the postcard were Products de Banon (Alpes de Haute-Provence) specialitiés de Saucisses (Franiches, Seches, Parfuéas) Fromage de Banon Products Régionaux.As an aside, food here is very expensive. A chicken cost us twelve Euros. Clearly the French farmer is protected from American competition. The thinking is that, if the French farmers are dislocated from their farms by foreign competition, the government will have to support them. So the higher price on food is a way of taxing the French people. They will have to pay the price, either in the price of food or in higher taxes. The land remains productive. France remains independent of other countries supplying their food. I don’t see how this will change, even though it is a severe disadvantage to the French consumer and the general quality of life in France.Back to lunch, we had a variety of soft cheeses, mostly goat cheese for lunch. For desert we had sliced fresh fruit; melons, apricots, peaches, and nectarines with ice cream. We sat at the table expanding our life expectancy, according to Christian’s father, til 4:00 PM talking.At four Christian went with us to the cybercafé to help us check our E-mails. Christian and I shared a beer and Christian generously offered me a fine Cuban cigar. This was an El Ray Del Mundo Robesto, Choix Seupreme.  It is the first category of cigar from Cuba.  It has a four band rating out of five.Christian had the special cigar lighter that spit out a flame, like a torch.  It was dangerous, but effective.  One used it to light the cigar by holding the cigar in one’s hand.  Lighting it this way did not require puffing on it to get it started.  It was rather more like welding, than lighting the cigar in the traditional way.  I took my first puff and Christian and Marietta exploded, “Don’t inhale!”  I didn’t.  It was just a big toke.  It took awhile, but I got what Christian meant by savoring the cigar.  It is much like sipping scotch whiskey straight, just a small amount is enough.  It took a good thirty minutes to completely smoke the cigar.  As I put it out, I felt a slight buzz.  It was a good feeling.  Christian said he felt a feeling of well-being smoking a cigar.  I just felt slightly drunk.Christian and I went upstairs to see how Marietta was getting on with the computer.  She was doing fairly well, considering that the French keyboard was different than the American version.  Christian took over typing for her and expedited the remaining part of the process.  The life of a pharmacological researcher makes Christian exceedingly competent with E-mail and the French computer. It seemed to all of us a miracle that we could check our E-mails in Buis-les-Baronnies en Provence. One sad note was that my elderly Aunt Jane was in the hospital from a stroke.  It made me wonder when people would be saying about me, “perhaps it is near his time.”   She is about ninety.We went home to Isabelle, who had just awakened from a nap.  Today Isabelle confirmed my theory. She was exhausted and for the first time a bit out of sorts.  She had been short and impatient with Christian, but after her nap, she seemed to regain her form.OUR VERY, VERY BAD DAYWhen I awoke, Marietta and Isabelle had gone to the March.  Charlotte and her friends were coming to lunch. This included Charlotte, Vincent, Delphine and Guilliam. This would take a lot of shopping.Just as I finished my breakfast and sat down to write, Christian came into the kitchen for his coffee and breakfast.  This was around 10:00 a.m., early for Christian on vacation.  As he began to fix his coffee, we heard a car drive up in front of our house and honk the horn.  “They’re back,” we said together.  And I was thinking, “They want their pack mules to carry in the groceries.”Not so.  I heard a male voice say something French through the door.  I opened it and Jean Pierre bounded in, carrying Isabelle’s straw shopping bags.  (These bags are useful because they are oval shaped, smaller at the bottom and larger at the top, with strong handles.)  He went immediately to Christian and talked hurriedly with him in French.  I took the bags from him and began taking the groceries out of the bags.  From his hand gestures, I could tell something wasn’t right, but I assumed it was with him.  He was gone, as quickly as he came.Something was wrong, but not with him.  Marietta had lost her keys.  Here is was at last, my graduating moment.  How I handled this could crown me in glory, like Emmanuel’s concern and helpful assistance to Isabelle’s lost watch crisis anointed him as a prince of a guy, which he naturally is and I am not.Of course, my instinct is to feel threatened and storm down to find Marietta and become the complaining long-suffering husband, who is a suffering hero for living with Marietta often losing something.  That is my natural curmudgeon spirit coming out.As this impulse flowed into my body, I observed it.  There were some good elements to this impulse.  This was a real threat and responding to it as such is not inappropriate.  I could feel energizing…My instinct to sigh heavily and roll my head along with my eyes.  I knew that was wrong.  The frustration I felt at wanting to help and be effective, knowing that I had little to offer also seemed appropriate.  To manage this, I created a theory that the keys weren’t really lost.  They were locked in the car.  So we would have to call Hertz to bring another set.As soon as we put away the groceries, we got on our white horse, Christian’s Renault Lamina, and rushed to the Marche, where we found masses of people clogging the streets and no Marietta or Isabelle, nor the car.  Christian let me out into the crowd, while he looked for a place to park.That was a mistake.  I wandered the Marche aimlessly and the best parking place Christian could find was at our house in our garage.While I was going through a parking lot, looking for somebody’s car I recognized, I came upon the Renault Lamina parked, blocking other cars.  Oh, at last, Christian decided to park there and wait for someone to find him.  I walked over to the passenger side, stuck my head in the door.  The driver turned to look at me and he wasn’t Christian.  I said, “Excuse me,” which I’m sure he did not understand and I walked away feeling more lost, and more incompetent and more out of place.I turned back toward the Marche, hearing the beat of large drums.  I wandered toward them for no particular reason, still intently searching for someone or some car I recognized.  Before I knew it, I was walking in a procession with the drummers, who were snaking their way through the Marche in order to draw a crowd.  One of the drummers banged and snaked directly toward me.  Bum-BA-Bum Ba Bum – right in my face.  Never have I found music more irritating!I continued my wandering, until I saw Marietta’s straw hat.  All was well.  “The keys had been found and now I’ve found you,” Marietta said. “I left the key in a booth in the Marche. We drove home, found Christian and he told me that you were in the Marche looking for us.”This was anti-climatic for me.  My theory about locking the keys in the car was incorrect.  I had no audience that I could demonstrate my patience to.  This did not seem to be my moment to demonstrate my new found spirit.Marietta was smiling disarmingly as if all was well.  I decided my best tact was to let it be so.  When I returned to the house, I tested my key-locked-in-the-car-theory.  With the Renault, the only locking device is the button on the key that radio’s a signal to the car to lock and unlock.  I tried to see if one might lock the key in the car somehow inadvertently and it was not possible.  Good for Renault.  They know who they are dealing with.The lunch was delightful.  We sat at the table talking, eating and drinking, four middle-aged parent types and four early twenty year olds from 1:00 P.M. until 4:30 P.M.  Though I missed most of the dinner conversation, I could tell through body language that Christian was holding court and Vincent, Charlotte’s boyfriend, was being appropriately solicitous.One of the things that kept us together at the table was the food.  Most of it was in salad form.  One was Salad Nicoise, a potato, olives, green beans, tomatoes & tuna salad.  The other was a rice and tuna salad, and another was a fruit salad of melons, apricots, nectarines and berries, soaked in peche (peach) liquor.  Then there was the fromage (cheese) and the pain (bread) and a variety of cookies that we nibbled on, after we finished the main meal.  Oh, I forgot, and two types of wine, rouge and rose. That probably helped to keep us together at a table for so long, as much as anything else.After the meal, we began the picture taking ritual.  Marietta and I both thought something was amiss with the setting of the digital camera.  I began to mess with it and I erased two week’s worth of pictures with one push of the menu button.Marietta was still smarting from losing the keys, so having me to play the goat was too good to pass up.  “How could you” and so on lasted a painful five minutes.  “The camera should make it more difficult to do,” I said in my defense. “I have it set right now.”Isabelle came to the rescue.  “I will send you copies of my video.”The final part of this very, very bad day happened as Marietta and Isabelle were getting their purses out of the trunk of the car when we got home after going to Buis for a glace’. Marietta closed the trunk on Isabelle’s head.OUR “AH HA” ON PLATEAU de VERCORSThe next day was our trip to the Vercors Plateau.  It was a two hour drive from Buis. We got up at 7:00 a.m. with the plan to leave at 7:30.  We left at 8:00 a.m. and arrived there at 10:00 a.m.  The drive was scenic and difficult, with three mountain passes and their accompanying switchbacks every 100 yards.When we arrived at Colder Rousset, we were startled by how cold it was.  A front came through in the night.  It had been hot there just as in the rest of France, but now it was fifteen degrees centigrade at the bottom of the mountain, 1300 meteres above sea level.  It was less than 10 deg. Centigrade at the top of the mountain at 2,000 meters.We met Isabelle’s brother, Olive and his wife, Veronique.   They had been waiting and were eager to get on with our walk.  This was to be a long four hour walk to a Roman quarry and four hours back, with lunch on the Plateau from out of our collective sac ‘a dos.We took the ski lift up the mountain.  This took much of the ordeal out of the assent.  Once on the Plateau, the vistas were amazing.  The quarry was on an ancient Roman road from Die to Grenoble.  The path from the lift to our destination was lightly uphill.  It was easy to get lost on this plateau, so we were well-armed with a detailed map and a compass.I wish I could describe the sights from this Plateau. The town of Die was below the expanse of vertical rock. Unlike other mountains in France, there were some flowers in the Vercors and some green grasses.  Sheep were grazing here.  We came on two separate herds accompanied by dogs and Shepherds.  About one hour into our walk, we came upon a rock garden.  Someone or ones had spent time in this space making rock statues and rock sculptures from the plentiful stones that covered much of the ground here.The site of these rocks created a spirit that was a combination of whimsy and serious thought.  Someone had enjoyed their creative spirit here and had created something that resembled a cemetery.We stopped for lunch before we got to the quarry.  We pulled out of our sac ‘a dos dried mangoes, dried pineapple, and the best yogurt I have ever tasted.  It was German yogurt.   It was creamier, yet tart with the fruit (in my case, peche) as its primary sweetener.  It was better than my Dannon peche yogurt that we bought in Buis.  In France, Veronique said, “There are so many yogurts in the grocery stores to choose from that it is difficult for me to find my favorite one among all of them.”We had hot tea with a separate cup for each of us, sliced fresh cantaloupe from two large melons, a sack of peaches, nectarines and apricots.  Plastic wrapped fromage (cheese) emerged from the sac ‘a dos.  I carried along with a small baguette.  After lunch and a short rest, we walked on to the quarry.  In fact, Veronique and I were so intent on our conversation, that we walked past it.  The rocks in the quarry looked much like other rock along the trail, except for their shape.  It takes a second look to see that one is in the shape of a broken column and others are perfect rectangles.  The stone looks like very good, but aged marble.  We all wondered how such large masses of stone were transported down this mountain.Marietta and I were exhausted, when we reached the quarry and so ready to return to the comfort of a car seat.  Isabelle and Oliver wanted to walk on to the top of the next slope. Veronique was willing to go with them for part of the way.  Marietta and I lay down in the shade of a rock and took a nap, an hour of deep sleep. When they returned, we were glad to begin our trek home.When we were about fifteen minutes on our return, we were passed by a young couple walking briskly in the opposite direction, carrying no packs, only a water bottle.  About five minutes later, we came upon official papers laying in the path.  One was a registration for a car; another was a French driver’s license.  Then I found a Visa card.  Since the name and address were on the driver’s license and the registration, Olive said he would send it to them by mail. Veronique looked at the picture on the driver’s license and recognized the woman of the couple we had just passed.Olive resolved to run to catch the hikers and take these papers and credit card back to the them.  Isabelle and Veronique would wait for him and since Marietta and I were tired, Isabelle suggested that we walk on slowly and they would catch up soon.The path was mostly downhill and we walked at a good pace.  The couple proved to be elusive.  They were walking very fast, so there was some distance between them and our party.  When Olive got to the quarry, he couldn’t find them, but since he could see miles in front on the path, he knew that they must be there exploring.  After searching for them, he found them and the papers did indeed belong to the girl.Well, that was chivalry gone too far for me.  I could never match that.  Olive was indeed a benevolent, (a good fellow) certainly a pier to Emanuel.  I was not one of them.  I would certainly have mailed it to her.  I probably would have asked the people camping at a mountain hut we passed along the way whether or not it belonged to them, but I was so exhausted, it would never have occurred to me to chase them down.  I was disappointed in myself that I was clearly not in the league of Emanuel and Olive.A note about Olive.  He was also in the class of my cousin, Jerry Vestal, along with Emanuel, as a non-curmudgeon male. He clearly adored his sister, Isabelle, as she did him. He also was clearly happily married to Veronique., who was a beautiful, charming woman, currently learning Italian and Arabic in her spare time.  They met, when she was organizing a small theatre group to act in plays for the elderly in nursing homes.  She was a friend of Emanuel, who had agreed to be part of the theatre troop, and he brought Olive along to join as well. The rest to me seemed “heureux pour toujourr” (happily ever after).My cousin, Jerry, could trace his generous lineage back to my Aunt Margie, through his father.  I did not have a clear path to anyone in my heritage like that.  My father was generous and loyal, but controlling and rigid.  My mother was kind and caring and did many wonderful things for many people like Aunt Margie, Jerry and Olive, but she was also extremely driven and disciplined.As I was beginning to realize that I didn’t have the genes to belong to this group, I was saved by Marietta, who did.“I realize what makes a curmudgeon,” she said.“You do,” I said, amazed.“Yes, it is being pushed beyond your limits.”“I think you’ve got something there.  But how did you come to recognize that?”, I wondered.“I’m a curmudgeon, a grande curmudgeon.  I’ve been complaining now for an hour.  In this beautiful place, nothing is beautiful to me.  I’m mad at Isabelle for making us late.  We won’t get home til past midnight.”“You’re worrying about time?” I said shocked. “You, who’s always late, never on time.”“I know it,” she said.  “I sound just like you and the reason is that my feet hurt.  I’m exhausted.  I’ve reached my limit and Isabelle and her brother keep on going and I feel like they think we are wimps.  This is not a pleasant walk.  This is an endurance test and I’m failing.  I didn’t sign up for this.”“Yes, you did,” I said.  “What did you think an eight hour walk in the mountain would be?”“Perhaps I should have known, but that was before I had a blister on my big toe.  That was before I was sunburned, even with sunscreen.  That was before I walked six hours - seven miles one way.  Now I’m a curmudgeon just like you and it’s because I have reached my limit.”“Yes, that’s it all right.  You do that to me all the time.  I tell you that I’ve reached my limit and you seem to take that as a challenge that you accept.  You use it as an opportunity to prove that your feminine charms work and you push me further, knowing that I can’t resist you.”“Yes, I do that to you sometimes.”“You admit to this!”  I was incredulous. She never confesses to a sin, apologizes easily or admits to mistakes.“Yes, now that I see what happens on this side. Isabelle is playing my role and I’m playing yours.  The only reason you are not, is because you are in better shape than me and I reached my limit before you did.”“Yes,” I agreed. “I think that’s right.  I’m trying to challenge myself to be less of a curmudgeon.  I think for a time we were locked in these roles of you pushing me beyond my limits and me resenting you for that and you resenting me because I was so difficult to push.”“That’s right, except it is more than that,” she said.  “It often becomes a power struggle and your answer is “no” to any request or invitation I offer because it comes from me.”“I suppose that has happened,” I acquiesced.  “But you have set so many precedents.  I don’t trust you to respect my limits.”“Well, sometimes I don’t,” she said.  “They are silly.  I don’t see why you cannot wait one more minute for us to go when we are at a party and I haven’t finished a conversation.”“The reason for that,” I fired back, “is because I push myself as far as I can and then some more, because I agree with you.  I should be more sociable, more flexible and I try, but when I reach my limit, I want to go.  The fact that I tell you that it has past the point of pleasure, past the point of tolerance and is moving well into pain and you ignore me feels insulting to me.  It feels like you don’t care, don’t care how I feel.”“I don’t,” she admitted. “I think you should be able to handle a social situation, staying longer will give you more practice.  It will do you good.  That’s what I think.”“No, it will do just the opposite,” I said emphatically. “It will make me determined not to even go and not to trust you in these situations to consider me.”“It’s a pain to deal with you,” she said.  “It’s like having a child pull on your skirt all the time. I don’t feel I should have to put up with that.”“And Isabelle shouldn’t have to put up with you complaining about time and exhaustion. She gave you every opportunity to not go. She let you take a nap when you wanted.  She fed you when you were hungry.  You had informed consent, so shut up.  Now how does that feel?”“I get it,” she said. “That’s what I do to you and you are right this time and I’m right when I do it to you.  All limits are stupid and can always be challenged.”I felt gratified that she got this. “That’s right. We have a right to our limits.  We all reach a point where we have no more to give.  We are out of gas.  You’ve reached that point and you should take care of yourself and we, who love you, should help.”“I don’t do that for you, do I?” she said.“No, you don’t.  You make me explain myself and justify how I feel.  Sometimes I don’t have a good answer.  Even when I do, I do not want to have to justify myself.  If I do offer a good explanation, it is never good enough for you.”“I suppose not.” She admitted.  “I play Isabelle to your Christian and we get locked into that.”“I’m trying to move out of this crust that confines me into curmudgeondom,” I said.  “What are you doing?”“I can change, too,” She said defensively.“You mean you think I’m changing?” I said, stunned by her implication.“Well, yes,” she said. “I think it’s obvious.  Before you always reach your limits, before I do mine. So I never discovered this place before.  It helped me see what you’ve been saying.”“For years.”“Yes, you don’t have to rub it in when I’m beginning to understand.”“It helps me,” I offered, “when I can find something in the activity that I want to do.  If I have a personal agenda inside or along with your agenda.“For example, it helped me go to Italy to have an agenda to go to Cortona and see Frances Mayes’ home that she wrote about in Under the Tuscan Sun.  I had a fantasy that I wanted to live out, and I did.  That was good for me.  It gave the trip a purpose for me.  It was a bit anti-climatic when I got there. Frances didn’t come out of her house down her drive with open arms and invite us for a Tuscan dinner.  She didn’t take me for a tour of her olive groves.  But thinking about that place and Frances and her lover there made that trip more interesting for me.”“My fantasy trip,” Marietta said, “was that Isabelle and I would go shopping together in Argnon or Aix or Gap or Orange.  Isabelle’s fantasy was to hike from the mountains navel to its crown.  While a thirty minute walk to the crown would be fine with me, an eight hour march was not what I ever imagined.”I came to Isabelle’s defense (a mistake).  “Isabelle is like me.  She likes to go where people are not.  I imagine travel, like Hemingway.  I want to go to the out-of-the-way, undiscovered place, the place that is de classe (out of favor).  You want to go to the “in” place, where everybody goes.  The crowds don’t bother you.  While Isabelle thinks the Champs Elysees is a silly place to go, that is exactly where you want to go.”“No, not this trip,” Marietta said.  “I wanted to go to St. Troupe where my friend Anne gave me the name of neat stores.”“We can’t afford to add on to our house, travel to Europe and a shopping spree for you in St. Troupe. My back can’t afford to carry back that stuff in the luggage.  Isabelle is not as materialistic as you.  Why can’t you enjoy the road less traveled, the place that Madison Avenue is not selling?”Now I was really in trouble.  Marietta answered with a strong voice.  “You can have your limits and I’m supposed to accept them only because they are yours, but there is something always wrong with my fantasies.  Just like you wanted to go on your pilgrimage to Cortona, I have always wanted to walk down Fifth Avenue.  I did it.  It was anti-climatic.  I couldn’t afford anything at Tiffany’s, but I bought a dress I still have from Bloomingdales. I’m glad I had that fantasy.  These dreams are never what we imagine, but they keep us going.  You imagine that you will publish this book about our trip, but probably you won’t, but the dream gives you the opportunity to write, and you love that.  Why should we have to justify our fantasies to each other?  Why can’t we help each other live them out?”“So you will join me with another woman in a three way sex adventure?”  I wondered.“You are terrible.”“I get your point.  You shouldn’t have to justify your imagination anymore than I should my limits.  If you can respect my limits, I can try to join your dreams with fantasies of my own.  But when walking and looking in the big cities is your dream, you are going to have to help me find a comfortable hotel lobby, where I can sit and write.”“I’ll try to do that.  I know how I can have an agenda now.  I’m past being able to look for wildflowers, but this is good conditioning for me.  That’s how I can look at it.  I’m glad we had this talk. I’m beginning to feel better.”We were way ahead of the others by this time and were afraid that we might take the wrong path, so we waited.  It took about forty-five minutes, but they eventually caught up to us.  We walked on further together.  I was intent on getting to the bottom.  I pushed on aware of my sore legs, feet, shoulder, hip and back.  Olive kept pace with me.  The women fell behind a bit.I felt it coming on again, as soon as Olive suggested we stop next to the edge of a cliff and have a snack.  This suggestion had two bad consequences for me.  First, it would mean a longer time before I sat down in the car seat.  And second, I had to look over the edge of the cliff and watch my fear of heights grow and feel my stomach move up in my throat. I joined the contest with Olive and lost very quickly as Olive ignored my protests, took off his sac ‘a dos, sat down and began to prepare a snack.  The others followed him to the cliff’s edge.  I lay down away from the edge, head on my pack, eyes closed, meditating to manage my fear and to back myself away from a contest with Olive.It seemed easier for me to be tolerant and flexible and a non-curmudgeon. when a woman threw down the gauntlet, but when Olive did, I felt my curmudgeon spirit rise.  Or perhaps, it was given back to me when Marietta seemed to releases it a few minutes before.When we reached the lift, it was closed.  We began our descent down a path that was marked as a green ski slope. We had walked only a short distance when we saw a wild animal that looked like a small deer, but had only two horns.  It looked like an antelope, but none of us were sure that antelopes existed in the Alps.  It could have been a wild mountain goat.  It watched us walk for a while and disappeared.Marietta took this as her cue to grab my arm and begin running down the hill. We raced away from the others, like horses running to the barn.  When we got to the car, we flung open its doors and sat down on the soft seats with back support.  AHHH!!!OUR LAST DAYWe were exhausted when we got home at about 12:15 A.M.  Christian was awake, glad to see us and not at all surprised that we were late.  I drove home on corkscrew roads in the dark and I tried to control my energized curmudgeon spirit by going straight to bed.We were amazed that we awoke the next day with only some soreness, but otherwise back to our old-selves.  And we woke up fairly early for us, around 9:00 a.m.  Isabelle had planned for us to meet with another psychologist about an hour away from Buis. We were happy, when these plans fell through. All of us seemed content to sit about the house.  Mercifully, the temperature had moderated and we were able to enjoy the view of the Mt. Venteux with our doors and windows open.We spent the morning reading, writing and snacking.  We ate lunch at 1:30 and sat at the table commiserating about how similar our marriages were, how Isabelle and Marietta seem to push Christian and my limits and how we had become locked in our roles and a constant and repeating power struggle that had become so familiar to all of us.  This discussion lasted until 4:00 p.m., another two and a half hours that extended our life expectancy, according to Christian’s father.None of us slept that well our last night.  Marietta and I believed that, for us, it was because we were afraid of leaving the womb of Isabelle and Christian.  Perhaps our collective discussion upset the equilibrium of Isabelle and Christian’s marriage.  And they, too, may have been afraid to leave us in some way.But pack and leave, we did.  There was no way to say our thank-yous and good-byes adequately.  We did our best.  We will miss Christian and Isabelle.  We will miss Mont Ventoux and Mt. St. Julian, the lavender blues and smell, the mountain passes that gave us “Sound of Music” views.  There is no way to thank Madame Faccherine and her family for their kindnesses.  We left that to Isabelle and Christian.  Somehow we should have done more to express our gratitude and to give our blessings back to these people and this land.  We didn’t.  We got in our car and left, feeling the sense of inadequacy and emptiness in our hearts.At the same time, we were ready to return home to our responsibilities, our dog and cat, our home and contractor, our constituents who we need to need us. We had learned a lot this trip.  Marietta and I were grateful for the break in the stereotype of our relationship.  We were pleased with this insight and the compassion we had gained.  The rest of the trip without Isabelle and Christian lay in front of us and we were apprehensive.The first night away from Buis, I had a dream.  I was trying to make love to my ex-wife.  She wasn’t interested, as usual.  She turned to me, crying and said the reason she wasn’t interested was that she was ashamed and frightened.  “I have a penis,” she said.  “I have always hidden it from you.  I was afraid that if you saw it, you wouldn’t want to be with me.  I didn’t think you would accept me, if you knew.”I told her that it was okay with me, but I wasn’t sure how I would react when I saw it.  “I’m so glad you can accept me,” she said.  And she pulled me toward her.  I saw it (her penis).  It was hanging on her hip.  It was a curiosity to me, but it wasn’t repulsive.  My excitement was a bit diminished, but I seemed to have enough enthusiasm for continue the original project.  Then, I awoke.For much of the day, I puzzled over what this dream might mean.  Of course, I knew my ex-wife had many reasons to be uninterested in me, and this was certainly not the one.  I am certain she didn’t have a penis.Eventually I came to a more comfortable understanding of the dream.  I was in fact repulsed by my own feminine side.  Weakness in myself has never been something I wanted to embrace.  There is something about my unique limited self that I think is repulsive.  So I do not show that side of myself often.  I’m afraid it will be rejected.  The problem is more with me than anybody else.  Can I accept this weird androgyny in myself?  Can I let my weakness assert itself?  Can respect that I do not know?  Perhaps I can accept my weakness if that was all there was to it, but can I affirm the strength in the weakness, the penis that seems to be a corollary to my feminine?  According to my interpretation of the dream, it says that I pout etre, perhaps, I can.That morning, while I was in the bathroom, I heard Marietta bark at me to hurry up.  It hurt my feelings for no reason I could think of.  It was not something she said, but it was the way she said it.  The offense was in the tone of her voice.How can I be so easily insulted by behavior that I use so much more often than she, meaning no offense when I raise my voice, as she did or when I playfully turn the screw of a critical sarcastic question.  I tease and communicate affection this way.  My sarcasm and teasing tone is one of the most enjoyable parts of my curmudgeon spirit.  Usually when I take such a tone, it is meant well.  I can take back more than I give and am glad for the verbal contest.I am reminded of John Gottman’s, “Four Horses of the Apocalypse” in a marriage.  Humiliating, sarcasm, harsh tones of voices are two of those horses.  Language with these harsh inflictions can become characteristic of some relationships.I could see it in an exchange I had with Christian about the luggage that Marietta and Isabelle take on trips.  We were enjoying our righteousness and advertising our suffering at Marietta’s and Isabelle’s expense.  But Marietta only had one bag.  Christian said beginning the contest.“Yes,” I replied.  “But you carried it upstairs. What did you think?”“That it had rocks in it.”“And empty bags to be filled with more junk for me to tote back,” I said.“Well Isabelle filled the whole trunk with her stuff, I just brought this small bag,” was his response.“And here is the transformer,” Marietta said in a tone that indicated she was getting defensive.  With those words, she handed me this heavy electronic box we bought at the hardware store to transform the French 22 volt current to the U. S. 110 volt current so that we could recharge our camera’s battery.  It was heavy.But probably heavier and more painful was the words Christian and I used to belittle our wives.  Fun is fun.  All humor has a butt of a joke, but too often I have “lovingly” teased Marietta and unintentionally pierced the skin.   Marietta, to survive living with me, has adopted this tone and the result is that we inadvertently become locked in a cycle of teasing that becomes hostility that can become just plain mean.That’s one of the problems with the curmudgeon spirit.  It is never too far from that line, where fun is no longer funny.  Watching my tone of voice requires a conscience-raising that is hard for me.  My tones just come with my words.  I don’t contemplate them, nor do I censor them.  I just speak what’s on my mind, the truth.That has always been my defense.  The truths, if you can’t take it, then too bad for you.  I say this and then I watch myself in my work, being careful with my tone and my words.  Oh, I tell the truth.  Psychotherapy without the truth can encourage pathology.  Good psychotherapy always speaks the truth in the context of love, compassion and understanding.  I have done that.  I should give Marietta that benefit of my kindness, when I speak the truth.The problem has been that Marietta and Isabelle have ignored their husband’s limits.  What defenses do Christian and I both with bad backs, have to protect us in our fears that these bags will demonstrate our ineptness, weakness and inadequacy.  We are afraid of their luggage and we can’t very well say that.  Certainly, it was no problem for either of us at eighteen, but truth be told, it is now.  Marietta and Isabelle both pulled their weight and then some.  It is difficult to talk about.  The airlines only allow four bags.  But we only took three.Is this what my dreams are about?  I can travel with Marietta, if I assert that my back hurts.  If I do, she will have compassion for me.  But I must tell her about this part of me that I feel so awkward about.  In this case, it is an old man’s aching back.  If I can have this conversation, perhaps I won’t need too much sarcasm or anger in my tone of voice.The next day we went in search of the famous French antique marche, the Brocante Marche.  What we found was a small grouping of flea market booths under a large shed, maybe twenty-five in number.  This was a flea market very much like what one might see in the states.  Old pictures, old shoes, old cooking utensils, some furniture, some clothes, some linens.  Marietta bought a tablecloth after haggling for 30 minutes.We found lunch at a Marche.  We bought a half cooked chicken and some fruit.  What we didn’t have was water.  On our way out of town, we stopped in a small market.  Marietta goes in for a bouteille d'eau, while I manned our double parked car.  She returned in a few minutes.  “I met the characters in Peter Maille’s book,” she said excitedly, as soon as she got into the car.  The owner was drinking Pastis with four other men.  This was a dark hole in the wall place.  I had to pay 1 Euro for the bottle in addition to what I would pay for the water.  He was rough.  Two women were together behind the counter.  They might have been his wife and daughter.  I don’t know.  Those men were feeling no pain and this is 2:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday.Our other encounter with the French poor was walking back from the Brocante Marche. An elderly man was shuffling behind a walker, a woman over seventy, presumably his wife, watched him carefully, as he struggled.  When we passed them, we looked in an open door.  It was a two room apartment that we imagined belonged to the couple.  One room contained a made bed and a commode. The other room was a small kitchen.We drove from Moneause to Isles de Sorgue.  Here three rivers came together in the center of this town.  Main Street was right beside the river.  Shops were on either side of the river.  This must be where the flea market booths had come, because there were more antique tchotchke’s for sale than I had ever seen anywhere else. Booths lined the street in front of a river park.  The booths contained products of high quality and much higher prices.  This was an Aspen kind of town, picturesque and expensive.We found a seat on a waist high wall that lined the river for our lunch.  We carved the chicken we just bought and a melon into pieces.  We ended our lunch with peaches and nectarines.  We had enough water left in the bottle to wash the chicken and fruit juices from our hands.  As we were engaged in the clean up process, we saw something happening on the river.  There were two boats, one painted blue and white, the other red and white that looked like a combination long-boat from the Louisiana bayou and a Venice gondola with a place for the gondolier to stand.  People used plastic milk cartons with the handles, the bottoms cut out, and turned upside down to bail out the boats.  One of the boats began to float higher in the water.  Honda outboard motors were installed in the boats keel, one per boat.  A crew of eight boarded each boat.  Crew members were dressed in white with large white trousers, loose in the crotch and legs, ending at mid-calf.The crew of the rouge boat wore the same outfit with a rouge sash tied around the waist. The crew of the blue boat wore a blue sash around the waist.  In the crotch of the pants on the right side just below the waist, was a thick pad.  Soon it became clear what this was for.  Poles, some ten feet long, were loaded on the boats.Two boys, about twelve, took their place on the platform in the back of each boat.  Each were handed their ten foot staff.  They stood their pole straight up, balanced it in the palm of the right hand and placed their right hand on the pad in the crotch and secured their hand with the extra cloth in the pant’s midsection.I’m not sure what they called this contest, but it was clear, by this time, that they were in for a joust with the boat, as the horse for the two combatants.Suddenly a voice yelled over the loud speaker, “Prete rouge?”The driver of the red boat waved his hand to signal no.  He headed his boat down river some more while the blue boat headed up river.  Then they turned to face one another.  The voice from the speaker roared again. “Rouge Prete.”  This time the driver waved back his assent.“Bleu Prete.”The driver of the blue boat acknowledged, yes, with his wave.  Then the boats headed slowly toward one another.  By this time the combatants had their poles fixed in the air and they had been equipped with a shield that was a square box with a square hole that would provide a good target for the lance.  The shield was lashed to the contestant so that when the lance found its target, something had to give.  If the boats continued on, one or both contestants would be pushed off their perch and into the water. On the first pass, both found the water. Several jousts between the red and blue boats followed with different contestants. The Bleu boat took an early lead in the best three out of three with the victorious bleu contestant taking on the next rouge challenger.  The bleu champion stayed on to take on two more opponents, until a girl, who seemed to be older dispatched him easily.  Then, she defeated another female challenger and then, a second female challenger busted her.The joists continued for about two hours.  The grandstands set for this occasion were half full.  At the end of the day, the blue boat won.  The serious joisting with well practiced strong men were the last matches of the day.  No one was physically injured, but there were perhaps a few bruised egos.   We felt lucky to be sitting along the river, just as this event was staged.It was about six o’clock when we left the Isles de Sorgues.  Marietta wanted to go to Fountain Varchluse.  I was ambivalent, but I acquiesced.  This was supposed to be a place of extraordinary geological interest.  A river poured out of the ground at the bottom of a mountain cliff.  As we drove into town, it became clear that parking would be a problem.  Thousands of cars filled several lots.  People walked in droves along the street.  The walk to the fountain was lined with Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge like tourist stuff.  The path to this fountain was clogged with people.  When we got to the place, where the water emerged from the ground, it was covered with boulders, with water rushing out among them.I was tired and I needed to go to the bathroom.  My limits were found.  I was quite pleased when Marietta’s limits were found as well.  We drove back to Avignon, agreeing that we had taken on one too many places, when we went to Fountaine Varvluse.I proposed a rule that I learned from Jerry Lee, a psychologist colleague of mine in Nashville.  She suggests that in any co-parenting decision, that the most conservative parent rules.  In our case, that would mean that we respect the person whose limits have been reached first, or we listen to the fears of whoever is afraid.This rule would require a great deal of trust for Marietta, since I was the most likely one to reach a limit first and my fears were more quickly stimulated.  The rule worked in Marietta’s favor, when we were semi-lost and may or may not stop and ask directions.  If I didn’t abuse Marietta’s trust, this principle might be useful.It would be tested the next day, our first trip to Avignon.  We drove across the Rhone from Villeneuve, found an underground parking lot and lost all orientation, when the parking garage road circled us down into its bowels.  We found a parking place, an exit stairway and the light of day easily, but we had no idea where we were or where we had left our car.  We were inside the city walls on a street that was not on any map. We went straight, then we turned right.  Then we turned right again.  Then we turned left and we found Rue de Republic, a street on the map.This satisfied Marietta, but not me.  I wanted to trace our way back to the entrance of the parking garage to make sure we could find our way back.  Without our rule, this would have been a fight.  If Marietta won, I would be nervous the rest of the day, wanting to get back to the car to manage my anxiety.  If I won, Marietta would feel resentful that I got my way.  Here the rule won.  It took ten minutes, but we found our way back to the parking garage door that had been our exit and that, when we returned, would be our entrance to the garage.Both of us were pleased with how this rule worked.  Marietta was glad to have a less anxious companion and I was glad to proceed on into Avignon.Avignon, in July, is an amazing city.  There is street entertainment everywhere.  There are plays, operas, recitals, concerts, dances, etc.  This is called the Festival.  There are Festival events and OFF Festival events.  The Festival Events are often expensive.  The OFF Festival Events are free or at most, 15 Euros.Every plaza had several street performers performing simultaneously, each on their own corner of the Plaza.  There may be music in one place, and juggling in another.  In some corners, acts trade off, each doing a thirty minute set.We were walking along a small street, Tenuhenir, when we heard piano music pouring out of a small storefront.  We saw the sign, Libre, on the door, and walked in.  It was a small theatre with about twenty seats.  The stage was backed with black cloth.  The windows were covered as well.  The light on the stage shined on two young women, one, no more than seventeen, holding a violin and watching the other twenty year old play the piano.  She was playing a medley of classical standards that seemed to leap from her fingers like a jazz pianist, changing from one mood to another.  The younger girl would get ready to join in and then the older did not give her an entry point.  Exasperated, the younger one sat down.  When she did get her chance to play, she was brilliant.  Her body and fingers seemed to be swept into the music and she carried us with her.  Turns out these girls were sisters and the pianist was wonderful, but when the younger violinist began to play, you knew why she had not let her in before.And this was just one of hundreds of moments like this for visitors to Avignon.  Marietta and I felt as if we had walked into the living room of these sisters, while they played and squabbled at the same time. The possibilities for this kind of serendipity in Avignon in July seemed endless to us.  We had dinner that night in an outdoor café, serenaded by flute music from a group of Navajo Indians.We couldn’t help wonder how something like this could be duplicated in the U.S..  First, the artists would need the support of patrons and the government.  The setting in the U.S. should be would need to be a place of low humidity and few mosquitoes.  It would be a place that attracted crowds.  We automatically thought of Park City, Utah, which hosts the Sundance Film Festival in January.  Why not a Sundance Drummer Festival?  In the summer, the Wasatch Mountains are cool, dry and no bugs, plenty of venues.  The only thing lacking is patrons and government support.  Clearly this is an example of “build it, they will come.” At least, this was Marietta’s and my opinions.The night before we left Avignon to return to Marseilles and our return trip home, I had a dream.  I dreamed that we came home to our house which was being remodeled, painted, cabinets installed in the kitchen, floors refinished, etc.  I dreamed that the paint colors were rather vivid, but acceptable.  The fans were hung from the ceiling, but there were many more of them than I had anticipated.  One was two fans on one pole.  The higher fan had two very fat blades.  I was not sure what I thought of that.  It was certainly more than I bargained for.  Then, there was a tiled roof over a wood box next to the fireplace. This was not in the plans at all.  The tiles were a strange amalgam of European clay tiles, some flat, some semi-circular, some gold, some bright blue, some green, some silver.  This was awful.  I didn’t know whether to show this or hide it from Marietta.  If I couldn’t hide it from her, I wasn’t sure how to present it.  Oh, I thought. We can just paint the roof tiles one color.To me this dream meant turbulence at the boundary.  While I dreaded the demands of our life in Nashville, this house remodeling, my practice, the demands of daily life, I felt prepared to return.  If the worst came, we could paint the tiles.Marietta and I had began our re-entry fights.  Why can’t we have some routine in our vacation?” I asked.  This the first line of a discussion we have had many times.The expected answer was, “Because I want a vacation from routine.”“Your routine is awful,” I replied.  “I understand why you want a break from 6:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. days.  But my routine serves me well.  I feel like I come home from vacation with ten more pounds, higher blood pressure and cholesterol, a higher resting pulse and my back worse.  Vacations ought to be good for you.  I’m not going to eat bread, drink wine or have desert for a week.”“I’ll give up bread and desert, but I want my half glass of wine with dinner,” Marietta said.“Yeah, but on vacation, why can’t we get up in the cool of the day at 7:30 or 8:00 and exercise while it feels good, have lunch at noon, take nap at the hottest part of the day, 4:00 or 4:30, go do something else, have a late dinner, go to bed at 12:00.  Why can’t we do that on vacation?  I would feel a lot better.”“Maybe if we stayed in one place for six weeks I could do that,” Marietta said.  “But on vacation I want to avoid routines.  I want to experience new things, go places I’ve never seen before and sometimes that takes the whole day.”“Discipline brings health,” I said.  “And discipline must be served.”“I’m not going on vacation to be disciplined.”I wasn’t sure I could serve discipline on a vacation either.  I sure as hell couldn’t without Marietta’s support, which I would probably never get.  This was not a real discussion.  This was my ambivalence and fear about the end of our vacation.  I felt myself going through the paces on our last day of vacation, a trip to the coast, through the French Marshland, cowboy and wild horse country, home to bullfights, churches that looked as if they came from Spain, herds of people on the beach, hot.  I clearly wasn’t interested.  I wanted to go home.  I was just like a horse headed back to the barn, anything in my way was an obstacle, not a resource.I could tell how much I valued home by the fears that came into my head.  I was afraid that the mediation between the British Airways ticket counter employees and their airline would strand us, even though the mediation wouldn’t begin for two days.  And it was only mediation, not a strike.  I was afraid there might be a fire in the hotel and I looked carefully at the evacuation route.  I suddenly felt claustrophobic in my hotel room.  I was afraid I wouldn’t sleep.  I was afraid I would sleep through the alarm.As we were leaving, I was angry at the French for speaking French.  I was angry at the French bureaucracy.  I was angry at my own ignorance.  The best thing about all this was that I knew that my anger had little to do with Marietta.  It had to do with loving my home, my country, my town, my state, my friends, my clients, my house, my backyard.  I wanted to be there now.  Being away from home for almost a month in, a foreign country, where the language was not mine, the road signs unfamiliar, where I knew two people out of millions, had lost all appeal for me.  Avignon was nice, but ….And this is perhaps the best part of the trip. This temper, this fear of mine tells me about what I love about home.  I love my secretary, my bedroom, my dog, even my cat.  I love the home we are completing, the friends I want to have over for dinner, the long conversations with food and wine that will be in english.  I love my church, my colleagues at Vanderbilt. I love the Community Psychologist Journal that I sometimes contribute to.  I love Nashville.  I love my family.  I love my trees, those in my yard, on my land and those that hover over the streets of towns and cities all over the south.  I am curious about what this unusually cool wet spring and summer in Nashville will do to our usually beautiful fall colors.I want to get back to my story, my client’s stories.  I want to read about the Titans football.  I want to catch up on the news.  I want to hear voices of my friends laughing and crying.  I want to learn what happened to the court case I testified in before I left.  I want to see what the flowers are doing in our garden.  I even want to hear the bad news from our contractor about how this remodeling project is coming.I realize that my grandfather was right.  That the secret to happiness was loving what you have to do.  And I do.  I love my obligations at home.  I love my clients.  I am pleased and honored that they need me.  I am excited to sit in my therapist’s chair.  I am eager to catch up with the couples who consult me.  It is a privilege for me to do what I do.  I listen to the American Airline pilot announce, “We realize you have a choice in air travel and we appreciate your choice to fly with us.”I realize my clients, friends and family have many choices and I am blessed they chose to include me in them.There are many things I do not admire about my country.  I dislike the wake made by the swagger and arrogance of the Southern Americans in a foreign country with their accent and posture.  And the sound of my voice trying to speak French is first among those I dislike.  I don’t like my country’s sense that everything is a crisis. We must go to war before summer in Iraq.  We can’t wait for diplomacy.  We will miss our window of opportunity.  This is silly nonsense in a country like France, where history is measured in thousands of years, not decades.There are, though, many things about my country that I do appreciate.  In France I saw very few people of color.  In Nashville, I see the colors of many races.  Though France and other European countries encourage their people to speak many languages, I don’t think, they do as good a job at appreciating and including people of color in their culture, as we do.  Not that racism and prejudice, isn’t a serious problem in our country. It is, but we are trying and we are improving and we are the better for that.Another thing I love about my country is that we Americans do not give up easily.  We use rules like a good Rabi does.  We appreciate the spirit of a rule and bend the latter to serve the spirit.  That is why we can change things. We can make decisions.  Though we have committees, we don’t have quite so many, I think.  Our discussions about decisions don’t last quite so long.  Though I wish we would have more of a sense of history and our context, I’m glad Americans still have faith that we can make a difference.