Alice and Rob

Blog Entry Monday April 28th, 2008
Rain this morning after a very warm yesterday afternoon that dissolved into a chill wind amidst our reveries with our good friends, Alice and Rob from Chezel Benoit. I did a Mexican lunch thing, quick but quite good if I do say so myself and I enlisted their chopping help with the onions and garlic and apple. Mexican Hash (Pecadillo), Spanish Rice, Beans in a Pot, corn tortillas. It was all good but the chill wind took the temp down quickly and frankly screwed it for me, I like food HOT and this was not. Rob really LIKED it and had seconds and thirds, Alice soon followed suit, so cold to me was fine for them.
We had gone out yesterday morning to see what we could see at two local brocantes (junk sales), great fun for the French and Brits who seem to adore these things but not so much for Kelly and I who have become pretty jaded after 6 years of attending these events with some regularity...piles of knick-knacks and rusted tools, old crap that nobody wants any longer. Every once in a while something terrific shows up but with the dollar at 1.6 to 1 or worse it would have to be a Mona Lisa to get our money. We did find a bargain with a man selling plants, 10 very healthy looking strawberry plants with flowers and tiny berries for 6.20E, so I bought 20 for our courtyard planting. That was it. It was warm enough I sought out the shade of a nearby seller selling crepes, iced drinks and at the moment eating their lunch.
Today? Well, stay home and work on the ruin a bit. Nail the strips in the old waiting room so that the cloth for the walls can be fastened, not many left to do then Kelly can start hanging the wall covering material. Have to go over to DIX (Deez...10 Rt St. Amand) to empty it of extraneous odds and ends in preparation for sale someday real-soon-now. As I finish that up there is a knock at the door, it's our original English speaking friends Jack and Hortense who told us last week that they would be by to “have a look” soon. Today was the day. So we gave the grand tour including the barn for Jack. He is very familiar with the style of construction as he was a contractor in the UK for years. He is the funniest human being I know, he is very animated, all arms and gestures galore, constantly commenting on many subjects and an open door in every verbal way. He is VERY suspicious of almost everyone here, with many examples of paranoia-like thinking, The French, The Gypsies, The neighbors across the street, the local bar-master, The Cafe, US for all we know. We sat in the dining room and gabbed for hours about the house and their future abode in Spain which they have adopted as their next home...and we laughed our asses off! Like many Brits they like the heat of warmer climes so prefer Italy, Spain, Morocco and other locales to this particular one. So be it, something for everyone hereabouts, mostly anyway.
Music:
Listening to Bob Dylan in my iTunes Library takes me back to my Air Force days,
listening to him rap his way thru his tunes while I laid in my bunk at Beale AFB.
Seems a million years ago now, before anything of consequence to me, my mother dead a few years before and my father gone away to god-knows-where.
My grandmother and her husband Harold in the not-so-distant past and only down the road a few hundred miles, I listened on, dreaming of a future, jet noise in the background. Yes, at the time it took a wild ear to listen to ol' Bob,
not the most melodic sound one let into one's ears, he said things that we all felt but few spoke. I found him intellectually stimulating if not highly entertaining in the time. Now I listen and enjoy him very much, older, much older, and wiser too.
Then things happen out of the larger nowhere that encompasses all of us and our lives. Friends I have long lost came back. The first was SC, a letter arrived the day AFTER we returned from our stay in France, hello, Hi! How are you? It began, now several years later I review the miracle of his finding me after I had looked for him many times in the past. Gone, in a bus travelling across the US,
once in Seattle, a computer repair business then just g-o-n-e. Now back we share thoughts and memories often, reveries amidst the storm of Life. So very good for the soul, old friends renewed. Another happened too, a friend from longer ago yet, an old girlfriend T. She was gone while I was still in the USAF.
Afriend stole her away as I was courting her. Mad? No...just looked elsewhere.
Long, long gone she was, another letter came via email, she had read my blog!
Amazing! Over 40 years had passed since I saw her face! 40 years! Now we regularly exchange emails about our families and lives. I'm a happy man.