Another Four Letter Word

I wrote this in an email responding to an email I received from a long lost acquaintance - her family is alluded to in Screen Saver - and when I re-read it I thought "this is a better Blog than it is an email". The first paragraph is a response to her question: "So tell me….what do you do when you go to France and what made you start going there in the first place?" Rather than just ignore the question or blow it off with irrelevancies I attempted to really give an answer, starting with the fact that the real answer is in Screen Saver.

But here it is.

What made me go there in the first place and what I do there when I am there are some of the story lines in Screen Saver. Briefly, I went there because some friends were going and Mysti decided to go and I decided to test a life long pillar of personal knowledge: France and the French suck. How wrong. When I'm there I rent apartments in Paris and just blend in with occasional stops for wine, espress or onion soup.

Mysti and I have taken a couple of self directed bike tours, one in Languedoc and one in Entre deux mers. Those put us out on the back roads of rural France where we stayed in tour provided gits and ate local food and drank local wines with local people.

We also took five weeks in Brittany. On that one we picked up our rental car in Rennes and just took off. We didn't have any reservations. We just took a map and found towns that looked interesting and stayed in them when we could get ocean view rooms. We were always able to get ocean front rooms because it was in September and October, so the Season was over. We usually stayed in a town for four or five days and made side trips every day into the adjacent country side to see what we could see. In that manner we found Pont Croix which is a little town several miles inland from the Atlantic which lost its significance eight or nine hundred years ago when the port silted up. But it was a fascinating little place.

The high point of that trip, I always thought, occurred on an evening in early October. We had gotten a room in a lodging place in the vestiges of Merlin's forest and had, naturally, retired to the bar. After several wines and a convivial and animated discussion with a number of our fellow drinkers, one of the men turned to me and said, "so what the fuck is the deal with this Bush?" That was in 2005.

I bought the guy a drink.

The proprietor herded a bunch of us out of the place at about 1:30 am, all singing, as best we could, Milord. I'd rather be in France than any where I know of. But at least now I know that the word "know" is a four letter word and, therefore extremely dangerous. A lot of damage has been done under that banner.