Somebody explain to me how a man working in an occult bookstore could POSSIBLY be so unpleasant.
In Chartres, no less, a town filled with more spirit than stress, so completely unlike Paris that I spent hours trying to explain to Annik this is France where people say hello in the streets and wish you a good day because they mean it, they really want you to have a good day...
Picnicking along the Rhone, perched on stairs and benches and the low stone wall bordering the river, cobblestones and low-hanging trees as far as the eye can see, sparrows dive-bombing for crumbs and yet somehow maintaining their dainty shyness about us.
My eye caught on a little boat house with stairs leading down from the street and space for four little rafts to take people home up or down the river from the crazily sloping downtown streets centered about the Cathedral.
The Cathedral.
Wandering hand in hand with princess, necks craning at the impossible detail of every corner, stained glass window, delicate stone carvings of hundreds upon thousands of individual lacy arching patterns along the walls, corners, inside and outside and everywhere until I was too dizzy from the incense and the Bach fugues from the organ were echoing in my head.
A hundred tiny little shops, postcards from fifty years ago reflecting the same perfectly preserved streetcorners that we wandered along yesterday.
There are new shops and a few of the stone walls are blackened with age but the spirit is still there. THe bicycles leaning against the walls, the scent of bread from the boulangerie making the same hand-painted sign in the photograph all the more dimensional.
COffee in one bar, buying stamps in another, following this or that tourist trail and always veering off from it, again and again to discover this church with the perfect accoustics that made me want to sing that HIIIIIGH note, or that gloriously scultped stone �glise just a few blocks down.
POttery shops and porcelain shops and lace stores and stained-glass galleries, too many tourists but so many local people too, all smiling, all bidding each other good everything.
Driving home we sang and when we stopped for air Sophie grabbed my hand and we can-canned for Annik and then danced a breton dance singing "La Jument de Michaud" most of the way about the truck, giggling and gasping for air until I tripped over my own feet in the ditch and tumbled over backwards into the damp grass.
It took a while to get up, what with everyone so paralyzed with laughter.
Last night Annik and Sophie and Seb headed out to the Tournesol in Montparnasse and I would've loved to hang out, it being so near to Cristal's perhaps we could have given her the postcards we'd filled out directly.
But my cold was drawing strength from my ditch-dampened underpants and I wanted cuddle-time with princess so we came home and ate leftover chicken and she announced "You're a good cook" and with my heart full to bursting we e-mailed our beloveds and sat down to watch a terrible, terrible horror movie from the collection Seb had left behind.
Dropping off to sleep we talked of a million things, love and family and the tiny stresses that we've been working on figuring out all our lives so far, and David
oh David
You're not letting me down. I know how you feel and I'm afraid too, sad somehow and still in love at the same time.
But you're so brave and so beautiful and I'm thrilled to the point of tears just knowing...
...just knowing that someone so wonderful as you thinks so well of me.
Such glowing words.
That lump in your throat is just as big out here, stuck and suffocating in mine.