One month

A month from today--a month from right now--we'll be on a plane bound for the New World. The girls and I are taking off a day before C and the dogs: we're traveling directly (if you can call three flights direct) to my hometown, where we'll recover from jet lag and the first bumps of cultural re-entry. Meanwhile, C, Alice, and Wendy will go directly (only two flights) to Washington.

If you've ever traveled by plane with your dogs, then perhaps you know that American carriers refuse to transport animals too large for the passenger cabin if the temperature forecast at either the departure or arrival airport exceeds 85 degrees. That's because the animals in their crates go out onto the tarmac when the luggage goes out. And if the luggage has to wait a bit, so do the animals. (Beagle brochette, anyone?) Hence the policy: over 85 degrees, Fido goes the next day. Air France has no weather policy because the animals go on at the end, while the passengers are boarding. Et voilà, the weather doesn't matter so much; Fifi travels with maman no matter what.

My hometown--have I told you where it is? I can't remember--does not sport an international airport. Thus: if they traveled with me, the dogs would have to fly domestically. And the 85 degree rule would be invoked. And there I would be, at a pay phone in O'Hare, leafing through my address book and hoping that I still have my college adviser's home phone number so that she can come and get my dogs for a sleepover.

And why are C and I not going to the same place? The answer is so much less interesting than you may be imagining. He's got to go back to work. The girls don't start school until the end of the summer, and I won't even look for a job til September or October or maybe let's just keep checking those unemployment figures...so we are going to profit from our relative footlooseness by having a nice long old-fashioned family visit.

Also our furniture won't arrive in Washington until the middle of August.

And then, Washington is, for us, Real Life. Were the girls and I to go directly back and move, with C, into Grandma's house while we wait for the boat with all our furniture to come, then we are all pretty certain that the summer would look like this:

1. Worry about the start of school.

2. Worry about finding a job.

Repeat as necessary until bedtime.

So C and the dogs will land in Washington and the girls and I will land farther south.

C, you'll have deduced, clever as you are, will be flying Air France. Nice to Paris, Paris to Washington. Champagne and movies on demand the entire way (even for the dogs).

The girls and I will be flying Aer Lingus. Nice to Dublin, Dublin to Chicago, Chicago to home. When I mentioned to an Irish friend that we would be on the Irish airline, she stopped what she was doing and turned to me.

You know Aer Lingus is a low-cost airline, she said.

Well, they were the cheapest tickets we could find, and even though the company is paying for it, all the other tickets were thousands of dollars and had terrible connections...

She looked at me pityingly. No, she said, I don't mean they have cheap tickets. I mean you have to pay for your food.

I got it the second time around. While C sips champagne and catches up on this summer's blockbusters, E, G, and I will be spending our last euros on microwaved meat pies with cabbage, and headphones that will let us listen to the film version of The Price is Right as the video is shown on the front wall of the cabin.

Maybe my friend was wrong. (I hope so.) Maybe overseas flights are different. (Fingers crossed.)

Or maybe we'll just be that much happier to touch down.

Dinner with Maigret

L and I treated ourselves--really, the whole trip was one long treat--to a proper dinner out on our last evening in Paris. She'd cut an article out of a budget travel magazine on a restaurant that turned out to be walking distance from our Charming Apartment in the Heart of the Marais. The article said it was an Authentic Neighborhood Bistrot with Regional Specialities from Throughout France, and featured a photo of the smiling chef standing in the dining room holding a few plates of plats, main courses.

Now, I imagine that there are some among you who would not dream of going to Paris without a list of restaurants to try. A list, maybe even cross-referenced with wines and the chef's employment history. We are not that kind of travellers. It's not that food is not central to our experience. Rather it's that the restaurants that turn up in foodie magazines often seem too cool for us, or too expensive, or too fancy, or too far from where we're staying and who wants to change metro lines late at night after a good dinner? Or all of the above. Anyway, the fact that this one was in a magazine aimed at the less wealthy traveler, and its proximity to our neighborhood, were both points in its favor. So off we went.

We walked through the door at 7.45. The chef--we recognized him from the photo--was sitting at a table in front of the bar with a glass of wine, looking at his fingernails. There was no one else in evidence.

C'est un peu tôt, mesdames, he said, barely looking up. It's a little early. We're not quite ready. Come back in, oh, maybe 15 minutes.

We backed out onto the street. We looked at each other. Early? 7:45? Dinner is sometimes but a distant memory by then. Go away? I know you are paying customers and all, but I need to finish my pre-opening verre?

We were impressed. This was taking the clash between American ideas of customer service and the profit motive versus French ideas of the dignity of labor and working to live to a whole new level.

We wandered around for 25 minutes. (No way were we going to be the first ones to be seated, and no way were we going to be turned away again.) Why didn't we go to a different restaurant? We thought that any chef with the presence of mind to send away customers--well, we thought it would be interesting.

And it was. There were two other tables of customers when we went back: a French couple murmuring to each other in the corner, and three Americans in sweatpants and logo tshirts sustaining a dull, but good-tempered, roar opposite them. We ordered from the chalkboard that the hôtesse brought. Asparagus in vinaigrette, ricotta flan with herbs for the first courses. Lamb cutlets and brandade de morue for the second. Then we looked around.

The restaurant was small--perhaps a dozen tables--and the walls were unfinished stone. White lace café curtains hung in the large front windows. A wooden partition four or so feet high divided the room, with a small bar on one side and a few dining tables, and the rest of the tables on the other.

At the back of the room, in the corner opposite us, there was a table for two in front of the partition that divided the dining room from the kitchen. A brass plaque hung over it. Dedicated plaque enthusiasts, we got up to read it.

Georges Simenon, 1903-2003, it said. And, below, in a smaller script, Ici vous êtes assis à la table d'Inspecteur Maigret. Here you sit at Inspector Maigret's table.

All the bistrots in all of Paris, and we walked into this one. We've been reading Maigret since we were kids, both of us, first in English (they had a whole shelf in the Reynolda Manor Branch Public Library) and, lately, in French (ooh la la). We toasted Simenon, and Maigret, tried to figure out whether it had been Simenon's table in reality or Maigret's in fiction, and, about the time the first courses came, decided it didn't matter.

The chef delivered the asparagus and the flan. He asked who was having which. We explained we were sharing.

In that case, he said, eat the asparagus first. Its taste is more mild, and the ricotta and herbs would overshadow it.

We took his advice. The asparagus was wonderful--what you imagine the asparagus wrapped in a purple rubber band that you buy at the grocery store is going to taste like, and what it never does. Chives figured in the seasoning--chives, which grow in our garden and go to seed because we never know what to do with them--both the stems and the flowers.

The chef asked us how we liked it. We praised his work to the skies, and asked about the chive flowers.

He responded with a two minute discourse on the making of the dish. While we couldn't recreate either--the dish or the discourse--we were moved by his passion. Anyone who can wax eloquent on the marriage of mustard, vinegar, and asparagus is someone at whose table we want a place.

The lamb and the brandade came out next. M. le chef offered a little extra olive oil with the brandade--we were getting to be friends now. Brandade is, by the way, salt cod mashed with olive oil and milk. It is so much better than it sounds. Really. Comfort food. I promise.

We ate away, watching as the restaurant began to fill up with regulars. We were pretty sure that the table opposite ours was occupied by a French film star of a certain age (and a certain amount of Botox about the lips) with her daughter. Next to them sat an older couple who had brought their own bottle of wine because I never know if you're going to have anything drinkable, monsieur joked with the hôtesse. When we were nearly finished, a photographer came in, bearing his camera bags and lenses, all in black except for his shock of thick grey hair. He made the rounds of the regulars' tables, shaking hands and air kissing, and then walked through to the kitchen. He met the chef, hands full of plats, and stopped him to discuss each one.

Then he installed himself at Simenon's, or Maigret's, table.

It was time to order dessert. The chef came to take our request: a moelleux au chocolat, a crême brulée, a tarte tatin, or a fromage blanc with raspberry sauce?

We took the fromage blanc. The chef nodded in satisfaction: we had passed this, the final test. We'd shared entrées that complemented each other. We'd ordered the brandade--something off the beaten path of most foreigners. And now we had passed up both the chocolate and the twin sisters of French desserts for the homely fromage blanc.

He brought it to us; in a flat soup bowl, with the coulis poured over it, it looked like a camellia blossom. You can google fromage blanc and get plenty of sites that explain what it is, but this is all you really need to know: fromage blanc is what God intended dairy products to be. When God made cattle, it was because he had a hankering for fromage blanc.

This serving was appropriately divine. The chef came to check on us again while we were eating it. We praised it and him and, really, at this point, the whole world. He nodded, accepting responsibility graciously. Comment dit-on fromage blanc en anglais?

On dit fromage blanc, we said. There's no other word.

You know, he said, they don't even have fromage blanc in England. He said it in a way that made it clear that that fact alone explained so much about the other side of the channel.

We don't have it in America, either, we said.

Ah, said the chef wistfully. He who brings fromage blanc to America, that man will be a billionaire.

We didn't take coffee afterwards, or a tisane. We paid the bill--it was, if not exactly budget, well worth every centime--and stood up to go. The chef appeared at our side.

Take these postcards, he said, and give them to your friends in America. He handed us each a half dozen postcards bearing the restaurant's coordonnées. And come back again, anytime. He opened the door for us. We turned to say goodbye and thank him, and he shook our hands.

Merci, monsieur, we said.

Mais non, mesdames, he replied, c'est à moi. Merci à vous.

Falafel

It would be only a slight overstatement to say that we chose our Charming Vacation Apartment because of its proximity to L'As du Falafel. If, after all, you can choose between an Authentic Parisian Small Building two metro stops away from falafel, or an equally Authentic place a mere two minutes' walk away, I think the choice is clear. I have been making the Falafel Pilgrimage for almost two decades. C has gone with me many times; we've taken the girls (they, at age 9, chose a hot dog instead; as a good mother, I've forgiven them their youthful waywardness). L and I have gone regularly over the past few years. The visit that stands out--the visit, I think, that marked me as a Falafel Lifer, was one that we undertook with the girls' Aunt A. That time, we elected to take our falafel around the corner to a park. It's not a big park, or a particularly notable park--sand and gravel, a play structure, a very small boules pitch--but it provides the closest park benches to the falafel window.

We installed ourselves on a bench, falafel-filled pitas in hand. It was A's first pilgrimage to the rue des Rosiers, and I had been talking of not a whole lot else the entire day. We'd had a late breakfast and, what with one small child and another, not gotten out the door til past noon. Although it was only an hour or so since our morning tartines, I suggested that we go directly to Falafel Land. Lunch, after all, is lunch.

A and L demurred. No one was hungry--when pressed, I had to admit that I wasn't either, actually--and they both wanted to visit the Centre Pompidou. You know, the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in France. Magnanimously, I agreed, secure in the knowledge that if, once inside the museum, either showed a reluctance to proceed, after a reasonable art-viewing period, to the rue des Rosiers, I could always strike out on my own and make it back before they'd finished discussing Number 26 A.

Eventually--post cards bought, Pollocks perused--we headed over to L'As du Falafel. It had been several months since I'd had my falafel fix--several months of herbes de provence, lamb, fresh pasta, cheeses, and salads--and I was ready. Perhaps you've never had really good falafel, and don't know what I'm talking about? I'll defer to a proper food writer, the Times' Mark Bittman, to explain:

The sandwich contains the requisite super-crisp, garlicky chickpea fritters, with creamy hummus, lightly pickled red cabbage (something between slaw and kraut), salted cucumbers, fried eggplant and just-hot-enough harissa. This is all piled into a pita in such quantities that eating it is an adventure in napkin management.

Each sandwich has four or five fritters in it, layered with the other ingredients so that each mouthful brings a mix of tastes and textures. We sat down on our bench, extended our sandwiches away from our laps, leaned forward, and bit.

One of my falafel fritters escaped the pita. It rolled out of my lap, along the bench, and dropped onto the ground.

Don't eat that! L used the tone that she usually reserves for when a small child has just picked up a piece of raw chicken from the floor of a public restroom, has opened his mouth and is looking at the chicken with avid curiosity and hunger. It may be that I had reached to pick up the fritter from where it had rolled to a stop, just between a cigarette butt and an empty Ricola box.

I looked up. The aunts looked back at me and started to laugh. I couldn't quite see what was funny: here I was, down one fritter out of five, experiencing my own personal crise du falafel, my falafel investment down 20% before I'd even taken a bite. L wiped away a tear while A tried to hold her sandwich upright while she doubled over laughing.

It's just that you looked so griefstricken, said A.

Well. Since then, I eat inside at L'As du Falafel, sitting at a table, and with a knife and fork. What it lacks in excitement, in the edginess of dining al fresco, it makes up for in the virtual certainty that all of the fritters, and even the last bits of eggplant, will reach their destination.

Déjeuner

We arrived in Paris on a Sunday afternoon; it turned out to be the Sunday afternoon of le week-end d'Ascension which we would have understood had we stopped to think about it. We knew it, of course. But we didn't understand it. L'Ascension--the day in the Church year which marks exactly what you might think it marks, Jesus' ascension into heaven--fell on a Thursday this year and France, being a bedrock secular country, took the day off. And, since it was a Thursday, also took the day following. Which meant, had we but taken the time to consider, that arriving in Paris on Sunday afternoon was the close equivalent of arriving in any major American city on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. In short, a bad idea for the traveler.

And a worse idea, it turned out, for the traveler needing to collect the key to a rented holiday apartment. We had rented an apartment for our few days in Paris through one of those agencies that rents holiday apartments to Americans. You know the ones: they serve as middlemen between French apartment owners who have found a way to bring in some extra euros and eager Americans who have found a way to Live Like a Parisian in Paris. The agencies themselves always seem faintly shady, as though, when you send off your credit card number, instead of getting, in return, an apartment in a Classic Parisian Building in a Quiet Street, Walking Distance to Place des Vosges and Convenient to Métro, you get dunned for a thousand or so dollars.

We'd sent off our credit card number and emailed the agency our arrival time for the Sunday afternoon. M. Gaymard, the propriétaire of the Charming Studio Apartment with Mezzanine in the Heart of the Marais, was to meet us at the apartment with the key. He had our flight information. We copied his phone number into our cahier.

The flight was an hour late. The baggage arrived forty-five minutes later. The Air France autocars into Paris were running a reduced schedule. We phoned M. Gaymard (1) while standing beside the baggage carousel; (2) while waiting for the bus; (3) from the bus; (4) while standing in front of the gates to the courtyard through which we had to pass to enter the Classic Parisian Building where our Charming Studio Apartment waited; (5) while standing outside the door of said apartment (after someone had kindly buzzed us through the gates). Each time we left a message in which we stated where we were (airport, bus stop, bus, gates, corridor) and how dearly we would love to catch up with him on this fine Sunday afternoon.

After phone call number five, we thumbed through our cahier in search of other Paris addresses and phone numbers and, finding a likely one, rang up a friend of a friend and explained our plight. Could she--if M. Gaymard did not turn up (was, perhaps, even now enjoying a holiday in the Seychelles on our credit card), as looked increasingly likely--put us up for the night? Mais bien sûr, came the blessed words down the line. Absolutely! How awful! Stay here in any case! Come right over! Or she would come to us!

We decided to hang on for a little longer to the dream of the Charming Apartment in the Heart of the Marais. It being nigh on five o'clock, and one of us having started her journey well over 18 hours earlier and on another continent, we went round the corner to a café and ordered a meal.

The rosé had just arrived when our phone rang. It was M. Gaymard.

I am calling about the apartment, he said, in correct, accented English. Was there anything in particular that you needed?

Yes, we said. The key.

Ah, bon. We could see him nodding. En fait, in fact, I am just finishing lunch with my family, and now I must take my mother back to her house. Perhaps I could meet you at the apartment in--oh, perhaps in two hours?

I had a professor in graduate school who used routinely to stand me up for appointments. She had two offices on campus, and no matter which office I turned up at, she was never there at the time we had agreed on. Sometimes she showed up in a half hour or so; more often, never. She never apologized and never explained. It's an enviable skill. M. Gaymard possessed it in spades.

An hour and a half later, we rolled our suitcases back around the corner. In front of the gates, standing still in the middle of a sea of sunny Sunday evening strollers, was a man who resembled a middle-aged Christopher Plummer, if Plummer had been cast in the role of a bourgeois French gentleman. Neatly pressed linen pants, a striped Façonnable shirt, a navy linen jacket slung--slung? no, draped--over his shoulders, his hair carefully swept back from his brow, M. Gaymard greeted us by our first names. We greeted him as Monsieur.

He had been at lunch, he explained. Had our flight plans changed? Had we been supposed to arrive today?

Clearly the idea of arriving in Paris on a Sunday afternoon, the Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend, boggled the mind. And it was beyond boggling--unthinkable, really--that there could ever have been an expectation that one would interrupt one's Sunday lunch en famille to provide a key to tourists. And after lunch, of course, one had to take one's mother home, and settle her for the week. There is no reason to apologize when one has behaved comme il faut.

The apartment, once we breached its defenses, was lovely. Its meters-high window looked down on a hidden garden; the building was steps from one of our favorite streets in our favorite city. We shook hands with M. Gaymard as he handed over the keys and vaguely answered our question about whether or not the electricity and hot water were turned on, and then we closed the door behind him. We looked at each other and shrugged. A holiday weekend, a French gentleman, and his Sunday lunch: we should have booked our flights for Monday.

Tender mercies

In the summer of 1991, I went to Paris to do research. I had just finished my second year of graduate school, and the common thing to do at that point was to go off to your country of specialization--in my case, France--and begin preliminary dissertation research. I rented a room in a foyer, a boarding house for jeunes filles, that was run by a not terribly friendly order of Lebanese nuns. My room overlooked an interior courtyard and had a bed, a desk, a hotplate, small fridge, sink, and bathroom. Tiny, spartan, adequate.

It was my first time living in a city. My first time living alone overseas. I knew no one. My advisor had given me an introduction to an American scholar who lived in Paris. When I met him for coffee one day across the street from the Bibliothèque nationale in the rue de Richelieu--it was a decade or more before the Bibliothèque de France--he told me my research topic would never work. There was not enough material, he said, unconsciously mimicking Woody Allen, and too much had already been written about it.

I was miserable. I missed C dreadfully. I hardly spoke French. The métro smelled bad. I was too shy to buy a roasted chicken from the traiteur. I didn't know what I was doing there. It was in the days of postcards and those flimsy blue air-mail letters, and calling cards in phone booths. I was, in short, alone and lonely and increasingly unsure of myself and my purpose, wondering why I had ever thought I wanted to study France.

Then a postcard came from a former student of Madame Mère, another transplanted Southern girl who was travelling through Europe. She would be passing through Paris; could she stay a couple of nights with me? She'd be with me the last few days that I was in Paris; her dates fell just at the end of my--now foreshortened--stay. I had intended to stay the entire summer but, one day in the depths of gloom about my prospects as a French historian, I had walked by a travel agency and had what I now know was a coup de foudre, a sudden insight: I could leave. I was having a lousy time and I could do something about it. I walked in and changed my ticket. Then I walked down the street to a phone booth and called C: I was coming home a month early.

A week or two after that, the former student's visit coincided with that of friends from college who had--of all things--a car. I cleared my desk at the B.N. and we went off for a day at Fontainebleau. While my friends napped in the shade of the forêt, the traveller and I sat on the edge of Henri IV's canal and talked. And talked. Later, we stopped in a village for dinner. The only commerce was an auberge that backed up to the Seine. We sat in the garden next to the river and ate coq au vin and drank red wine, and I began to remember why France had beckoned me. The next day my new friend helped me move out of my room and got me as far as Montparnasse station on my journey back to America; she added my jar of Nutella to her backpack and went off down the rue de Rennes to her next adventure.

You won't hear from me for a few days this week because I'll be meeting up with that friend in Paris. Husbands, children, doctorates, houses, and several cross-continent moves later, L is one of the great constants, and tender mercies, in my life. And so, it turns out, is Paris.

Piétianque

We spent the weekend with friends on the Ile de Porquerolles. It's one of the Iles d'Hyères, which I seem to remember is a crossword-puzzle phrase, off the coast of Toulon. The Porquerolles is a national park, with minimal development and (in theory) no cars. (The cars, and really, there aren't many, are mostly in the village, of which of course there is one, this being France.) The rest of the island is divided between forests and vineyards and hiking trails. And of course beaches around the edges.

Our hotel was next to the church, on the village square. The village went something like this: church, hotel, hotel, restaurant, postcard stand, ice cream stand, corner store, restaurant, town hall (we've come halfway round the square now; the mairie is opposite the church), hotel, restaurant, ice cream, postcards, restaurant, bar, bike rental, bike rental, bike rental, bar, restaurant, swimsuit shop, postcards, filmy lineny blouses shop, restaurant, bike rental, bike rental, hotel, and here we are back at the church. The town was one block deep and one square wide; it looked like a stage set. If Humphrey Bogart had turned up on the terrace at the bar, we would not have been surprised.

The center of the village is taken up by a wide unpaved square. A playground stands in front of the mairie; at the church end, there's a paved step down into the place. A row of eucalyptus trees holds down the other two sides. Saturday evening I took my book and sat on a bench to watch the action. Whiffs of garlic and fish came out of the restaurant behind me as the chef got dinner started. A wedding had taken place at the mairie an hour or so earlier--we'd seen the wedding party having their champagne outside the town hall while we had our ice cream--and there were still stragglers from the group parading up and down in their finery. Daytrippers were hurrying to catch the last ferry to the mainland. Parents were sitting on the benches around the aire de jeux, and their kids were racing in circles around them.

But the main show was the boules matches. While I was sitting there--and I was there for an hour or so--there were never fewer than three matches going on in different parts of the square. The ground was uneven (sloped would not be too strong a word) and grassy in some places, stony in others. The players weren't troubled, though: if they preferred the manicured courts of cities, or even the mostly level ones of villages, they didn't act like it.

The group playing closest to my bench was made up of five old men. They were the central casting version of Provençal boules players: grizzled in varying degrees, leathery from the sun, dressed in outfits ranging from the downright natty (loafers, linen pants, polo shirt, a sweater tied over the shoulders) to the grab bag (grocery store espadrilles, worn, baggy dark Adidas sweatpants, and an equally worn, baggy tennis shirt in a clashing set of stripes). Each man had his own set of boules, of course, and they were all worn to differing degrees. One man--baggy sweatpants man--even had a magnet on a string that he used for picking up his boule. It kept him from having to bend down, presumably, and if it psyched out his opponents, surely that was no more than an added bonus.

Their game moved, after a bit, so that it was directly in front of my bench. When it did, the older man who had been watching them and providing color commentary relocated from his bench (up the way a bit) to mine. May I sit next to you, Madame? he asked. You have nothing to fear from me, he said, I am much too old.

C had joined me by this point, and we made room. The man's dog came along with him and sat down at his feet. We all watched the game intently; the players affected not to notice.

Are there two separate teams? I asked, after we watched most of a round.

No, there is only one team, he said, but there are two who play with three balls and three who play with only two. The ones who have three balls, their job is to use the third ball to knock the other balls out of the way.

Now, I could take a hundred or so words here and explain to you something about the way that boules is played, tossing the ball so that it comes close to the cochonnet, knocking other players' balls out of the way, and so forth, but even if I told you everything I know about boules (which is not much), that would still not help you understand what the man had just told me. The fact that I even understood the French--the words, I mean, not their meaning--was triumph enough for me.

He seemed to recognize that C and I were not up for the finer points of boules, and he changed the subject. Vous êtes anglais?

Non, Americain, we said.

Ah, American! But you speak French very well for an American.

Oh, no, I said, as I always do, not really. Sometimes I have good days of speaking, sometimes, not so good. Because there would be no point in saying, Yes, even though I am American, I am not a complete idiot and I have, by dint of years of study and reading and memorizing, gotten to the point that I can carry on a simple conversation with you. Because when an old Frenchman says that, in a genuinely surprised tone, he means it as a compliment.

He ascertained that we came from Washington and that America is a very big place, and that we were living in France now. Then I felt it was safe to ask him about himself: he had been born on the island and grown up there--he remembered when the Americans came, he was 15--but there was no work on the island; he'd had to leave, and had worked in the douanes, customs, for 40 years before coming home to retire. The island wasn't what it had been. Too developed. Too many people.

Then the subject returned to boules, or, as he called it (and many do), pétanque. If you meet a Frenchman and he takes a shine to you, you'll know because he'll begin to instruct you in something. My friend who sells cheese at the market--we call him the Cheese Man at our house--always has a new hike to tell me about. Jules is forever explaining to us the finer points of something rudimentary but which, to his mind, we are unlikely to know. And we knew we had impressed our boules benchmate when he began to tell us the history of pétanque.

His version went something like this: in a village on the coast, between Toulon and Marseilles, many years ago there was a game played that was very like boules. The best player in the village was called up to war, and when he came back, he had lost a leg. He could no longer play boules the way that the rest of the village did; he could not walk, only stand still. And so he would sit on the bench at the side, watching.

His comrades, though, knew this was not right. And they came up with a new version of the game: the players had to stand still to throw their boules. No more taking a step forward to toss the ball. The feet--the pieds--had to stay together. Piéds-tianque, he said, as though the words were self-explanatory. And from that, the true Provençal name for the game, came the bastardized French word, pétanque. Et maintenant, he went on, people play pétanque all over the world. The best players aren't even necessarily French. Some of the best players in the world come from Madagascar.

We listened and made the appropriate sounds of comprehension. Of course--fine French-speaker that I am--there was quite a bit that I didn't quite catch; this was miles away from school French, a long way from Parisian French, a fairly good distance even from the French that I hear in our village. But I think I got the gist of the story, and we all sat there together, when he was finished, watching his friends play until, a round or two later, the church bells struck the hour. They all picked up their boules and shook hands all around; our bench mate stood up and explained that he was very tired, he'd been doing some construction at his house all day, and he needed to go home now. He bowed to us, wished us bonnes vacances, and went away. His dog followed.

Then C slipped into the hotel. We'd noticed earlier that there were boules sets in the sitting room for guests to borrow. He brought a set outside, and we played a round or two of pétanque ourselves before dinner.

Mimi

Friday afternoon found us on Easyjet heading south from Liverpool. For those of you who are not enjoying a Bank Holiday today, you should know that our English cousins are. And our flight was full of Liverpudlians (a word that it's just not possible to say too many times) who were determined to enjoy their Bank Holiday Weekend in the sunny south of France.

In the rain and chill and damp-induced fog that I was in when we boarded the plane, I did not grasp until most of the way through the flight that our flying compatriots were all English weekend-trippers. It began to dawn on me that something festive was up when, just before the drinks service, a voice behind me called Mimi! up the aisle. It was a young male voice, a voice redolent of (what I imagined to be) warm beer and snooker (what is snooker?) and football (not American style) and baked beans on toast. A younger version of Andy Capp.

When the flight attendant got to young Andy, he asked her what sort of sandwiches were available. Ham and cheese? he suggested. Oh no, love, said the young woman. Ham and cheese was only available on flights that originated in France. For this flight, he'd have to look in the flights originating in England column. And they had extra sandwiches, too, this time, a hot bacon baguette...

She pronounced the a in baguette to rhyme with hay.

I'll have that, please, love, said young Andy. A hot bacon baguette (again the hay). And a hot coffee with milk, and a Stella lager, and do you have any croissants?

No croissants, I'm sorry, but we do have some blueberry and chocolate muffins.

He chose a chocolate muffin to go with his hot bacon baguette, coffee, and beer, and as the flight attendant (twentyish herself; pink and white complexion; dyed blond hair pulled back into a knot, with the front section back-combed to suggest a bouffant) went up the aisle in search of the hot sandwich, he called after her: Could you just bring me another packet of ketchup please love?

I think it was the idea of adding ketchup to the hot bacon baguette that made me start taking notes. The man across the aisle from me, who was carrying twins, had just finished a plastic box of pasta salad that looked for all the world like egg noodles mixed with mayonnaise. In front of him was a man in his mid-40s wearing a black leather jacket and new blue and silver running shoes with a Chevrolet symbol on the heel. His salt and pepper hair was thinning in front, and he hadn't shaved that morning; he was reading a book called The Secrets of Sit-n-go, with sections called Playing a monster hand post flop, Playing a weaker draw, and Playing top pair, no kicker. His girlfriend sat across from him, in front of me, a slight blond in a blue hand knit sweater with small red wire-framed glasses.

Meanwhile, a strawberry-blond toddler staggered up and down the aisle with a plastic drink stirrer in his fist. His cheeks were chapped and his tshirt--I am the little brother, it said, in childish print--was stretched tight across his belly. His mother, or grandmother--older than I am, unless she had had a particularly hard life--was in loose jeans, a baggy linen jacket over a (proportionately) baggier cream-colored sweater, and I have no idea, none, what her cup size was. She followed him back and forth, up and down, and, proving once again that God looks after fools, the child made it all the way over the Massif Central without putting his eye out with the plastic stick.

Behind me, young Andy bellowed up to Mimi a few more times, and, in between, carried on an unbroken conversation with his friend across the aisle who had foregone the hot bacon baguette and chocolate muffin for a beer and a 7-Up and vodka. While I could follow most of what young Andy Capp said, I could only make out odd syllables of his friend's conversation. There, or food, or out, a bit of shut eye, whatever. After he was paged a few more times, Mimi--it turned out he was a beefy young man, not a tubercular soprano--turned around and threw an embarrassed grin in the direction of young Andy. I watched as he explained to the people around him--he was six or seven rows up--about his friends sitting back in steerage.

As the plane made the turn to cruise along the Riviera, everyone craned their necks to look out the window. Flashes went off as people took pictures of the view. My neighbors all looked like they'd been on the inside of a laboratory for the past six months, possibly even in cold storage, in petri dishes, part of an experiment to determine what would happen if humans were deprived of sunlight and fed a steady diet of hot bacon baguettes and pasta mayonnaise. I was in my travelling black and still feeling cold and damp, but they were dressed for the sun in capris, tshirts, and new tennis shoes, sunglasses at the ready.

There was a holiday spirit to the cabin. These English strangers demonstrated a level of intimacy in public that it's difficult to imagine French friends, much less airplane passengers, displaying in public after decades of life together. Any French man who yelled his friend's name up the aisle of an airplane--well, it's just unimaginable. Unless there was a dire emergency. Even then. It simply isn't done. And if it were done there would be a collective resettling, a recrossing of legs, shaking out of newspapers, an imperceptible drawing in and away, that would make it abundantly clear that it should not be done again.

The plane landed, and everyone leaped to their feet. They compared return flights--when are you leaving on Monday? maybe we'll be on the same flight--and then, slowly, they filed off. We watched them at baggage claim. Young Andy Capp--it turned out he was called Carl--was wearing black nylon cargo capris that set off his white legs and a pale blue knit sweat jacket. His Pumas were shiny white. He was standing with his unintelligible friend and Mimi, eyeing the French women standing across from them while they waited for their bags. The women were swaddled in various layers of white lycra--34Cs all around, no secrets there--and tight denim. They looked as though they had steered clear of the pasta mayonnaise. Or maybe it's just the red wine.

I hope those women let them down gently.

Planned obsolesence

G and E are tall enough to reach the upper rail in the Underground trains. You know, the railing suspended from the ceiling. They've been on the Washington Metro, the New York Subway, the Paris Metro, and, as of a few weeks ago, the London Underground. Their first trips on the Washington Metro were in strollers. Then there came a day when they had stamina enough to leave the strollers at home. And now, about two weeks later, they're standing next to investment bankers and Asian tourists loaded down with bags from Harrod's, holding on to the high bar and casually swaying with the rhythm of the train.

What I learned in London was how near my job is to being done. I watched as my girls interviewed the directors and assistant directors and heads of departments of various museums you've heard of. They took out their Clairefontaine notebooks, pulled their chairs up to the tables, and led suited-up men whose next meetings involved arranging tours for the G 12 first ladies through a list of questions about the museum profession. I kept track of their coats.

After one of these interviews, their Aunt A and I were sitting with them in a café on the Embankment. A asked what they thought they might like to do when they grew up.

I'm not sure, said G, except that I know I want to do something that helps.

We've tried to teach them to recycle, to buy seasonal produce, that it's possible to read a novel and cook dinner at the same time. To take the dogs for a walk. Separate whites and colors. Fertilize the geraniums. Keep up with friends. Eat three meals a day and get enough sleep. Help the person with a stroller. Watch movies. Hold the door for the next person. Tell stories.

What they don't know yet are some of the mechanics. How to read a subway map. Wear your purse over your shoulder, across your body, in the city. Put your change away before you leave the cashier. Be aware of your surroundings. They're the skills that my mother taught me, began teaching me on our first trip to London. They're the skills that made me feel competent and capable when, not that many years later, I was in London and New York and Paris on my own.

It seems to me that planned obsolesence is the goal of parenting: to bring up your children not to need you to bring them up any longer. When G, sipping her hot chocolate, said casually that what she wanted to do was to help--and that she wasn't sure, exactly, how she was going to do that, only that that was the thing that mattered to her, helping other people, making things better--A turned to me and said: I think your work here is done.

Almost. We walked down into the Underground and I reminded the girls to hold on.

In praise of aunts

E and G -- along with every other student their age in France -- have to do a stage d'entreprise, an internship in which they learn about a business or a profession. Every 13 year old in French school will spend a week going to work every day--in a stable, on a golf course, in a boulangerie, with a veterinarian--seeing what it's like and thinking about whether it's the kind of work they might like to do someday. Then each one will write a report (12 to 20 pages, illustrated).

It's a big deal. We've known it was in the offing for over a year. The other kids talk about it, and the teachers started talking about it in the fall. We wondered what to do. Our connections here fall into three categories: C's colleagues, our village friends who are nearly all retired, and our shopkeeper friends. Sending the girls to do an internship at C's office seemed uninspired, and asking Gilbert if one of them, at least, could come along to work at the boulangerie would mean waking up awfully early.

That's where the girls' Aunt A comes in to the story. I was talking to her one day about what we might do--thinking about sending them back to Washington for a week--and she listened. Then she called me back. What if we took the girls to London, to work with A's museum colleagues there for a week? They'd have a tour of the museum profession, see the other side of exhibition galleries, find out a little bit about the kind of work that A does and that I used to do. A would come along, of course, and we'd have a week together in London.

We said yes, please, and thank you. And we're going next week.

Now, here's the thing you need to know. A is not really their aunt. By which I mean, she's not my sister, or C's. But she's watched them and enjoyed them and cut out valentines with them and gone to movies with them--she's loved them--since they were small. Now she's drawn up a week long internship with her museumy friends, and is taking a week of vacation and flying across the ocean, to hang out with them and help them out. Aunt-like behavior if I've ever seen aunt-like behavior.

A few weeks ago I read this and it reminded me of all the women who've looked out for me--my family aunts, my extended family aunts, my aunty friends--and it made me think, too, of the girls' aunts--family, extended, and otherwise. The kindness and generosity of A and her consoeurs makes me catch my breath with gratitude. We are some lucky girls, E and G and I.

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We'll be away, but I'll still be posting thanks to the miracle of writing ahead. À très bientôt!

À peu près

We drove up to the mountains late last Saturday afternoon. From La Bastiole (50 degrees) to Valberg (30 degrees) it took just under two hours, the first hour on the autoroute, the second up an increasingly narrow road through a canyon whose rocks hung with car-sized icicles. It was the middle Sunday of our region's vacances de ski, and we were prepared for ski traffic, families going up, like us, for a few days' skiing.

There was none. Unless you count the five cars that we passed waiting to turn left onto the road at the bottom of the gorges.

After we had unloaded the car at the apartment and bundled up, we walked down the hill to the local pizzeria. We should have made a reservation, C said. It's going to be packed. Saturday night, middle of the vacation, and it's the only restaurant in the village. What are we going to do when it's full?

I guess we're going to walk back up the hill and drive someplace else, I said.

It's going to be a long walk. We should have called.

We got to the Sapin Blanc at 7.15. There were two cars in the parking lot. When we walked up the steps to the door, the owner put his head out and said they didn't open til 7.30.

Could we make a-- C said as the door closed.

I should have called before, he said. Dejectedly.

I looked around at the empty car park, across the snowy field towards the cross-country ski hut and the village houses perched above it. There were no car headlights anywhere, no lights to detract from the one house that had strung itself with flashing Christmas lights.

I think it's going to be okay, I said.

At 7.30 we went in. Wherever you want to sit, said the owner. Choisissez-vous.

We chose a table by the window. We ordered. A little while later, another family came in. Then a couple. Then two families together, with a sulky teenager.

The next morning C and the girls were up early--for us--and left for the ski lift a little before nine. It's going to be busy, said C, and we have to get our lift tickets and look at the map and figure everything out.

I went off to buy provisions and rent raquettes--the only place I waited was in the boulangerie, where everything I bought was still warm--and met up with the skiers again at noon.

Was it crowded? I asked.

The girls answered. There are no lines anywhere, Mommy, they said. We never waited at all and there's hardly anyone on the slopes.

I looked at C and he shook his head. I don't know where all the people are, he said.

We are city people. We expect to wait in line, to need reservations. We used routinely to buy our Saturday night movie tickets online Saturday morning, or even Friday night. Even, truth be told, Thursday. And our parents before us expected to wait, and taught us, early and well, to make reservations. Figure out where we're going to leave the car. We're genetically and environmentally disposed, because of all that training, to be early. In my family, we allowed at least fifteen minutes to get anywhere, and likely more. If we were early, then we'd just park down the block and wait til it was the stroke of on time to appear. C's family leaves early, too: look around any grandchildren-centered event, and, at least 20 minutes before it's due to begin, you'll find a couple ambling about outside, reading the notice board and checking out the third grade's Lewis and Clark posters.

My own small act of rebellion is to be late. Not late, late--that will be for my descendants--just five or, maybe, ten minutes. (Truly radical. I know. My mother wonders where she went wrong.) I don't like being early, sitting in the car, standing around. What that means is that I wait til the last possible moment to get ready to go somewhere and then, because I'm rushed, forget something and have to go back in the house. This can be, on occasion, a point of marital stress. But at least I don't have to wait when I get there.

The French have an expression: à peu près. It denotes approximation. More or lessness. If you arrange to meet for coffee à peu près 10.00, then one of you might come at 9.45 and the other at 10.15, but it won't matter: you'll wait inside with your café crème and your paper and, if you finish the café crème, maybe you'll run up the street for a few groceries and then come back. And have another coffee with your friend.

And you can do that--you can be à peu près--because this is the country. What happens in Paris I don't know. But here, in our corner of the world, there just aren't that many people. You don't need a reservation, and, when the ski lift opens at 9.00, the line will not have formed. In fact, the only people around will be the lift operator and his dog. If there's a line at the bakery at 10.00, well then, that's because everyone knows that that's when the second batch of the day comes out of the oven. But if you miss that, it's okay, because at noon there'll be the third batch coming out. You can go up the street and have a coffee while you wait.

We're learning--slowly--to relax. That we don't need to call ahead and that there will be plenty of parking, some of it even legal. But it goes against our grain, and I'm afraid that by the time we begin to organize our lives around the à peu près principle, we'll be back on the East Coast and find ourselves forgetting that we needed dinner reservations only to arrive late to a sold-out movie.

Maybe we'll move to Montana.

Finding Provence

While we were in the Lubéron last week we went on an expedition to find the house Peter Mayle lived in when he wrote A Year in Provence. He's moved house since then, which made me feel marginally less like a stalker and more like a curious pilgrim--curious in both senses. Looking for Mayle's house would, I reasoned, give us a reason for a walk. (A walk is more satisfying if there's a mission involved, even if it's just mailing a letter.) It would take us to a village. (Always good to see another village.) And looking for the house would perhaps give us a sense of place, of what it is like to take a walk in the Lubéron, what it feels like to look out over vineyards and limestone and fallow fields. And this particular walk would, as an added perk, provide a mystery: which mas was the Mayles'?--and, if we were lucky, a solution: this one.

G and I went through our copy of A Year in Provence and made careful notes. The house was on a country road between Ménerbes and Bonnieux. It stood at the end of a dirt track that led through grape vines and cherry trees, with the Lubéron parc régional behind it. It was, in the oldest part, two centuries old. There were established shade trees near the house, as well as a stand of cypresses, a few amandiers, and a hedge of rosemary. The house had three wells.

It was ten miles or thereabouts from the house to Bonnieux, which meant that the house stood closer to Ménerbes. We started the research drive in Bonnieux. We'd make the drive, we thought, and then, once we'd scouted, go back on foot. We drove to the top of the village and found, after only one spell of turning around on a narrow road with a hilltop's height drop on one side and a medieval fortification on the other, the road that led to Ménerbes. Off we went, winding along the crest of the hill, the valley on our right and the Lubéron range on our left. About ten miles out of the village we started slowing down for every farmhouse on the left and reviewing our list.

Every mas matched.

They all stood at the end of a dirt track. They all had vineyards and cherry orchards. Rosemary hedges. Cypress trees. Hard to tell about the wells, of course, but every one had its fair share of outbuildings. Which is not to say that they were all the same; they weren't. Some sat closer to the road, some farther back. Some had the shade trees in front, some around to the side. Sometimes the cherry orchard took up the entire frontage; sometimes it was just a few cerisiers. But a provençal mas is like a Gothic cathedral, or a Shakespearean sonnet: unless you know a lot about what you're looking at, they all look pretty much the same.

We retreated to the hotel and to our book. On a closer reading we found a passage where Mayle had written that it was a two kilometer walk to Ménerbes along the trail at the back of the house. Et voilà. Now we had only to find the trail to the village and work from there.

The next morning we put together a picnic and went in search of the trail. The Lubéron, being a national park, is crisscrossed with trails that lead to villages and ruins and outcroppings and, some of them, to nothing at all. We found the trail that ran along the base of the mountain in the direction of Ménerbes and set off down it. But, an hour later, we hadn't found Ménerbes. Then, when we finally found Ménerbes--using the Sierra Club-recommended method of there's a village over there that might be it, and if we follow this dirt road maybe we'll get to it; of course we hadn't remembered a map--we lost the trail. We stood on the village's ramparts with our binoculars and tried to read road signs several kilometers away.

Eventually we walked back along the road in the direction that we thought the car might be in. It was not shaping up to be one of our more successful expeditions. We'd lost our way and walked a kilometer or so uphill through a forest, only to have to turn around and walk back down, never good for morale. We had had to walk on the road at more than one point--and while walking on a country road in Provence is hardly a hardship, we prefer the unpaved. We'd picnicked on a bench in the village, looking out over the vineyards and the Lubéron and trying to figure out exactly where we were in relation to the car, never mind in relation to Peter Mayle's house. And so when, a kilometer or so outside of Ménerbes and an hour later in the day than we had planned to be, we found an old sunken unpaved road leading off through the vineyards towards the mountains, we got out the binoculars before we veered off.

What we could see through those was, we were fairly certain, the trail on which we had begun, the trail we had thought would lead us to Ménerbes, which had led us instead up into the forest until we turned around and started finding our way by sight instead of logic. We took the turn. An orchard on one side, vines on the other, and when the road stopped, we were at the trail where we had started in the morning. And on the trail was a signpost pointing the way to Ménerbes along the route we had just come. 1.8 kilometers, it said. We'd missed it before, seasoned hikers that we are. We retraced our steps to the car and dropped the pack. Let's just look, I said. Just a few meters, it won't make us that much later, let's just see.

Back a little further along the trail from the dead end where we'd left the car, and there was a house with a pool at the back of the property and, between house and pool, a large enclosed courtyard. It was this one, the house. We had found it.

It was an awkward feeling, finding the house. We felt somewhere between literary pilgrims and stalkers. We were consoled by the fact that the Mayles have long since moved to another mas outside another village and so, while we were certainly taking surreptitious photos of someone's house, we weren't taking pictures of someone in particular. We weren't snooping on the house's residents but on the house. It was just a house, the way that any house is just a house, but also the way that the Bronte parsonage, or Carl Sandburg's Connemara, are just houses. A place that you knew in your imagination and never knew if you'd see. It was a goal, a destination, and we had--a half day's walk up and down hill and road, through pastures, and across vineyards and a village--reached it, a hundred meters or so from where we had begun.

Why do we go on pilgrimages? The pilgrims who crossed the Lubéron valley hundreds of years ago were on their way to the shrine of Saint James at Compostello. If they could get there, they believed, they could get that much closer to salvation, or to health, or, maybe, to hope. We weren't looking to save our souls. But instead, maybe, to feed them. To show our souls that the imagined can be made real, the word made flesh or, in this case, stone and vine and tree and path. To show our souls that we can, if not dwell in the imagination, well, we can take a walk alongside it. We can sit on a bench in the sun with our sandwiches, and look down at the vines growing in their orderly rows, vineyards stretching as far as we could see across the valley, and, as Saint James' brother put it, receive from the fullness of it all grace upon grace. It was a good walk.

Not easy being green

Whenever we go somewhere, we look for an Asian restaurant. There's one place we can get Chinese-esque food nearby--twenty minutes away on twisty roads--and it is the all-too-usual French variation on a Chinese restaurant. Platters of food are arranged behind a glass counter, dumplings, wontons, spring rolls at one end; main courses in the middle; desserts nearest the caisse. You point and say how many portions of the poulet au curry or porc au gingembre you would like, the counter guy scoops it into a plastic box that he then heat-seals using the little machine on the back counter, and off you go. For the four of us to have dinner from our local Asian Palace it runs about 60 euros. And by the time we get it home, it has congealed.

We ate a lot of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai food in America. Chinese restaurants were our travel standby when the girls were younger: we knew that we could always find some stir-fried vegetables that they would eat, and some chicken, and there was the added interest of the restaurant's interior design. We are particular fans of the photograph of the waterfall that, when lit from behind, appears to be flowing. The food wasn't always particularly good--you try finding a good restaurant off of I-95 in Virginia--but it was interesting and gave us something to talk about.

Good Asian food: certainly on my list of things to look forward to about moving back to America. I remember a dish of scallops that I ate at a Chinese restaurant in Portland, Oregon, in 2002: spicy, garlicky, a hint of sweetness. Then there's the walnut shrimp we used to get at the fancy Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto, the shrimp lightly battered and fried, a white sauce that you barely noticed, candied walnuts. And the dumplings from our everyday Chinese place, and the sizzling rice soup. Then there's the dish of cellophane noodles with crab meat at The Slanted Door, in San Francisco. Words fail me.

When we travel here in the land of seasonal local eating, we are always on the lookout for an Asian restaurant. We found one that was not bad in Maintenon, in the Loire, last August. It sat across the place from the château gates, sandwiched between a brasserie that served beautiful salades composées (we walked by several people eating them on our way into Au Royal Maintenon) and the village Bar / Tabac. There's a sushi place near where L lived in Paris that did California rolls that served as a pleasant reminder of what a California roll tasted like. Last Saturday, walking down Cavaillon's main street, we passed a Vietnamese restaurant. C and I gravitated towards it, but the girls had already spotted a boulangerie next door that offered lunches. On closer examination, it turned out to be the boulangerie that Peter Mayle called the best bakery in the Lubéron. So we ate there: roasted chicken, homemade mayonnaise, tiny purple lettuce leaves on fresh baguettes for G and E; mesclun salad with tuna, olives, tomatoes and a light mustardy vinaigrette for us. The baker himself came out and talked to us for a while. It was an excellent lunch that could only have been improved by a plate of steamed dumplings.

The Relais was outside of Apt, which is a large market town. Aha, we thought: perhaps there will be an Asian restaurant. We dropped the girls at the hotel after a day of hiking and went to scout. It was Sunday evening, a risky time to look for a restaurant in France. Everyone who was going to eat out has already eaten out at noontime, and nearly every restaurant that was going to open on Sunday has already opened at noontime, and the proprietors are now at home, enjoying their Sunday evening, maybe thawing out some frozen pieds et paquets in the microwave.

We parked on the main street in Apt. One of our guidebooks listed, but did not describe, an establishment called Le Restaurant de l'Ho. Sounds vaguely Asian, no? At least, not terribly French? So off we walked to find it. It turned out to be across the street from--what we learned for certain the next day, and suspected at the time--a crime scene. Gendarmes were interviewing neighbors and red and white tape blocked off a portion of the pavement. Men with white paper suits over their street clothes were going inside the house. Tragedy may have struck en face, but we were busy looking at the menu of the Restaurant de l'Ho which turned out to be a. closed and b. regular French. We turned down a pedestrian street (all shutterd storefronts, just us and a cat or two) and, a block or so away, saw a sign that was unmistakably Asian in aspect. We quickened our steps and examined the doorway: it was Asian, and it would open for dinner in an hour. We looked at the menu posted beside the door.

There were all the standard starters: soups, dumplings, spring rolls. Then a small poultry section. A small fish section. A small beef section. But the largest portion of the menu, the delicacy that was clearly closest to the chef's heart, was the section devoted to grenouilles. Each item was helpfully translated into English. You could choose between beignets de grenouille (frog fritter); grenouilles au curry (frog curry); grenouille au gingembre (frog with ginger); grenouille au citron et à l'ail (Lemon and garlic fried frog); and, last but not least appetizing, grenouille à la sauce aigre douce (frog with sweet and sour sauce).

Now. If my friend Marie-Claire invited me for dinner, and she put a platter of grenouilles on the table, even grenouilles fritters, I like to think that I would tuck in with an open mind and plenty of baguette and red wine. However. It seemed to us, standing on the deserted street a few blocks from where a murder had been committed earlier in the day, looking in the window at the saggy houseplants that were the dining room's chief decoration, that Kermit should wait.

We retreated to the hill town of Bonnieux, where we found an open brasserie: cuisine traditionelle à base de produits frais régionaux, said the menu. Traditional dishes from fresh local food. The bartender promised us that he would stay open long enough to give us dinner. We collected the girls, and then we sat in front of the fireplace and ate vegetable soup and steack frites. A meal that, I like to think, could only have been improved by a few cellophane noodles.

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I'll be away on Wednesday. Still the school vacances, and we're going up to the mountains for a few days. See you on Friday.

Brocante

Sunday morning we went to the brocante in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Brocante translates directly as a flea market--but it's a flea market the way that a shop that sells last year's couture with the tags cut out is a second-hand store. And the Sunday brocante in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is the Platonic ideal of the type. Stands line the sidewalk between the village's main road and its canal for blocks, and when the road reaches the obligatory place and monument aux morts, the line of stands divides and multiplies, encircling the monument and place and then heading deeper into the village. Every stand is different, every dealer with his own specialty.

I've long been a denizen of antique markets and flea markets and antique flea markets in America, and have the odds and ends to prove it. The odd porcelain platter that matches my grandparents' wedding china. Small framed prints of a hot-air balloon in flight. A large rooster made out of old scrap iron. I love sorting through old stuff, the smell and feel of it, and, in America, I love the moment of connection when I find something that reminds me of a house I knew or a relative, or a novel.

In France, of course, I don't often have that moment of connection. What a French brocante lets me do, instead, is peek inside another world, another past. Kitchen tools whose function I cannot guess. Old boules, each with its own pattern of markings, so that the old man who used it would recognize it by feel even when the dusk had fallen so that all the boules looked alike. Sets of silver: to judge from most brocantes I've been to, there was a time in France when all households needed a set of silver or silver-plate fish forks and knives. And, also judging from the population of those fish services on brocante dealers' tables, that time has passed. Souvenir plates from Lourdes. Altar pieces and chipped statues of the saints. (Wouldn't a Saint Catherine look nice in the front yard beside my rusty rooster? I say to C. Are you kidding? he says, in a tone that makes it clear that he knows I'm not, and that he isn't, either.)

At Sunday's brocante, we parked in the first space we came to, put on all of our outer layers, and began the walk along the stalls. It was cold. Four degrees Celsius, 39 Fahrenheit, but the wind was blowing. The famous mistral that begins somewhere in Siberia and is going along at a pretty good clip by the time it gets to Provence, a wind that finds any chink in your clothing and seeps inside. We walked into it for a block or two and then, thinking to outsmart it and put it at our backs, we crossed the canal and walked in the opposite direction. It was still in our faces and blowing just as hard.

If it hadn't been for the wind, we could easily have furnished our imaginary mas in the Lubéron. Plates, cutlery, linens (linen linens, with lace edging), mirrors, chandeliers, candlesticks, kitchen scales, glassware (crystal, everyday, and several complete sets of pastis glasses marked with brand names), rugs, sofas, chairs, tables, garden furniture: a whole life, ready to be loaded up on a truck and carted off down a windy road to a stone farmhouse, where we would tend our vines and sit under the beech tree in the courtyard eating cherries from our trees, salad from our garden, bread from the village baker, and fresh chèvre from the farm down the lane.

But there was wind, and it was cold, and time for lunch. We bought a tiny set of silver tongs--E and G chose the ones with the more moderne design instead of the fancy claw-shaped ones--and went to find a café.

Boundaries

We stayed at the Relais de Roquefure--and let me interrupt myself to say how much I love staying in small family-run hotels. There are probably thousands of them in France, in old town houses, châteaux, farmhouses, stables, a lot of them in old inns that have always been inns. The rooms, at least in the ones we can afford, tend to be small and the bathrooms smaller, but they are clean and comfortable and come with a sense of place and of individuality. The person who greets you when you arrive is not waiting for her shift to end; it's her hotel. She lives in the other wing. And these hotels are not precious, either, at least I've not come across one that is: that self-conscious homeyness of cheap antiques, pink wallpaper and dishes of potpourri that afflicts many small non-chain American hotels. These hotels are, I guess we would say, old-fashioned family hotels. In the best sense of the word.

And the Relais de Roquefure was a fine example of the genre. The building is a 200 year old bastide, a three-story main section bolstered by assorted connected former farm buildings, set on a few acres of land at the end of a country road that is part of one of the medieval Saint Jacques de Compostello pilgrimage routes. The innkeepers were a young couple expecting their first child. February is deep in the off season in the Lubéron, and so we were among the only guests.

As is often the case with hotels like this one, dinner was offered in the hotel's dining room. The husband in the couple was also the hotel chef. Our first two nights at the Relais we elected to eat elsewhere, partly because the chef offered only a menu. Which means, translated, not a menu in the American senses but rather a set dinner. To put it bluntly: no choices. First course, second course, cheese or dessert. Everyone got the same thing, and what they got was what the chef found at the market that day.

All very romantic and slow food and charming until the first time you sit down to dinner and find pieds et paquets on your plate. Pieds et paquets, for the uninitiated, is a popular Provençal stew composed of stuffed bits of sheep or cow stomach (the paquets, packets) simmered with blanched sheep's pieds, feet.

You know how much I love France. And French food. But that's my boundary.

I've never actually had the experience of pushing blanched pied du mouton around on my plate, and I hope not to. And that is why we put off dinner at the Relais until our final evening there. We wanted to have dinner in the large paneled dining room with windows overlooking the garden, we really did; we like nothing better than the idea of going down to dinner in the hotel. But what were we going to do if the main course turned out to be beyond our boundaries or, worse, beyond E and G's boundaries? They are adventurous eaters, but there are limits to any 13 year old palate, and we did not want to test them.

So Monday afternoon when we returned from our hike and bumped into the chef in the front hall, we reserved for dinner, feeling very brave indeed. Part of the experience, we said. We didn't mention our concern that dinner might be a long way from roast chicken to the girls. We didn't want to worry them or give them time to draw up a list of acceptable foods. We didn't want to give up the element of surprise.

Dinner was at 8. We took up our station in the dining room; the only other diner was the only other hotel guest, a Belgian woman who sat across the room from us with her book. The chef came out. Tonight's dinner: a salad with melted rounds of chèvre served on toasts; magret de canard with vegetables; a fruit gratin. The chef gave us a plate of thin baguette slices covered in homemade tapenade and went back to the kitchen. Our work began.

Magret de canard is duck breast. You know, ducks, those cute little birds that we were watching on the river this afternoon.

It tastes like dark meat chicken, and you like that, I said.

It's a lot like beef, C said.

Think how cool it would be to tell you friends in America about the time you ate duck breast at a country inn in Provence, I said.

The girls were unconvinced. Remember, cute little feathery creatures. Quack, quack.

We all enjoyed the salad with cheese. Then C and I went back on duty.

Just try it, is all. Just take a couple of bites, C said.

Don't think about what it is, I said. Just try it.

And then the plates arrived. A fan of sliced duck breast enclosing ratatouille and a roasted potato covered in a creamy mint and truffle sauce.

It tastes like beef, C said. Think of it as beef.

Just try it, I said.

The girls each took a bite. They chewed.

G was the first to swallow. It tastes like beef, she said with a twinkle, but better.

They both finished their portions. It was a success.

G had only one caveat. I still don't like foie gras, she said.

Duly noted.

Once upon a time in Provence

Vous connaissez les livres de Peter Mayle? I was walking with Olivier up the terraces to see Jules. He thought for a moment, frowning, then (probably having translated my American pronunciation into French), nodded. Jules est comme un personnage dans ses livres. Jules is like a character out of Peter Mayle's books.

Olivier chuckled. Exactement. C'est ça.

Peter Mayle's books on Provence have been among our chief references for the region and its culture; for conveying an outsider's sense of wonder and delight A Year in Provence, Toujours Provence, and their confrères stand alone. G and E read the books when we first came, and have reread them since many times.

Mayle's characters are stock figures in our family stories. A few weeks ago, we took a day trip for C's birthday. We visited a couple of châteaux--wine making châteaux, not historic châteaux--in the morning (nothing like tasting a half dozen côtes de Provence to wake you up) and then, around noon, pulled into the village of Lorgues for lunch. As we got out of the car, G said: I hope we see some of those old Provençal men who spend all day playing boules and drinking pastis. Those guys are, of course, Mayleian standbys: the men of a certain uncertain age, between 50 and 90, pacing off the distance between the boules on the court across from the café.

And just as our steacks frites arrived at our table in the Hôtel du Parc, the men G had been talking about shuffled in. There were two of them, one short and stout, the other tall and ropey, missing their share of teeth, garbed in layers of flannel and wool and berets and sturdy boots, and they knew everyone in the place. We all looked at each other. There they are, she said.

We're not above using A Year in Provence as our travel guide. Last year, during one of the school vacances, the girls and I spent a night in Aix en Provence, and ate our dinner at the café Les Deux Garçons. Peter Mayle describes it thus:

The ceiling is high, and toasted to a caramel color by the smoke from a million cigarettes. The bar is burnished copper, the tables and chairs gleam with the patina bestowed by countless bottoms and elbows, and the waiters have aprons and flat feet, as all proper waiters should.

He doesn't mention the gilded mirrors that line the walls, or the leather banquettes, or the chandeliers whose soft light make everyone look like Audrey Tautou. We ordered drinks--a glass of red wine for me, Orangina and a Coca for the girls--and when the waiter (tall; black vest over white shirt; white floor-length apron over black pants; the tip of the third finger on his left hand missing, no doubt from a misadventure when he was in the Resistance during the War) brought the drinks, he picked up the bottle of Coca in his right hand. He put it over his shoulder and, in one movement, opened it with the bottle opener he had concealed in his palm, brought it back down, and poured it into its glass.

We would not have been any more starstruck if he had made a dove fly out of the bottle. It is now the standard by which all other restaurant tricks are measured. A waiter could balance a silver tray bearing an entire flaming roast turkey on one hand and we would cock our heads, consider it, and decide, upon reflection, that while it was no doubt difficult and quite clever, it was not, on the whole, as remarkable as that time the waiter at the Deux Garçons opened the bottle of Coke.

It's time for another vacances--they've been going to school steadily for seven weeks now, after all--and tomorrow morning we're off to Peter Mayle country. We'll be going to markets and visiting abbeys and hiking and eating and looking for old men playing boules and waiters who can do tricks. I doubt that we'll find anyone who surpasses our friend in Aix, but, after all, the pleasure is in the research as much as the discovery. We will be Internet-free for a few days, so, dear readers, I'll look for some good stories to tell you. And I'll see you back here next Wednesday.