The French Diaries

NOUS SOMMES ICI!!!
J'aime aller à Paris!

Au revoir, les États-Unis.
Paris, Paris nous sommes ici!!!!!!!!

Oh-la-la et oui, oui, OUI!!!!!!!

St. Chappelle et Notre Dame,

a little rain

along the Seine

Croissants and crepes, cafe au lait

a little shopping along the way;

all in all,it's been a very good day

as we enjoy la belle français!!!!!

PARIS!! 

Eiffel Tower to the top

Champs Elysee just to shop

Arc de Triomphe, Ferris wheel ride

stop at cafe  riverside

Tour the jardins de Tuilleries

...stroll the streets of old Parie

tomorrow we head for Normandie

and then it`s off to the Loire Valley

all in all it`s been another good day

as we still enjoy la belle français!!!!!!!!!

NORMANDIE

The hallowed beaches of Normandie;

The graves at American Cemetery,
For 9000 soldiers who shed their blood

Perfect white crosses solemnly stood

Row by row; side by side

...Each soldier's fate rests by the tide.

The price of freedom has been bought

By every bitter battle fought

and as those fallen warriors slept,

I stood beside their graves and wept.

LOIRE VALLEY

I think that I was meant to be

A princess in the Loire Valley

Stroll the jardins of Chanonceaux

Waltz my way through each Chateau

Amboise and Blois both suit me fine

...Moats and towers, boats and wine

Yes, I could live the Chateau life

If I were born a monarch's wife...

but wait; I think some lost their head

and all the rest are now long dead

so perhaps it's best to be

simply little bourgeoise me!

VERSAILLES

Versailles! Il est un grand château!

Il est vieux et il et beau!

Fountains flowing

Gilt is glowing

Jardins growing

Everywhere.....

Louis lived large and he lived fine;

loved to dance and wine and dine;

Mirrored halls

And Painted walls

Courtly balls--

Life had no cares.....

But when the people had no bread

Marie said "Give them cake instead!"

"We have no cake!"

the people cried

as many of them

starved and died:

Discontent

was in the air.

The opulence was overwhelming;

Revolution soon was swelling

"Off with their head!"
the people said

and soon the monarchy was dead;

It was only fair.

Versailles! The people rule once more

le grand chateau! Louis est mort;

Marie et les enfants aussi

Le monarchie; il est fini!

The fate of all is history

vanished in thin air.

AU REVOIR!
So now our time in France is through
Au revoir cafes, the Seine, the Louvre,
the crusty breads, the cheese, the wine,
the chocolaterie so tres divine
the chateaux and boulangeries
the croissants and pasteseries
I'll miss the Paris air at night
the city all illlumined in light

The cafe cremes ,the cobbled streets
 the crepes-- so hot and light and sweet!
Au revoir, Paris! I'll come again
and stroll once more along the Seine
but until the day I do
I'll smile when I remember you......

Wanted: one old-fashioned shoe dog

     Whatever happened to good ole dogs that just ate shoes? That's all I really ever wanted-- an adorable, scruffy, floppy little puppy that chewed up my slippers, perhaps an occasional pump or two, maybe an old sneaker. You know the type, the ones you can laughingly swat on the head with a newspaper, saying "Bad dog, bad dog," as they guiltily look up at you with a fuzzy slipper hanging out of their mouth. But, oh no, not for us a mere shoe-eating dog. We had to have poodles. Standard poodles. Big, smart, finicky, fussy dogs that think they are too good to feast on  something you would solely put on your feet. These purebred types, they go for the high ticket items....furniture, rugs, accessories, appliances...expensive things that you can't just run out and replace when one gets destroyed. Poodles are tricky. They think about the damage they are inflicting. They want it to hurt. They want to max out your credit card when you have to replace the latest project they've gnawed to pieces.  I think it's a power play, a poodle ploy just to let us simple humans know those crafty canis familaris are really in control, that they are smarter than your average homo sapien.    
     We knew this about poodles. We understood this about poodles. We worried about this with poodles. And yet, we still went out and brought home poodles. Poodles!  Knowing full well that our home was going to be invaded by an animal with an attitude. Not only that, the attitude was a fur-wrapped termite the size of  a small cow.  Gus, Rhett, Sugar Pie, Auggie....a pestiferous poodle pattern  repeated over and over and over and over for the last twenty years. It was the eighth wonder of the world that we still had a house standing after decades of these poodles with a penchant for period pieces.

      Our last poodle had been the largest and hungriest so far, chomping his way through every room in the house.  The late, great Auggie was eighty-five pounds of curly white wool, innocent as a lamb but with fangs that could easily rip through a sideboard. He preferred mahogany over walnut, Chippendale over Queen Anne. He left a path of destruction that often left me in tears, and over the course of  his puppy stage,  he managed to devour eight dining room chairs, three oriental rugs, two legs on the breakfast room set, and an antique card table that had belonged to my grandmother. Miraculously, he survived his teething period only because he could run faster than I could catch him and because  he was smart enough to hide until I had cooled off. After he finished cutting his canines, he settled into an affectionate and lovable member of the family, and I dearly loved him, even though I always eyed him suspiciously around my mahogany. Sadly, in March, he suddenly died from an autoimmune disease, an illness I believed was caused by ingesting pounds and pounds of wood splinters and carpet fibers.  My husband deeply mourned the loss of his big, ravenous poodle, and to fill the void left behind by eighty-five pounds of  lumbering dog, we  decided to surprise him with a shaggy haired, thick-snouted, red -headed poodle puppy that we fittingly named "Alf."   We quickly discovered, however, that unlike his television namesake,  this "Alien Life Form" did not have a taste for mere kitties.  He preferred, much like his poodle predecessors,  household accessories.
      Pillows, picture frames, willow baskets, tilt-top tables, porcelain vases, computer cords ....all were fair game in the mind of this poodle. Alf had only been part of the family for a month, just long enough to settle in and take inventory, when he started munching his way through the house.  From living room to dining room to den to study, across the mid-section, through the back, and down the center; bedrooms and bathrooms had all been inventoried and invaded and tasted and sampled as he began to eat his way from one end to the other. I bought chew toys and squeaky toys and busy bones and crunchy treats, but they did  little more than take the edge off his appetite for timber, and fresh little teeth marks began appearing on the edges of furniture. He soon expanded into more than just the wooden legs of all my tables and chairs. He was a renaissance dog, with a growing taste for art and furniture and accessories, and a curiosity for even the more mundane of household items.
       He attacked the fountain on the front porch with a regular fury, dove headfirst into all the toilets to splash water everywhere, played leapfrog on the sofas,  left slobbery noseprints investigating every window in the house, nibbled off the scant remaining fringe on my rugs, and  once almost made an international call while chewing on the cordless phone. His ambitious antics only served  to work up an appetite, a furious craving to chew on something solid and substantial.  I  tried to sabotage his tastes and train him to eat shoes, leaving slippers and loafers and sandals lying all over the house, thinking surely a stinky sneaker or a well-used hunting boot would get his attention.  But alas, this doggie would not bite! Not a single sole had been so much as sniffed. Just like Auggie, he was purely a house dog.


Guilty as charged!

       And so, he continued to gobble his way through the house, each day finding some new and tasty tidbit to inhale.  This morning, for breakfast, he devoured a silk braided tassel that was hanging from the skeleton key of my walnut corner cupboard.  As a mid-morning snack, he polished off two needlepoint pillows-- a matching set of Whippets that  had proudly perched on the Queen Ann wing chairs in the living room. I discovered his little feast by following a mysterious trail down the hall, a Hansel and Gretel trail of white pillow stuffing and fluff, a trail which led right to the tip of his guilty little snout. The poor, demolished, decapitated whippets lay dead on the floor, entrails spilling onto the rug, bits of fluff and thread scattered nearby.  Alf merely looked up at me as if to say, "They didn't even taste all that great. Grab me a footstool, will you? I'm still hungry."
     My days of chasing dogs were long over. I had willingly brought the rascal into my home; I had purchased the pup with my own hand-written check.  It had been my decision, and mine alone, to surprise my husband (the same man who had recently announced there would be no more poodles) with a new puppy.  I knew what I was doing. I knew what the consequences would be, and that made me almost as guilty as Alf.
       So I simply picked up the mauled pillows and tossed them in the trash with a sigh. I patted him behind the ears and gently said, "Bad dog, bad dog," as I headed to the closet for the vacuum cleaner and a bone.

The days of vines and roses.....

      You can approach life in one of two ways: either with a sense of gloom, despair, and sadness or with a sense of humor and a feeling of relief that at least you've made it this far.  Life can come at you hard and fast, but if you face all the challenges with a little laughter, it certainly eases the strain.  Things happen that are out of our control, and it always feels like once that downward spiral of tragedy starts, it gains momentum and gets bigger and bigger as it tries to pull you down with it. The only way to survive is to find something strong and steady to cling to, and with a sense of hope and awe, a lot of prayer and a little laughter, you can get through it and start the uphill climb toward normal once again.
     For our family,  the downward spiral started on Memorial Day.  Within a period of two weeks, my mother had fallen and broken her hip, a close friend's son had died, our beloved Aunt Virginia had gone home to glory, and french class was in full swing. It was, may I please say, a bit stressful, but through it all, we held on to our faith and found peace and hope and reasons to laugh.
     The broken hip was just the beginning, occurring on the first day of class. On this particularly hot May afternoon, my mother decided to do a little weeding and deadheading while waiting for us to arrive home from school. Dad had warned her to stay out of the 98 degree heat and to wait until our return, but when he fell asleep in his lift-off recliner, she slipped out of the house and headed to her flower bed. 
      Things were going well in the garden until she spied a muscadine vine strangling her climbing Queen Elizabeth rose. The woody vine had crept up the arbor and was clinging to the thorny canes of the old rose, and if it didn't come down, the rose would soon be consumed by the invasive plant.  Mama wrapped her hands around the muscadine, determined to free her delicate rose, and with a determined yank, gave it a pull.  It was a game of tug-o-war between Mama and the vine, both sides holding on and pulling for dear life, but that sinewy old vine finally snapped, and when it did, it shot Mama back like a pebble out of a sling shot.  She hit the ground hard, with a solid thud, and realized right away that the vine was not the only thing that had snapped.
   For two hours, Mama lay stranded in the hot Carolina sun, desperately calling "Help!" When we finally found her, it was obvious that the ambulance ride to the hospital would not be for a quick patch-up job. 
      As they loaded her onto the back board, I told the ambulance drivers what had happened, that Mama had gotten into the muscadine vine and taken a bad fall.
     "Has she been drinking for long?" they asked.
      I was puzzled for a moment, and then started laughing.
      "VINE! I said muscadine VINE, not WINE!"
       I could tell they didn't believe me until I picked up the broken tendril of the vine and shook it under their noses.
      It was a long ride to the hospital, and an even longer twenty-four wait until surgery.
       Let me tell you something. Post-anesthesia conversations can be pretty darn funny.  When they wheeled Mama back into the room after her hip replacement, she was  in la-la land and feeling fine, a much needed break after the last twenty-four hours of pain she had endured.
    "Mama," we all started at once, "Mama, you're back in the room. You did fine in surgery. You have a brand new hip!"
    "Well, that's nice." she murmured. "Isn't that wonderful?" Those were definitely NOT the same words she had been muttering pre-surgery.
      We decided to have a little fun while she was in her post-surgical land of delusions, and in that sick way of finding release in the midst of trauma, we also needed to laugh.
     "Mama, we all wanted them to put in a gold hip, but Daddy said that was too expensive. Said he'd only pay for plastic, it would work just fine, but we made him splurge for titanium"
      "Well,  sounds just like him,"  she declared, having a sudden moment of clear-headedness in her anesthetic delusion.
     For the next several days, we travelled with her around the world, visiting strange creatures, venturing through magical doors and boxes and windows, and talking to invisible beings. It was a side of Mama we had never seen, a loopy, drunken, foggy-headed version, and although it was a little disturbing to listen to her drug-induced ramblings, it was in a weird sense also quite funny. We encouraged her anesthetic delusions with great gusto, and with a cathartic sense of sick humor, laughed our way back to normal. It was the only way we knew how to survive as we helped Mama heal, buried loved ones, and still made it to french class each day.
     She quickly bounced back, became the queen of rehab, and within two weeks was back home and safely ensconced in the matching lift-off recliner that Dad had purchased for her while she was in the hospital.  Side-by-side, they could now sit together and look out the window at a garden that had been completely purged of all vines and climbing tendrils, a vase of Queen Elizabeth roses sitting prettily on the table beside them.
   
   
    

     

Oui! Oui! OUI!!!!!!!!!

    WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG FOR THE FOLLOWING INTERNATIONAL NEWS FLASH.....
REPORTING FROM SOUTH CAROLINA.....

     Oui! Oui! OUI!!!!!!!!!!!
     Our gal did it!! La classe française était terminée et qu'elle n'est pas morte! The french class is over and she did not die!! Not only that, but she passed the exit exam on her first attempt and aced the class. After three semesters of angst, drama, tears, and fears; after sleepless nights and countless hours in study jail; after all the agony and pain; she made it! Not only did she make it, she crossed the finish line with an "A" for the semester and a passing grade on all four sections of the exit exam. Our gal can now speak, read, write, and listen en francais. Il est fini!!

               I think that gal needs une petite treat for such a feat, and so we're headin' to Pa-rieeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  Merci me, who'da thunk it? Après trois semestres difficiles de classe française, Paris, nous voilà!!!!!!!
     Yes ma'am, we am, avec un grand "Ooh-la-la"..... the  college gals are going international.
      Ain't life tres grande?
   

Mary Lapsley and her french professor