Two Women

 

The café where Rick and I free write was closed for holiday. We drove thru the sunflowers, cornfields and vineyards to the next village and found another café.

The prompt was a woman, late thirties with a long slightly graying braid and an older woman with white hair, obviously at least 20 years older.

Rick's free write Braided Pony Tail

The younger woman was nervous, fidgety, picking at something invisible on her arm, rubbing something on her thigh as she half-listened to the white-haired woman sitting close beside her on the grass terrace of the small village café.

Their posture was defensive, her jeans and army green t-shirt, sans bra, a contrast to the older woman's tailored jacket and designer sunglasses. 

A farm girl perhaps.But she had the left the farm or was about to do so, and her friend was counseling her to carve out a new life without Carl, without grapevines without pigs out the kitchen window.

She was still relatively young, relatively healthy, strong. But she had no marketable skills, so where might she work? A grocery?  A shop downtown? She'd need new clothes to do that and she had no money of her own.

Maybe she would just go back to the farm.After all, the only thing Carl knew was she'd  gone to have coffee with an old friend.

D-L's free write I have to tell you...

 "Have you told her yet?"

"No," she texted and shut down her phone.

Her mother appeared with a tray of croissants and two espressos.

When she was home, she and her mom met here Monday mornings "to start the week," her mom said.

The last time she and Phil had been away for a year. They were nomads, he's told her. They'd spent a year in London and 10 months on a cargo ship going from port to port with home stays in between. "Prison time," Phil called it.

The cafe's garden was a bit unkempt with unmatching tables and chairs. All kinds of flowers, whose names she didn't know, surrounded the terrace. She called them yellow, pink, purple.

She knew her mother wouldn't say anything against her and Phil's next adventure. "There's something I need to tell you," she said.

Her mother leaned forward. She still had her figure and an unwrinkled face. "Me too."

"You first." 

Her mother looked at her hands. "I've the biopsy results. They weren't good."

We use free writes to prime our writing pumps, never mind the pleasure of a good café sit. We write non-stop for ten minutes triggered by the prompt. We make no corrections. The pieces could be polished into a flash fiction piece or even a chapter in a novel. Or we could go back to our writing projects underway.

Buttons and envelope linings

 

BUTTONS

As a child, on rainy days when my usual devices for amusing myself had run out, my grandmother would take out her button box.

For decades, when clothes were no longer wearable, she'd save their buttons in a box that rattled if shaken. 

If we lost a button from any of our clothes, she usually could find its mate within the hundreds of buttons, but if not she would be able to replace them all from her collection. The rest of the buttons from the defunct garment would be added to the collection.

I would use the buttons to make designs on a table top. Sometimes they would become people, buildings, paths...there were so many things those buttons could become.

I have no idea why, but after my retirement to a French village, I suddenly wanted to make baby cardigans. Perhaps it was the lovely woman who owned the yarn shop: in her window were the most fantastic buttons. I became a 20th century Madame Defarge. Only I watched TV in place of executions as I knitted away.

The buttons from the shop had wonderful shapes: apples, ice cream cones, teddy bears and more. My favorite was a set of school items: a tiny book, ruler, crayon... The buttons were a finishing touch on the 30 odd sweaters I produced.

My knitting craze passed. It took a couple of years to find enough babies to receive my offerings. My love of interesting buttons has not, although there are not many opportunities to indulge it.

ENVELOPE LININGS

E-mails do not come with envelope linings as they did when my grandmother was a young woman. Some were plainly colored, but others were decorated with beautiful color combinations and designs.

She removed the linings and kept them in a box the same size as her button box, and I was allowed to use the bits and pieces to make clothes for my paper dolls or mosaics. 

I would be so engrossed that her gentle reminder that it was time to clear the table for dinner, always came as a shock.

TODAY

As an adult I tried to create a button box, but seldom had the patience to replace all the buttons when only one was missing. It was easier to buy more, something that would make my frugal grandmother shake her head.

As for envelope linings, they are rare, sometimes with gift cards, but the most of the bills that arrive are not electronic and do not come with any linings. Now with AI, I can create far better artwork than I could with linings. As for buttons as toys, I can't imagine buttons replacing Barbie, her descendants, Legos or computer games. 

Sigh.

Oppenheimer

 

Whenever people have said, "You've gotta to see this movie, it's wonderful," I am invariably disappointed.

That wasn't the case with Oppenheimer. 

I lived through the dropping of the bomb, although I was too young to remember. I do remember seeing A-bomb tests on television news. 

I remember bomb drills when we hid under our desks at school, heads down, hands over our necks. I wondered what Russian children were doing. Did they really want to kill me and my friends?

The movie was brilliant: acting, filming, writing.

I found a parallel to today's situation only without the technology. Power games among the powerful and those who want to be more powerful are nothing new. The idea of my weapons have to be better than your weapons and I need to do it first, is the same today.

The fear of communism and socialism keeps popping up as a theme as often as it still falls from right-wing politicians of today and with as little understanding now as it was then. 

The way numbers of deaths seem somehow unimportant to those that cause those deaths is the same.

As much as I adore life, I abhor much of humanity that seeks to control and destroy.

52-year-old writer, producer, director Christopher Nolan has produced a thought-provoking masterpiece.

My husband has done a dueling blog on his impressions of the movie. https://lovinglifeineurope.blogspot.com/2023/01/hope-for-near-homeless.html

Free Write Summer Day Camp

 

Every Tuesday morning Rick and I go to our local boulangerie to free write over pastries and tea. Using either something or someone we see as a prompt we free write for ten minutes. If we don't see a human, we will randomly select a line from a book.

We put pen to paper and write whatever comes into our heads. We do not go back and correct or change. If we can't think of a word, we repeat the last one over and over until we get unstuck. 

It's a bit like priming a pump only no water to help us get started on our daily writing.

This week the prompt was two  young women with a group of kids that looked to be around nine. We both thought day camp and began to write.  

I loved Rick's. I felt mine served its purpose but other than that, I wasn't thrilled.

Rick's

He hated it when the teacher called him Guillaume. The other kids would make fun of him, mimicking shooting an arrow from a crossbow at his head. He preferred Will, which was his father's name as well.

But his father was traveling as usual somewhere in the States: New York, Los Angeles, Denver. He couldn't keep track. Will only knew he was rarely home in Geneva.

His mother had stuck him in this summer "camp" which was pretty much like school but hotter so she would be free to have lunch with her girl friends in the city, shop in the high-end boutiques, sipping espresso in a café, having a pedicure or a massage (or more maybe!)

The teachers weren't even teachers, just kid sitters paid to keep him and others busy with crafts and things to read and walks thru the village park and back.

One of these days on one of these walks, Will decided he would make a run for it. On the far side of the park, just up the road there was a bus stop. He knew the timetables. He could catch the 33 before anyone realized where he had gone.

The bus drivers rarely checked fares, and even if they did ask, he was just an 11 year old kid, they wouldn't arrest him, not the son of the head of a UN Agency.

D-L's

Denise didn't want to be here. but she needed the money.

So, here she was with six nine-year-olds working at Patty's summer camp. After a year of teaching algebra to high school students, she wanted to be with her friends in the South of France.

Her friends had rented a caravan in one of those luxurious mobile home parks With a pool, tennis court, horses, gourmet restaurants and snack bars, She couldn't have afforded even her share.

She glanced over her shoulder.

Yup. All six kids were with them.

 

Patty thought maybe she should invited Denise for a glass of wine after all the kids were picked up by their parents. 

If there was one kid left it would probably be Danny. Last week each of his parents forgot him. They claimed they thought it was the other one's job.

Poor Danny. Good thing Lisa took to him, not in a boyfriend and girlfriend kinda way. They both loved painting and shared a lot about it often ignoring the other activities.

Patty didn't mind. This was summer camp, not school. Today she would head them to the bus and the beach along Lake Geneva. She knew they all could swim.

Denise. She wished Denise took more interest in the Danny, Lisa, Anne, Jean, Paul and Julie. 

The day camp had been her idea to fill her summer days between the teaching year. Without she would so miss working with kids.

Barbie, a retrospective

 

I was too old to play with Barbie when she was introduced. My daughter was not. She and her friends had the clothing and accessories spending hours making up adventures and dressing and undressing their dolls.

Part of me was happy that they used their imaginations to come up with all kinds of situations. I liked that Barbie had multiple professions, but I saw no need to buy more Barbies when than the original one could fit into all the clothes and the rest was imagination. I didn't tell them how much study one needed to have some of those jobs.

I hated the commercialism of it all. Barbie needed a house, a car, and tons of stuff. Buy, buy, buy...the job of an American citizen. It was training my daughter to be a consumer.

My daughter did not grow up to be a Barbie-type consumer nor a clothes horse. I'm more of a clothes horse than she is. I guess my discussions on that must have overridden the propaganda.

Now there's a movie about Barbie and when it comes to Europe, I want to see it. It looks like fun.

Years ago there was a Barbie song:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyhrYis509A

Growing up Skipper was a doll that my daughter was given. Two dolls in one. A girl and when you twisted her arm she grew boobs.  As a flat-chested adult, no matter how I twisted my arm, I remained flat chested. 

As a feminist and a non-consumer I shudder at the subconscious  lessons of Barbie and Skipper. At the same time I understand what makes little girls want Barbie and her accessories. A test tube or a microscope might not hold the same appeal as an evening gown. 

I do credit Mattel for coming up with a cross generational product. I abhor the consumerism message. The clothes still intrigue me. Sometimes I wonder how many little girls want to grow up to be Barbie and that makes my feminism side shudder.

kittens

 

My family joked that my brother had put a sign in front of our house says, "Unwed Cat Mothers Welcomed."

Over the years more than one pregnant cat took up residence.

My mother and I would wait until my brother and grandmother were in bed then bring out the box of kittens. We watched their development adoring every minute as they grew more playful.

Most of the time we found homes for them. One time we didn't. My mother and grandmother called the Animal rescue League telling us the kittens would go to a happy farm. My brother and I hid the kittens, which were not found until after the League drivers had disappeared.

We did keep two kittens which we named Splochie, a tough male who brought us birds, mice and once even a snake which he deposited in the fireplace for us to admire. The neighbors heard my grandmother's screams. 

Toughie was a little tiger in markings only and lacked his brother's hunting skills. He did manage one day to capture a feather which he displayed with the same pride that his brother did with his birds and mice.

Today, I'm more of a dog person, but I melt when I look into the eyes of kitten. Unlike my late brother, I don't adopt them. If a cat adopted me? Who knows?

Mushroom love affair

 

Years ago when I walked in the Swiss woods during weekends I often saw families picking mushrooms. Most had wicker baskets making a lovely picturesque scene.

How lovely, I thought. I did not worry that some of the mushrooms would be poison. I knew the local pharmacist  would look at each one pronouncing them safe or not.

In a village where I spent my weekends, there was a group of mushroom lovers that once a year had a mushroom night with all types of mushrooms, good and bad on display. Their dinner was made of mushrooms in various dishes. Yummy.

Growing up I thought there was just one kind of mushroom what is often called Parish mushrooms. I now know there are hundreds. 

The Wikipedia definition "A mushroom ... is the fleshy, spore bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground, on soil, or on its food source."

That doesn't sound all that appetizing, but I've enjoyed them so many ways with pastas, in sauces, marinated,  etc.

 

                                                                                                                  My favorite will always be the morel  

 

Whenever I see any dish made with morels on a restaurant menu, I will order that dish

I have yet to pick my own mushrooms, even knowing they can be certified at my local pharmacy. 

Walking the dog mornings, he passes a giant mushroom, reminding me of one I used to pass coming home from work, only that one was dark brown reminding me how I wanted a piece of chocolate. For all I know neither one was a good or bad mushroom

Writing this blog has made me want morels. Not quite the season. Sigh.

 

The writer Brenda Ainsworth is writing a book about single moms working together. Their daughters all go to the same day care. This chapter is about Ashley Anderson Nickles, a family lawyer. Her daughter is adopted. Chapters about the other characters and Brenda were on June 15, June 21, July 1 and July 8 blogs. The book is available as an e-book and in paperback.

Brenda Ainsworth on Ashley Anderson Nickels

After leaving Maura, I went to the law offices of Anderson, Anderson & Nickels to interview the fourth woman for the book, Ashley Anderson Nickels. It was cold; and it felt like snow even if Halloween was yesterday. Much too early.

One of the advantages of being in my fifties, I have no desire to go out on a Friday night. I can stay in and work on my notes for the book. I’m in my sweats with a cup of tea. I’d rather have a glass of wine, but I don’t like to drink at all when I’m working. Maybe I’m stuffy, but I know what works for me.

I know in Grass it is a beautiful autumn day with blue skies and temperatures that might require a sweater or not depending on the person’s personal thermometer. Well, maybe it’s night. Grass is six hours ahead of us, so it’s night.

I reread my notes.

Ashley’s office is in an old Victorian house, located just off Reading Square, which is almost a postcard of a New England village with its white church at the head of a small green and a cemetery to the left. Only now with a population of some 24,000 it is more than a village. Unlike many towns, whose centers have been decimated by suburban shopping centers and big box stores, it still has an active downtown with small shops as well a couple of chains.

I know Reading. My mother grew up in Reading, where all these women I’m writing about live. She told me about a grave of a child who died and whose name was Jennie something. I’m not sure of the last name. The poem went something like this:

Mother, dear mother

Please don’t cry

The angels are waiting

To carry me on high

I can’t remember the rest. For a long time, I was afraid I would die young until my mother told me that it was in the olden days when children died regularly but with modern medicine it was rare. I thought maybe I might look up the grave, if I’ve time. Maybe I could incorporate it in Maura and Violet’s story, a comparison of medical care today and yesterday. Then again, maybe not. We’ll see how it develops, but I’ll leave a note in my files.

I find when I’m working on a book, I often go down wrong paths. That’s what delete keys are for.

These were some of my thoughts until I found the old Victorian that housed not only Anderson, Anderson & Nickels but a dentist, an architect and a temporary employment agency.

The door, flanked by two panels of red- and green-colored glass squares, isn’t locked. A receptionist sits at an antique oak desk next to the staircase. Without looking up from the computer, she points to the stairs and says, “Second floor.”

As the plaque says under the firm’s name, “Ring and walk in.” I do.

A big central room has doors to the left and right. The walls are painted a soft green and the bay window has dark green curtains. I notice the center of the ceiling has a floral circular plaster rosette from which a glass chandelier hangs. I’m glad I’m not the one cleaning all those glass bibs and bobs.

The waiting area has three comfortable rust-colored chairs and an oak coffee table with up-to-date reading: Economist, Forbes, Ms, Woman’s Day, Consumer Reports, The Boston Globe, Financial Times—something for everyone, I guess.

A woman emerges from the office to the right. To look at her I guess she is somewhere in her 30s, yet I know Ashley is in her early 40s, the oldest of the women. It’s hard to guess age. When someone says, “She looks 50,” I always ask myself what does 50 look like anyway?

I like her blue slacks, red turtleneck and red and blue patterned scarf. Her earrings are interlocking blue and red triangles. She sticks out her hand. “You must be Brenda Ainsworth.”

She offers me coffee, which I decline. I tell her about when I interviewed a U.S. Senator and spilled my coffee all over his papers.

“Scarred you for life?” she asks as she directs me to one of two brown leather couches in her office. One wall has a bulletin board with a child’s drawing and photos of a little girl, most likely the adopted daughter I’ve been told about. The office style cannot be given a name other than warm and cozy. I’ll call it that but hope I can find better words.

“Not an accident. When people, mostly women, come in here for a divorce, they’re upset. The last thing they need is anything impersonal. She points to the fireplace opposite the door. “I even light it, if the day is cold enough.”

When I describe the project to her, she smiles. “Great. If people would only help each other more, the world would be a better place.”

The door opens and an older version of Ashley sticks her head in. “I just made a pot of hot chocolate, and we’ve those cookies I made.”

Ashley points to the coffee table. “No papers, so you can spill it.”

Cookies and hot chocolate. Outside the wind blows a branch against the middle bay window, making a clicking sound. If only the firm that handled my divorce had been like this.

I know I will like this woman more and more as I get to know her.

Rows or circles

 

Any married couple knows that each one brings into the relationship there own way of doing things. 

Rick and I have had our share of conversations on hiccup cures, filing or lack there of, scarves against sore throats (I think this is a European vs. American thingie) and more.

One of the most recent was how to eat corn on the cob. He eats it in rows and I eat it in circles.

Corn when I first moved to Europe was considered only good for cattle. I was spoiled coming from New England. I'd call my daughter telling her the time I'd be home and she should have water boiling. I'd stop on the way home from work and pick or buy freshly picked corn. As soon as I walked in the door, we would shuck it and cook it. Anything else wasn't worth eating.

Having gone through years of corn deprivation combined with the change in corn production for humans in Europe, I changed the way I ate it. I ate it in rounds. I did not add the butter and salt that my husband slathered the corn with.

We decided to do a Facebook survey on how others ate it: rows won out seven to one. 

How we differ in any of these issues will not change the strength of our marriage. It does make for a few giggles.

Corsets, a thing of the past

 

For no logical reason I thought of my grandmother's corsets this morning. 

There was nothing sexy in her corset. They were beige and looked a bit like cardboard. She wore it from getting dressed until she traded it for her nightgown.

All her friends wore them into the 1960s. They wore house dresses and sensible black shoes that tied and had one inch heels. They were only slightly different from men's shoes. It was what older ladies did in my New England hometown.

I'm older now than they were then. No corset for me, not even the sexier ones. I only wear a bra for balance having had one boob lobbed off before it could kill me. At least my underwear is color co-ordinated and feminine.

I can't imagine my grandmother or any of her friends wearing my jeans or my t-shirt saying "I'm wicked Smaht-Boston" or any of my t-shirts.

I'm grateful that I'm not bound by rigid standards or the discomfort of a corset.

3 Photos Free Write

 

Rick goes for our fresh baked croissants before our Tuesday free write. We were extra early to capture the cool before the heat of the day. No one was around so we used a line from a book.

There were three more photographs all from different angles.

My free write

He angled the screen. No longer could he slip photos in his pocket. These weren't even on a laptop he could take.

She wouldn't come into the city to look at them. Of course he could email them to her. Yes, he could do that even if he couldn't guarantee that he would be there when she first saw them: her, the baby and whomever.

The three looked like a family, but not his family.

Whose family?

Who was the man holding his son?

His son?

It had to be his son. The baby looked like him. The man looked like him, too. Both of them had that WASP look, except the man in the photos was so much younger.

When he left his first wife for her, he didn't think the age would make a difference.

The photos disappeared when he shut down the computer without emailing the photos.

Rick's free write

Two of the photos were lurid depicting sexual acrobatics he'd never seen before and certainly had never performed.The third was dark and barely distinguishable, a selfie apparently of the photographer who had shot the gymnastic couple.

He-she was deep in the shadows of the room. Near a door. You could faintly make out the scene of the framework and the glint of the door handle, a flat handle, not a knob.

It was hard to tell, the height of the hooded figure, and certainly not the gender. 

Was the photographer a participant in the macabre threesome's scheme? Or a voyeur? And the selfie was a trophy, proof of presence? 

The woman was sprawled, spread-eagle on the sheets, a pillow over her face. Her partner was gone, the window to the balcony open. 

But there was no exit. That way except for a three-story drop into the hotel's pool plaza. 

Or was the man the selfie-taker? Dressed after the suffocation to lead us to think there were three. And did he leave his phone on the dresser deliberately? A burner phone, to be sure. With three photos to drive the police crazy.

China service

 

I'm not a brand name person. I won't wear anything with a brand name. So my love of Villeroy & Boch china services is not in character.

I fell in love with their Acapulco service at a Maine outlet store. Yes, they would ship to France. I sent it to a friend in Toulouse, for my daughter to pick up then take to the studio I had bought for retirement. She was studying in Germany and she and her friends on vacation were checking out the studio in Argelès-sur-mer.

Later when I was living in Geneva, a friend called to say she was at a Vide Grenier (flea market) in Geneva and saw my dish pattern at one CHF per piece. "Buy it all," I said, delighted I would have the service in my current home and future home.

The manufacturer was Villeroy & Boch, a company founded in 1748. Their sales are just under one billion euros now. What I find interesting is that probably 90% of the time when I see a china design I like or love, it is by Villeroy & Boch. 

We've rented a completely furnished studio in a Swiss village near Geneva. 

I shouldn't be surprised that the dishes, which I adored from the time I first opened the cupboard was (drum roll) Villeroy & Boch.

The Box

 

Damn it. She’d forgotten about this box labelled Stephen’s things.

How long had it been in there in the back of her bedroom closet? Seven? Ten? More?

Stephen had been Jeremy’s friend, something that hadn’t pleased her. He was a troubled kid, staying with a foster family, his sixth, he had said. He was to be moved to the seventh when he brought the box to her asking her to keep it. She had shoved it in her closet and forgotten it.

Now her house was so full of boxes that she had to weave around them to move from room to room. They were mostly filled with books marked, flat, library, charity shops. Condensing a 10-room, three-story house into a two-bedroom apartment was downsizing at its extreme.

The movers would be there tomorrow to complete the transition from her life since she moved there as a bride to that of a widow with a son who had his own family.

Some of the boxes were toys, Jeremy’s toys. Alice, Jeremy’s wife, said she would love to give them to Jeremy’s son or at least go through them before taking them to the Salvation Army store.

The past three months had been full of decisions as she looked at the memories of her life: sell, move, throw out, sell, move, throw out, sell, move…

*****

“I don’t know, Mom. I haven’t seen Stephen for I don’t know, years.” Jeremy said over the phone.

“Could you try and find him. I have a box of his things.”

She heard her son sigh. He sighed a lot lately when she tried to involve him in her move. He had been adamant she shouldn’t sell the house until his father had been dead a year. It went on the market the anniversary of Jim’s death. Two months later she signed the papers.

She was looking forward to her new place. Jeremy thought she’d made the decision to buy it far too quickly, but she knew the moment she had walked in, that it was right for her. It had a fireplace that none of the other ones she looked at did. There was a view of the mountains and stores within walking distance. She finally could get rid of her car. Her pension would not have to be stretched as it was now.

“Throw it out, Mom. I bet Stephen doesn’t even remember he left it.” 

She couldn’t sleep that night, her last night where she and Jim had made love and a few quarrels. She’d nursed Jeremy there. After a nightmare Jeremy would crawl into their bed and snuggle in their safety from monsters. The brass bed would look good in her new flat with the new duvet and pillow covers. She had had plenty of linens, but she wanted the new place to have a slightly different look combined with memories of her old life. Old, new, old, new.

*****

The doorbell rang.

“I wondered it you wanted company as the movers take stuff away.” Martha had been her best friend since they had moved into the house. They had shared the daily annoyances and pleasures from the beginning.

She showed Martha Stephen’s box. “Jeremy says to throw it out, but what if Stephen comes back? What if…?”

“...I would open and see what it’s in it.” Normally, Martha and she would be drinking coffee to talk about things. The coffee pot was packed.

“Isn’t that invading Stephen’s privacy?”

Martha shook her head. “Take it with you. You don’t have to decide now. Maybe if Stephen comes back: or maybe he might not be able to find you anyway.”

*****

Three months later, she was settled. Photos and paintings were where she wanted them, drapes were hung. Once again, she could reach for a pan or a fork and know where it was instead of wondering where she’d put it.

She’d met the couple next door and even babysat one night for them. Lisa, downstairs, another widow about her age and she played tennis twice. She thought about doing an open house to get to know the other tenants in the building, even if that wasn’t normally done.

Jeremy and his family had visited and called the flat “homey.”

The box was in the hall closet neatly tucked under the coats next to the boots. Jeremy had spied it when he dropped off a plant Alice had bought for the balcony. “You still have Stephen’s box?”

“Looks like it.”

“Well, if you won’t open it, I will.”

For a moment she thought of all the thrillers that she read. Maybe it contained a terrible secret of a murder Stephen had committed. He had been a troubled kid after all.

“Mooommm.” Jeremy could still turn the word into a multi-syllable word. He went to the kitchen, found a knife and returned. “You do it or me?”

She took the knife and slit the tape.

Inside was a baseball and a flattened football. One envelope held several report cards with surprisingly good grades from four different school. Stephen’s birth certificate was almost ripped in half and taped back together. There was a photo of a woman holding a baby, maybe his mother. A towel had kept the contents from rattling.

It took her a few minutes to find tape to seal the box.

“I can throw it in the dumpster when I leave,” Jeremy said.

She shook her head as she put it in the guestroom closet. “It doesn’t take up much room.”

 

RIP Jean-Pierre

The Facebook message from a poet friend told me that Jean-Pierre had died after much suffering.

He was my hairdresser, but I had not seen him since before Covid. 

My life is divided between Geneva and Southern France and I have duplicates of doctors, hair dressers, etc.

Jean-Pierre was the best hair dresser I ever had. The appointments were long. It seemed to cut each hair individually and his head massages took away any tension in my life.

His salon doubled as an art gallery. I did attend some of his vernisages (exhibitions) but always took time to look at the painting during an appointment, if I missed the opening.

He hosted one of my book launches.

Whenever I had appointment, we had great discussions in French of books, movies, and any other topic imaginable. One time after talking about The Kite Runner, he left me to buy a copy in English from the bookstore next door.

My daughter, whenever she came to Geneva, always had him cut her hair, and he had clients who came from Amsterdam and Vienna.

It is another memory, wrapped in a box, tied with a ribbon, to be brought out from time to time and examined with a smile.

Marital Grammar Conversations.

 

My husband and I are both writers, journalists, professional communicators. 

Today, as we were riding thru the countryside to the farmers' market in another village, he once again corrected me on how I used less vs. fewer.

I countered on can and may which he confuses. sometimes My grandmother's voice, despite having died over 40 years ago, still echos. "You can go, but you may not."

Then we laughed. "How many couples," he said, "talk about grammar?"

He is right. We do discuss grammar and meaning of words. We will read a well-written sentence to each other or for that matter, a badly written one. A misleading headline or a great one -- that will be shared.

Oh, we have ordinary conversations too: what's for lunch, the dog needs to go out, have you seen (fill in the blanc), did you call (fill in the blank), wanta watch something tonight...

Sometimes our conversations are more serious about our work, budget, daughters. But overall, the grammar ones are more fun.

 

Banning Books NOOOOOO!!!!

 

Peyton Place was my first banned book...banned by my mother. I was 15. I read it cover to cover, snuck from the bookcase and was overwhelming disappointed. What was the fuss about?

Although my senior year of high school, we read the anti-Semitic Merchant of Venice, we were forbidden to read Othello. Only one person in my class ended up with a biracial marriage.

At university a Catholic schooled girl told the professor that her religion wouldn't allow her to read some of the books on the required course. He said, fine, she could either withdraw or flunk. She must have read them because she graduated.

I never banned anything for my daughter. From seventh grade her school gave kids a list of 100 books in June. They were expected to read 10 over the summer. A majority of the books on that list have turned up on various banned lists in southern schools. She wished the Old Man and the Sea, which she thought horribly boring, was banned from her required reading list.

The new wave of book bannings is at best terrifying. Many of the books are classics and/or well loved that add to the child's knowledge. It is enforcing ignorance.

At the moment, the banning list contains more fiction. Next will there be non-fiction? Many text books are now eliminating events that put the U.S. in a bad light. One text I saw had drawings of happy slaves but no hanging blacks. 

Groups like Mothers for Liberty is a fast-growing group with one of those Orwellian titles that is the opposite of what it does. Each of those women should have the right to protect their child from knowledge, but they have no right to make that determination of other people's children. 

Nor does any governmental body have the right to ban information from its citizens. Granted there is misinformation that people are exposed to, but if a citizen is only exposed to one side of the story from childhood on, they will lack the tools to find the truth.