In the 1970s, there was a summer where my housemates Bill, Susie and I did was work on the renovations of the house during the weekends. My daughter was spending most of the summer in Ocean Grove, NJ with Susie's mom.
Then a call came from our friend Michel in Paris, saying he had to come to the U.S. and would we be free to have him as a guest. The weekend was the same as the concert. Of course we would.
We had met Michel 24 hours after moving into Wigglesworth a few years before. To say the house was a handyman's nightmare was elevating its condition. Picture a sawed-through load-bearing beam, multi layers of paint on marble fireplaces and holes in the floor. It had taken a crew of several Harvard students to sanitize it before we moved in.
When we bought it on a whim, we'd seen the potential and a price 25% of the going rate in the area for houses.
After work Susie and I were waiting for Bill to come home. We heard the front door open. "I've brought Michel home for dinner," Bill announced.
Susie and I looked at each other. Not only were the cupboards bare, there were no cupboards and even if they had been moving boxes made access to the stove and sink impossible.
"Restaurant," we both said.
Later when we visited with Michel and his family in Paris, he admitted that he had felt we were not an average family in an average American home.
Fortunately, there was another ticket available for the concert.
My parents, who were spending the summer with her stepfather in Winchester as a respite from Florida heat, called. "Diane is coming." My sister was bringing her bridegroom from California where they lived. It was the same weekend.
Then my Aunt Evelyn decided to throw a family party to welcome the newly married couple.
Friday we picked Michel up at Logan airport on Friday night and took him to dinner at the Boston Union Oyster House. He noticed our progress on the house.
On Saturday my sister and her bridegroom showed up at our door. Her husband, Jim, was a Santa Barbara cop. We took them to our finished library that doubled as our living room. Three of the four walls were covered floor to ceiling with books.
When Jim found out that Bill was an M.I.T. graduate, he said, "I can't believe it. I've met a real intellectual. He would say it many more times during the day accompanied by head shakes. Maybe we could have put Bill in a zoo cage labelled "Boston Intellectuals" for Jim to study.
We all made our way to Weymouth where the family was gathered.
My Aunt Evelyn glomed onto Michel immediately speaking French to him. It had been her mother tongue as a young girl before moving to Massachusetts from Nova Scotia. Michel complimented her that she remembered so much. He said nothing about the difference in Canadian and Parisian French.
I barely had time to introduce Michel and say hello to my many aunts, uncles, cousins and spouses before we had to leave for the concert. Cohasset, where the concert would be, is not that far from Weymouth.
Since the ticket we had bought for Michel was in another area of the audience, Bill took that one. Michel settled into the Bill's seat with Susie and me.
Johnny sang our favorites, "A boy named Sue" and "Cadillac One Piece at a Time" and more.
On Sunday morning, after a leisurely breakfast at home (our kitchen had been functional for quite some time since Michel's first visit) we took him back to Logan.
Sunday evening we were sitting quietly talking about the weekend. All July of August every weekend was devoid of plans. One weekend, a whole summer's worth of activities had arrived, anyone which could have taken an entire weekend to enjoy.
Still, it had been a fun 72 hours.
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