Another ride with Monsieur Kamalt

I press the buzzer to open the door as the taxi pulls up at rue August Blanche. Monsieur Kamalt jumps out. He is dressed in avocado pants with a matching print shirt that would do well in Florida. His hand is out stretched. I notice he has cut his hair short, but his beard is still long. As always he is immaculate.

“Comment-allez vous, Madame Nelson?” he asks and thrusts my suitcase and computer in the trunk and when I tell him well he asks, “Gare du Lyon? Charles de Gaulle? Orly?”

When I say the train station he asks if I am going to Geneva or the South of France. I tell him the later.

He makes sure I am seated before shutting my door and we are off riding along the Seine. For the first time I notice he has a GPS and he tells me he always has it, but doesn’t always use it. There is a sense of relief. I don’t like to be unobservant.

I half watch our progress, half watch the pretty houses as we drive through Neuilly, the home of Sarkozy at least until he moved last month into the presidential palace. Monsieur Kamalt is not the least happy with the results of the French election – too pro American, too pro Israel, he says of the new president.

Again we discuss the situation in the Middle East. He asks how long the American people will put up with Bush? I cannot answer that. I sigh when I think of Cindy Sheehan saying people have more interest in American Idol than what is happening with the war.

He asks me when I will go to the US again, and it is too complicated to explain that I don’t want to go until Habeus Corpus is restored, although I will if there’s an emergency with loved ones.

Nor do I show him the Amnesty International map cut from Le Bleu Matin that has countries with a long list of human rights abuses colored purple. The US is purple. With the map is a list by country of which abuses each country indulges in and the US has one of the longest. I am too ashamed. Becoming Swiss has not alleviated my guilt of not doing enough to protect the democracy that gave me the strength and the skills to be whom I am today. These are not things I want to share with my cab driver no matter how lovely he is.

He asks me about my friend with whom I staying. Why isn’t she married, he asks. I explain she has been too busy with her studies. He thinks she should be married and says he will look for someone. He asks as always about my daughter, who he took to the airport a couple of Christmas’s ago, aware that he was transporting the thing most precious in my life. I only tell him she is still working in human resources.

We scuttle around the Arc de Triumph. The route is well known, not just from these cab rides, but from so many Paris visits.

On other cab trips he has called friends and relatives to introduce me, but it is so early there is almost no traffic, and friends and relatives are either in bed for just making their coffee.
We promise our next conversation will be about what Sarkozy has done as he pulls into the train station.

He hands me my suitcase and computer. “My computer is like your taxi, we cannot work without our tools of trade,” I tell him and he laughs.

He doesn’t say au revoir but A bientôt, and I get final wave as I tug my luggage toward Le Train Bleu for my petit dejeuner and to wait for my train. There is a comfort in the personal.

Long, long days in Paris

Although it was after 10 at night the red colour of the tiled Paris roof top across from my friend’s apartment was still visible in the late spring evening light. We’re in pajamas watching a DVD but the mood is so different from the December night when on another visit we drew the curtains from the spitting snow cocooning ourselves inside albeit it with a another DVD.

We are coming up to the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Long days create extra energy, night seems never to come and the desire to sleep disappears with the dark.
Dawn is for going to the beach long before the swarms of children with pails and their carping mothers appear.

I will head to Argelès tomorrow, to be there for the arrival of the Danes, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Dutch and the French from the North, people I greet each summer. We spend the long nights going to street dances, outdoor concerts or sometimes just bringing our chairs onto the narrow street to talk, perhaps with champagne, perhaps with wine, olives from local trees, some black, some green, some stuffed with anchovies pulled from the sea and sold in the next village from anchovy outlets. Others will have the nut still inside. And there may be saucisson cut in red little circles. And if we don’t nibble too much there will be decisions on which outdoor café to eat or to retreat to our own places.

For 400 years Catalan women have been sitting in the same spots it as part of their daily lives, snapping beans as they gossip and watching their children and grandchildren play up and down the street. For them it is not an escape from winter lives someplace else. Still the sitting, the talking nourishes our spirits for when we are back in our respective countries and once again facing the cold short days.

We will once again have a bonfire as the flame is brought down from the top of Canigou, the highest mountain in the area, for the fête de St. Jean celebrating the solstice. There will be music and dancing until the drums arrive and the men with fireworks shooting from their backs as they dance frantically to the beat of the drums around the dying bonfire.

The weather has been strange this year. When I left Geneva in April I was searching for my lightest clothes, but when I came back in May I reached for sweaters and woolly socks.

Today it is raining, scuttling my plans to wander an area of Paris I had missed but spied from a cab on my last trip to this flat. Instead I will treat myself to lunch at one of the neighbourhood restaurants and buy the makings of chicken soup to feed my ill hostess who stumbled off to work this morning despite it all.

There is an Arab fruit and vegetable hall with bins of bunches of fresh parsley, carrots, onions, eggplants and the apricots each prettier than the next, full of juice. The last of the cherries have been brought up from the south. Yesterday I began to establish a relationship by using the few words of Arabic I know. It worked with the internet café owner whom I cultivated on other visits and now we chat each time I time I come in. Even in a city in Paris it is possible to create a small village feeling. At the green grocer my Mahaba brought a smile that was not given to the three women in front of me even though I explained I really only know a few words of politeness.

When I serve the soup to my hostess, she will tell me I shouldn’t have and we will put on another DVD as in the window behind the TV set the sun lingers late into the evening as we eat.

Hair cuts out of the ordinary

My hair dresser is not your average hair dresser. He is so good that my daughter considers a cut and head massage a necessity on any trip to Switzerland. For many years his salon was also an art gallery as well and the discussion while he cut my hair were about music, art, events in Geneva, my writing, etc. In fact I even held a book reading and apero in the salon. My writing group used the salon to launch one of their anthologies.

Yesterday I was in for a much overdue cut and relaxed. The conversation was much about reading. He asked me if I could read in French. I said yes and read a book in that language at least once a month to every six weeks. We went on to other topics often breaking into laughter. He has a silly sense of humour and appreciates mine as well.

Finished I used the loo prior to paying. When I came back, he had disappeared. Although I was tempted to pay his brother who is co-stylist in the salon, I waited.

Jean-Pierre rushed in with a bag from Payot, the bookstore next door. He handed it to me.

“Un cadeau,” he said. A gift of one of the books we were discussing written about Kabul. I promised him a report (oral not written) for my next hair cut.

I could find hairdressers less expensive. Some might be almost as good. None would make a hair cut an experience and I doubt if I would find one who adds to my library.

A must listen

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/video_popups/pop_vid_kingston1-1.html

Toilet Paper Memories

I once had a guest who used three rolls of toilet paper a day to my one a week. It is not that I begrudge toilet paper to my guests nor do I belong to the Sheryl Crow school of one-sheetness, but I never understood how anyone could use so much, considering they she was out most of the day.

The opposite extreme was an uncle once who explained how to use toilet paper frugally and even sat on the closed toilet seat to explain how much to tear off and he held the paper on his knee as he shared his wisdom and until he could put it back on top of the roll for the next person, a true non wasteful New England Yankee.

When I was in fourth grade, a friend of my mother’s went to Europe. She made a presentation to my class with slides of war-torn Europe, telling us how lucky we were to live in such a rich place (now the standards of living are reversed). She had a roll of French toilet paper that reminded us of cardboard. For years I heard that about how much better American toilet paper was than that the Europeans had to suffer with.

In the early 60s as a new bride, living in a room in Stuttgart, our landlords provided newspaper in place of toilet paper. Although we wanted to use American paper bought from the PX, the said it would clog the toilet. Needless to say the toilet was clogged enough with the newspaper. My husband and I located a new place to live as soon as we could find one.

In Geneva my housemate and I use toilet paper as is needed, but when I returned home this week I discovered she had purchased some of the most unusual toilet paper that I have ever seen. The back ground is small light, light grey pinpoints of colour with white daisies embossed. Laura Ashley easily could have been the designer, if she were still alive. The paper would work as well for a wall paper in a room with a few red accessories perhaps. We will continue to use it however, for the purpose it is intended, rather than for redecoration.

However, it is strange to think of the pleasure looking at pretty toilet paper can give as well as give rise to memories of toilet paper long gone into unnamed sewers.

Ten Little Indians

Ten little Indians
Laying on a bed
One rolled over
Nine little Indians…

I’ve song the child’s backward counting song since nursery school, on Rainbow bus trips, with my own daughter (although she often asked me not to sing or sing softly). Always I pictured each Indians almost as Fisher-Price figures with a black Dutch-boy cut, leather head band, single feather, different primary colour shirt and pants and for some strange reason bright round black shoes.

Only recently did I take it as a metaphor for life and death. The older we get the more often one little Indian rolls over never to be seen again. How do the other little Indians feel? Would Indian number 2 cut back on his cholesterol? Would Indian 5 and 3 jockey for a place to keep his place on the bed a bit longer? The song doesn't go into any of that.

Then were the Indians always on that bed. Did perhaps Indian 2 come from another bed? How did the loss of Indian Number 6 get back to those on the other bed – smoke signals? How did the Indians from the former bed react to the news? Did they rush to comfort Indian 2 or shouldn’t No 2 go to the first bed to comfort those left there. Can smoke signals comfort as much as hugs?

So many questions from a childhood song. So few answers.

2 Euro entertainment

If my first day in Argelès was the vide grenier, it was appropriate that the last before returning home to Geneva, a brocante at the Château Valmy. I never really appreciated antiques that much until a woman I knew showed me some of the more interesting things. She could have had a bumper sticker that said, I break for antique stores.

I should have walked to the Château instead of spewing more pollutants into the environment. It is only about 20 minutes on foot and I would have been able to appreciate the flowers and vineyards on route, but I hadn’t realised that there were sidewalks all the way. Next time.

Those who know my anti-shopping stance may wonder, why I did this…

Well having trailed my friend through fairs, shops and auction rooms, I had learned a lot. Combine that with several BBC programs on antiques, I have learned a bit. So each time I go, I “buy” stuff for my imaginary farm house.

My purchases this time included

• A wooden trunk with all edges covered in iron to hold linens
• A Napoleon daybed for my office in case I have an overflow of guests
• A Scandinavian style pitcher and glasses in a triangle shape coloured chocolate and mint
• A five toothpick thick silver stick with a retractable ball and little silver threads to debubble champagne (the woman explained for people who can’t take the bubbles)
• A geometric paining of lavender in a style that could have been done by an offsping of Gauguin if his genes were mixed with Van Gogh
• A red corner cabinet painted with half moon laughing faces perfect for storing CDs
• Three book cases with light green and stencilled painted cabinets under the shelves for my library

As I left the brocante, a man with a hooded falcon on his leather-gloved wrist, talked to one of the ticket takers. Below the Mediterranean was grey against the grey sky.

For 2 Euros I had two hours of entertainment. No worry about deliveries. No worry about rearranging anything. No worry about credit card bills coming in. One of the great advantages of furnishing my imaginary house.

Little girls in white

Outside the church little girl after little girl shifted in place or ran to greet friends. All were dressed in white. They were leggy in the way that young girls are. Parents stood around before the service. Unlike many Sundays the worshipers were not predominantly grey haired, although the regulars were there with their canes and twisted backs.The bells began to peel. Deductive reasoning tells me it is First Communion combined with Pentecôte services.

More than soft soap

People who know me, know I chafe against mass production as well as things that have to be shipped distances. Now I can buy soap made locally -- good soap, beautiful soap.

Last summer at the beach crafts market, my New York friend and I came across a young woman who designed and made her own soap. My friend bought me a beautiful blue square.

That same young woman has opened a Savonerie in the village. The soaps are in all different shapes and colours, including a tube shape in the Catalonian yellow and flecked with orange. For those who want to give an assortment as a gift, there are choices of baskets. Or it is possible to buy just one for personal use.

Something as simple as washing my hands, now has become a pleasure, not just for the beauty of the soap, but the sense that I know who made the soap, what her mother looks like, where she went to school.

It puts the personal into what before was impersonal.

Sweeping up the Sahara

The wind blew hard. Cars left parked outside are dust covered.

Few cars have garages, which could almost make New York or London real estate look cheap. Well not totally. Some of the Catalans living in several-centuries old houses use their ground floor, which once housed cattle and chickens, to park their cars. But none of the transplants from the north of France nor other countries would waste the space on a car when it could be a kitchen or living room.

The dust has entered my flat leaving a fine coat on my sideboard, dishes, table, mantle and floor. I dust. I sweep it up, realising that it has travelled across the Mediterranean and I wonder if it once was stepped on by a camel. Had a Bedouin put up a tent over it and sat there with his family drinking tea and talking about the next day's plan? Or had it just sat there undisturbed until the wind picked it up for its journey?

No matter what happened to it before its journey, it had no control at all of its destiny. In a way it is like humans who can make little decisions, but are unable to change the direction of a hurricane, a downsizing company firing them, or a nation deciding to drop bombs on their home.

Sand doesn’t talk. I wish it did. There is much I would like to talk to it about.

Ben & Jerry

When I was first in Switzerland my flat mate and I discussed what we missed about the States excluding, of course, people we loved. That was a given. It usually came down to food. Things like Dr. Pepper and Oreos became valued like fine jewels.

Now approaching two decades later it still becomes a question of food. I often think of

Dunkin Donuts raisin bagels

Dunkin Donuts blueberry muffins

Stouffer’s welsh rarebit

Among other things. My daughter used to bring the muffins whens he flew from Boston to Geneva despite being teased about fear of hunger by the attendants, and a friend arrived once complete with an assortment of donuts that were gobbled up with joy.

And there was a time when having an email from a friend who talked about eating a blueberry muffin in her library with a cup of tea when an overwhelming wave of homesickness hit. I shared the feeling with one of my team. She went home and had her mother bake me blueberry muffins to make me feel better.

And it just isn’t stateside food. I never arrive at Cornavin without going directly from tracks to the sushi place and then to pick up taillaiul bread for my breakfast the next morning. Filet of perche from Lake Geneva is usually on my menu within 24 hours, and a fondue shortly after. I also think the best paprika potato chips are a Swiss brand.

But then when I return to France, I head for the fresh fruit and veggies. There is something about the Southern French sun that kisses goodness and creates produce where flavour explodes in my mouth.

So imagine my pleasure when doing errands when I saw a café with the sign “Ben et Jerry’s ici” Memories of the Boston ice cream wars came flooding back. Walks after dinner to have khalua cream with oreo mix-ins, or stopping for an ice cream after an evening class at BU.

How long did it take me to buy a cup? As long as it took me to dig out my Euros.

Waking up and smelling the coffee

Monday morning. The 5:30 Hardtalk was an interview with the president of Ikea. I have fresh melon and a cup of tea and I’ve finished my tweaking of Triple Deckers for the day and am on to my column for Writers Forum. It is due today, and although I wrote it a week ago, I want to give it a look-see now that some time has passed to tweak that as well.

Through the window comes a wonderful, wonderful smell of freshly brewed coffee. I can’t drink coffee because it makes me feel as if ants have moved into my skull, but that doesn’t destroy the pleasure of the wonderful aroma.

I recently bought coffee for my coffee-drinking friends from the tea and coffee shop down the street. They roast and ground the beans there, so just walking by produces wonderful sniffs.

My friends get the Guatemalan beans (sadly not fair trade) but I also asked for this amount of their cheapest beans. I held out my cupped hands.

Those beans now sit in a small crystal dish with a tea candle in the middle. My ode to coffee.

I want the main section in English

Guilt and Trees

The planet is in crisis and I know that every bit of electricity I use is destroying life. I know every second a car engine runs the planet is in more danger.

Now although I can reduce driving to a minimum and make sure no electricity is wasted, I am just one person.

I also know flights represent a real danger to the planet, but I do need to go to Calgary this summer on business. The plane will go whether or not I am on it but that doesn’t mean that I am innocent of being part of the problem while I am in the air.

Then I read how Desjardins Group is planting 97,000+ trees to balance the energy used by their members to attend their annual meeting.

I made the decision that I will plant a tree for every flight I take. So I am sending to messages to friends with land – so many have apartments – that if they let me know I will buy them a tree.

Will my trees save the planet??? Absolutely not, but then again, it may balance just a tiny, tiny bit of the damage I am doing.

So friends who read this and want a tree, let me know.

The 38 hour break

I decided to take a 38 hour break from my “work activities” although I don’t consider them work because I have so much fun doing them. Producing this article gave me a sense of pride www.thewip.net/contributors/2007/05/a_chair_can_be_a_powerful_symb.html my tiny, tiny part against the violence in the world. However, I decided to shut the computer off for 36 hours which meant…

• No emails
• No writing for thewip.net
• No working on Triple Deckers
• No editing
• No articles for Writers Forum
• No emails to senators or congress men

Now despite all these things that I love doing, there are other things I take pleasure and do regularly, but I thought I would revel in them so for 36 hours I…

• Did a café sit with a poet/play writer that I bumped into in a book store
• Knitted
• Watched three movies (see knitting, multi-tasking) while I still have Canal Plus
• Ambled to the beach taking in the scent of the flowers that I can identify as pink, blue, purple, yellow
• Had sesame encrusted salmon with a hollandaise nappe at La Reserve as I watched white caps dance on the water
• Took a long nap
• Read, read, read

Now, I do realise that there’s so much in life I love doing, that maybe I need to compartmentalize a bit…or not.

Good News

France24 is carrying as running headline that Costa Rica has withdrawn from the School of Americas Torture School How much of the American Press will pick that story up? Int'l Campaign Launched Against U.S. "Torture School" Gustavo Capdevila GENEVA, (IPS) - Peace activists from the non-governmental School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) will tour Chile, Peru and Ecuador in August to persuade the governments of those countries not to send any more military personnel to the training centre in the U.S. state of Georgia. Activists were enthusiastic about the results of a similar mission in recent months to convince the authorities in Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. The former School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), still bears the stigma of having trained thousands of military personnel in the techniques of repression, personnel who were subsequently involved in the bloodiest dictatorships in the region during recent decades. Research has shown that the United States instructed thousands of Latin American officers, NCOs and soldiers at the School every year. Upon graduation, these military personnel returned to their countries and perpetrated crimes against the civilian population, U.S. Catholic priest Roy Bourgeois, the founder of SOAW, told IPS. An SOAW delegation will implement the Latin American Initiative to convince governments and grassroots organisations in the region's countries of the need to permanently close the WHINSEC, which has been based at Fort Benning, Georgia since 1984. The School, initially established under another name in Panama in 1946, moved out of Panama in 1984 as part of the agreement transferring sovereignty of the canal and its surrounding zone, formerly under U.S. control, to the Panamanian nation. Bourgeois, a veteran of the Vietnam War who left the U.S. Navy to become a priest of the U.S. Maryknoll religious community, said that SOAW activists had returned in high spirits from the first tour of Latin American countries to promote the campaign against the School of the Americas. In Venezuela last year, the SOAW delegation met with President Hugo Chávez. A few weeks after the meeting, Caracas announced the withdrawal of its military personnel from the Fort Benning training school. An SOAW mission travelled to Bolivia this year and was received by President Evo Morales, who promised that Bolivian soldiers would be gradually withdrawn from the U.S. training centre. In Argentina, Defence Minister Nilda Garré announced that the government will order the return of military personnel taking courses at the WHINSEC. "The following week we went to Uruguay, where the minister of defence, Azucena Berrutti, told us that her country would make the same decision," said Bourgeois, although as it is, Montevideo has not taken up places reserved at the school for Uruguayan armed forces for several years. "Following this tour, we are very hopeful that these countries will withdraw (from the School), also because of what is happening in many Latin American countries which were formerly close allies of the United States, or rather, subject to Washington," he remarked. Bourgeois was present at the Mar. 24 ceremony in Buenos Aires commemorating the 30th anniversary of the coup d'état of 1976, which led to a brutal military dictatorship, responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances. The U.S. priest listened to Argentine president Néstor Kirchner's speech, in which he declared that "never again" would such things happen. Bourgeois asked himself if they really "could happen again." The school is a threat to the promise made by the Argentine president, was the pacifist's deduction. The Maryknoll priest's doubts are based on his certainty that "the aim of the school is to keep the military in power." The WHINSEC is a threat to democracy, human rights and human dignity, he warned. In addition, they resort to deceit, as in the case of the war against Iraq, Bourgeois said. "The Pentagon (U.S. Department of Defence) lies about the school. They say it teaches democracy. How can you teach democracy from the barrel of a gun?" he asked. SOAW plans to carry out a third tour later on, to Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, with the same purpose of encouraging these countries to give up using the former School of the Americas. Bourgeois thought that Colombia, on the other hand, was a "very difficult" case, because most of the students at Fort Benning are from that country, which is living through a half-century-old civil war, fuelled by the lucrative drug trafficking business. Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, after Israel and Egypt. "Getting Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's approval (for SOAW's cause) is a very complicated issue, because over the last four years Colombia has received about four billion dollars from the United States. They are not going to risk that flow of dollars to close down the school," he predicted. Bourgeois traveled to Geneva to attend sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which on Jul. 17-18 examined the report by the United States on its compliance, in policy and practice, with the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Bourgeois wants the committee, which is charged with supervising implementation of the Covenant, to look into cases of espionage committed by U.S. authorities against SOAW leaders and activists. Our peaceful demonstrations are monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "under the guise of counterterrorist action," he stated. I have come to the U.N. Committee with the hope that international pressure will stop "unwarranted espionage on U.S. citizens protesting peacefully against their government's policies," he said. "We know they are unlawfully tapping our telephone conversations, even though official records acknowledge that our movement has a long history of pacifism," Bourgeois maintained. The spying is occurring because any person or organisation in the United States that criticises the government's foreign policy is "seen as an agent of subversion, agitation and perhaps even terrorism," he said. And it is known that soldiers from other countries trained at the Fort Benning school "will go back to their countries and become the agents of U.S. foreign policy," the priest said. "They protect the economic interests of the United States in those countries," he added.

Morning light

We are coming up to the longest day. I love waking as the light is breaking. Although my windows are covered with quilted curtains, the skylight gradually turns from blue-black to gray. Items in my room appear first as shapes followed by the details. The rock wall made with stones placed there 400+ years ago begin to show colour: greys, browns and even a dark rose. For centuries they must have looked at grain (for that is where food was once stored) or unused items from a time nothing was discarded. I wish they could talk about what the people who lived in this house have felt.

The day breaking also reminds me the silliness of ownership. The earth is millions or billions of years. Man exists individually maybe 100 years, but most much, much less. How do we really think we can possess anything?

When the light is full, a hirondelle, a swallow struts across the glass, the feet making little clicking sounds. I get up to start the day.

Canal Plus and Cannes

I do not understand my TV cable service. They shifted stations around. For the month of February I had Canal Plus, a series of stations with great movies. Then they went off except one for a couple of hours. Okay. Because I live in Geneva I am not willing to pay extra for when I am in France especially all year round. Basic service yes, extra no.

Now they stations are back and happily just in time to watch the opening of the Cannes Film Festival. They ran short clips from the entries, a good insight what I want to see in the future.

A good morning

8:03 As I walk out my front door, my Catalan neighbour comes up to me waving his hands. He has a full head of white hair and has told me how he makes his wife breakfast every morning and how he loves her more than anything although they have been married over 50 years. He speaks so fast I have to ask him to slow down. Then he points to where a table USED to be holding some of his plants.

Rue Vermeille, my street, is considered the prettiest street in the village. Plants in planters line both sides of the narrow street and overhead wisteria and some red flowering plant make archways of colour and shade canopies.

However, this morning, several of the plants and their holders are missing. He drags me to where I once had two Spanish rectangular pots. Only one is there. I had bought them across the border in Bisbal, a factory outlet town for Spanish ceramics. Thank goodness I had only paid 5 Euros for them. The two big blue pots that flank my front door and are the same colour are still there, one over flowing with pansies, the other with patients still not in bloom. Other plants on the street are missing. A Catalan old lady is stomping up and down angry that someone took her pot of peppers and her pot of spinach that was just ready to be picked.

It is the second robbery on the street. About three weeks ago when I was still in Geneva, someone stole several of the black garbage cans. They left the ones with the yellow top for paper and plastic recycling.

8:15 I excuse myself to have breakfast at La Noisette. Today is marché day and I like watching the vendors set up their tables. Michel offers me the paper to read and it talks about Sarko's swearing in today and the beginning of the Cannes festival. Michel is a nurse in Perpignan and another regular. I see several of the English, who treat Argelés much like retirees treat Florida. I am one of the only ones in my family whose first words were NOT “When can I move to Florida.” I have never wanted to live in a retiree environment, although many of them are very nice people. I gravitate more to the artists who are still doing stuff...yes stuff...stuff that means something to them not just going from social event to social event and using the téléphone arab (gossip and grapevine)

Franck sets my hot croissant and baguette, tea and orange juice down. The butter is sweet. I know most of the people and I don’t get a chance to read my book L’étudiant étranger.

8:50 The marché is set up. The table next to the café is piled three two feet high with artichokes, about the size of a normal balloon. The centers are open and filled with iridescent purple spikes. I know from experience how meaty the leaves are when dipped in vinegarette and pulled through my teeth, but I pass. Today I am looking for melons.

The olive dealer, who offers marriage and romance despite having a wife and twin daughters, with his selections is busy proposing to another woman but winks at me as I pass by. I still have olives from Saturday.

At the boulongerie the line is short. The smell of yeasty bread baking floats around us. There is a sign that tells me about le coeur Catalan and I ask about it. The woman describes the honey and apricots in the bread and I tell myself to go tomorrow. They are selling it for the holiday, although I can never remember whether is it Ascension or Pentecost. France has more holidays in May than it seems normal days.

9:05 I stop at Pedro’s for tofu burgers made with mushrooms. He is a shy man and it took years before he spoke to me.www.virtourist.com/europe/argeles-sur-mer He is still unhappy that the writer described his shop as esoteric in the write up with the photo on the website above. We discuss the exhibition at the Gallerie Marianne where poets described the paintings done by local painters.

Back at the house I put my purchases away to get to work, grateful I make my own schedule. It has been a good morning.

Music stories

Music Story No 1.

I was taking a pair of too-tight brown shoes worn less than once and a backgammon game (I have another) to the charity shop and took the short cut through the building with the hall where the elderly go for lunch each day. This time music rang through the hall. An organ grinder dressed in a red and white striped crew neck jersey and a straw hat looking like he had been attacked by Yves Montand or Maurice Chevalier led the group in singing old French songs. I paused at the door and listened. I knew some from watching the variety shows on television.

An older man painfully made his way to me. “Entrez-vous,” he said.

I did, and despite being considered as part of the troisème age, the audience were anywhere from ten to thirty years older. I might be sprier but they could out sing me.

Music Story No. 2

He had a red clown nose, a drum on his back with Teletubbies La La and Po hanging off the back. A harmonica was suspended near his mouth and each step he took caused his cymbals to go ting ting ting. The English artist stopped him and said, “Musiques, s’il vous plait.”

The street musician complied and soon they were chatting in basic French. The English artist stood a bit taller each time the musician understood and taller still when he himself understood. The artist’s progress in French has been slow and he is unsure of himself, so anyone who speaks to him slowly and in simple terms he considers a gift. Finally the musician started to move on.

“A bientôt,” the artist said.

“See you later,” the musician replied.

“You speak English?” the artist asked.

“Of course, I am from Scotland,” the musician said.

Choosing verbs

I know why I adore my life. It was a busy day wrestling against time to get my newsletter out www.cunewswire.com and setting up interviews. However, I took three breaks, one to wander around the marché, one to have lunch at La Noisette (easier then cooking and washing up) and a third to meet with a rather new but dedicated writer who lives nearby. I traipsed to at La Noisette for a second time. Everyone should have a neighbourhood tea room around the corner.

We sat in the shade, the sky a royal blue, the 700-year old church across the street in various shades of ochre.

Sophie, the waitress as disgustingly beautiful as ever with her Catherine Zeta-Jones hair and Sophia Loren lushness, delivered une boule de café glace with chocolate sauce and one cappuccino.

The writer and I talked and talked about her new writing group, writing projects, my writing and a workshop I am planning.

However, I knew I was with a kindred spirit when she described a woman, not as beautiful, tall, thin, funny, but as someone who chooses good verbs.

The mirror

I have a friend in New York with whom I disagree on much and agree on much and we laugh at the differences but with respect. One of the biggest is that she takes shopping to an art form and I’m shopping phobic, although I admit double the pleasure of a sweater she persuaded me to buy this past summer in a specialty store in a medieval village. (I won’t tell her that shopping in a specialty store in a medieval village doesn’t have that much to do with shopping and a lot more to do with sharing of time and fun). She likes to hear when I go over to what I call the black side of consumerism so this blog is dedicated to her.

I bought a new mirror for over my fireplace. Did you hear that all the way to New York???? I confess not only did I buy it, the second I saw it I couldn’t imagine not having it, but then again it does fit one my criteria for a possession, it is beautiful and so original.

The mirror is round with a five inch leather frame. The interior edge is cut to reflect the design, which includes elephants and jungle plants. The colours of blue and green with touches of rust for fruit match the other colours in the flat. The clock that was there was moved to the side wall over the couch, the tapestry designed needlepointed by my daughter that was where the clock now is was transferred to the place where a copy of a grave rubbing of a medieval noblewoman bought decades ago on a trip to the UK was and that was put in the outside hall next to my front door.

However, I do make have to make it clear to one and all that these are Democratic elephants cavorting on the mirror not Republicans. I will be flexible on some things but siding with the war thugs in Washington would be impossible. I swear as I went to bed last night one of the elephants on the mirror whispered to me “Don’t forget to call Nancy Pelosi’s office on Monday and tell her that she can’t cave on the timeline

Vide Grenier

In France 1 May is a holiday. and I returned to Argelès to make sure I didn’t miss the Vide Grenier (empty attic) which is a giant flea market mostly with people selling their own stuff and a few professionals thrown in. I had no idea it would be so big. The area normally covered by the marché was full of blankets with everything from a carved apple to a stuffed zebra, some junk, some nice stuff. The Vide Grenier covered all the main streets and ran along the river and took up the parking lots.

As a non-shopper I loved browsing hoping for a copper fry pan that was tin-lined, no luck. If I had found a Clarice Cliff vase I would have been thrilled. No luck.

However I bought two replacement Chinese ceramic spoons to replace one I broke for 1.5 Euros. One broke before I got them home.

For 9 Euros I bought 10 wine glasses with blue stems to replace the mishmash I have been using and they co-ordinate perfectly with my dishes.

I did not look at all the places, it was too much. I suspect there were at least 500 sellers. And that doesn’t count the those selling kebabs, sauscissons, chickens, crêpes, waffles, etc.

I had planned to do another quick tour at the end of the day to pick up the Lilies-of-the-valley that are traditional sold on the first of May, but looking out at the red tiles of the house across the way I see they are wet. I suspect people are putting their wares in boxes and folding their blankets and their attics won't be empty once they get home and put the stuff back.

The blues

No not music, not sadness, but refrigerator. I stupidly forgot to leave the frigo door open when I shut off the electricity and when I opened it blue mould (a rather nice shade at that) covered everything. I quickly shut it again.

I concentrated on getting the wifi and TV working (it takes a while before the cable kicks in after being off for several weeks), my suitcase unpacked and made the executive decision to wait until morning. I wasn’t hungry (and after seeing the mould wouldn't have been even if I had been) since my friend Barbara had, as is our tradition, fed me. This time it was lasagne instead of the promised goat stew because the goat cheese man hadn’t delivered the goat. Chris, the artist whose house is www.virtourist.com/europe/argeles-sur-mer photo 7, joined us. He had lifted my suitcase up the three flights of stairs. My back thanked him.

Sleeping seemed a much better alternative but it is not a solution to the blues (mould). The next morning, I was ready to tackle the job. I doubt if my frigo has ever been so clean, and that leads to anything but the blues.

The mystery colour

Three times within the last 30 hours I’ve had the same discussion about a flowering tree. The flowers look more like feathers, the problem is the petal are a colour that has no name. I’ve heard it described as a very light salmon, white with a dab of orange, pink with orange mixed in, mauve and pink but none of them really works. It would almost be worth it to buy a set of oils and try and mix the colour, except that still would not give it a name, but at least I would know what went into it. What there is no debate about, is how pretty the trees are.

Michael Korda's Photo

The 20-year old Michael Korda book had been culled by the library and I picked it up from the pile under a sign that said, Take A Book. His photo was on the back. He was dressed in suit and tie and leaned against the side of an open door.

The glass panels of the door itself took up about 20% of the photo. Because there were trees filling the opening behind him I knew it was an outside door.
He wore huge glasses like mine. On closer examination I could see tiny lines making squares in his shirt. His resemblance to a horrible boss, a control freak, that I worked for once struck me but did not stop me reading the book.

His head was turned three quarters toward the photographer and his arms were crossed.
I could almost hear the photographer say, “Turn your head Michael. Now fold your arms. A little more toward me. A half smile, no not that much.” The shutter would have clicked and he would have broken from the position and the moment was caught in time for someone to see 3000 miles away and 20 years later.

That set me wondering. Had he just put down a cup of coffee? Was he late for his next appointment? Did he like/love the photographer? Did he change from the suit into jeans and sweater afterwards?

That is what photos do. They stop life. A family can be squabbling, a person arrives with a camera, everyone freezes a smile on their faces and years later, they might remember the day as a happy event. Or some may remember it that way. In most families two peoples’ memories of the same event retold makes the listener wonder if they were talking about the same thing.

In other photos the viewer can imagine the dynamics. Five members of the family are squeezed together, one stands apart. A mother cuddles a child who is stiff in her arms.

I also wonder about photos people keep on CD-ROM. What happens when CD-ROMs become outmoded? Or all the family photos on hard disk get eaten up? When fires destroy a home so often people say what upsets them most is the loss of photos.

I am not a picture taker overall, although I went through a phase of it when I lived on The Riverway in Boston. The number of pictures of my daughter in dresses makes one think that she only wore dresses, but the reality is she wore them so seldomly that we took her picture when she did. Still there are photos of all stages of my life, from being propped up on an overstuffed chair before I could sit, to tossing a salad in a Paris apartment.

Looking at photos of my childhood seem so remote it is like the life belonged to someone else.

Yet in most cases I remember what I did after that photo was snapped. I don’t have to wonder like I wonder about Korda’s actions when he broke the pose. Of course, the other people in the photos have different memories, but that’s okay.

Making choices

The black lab jumped for the stick his master was holding. In reality it looked more like the trunk of a young tree, a good three free across and probably three inches thick.

The master threw the stick as far as he could. It landed in the lake www.corsier.ch/default.asp just towards the end of the dock. The dog joyfully plunged into the water sparkling in the late afternoon sunshine, retrieved it and began swimming back to shore.

About halfway he saw a smaller stick floating to one side. It was less than a foot long and half as wide. He let the larger stick float, swam over to the smaller one, looked back at the bigger one, sniffed the smaller one, looked a last time at the bigger one and then brought the small one back for his master to throw again.

His master called him paresseux lazy. I called him intelligent.

Purple walk to the post

Purple prose, song Deep Purple, Movie and book The Color Purple, "When I am old I will wear more purple" T-shirt and book, purple is the colour of royalty, in Christianity it represents the sin of pride, www.purple.com, porphyrophobia is the fear of purple.

No one with porphyrophbia would have survived my walk to the post today. The colour was everywhere, the deep purple pansies, violets, star shaped wild flowers no bigger than my little fingernail and lilacs. And that does not include the wisteria www.gardenadvice.co.uk/advisor/plants/wisteria/index.html not just one like in the photo on the web site, but over a 100 lantern like globes hanging over a hedge with petals on each varying from almost white to deep lavender, which brings up the many names for purple: violet, orchid, mauve, lavender, aubergine, lilac, plum, wine, grape, amethyst...good Lord, all that for a mixture of red and blue.

Other colours existed, of course: yellow and white headed dandelions (which reminded me I still haven’t had a dandelion salad this year, but I will correct that at noon with a walk in our garden and a pair of scissors) green grass and leaves, and the first leaves were popping out on the grape vines which in the fall will be laden with grapes (coloured purple).

Musings

Yellow
One almost needs sunglasses with the yellow rapeseed fields near the house. Last weekend in the Jura it was fields and fields of daffodils.

Speaking of sunglasses
When I sat with friends in the Jura last weekend I realised that I was the only one without sunglasses and in fact haven’t even owned a pair for decades. Maybe I will pay for it someday, but I stopped wearing them years ago because it distorted and diluted the colours around me and that made me feel cheated of the genuine beauty around me.

Speaking of not having stuff…
It also dawned on me my make up shelf is not like other women’s. It is limited to foundation, blush and one box of hair colour: no creams, no lotions, nothing, nada, rien. Maybe it would be different if my mother and grandmother had not passed down good skin genes (as far as dry skin is concerned—the amount of acne over the years turned out to be citrus caused not gene caused). I didn’t need skin treatment I need not to drink orange juice everyday. Saved a lot of money on skin stuff and orange juice, but I doubt any financial advisor would recommend this is a life financial plan.

Indian costumes
After the brouhaha years ago by black women against Bo Derrick for corn-rowing her hair and co-opting their culture, I will admit I was a little self-conscious about wearing Indian clothing. But my Indian girl friend has brought me two wonderful Indian costumes that I now wear for their beauty and comfort. Last night I wore the pumpkin-coloured one (great match with my hair) to the Indian dance recital. I also stayed over rather than risk missing the last bus. This morning after breakfast I was amused that I, the Swiss-American was wearing an Indian costume, and she, the Indian was dressed in ordinary (although they looked great) slacks and a sweater. Neither of us felt our cultures had been co-opted.

Favourite Advert
Tarzan swings out of the jungle onto a Swiss mountain side and stops to milk a black and white cow as he sits on the Swiss stool that by tradition is strapped around his waist. He then drinks the milk. The sponsor is milk of course. I want to gag at that part. Just the thought of swallowing milk cold or warm makes me want to gag. He then smiles, looks out at the Swiss scenery as the cow flies off on his rope supposedly back to the jungle.

Torture
Okay, this blog is a mishmash of topics… Least anyone think I consider my adopted country perfect and my natal country without redemption, an article in the paper this morning accuses the Genevoise police of torture. I can get equally upset and activist in either case. Torture is wrong. Period. At least here the response is to put an end to it. It would be hard to be totally ashamed of both countries. Where could one run? A Cave?

Virginia Tech
I won’t deny how horrible the shootings were. We lost 32 citizens, young people with a future. 32 families will never be the same. The Iraqis have been losing more than that on average daily for five years. John Hopkins, not a shoddy university, estimates over 600,000 Iraqis are dead directly or indirectly because of the US invasion. 600,000 vs 32. Two hours of terror vs. five years of terror. One crazed killer vs. a crazed country.

Voting
For the third time since I became a Swiss citizen, I am voting. This time it is for the local mayor and 2 co-mayors. I did vote although there is no contest. Only three names on the ballot and for the designated roles.

However, my housemate caught me out when I said I wasn’t going to vote my one stock (life insurance company and it is the way the life insurance is set up). She’s right. I will drop that ballot in the mail too.

Jet d’Eau and an Yvoire memory
It is easy to miss a skyscraper high fountain when it is turned off. The fountain was shut off for seven days for maintenance. The last time I was on a boat in the lake (my daughter and I escaped to Yvoire www.yvoiretourism.com/accueil_en.html for lunch and a day on the lake, the boat passed so close that we felt the spray on our faces. The sunlight caught the water making rainbows in the air.

Joke
Tiger Woods, Jay Leno and George W. Bush were all on the same plane flying into the US and all three had forgotten their passports. (Okay it is implausible, I know but it is a joke.) The customs officials asked them to prove who they were.

Tiger Woods took his golf club and swung it and explained how to make a good swing. He was let in.

Jay Leno told a joke then explained how important timing was in comedy. He was let in.

George W. Bush said, “I don’t know anything.”

“Come right in Mr. President,” the customs official said.

Visit the Café du Soleil

It has a website. www.cafedusoleil.ch

I've talked so much about it, had so many fondues and other meals there, met with so many writers there...now you can visit it too.

A tale of two ducks

The Route d’Hermance is one of the main roads from Geneva to France. The villages on each side are bedroom villages (a smaller version of bedroom towns) interspersed with farms, vineyards and horse pastures for the many stables. The Lake and Alps are on one side, the Jura on the other.

Driving back from breakfast at Migros on the Route with my housemate a female duck stood on one side of the road, her web foot posed to walk across.

“I hope she doesn’t get hit,” my housemate said.

Then we saw her partner on the other side waiting.

In the rearview mirror we were able to see the two ducks reunited in mid air heading for the Lake.

The smell of water on Good Friday

I ambled (the pace my sore back is comfortable with) to the lake, a two-minute trip down a small path surrounded by walls of large moss laden grey squares of stone. In one crevice, four violets and their green tongue-shaped leaves were almost at eye level.

Violets have been my favourite flower since I was a child. The hill outside our backyard would be covered with them. My mother and I picked bouquets almost a foot across and put them in our pewter pitcher. Even at four and five I wanted to absorb the colour combination into my soul.

The lake glimmered blue-grey in the muted sun, a Manet day, not a VanGogh day. The Alps were hidden in mist. The lake has a certain smell, a clean smell that words don’t describe. The closest I can think of is the smell of sheets that have been sun-dried. I cannot find the words to describe the smell of mud in New England as the winter frost lets go of the earth.

Yesterday the lake had been dotted with white caps and was Coke bottle green. I learned that the Rhone runs through the lake and during the Bise the water gets churned up and changes colour. The person who told me that said when you fly over the lake you can see the Rhone passing through.

Ducks swam in the water so clear that I could see the ridges in their webbed feet. At certain angles the heads of the male mallards looked deep purple instead of luminescent green.

A few boats bobbed off shore. On one sailboat, the masts nude, a family ate a picnic. The cries of their baby floated across the water.

I found a place to sit and a small white un-coiffured poodle, Maisie, checked me out, found me uninteresting and moved on.

On a normal Friday, I would have been alone, but this is a four-day weekend and families were strolling up and down.

I found a perch and sat and watched at peace with myself and the world as I smelled the water.

The best cities and guilt

Zurich and Geneva have been named one and two of the best cities in the world to live in once again with Vancouver coming in right after by Mercer Consulting who does an annual scoring.

The first US city is at 28^th place, San Francisco, the next is Boston at 36^th, Chicago and DC tie for 41^st, Portland, OR is 45^th.

Once again I shivered at the pride of being Swiss, although I will never say this country is perfect. At least they aren’t under minding world peace and attacking other nations. I am underwhelmed with their Pharma and Banking interests. On the good side they have signed most of the international treaties for things like the prohibition of land mines and child soldiers, which the country of my other passport (COFMOP) has not. I don’t wake thinking that deaths of innocents are being caused directly or indirectly by my new countrymen as I often do with COFMOP especially after watching the news or reading the Middle Eastern papers with their graphic photos showing dead and maimed children. Instead of becoming immune I get more and more upset.

The glimmer of hope when Harry Reid said they might pull war funding next year helps. And he isn’t even one of the senators or house members that I have telephoned over the last couple of weeks asking them to end this war.

Still my American side is haunted in what has been done in my name, and the beauty and peace of my new homeland, does not irradiate the pain I feel at my rich and safe life as others are dying for nothing on both sides of the battle. My guilt at my enjoyment of my life does not stop the enjoyment bringing more guilt. Thus I will make more phone calls and still feel helpless and guilty.

Although the criteria of being one of the best places to live has nothing to do with war machines and military sales, it has to do with quality of life issues such as cultural, health, etc. I assume excitement and robust nightlife were not on that list either.

Casablanca

My hosts barely believed I had never seen Casablanca and set out to remedy the situation immediately thanks to the DVD. The film was made in my birth year and of course some scenes and phrases were as familiar as my left hand (or right).

So settled in with cushions at my back to protect it, I watched. Crossing borders is so much easier today, but what a shame that after all this time we are still fighting wars, sadly with the US as the aggressor instead of Germany this time.

Wonder what Rick would have said about that and would he have let Ilsa get away if this were modern times.

Ebay

I will admit I Google (acutally I use Dogpile.com) myself. I have found review of my books and other strange things.

However, the strangest of all was to see my novel Chickpea Lover: Not a Cookbook being sold on Ebay. Last bid $3.45

Geneva gives climate change new meaning

Calvin talked about an unpredictable God. After almost 17 years in this area, I am sure his theory was triggered because the weather is so changeable. Case in point: I left my Cosier Port home and it was a beautiful spring day, slightly on the chilly side, but the lake was calm and beautiful.

I went to the doctor’s in my old commune of Grand Saconnex on the other side of the lake. Still beautiful.

I was in the office less than a half hour. When I opened the door, the skies let loose. The rain looked like not so sheer, sheer curtains. I started for the bus anyway trying to stay under shelter.

Lightning less than one second before the thunder scared me. I know lightning has often struck the area but I made it safely to the bus, but not before being pelted with hail stones.

The Number 3 left Grand Saconnex for Petit Saconnex less than five minutes away. There the ground was snow covered.

Downtown I met my housemate for a movie. When we came out, the temperature had dropped even lower. The weather was clear until we got off the bus to walk to the house. Then the sleet began.

Geneva weather, you gotta love it…or not…

The chair is back

For years the area in front of the UN in Geneva was patchy grass, but for at least ten years there was a two-story three legged-chair. See photo: http://daveey.netapt.com/photos/europe/geneva

I could always imagine Edith Ann (Lily Tomlin) sitting there and saying, “That’s the truth.”

The chair’s missing leg symbolizes human legs lost in land mines. The chair was supposed to stand until every country signed the treaty. 138 countries have signed (but not the US).

The UN removed the chair while it turned the grubby land into a cement landscape. Ugly got uglier.

I haven’t been by for a long time. I used the number 3 bus instead of the number 5 when I went to Grand Saconnex where I used to live and when I went to my office, I was a block away. However, today late for a doctor’s appointment in my old apartment complex the number 5 came first taking me by the UN

Voilà…the ugly space had been replaced with a series of fountains and in the middle the chair is back.

Some people think the chair is ugly, but then landmines are ugly…and that’s the truth.

Perch and pups

The wall of the auberge restaurant had a trompe d’oeil of two black fuzzy dogs sitting under a window. On the right side a grey tiger cat stared down at the canines.

My writer friend and I ordered exactly the same thing. The salad greens, the first of the season from a nearby field were crisp and tasted of spring freshness. The filet des perches was, of course, from the lake.

As usual we talked about everything from personal to political and back again.

After finishing she showed me a near by nature reserve where we could walk in the air smelling of fresh earth and new grass. On this fine spring day we walked by the pond with ducks swimming. She identified some of the other birds. Wildflowers were everywhere. We stopped to sit on a bench, the trunk of a tree where one quarter had been carved out to make a seat. An elderly man, his French bulldog on a leash, walked by. The animal snuffled at us and he proudly told us of all her good qualities.

Under the blue sky with the snow covered Jura to one side, and the snow covered Alps to the other we continued into the woods. My friend explained there are still lots of wild animals, fox, deer, hares and boars. “Don’t run if you see one, just stare it down,” she said.

She had read an article that said because so many animals are protected in Switzerland, they find animals are moving in from France with no such laws. We pondered on how they knew on one side of the border they were safe from human predators. We wondered how they even knew where the borders were, although it was fun to imagine them strolling by the border guards and being asked if they had any merchandise to declare. We were sure they would have said no.

In the beginning there was fondue

The local paper did a history of fondue. The first recorded recipe was found in Zurich in 1699. I had always suspected that fondue was poor peoples’ food, but the story said no, because for years the best Gruyere cheese was exported with Lyon being one the largest purchasers.

Now, having a fondue, is one those wonderful Swiss stereotypes regardless of the section. French, Germans and Italian Swiss along with foreigners living here, consider it just one of those wonderfully social things that without life wouldn’t be quite as nice.

Movies a cure to backaches...not really but

Despite a backache I decided to see not one but two movies.

Mation Cotillard as Edith Piaf played in La Mome http://imdb.com/title/tt0450188 (US Release Title La Vie En Rose) was one of the most amazing acting performances I have seen. She had the speaking voice and the mannerisms down, but she went from a young girl to dying 47-year old wasted by abuse to her body. Of course the music was well it was Piaf.

After a short break I met former colleagues and we watched Herbstzeitloser, a Swiss German film that had us all chortling. Filmed in the Canton of Bern in a small village, a widow in her 80s deeply mourns her husband until her friends encourage her to change his grocery store into a sexy lingerie shop with her making the lingerie, shocking her pastor son and the more conservative elements in the village. Another friend helps the old woman set up an internet business and when orders are too heavy for her to handle she ends up teaching both men and women in the old age home to embroider. It is reminiscent of the film Chocolate. The actress in the leading role was 87.

Now the back pain didn’t go away, but since it hurt anyway, I was well entertained and distracted. Je ne regrette rien...

Pansies and Postmasters

Despite my aching back I decided to walk to the post office, although I could have used my housemate’s car. Ignoring pollution, I felt I was more likely to wrench the back behind a wheel. Besides, the day was incredible.

Passionately purple and golden yellow pansies blanketed the gardens and snowdrops almost hid the new grass. Everything shimmered as if jewellers had blown diamond dust over the entire countryside. Pink cherry blossoms, white apple blossoms and forsythia were everywhere, all against a backdrop of snow on the mountains.

My mission was “pour régler” the name on the mail box for my business account.

Our postmaster looked quite dapper in his brown suit, complete with vest, yellow shirt and brown and yellow stripped tie.

He is a slave to detail and dots every i not once but four times. I’ve taken rolled coins in for my savings account and even when they weigh correctly he takes them out and counts them several times.

Likewise he laboured over the paper work. Admittedly my handwriting is less than grammar school perfect. I am not sure it was a compliment or an insult when he said my French accent was better than my writing. I will say tact-lack and leave it at that.

However, as annoying his attention to detail can be, half of me wishes he could read English. I could use him as a proof reader, another of my weaknesses.

I voted on Sunday

It was Sunday, so I voted. This was the first time I had done it in person, because the other times I used the very efficient mail system. Voters get a package explaining the issues, a ballot, a ballot envelope and an identification card. The same envelope the package arrives in is reused and no postage is required.

However, I arrived back too late to guarantee it would get there in time to be countedl.

The election place is the local school. The young man, who measured me for my passport, was behind the counter and manned the ballot box which was yellow and red stripped reminding me of the Catalonian flag.

Even though the vote was already in the envelope, he wanted to make sure I had done everything correctly and sent me into the booth to check. I did, I had, and he took the envelope and slipped in the box.

One of the candidates for the town council was one of the women who interviewed me for my citizenship and had issued a negative report. Any guesses on how I voted?

Little Mosque on the Prairie

Having read about the Canadian series, I was hoping to get a look when I go to Canada next summer.

Nandita had introduced me to peekvid.com where I could watch TV shows etc. on my computer.
And Voilà there it was two episodes, but in looking at it I saw the source was You Tube which had several more episodes.

It's fun and pokes fun at own narrowmindness.

We aren't citizens but consumers

I came across this in my IWWG newsletter and it echoes what I have been thinking and saying People today are no longer citizens but consumers manipulated for an economic system that is in itself an artificial set up with its own rules and regulation. The question isn’t so much, what the hell are we are doing, is why are we letting if be done to us?

By Ethan Miller in YES

“The dominant story defines the heroes of our market system as the rational, self-interested firms and individuals who seek to satisfy their endless need for growth and accumulation in a world of scarce resources. In this story, we the people are just worker-bees and consumers, making and spending money, hoping for the opportunity to accumulate more, and perpetually dependent on the jobs and necessities that the corporate system allocates to the worthy. Citizenship is reduced to the active pursuit of financial wealth…A community of active, creative and skilled people without money of capital (or the desire to have it) are considered unproductive or backward…

Suppose we try a different story: Instead of defining economy as a market system, let’s define it as the diverse array by which humans generate livelihoods in relation to each other and to the Earth. Extending far beyond the workings of the capitalist market, economic activity included all the ways we sustain and support ourselves, our families and our communities. Peeling away the dominant economic story of competition and accumulations, we see that other economies are alive below the surface, nourishing us like roots. These are not the economies of stockbrokers and economists. These are the economies of mutual care and cooperation—community economies, local economies. They include.

Household Economies – meeting our needs with our own skills and work, raising children, offering advice or comfort, teaching life skills, cooking, cleaning, building, balance the check book, growing food and medicine…

Gift Economies—built on shared circles of generosity, volunterr fire companies, food banks, donationg to community organizations, sharing food.

Barter Economies—trading services with friends or neighbors, swapping one useful thing for another, returning a factor, exchanging plants or seed, time-based local currencies.

Gathers Economies—based on the abundance of earth’s gift economy: hunting, fishing and foraging. Also re-directing the waste stream, salvaging from demolition sites, gleaning from already harvested fields, dumpster diving.

Cooperative Economies—based on common ownership and/or control of resources: worker owned and run business, collective housing, intentional communities, community health trusts.

Community Market Economies—networks of exchange build from small businesses and cooperatives that are accountable to their communities through social ties, innovative ownership models and mutual support. Such economies not create to make large profits but to provide healthy, modest livelihoods to their participants and services to the larger communities.

The breakfast guest

Munchkin, the sleek, delicate, grey and white almost angora cat of my housemate, I suspect, pictures herself cast as a lioness in a Richard Attenborough nature film. She can probably see herself pounding across the plain and bringing down a zebra or wildebeest.

In Corsier Port zebras are not common and wildebeests less so, so she contents herself with smaller prey. Occasionally she goes airborne snaring a bird that has the audacity (or stupidity) to fly too low across her garden.

We have witnessed her prowess often because the office window looks out on her hunting domain.

In the house she reverts to a sweet-little thing. Therefore, it was not a surprise to enter the kitchen and see her sitting calmly, not in killer-strike pose and with no clicking of jaws as all cats are prone to do when about to kill. What was totally unmunchkinlike was to follow where she was looking. In her food dish a small brown, apparently uninjured mouse was jawing down her kitty food.

Did she issue a breakfast invitation? Did he turn up unexpectedly and she decided to be a good hostess? Was she fattening him up for a later snack?

Sadly, as bright as she is, her verbal skills do not allow for direct questions and answers.

Munchkin was invited to leave the room and the mouse was invited to leave the house, but not before a picture of the domestic scene had been snapped.

Sushi and Spice Racks

It is no secret whenever I get home to Geneva the first thing I do is eat sushi. The filet des perches, the jet d’eau, the tailleul bread and friends can wait.

This time was no different, except I was in pain and not from hunger. Three changes of train with too much luggage and a lap top had taken its toll on my back.

Unlike aspirin, I believe that sushi has magical qualities of healing, if not back pain at least a taste bud revival is guaranteed. However, rather than lug the stuff to Mikado or Bokey, I settled for the restaurant under the station.

Happy with my tray I sat down to eat, however, this time there was entertainment.

A man, probably in his late twenties, cute and probably a Brit from his accent, was sitting kitty corner, an ear plug draped from his ear to his phone.

‘I don’t care if the spice racks aren’t usually that size,’ he said.

For each bite of tuna, asparagus, shrimp, rice, salmon I learned more and more about spice racks and their measurements, their materials, etc. I never learned why the size was so important to him.

He finished his meal and as he left called Paul to report the spice rack condrum. Out the restaurant window I saw him wandering off talking to Paul as I popped the last morsel of sushi filled with avocado into my mouth.

I cry

As I was watching the morning news, there was an interview of the “raw recruits” bring sent to Iraq. A young man, who looked as if he should be shooting hoops at a high school game, was asked who the enemy was, and he had to think before saying the Iraqis. His voice raised at the end. He seemed to have little idea of why he was going.

A young woman was more sure. She was going to fight the Iraqis because “they hate our values.” Obviously she had heard the line but had never questioned why they hated our values or even if it were true. Obviously critical skills were not something developed in her school system and I suspect she knows even less history.

Both these kids may be killed or maimed. If they come back alive, they will see atrocities that no one should witness. Not only has the US failed them in their education, it has failed them in asking them to fight in this war.

And once again I cried for the horrendousness of what the US has done, which is far greater than anything that was ever done to us.

I cry for the American soldiers who have committed atrocities.

I cry for the American soldiers who have died for nothing.

I cry for the American soldiers who are forever wounded in body and/or soul.

I cry for the millions of Iraqi refugees who are seeking refuge all over the world. Sadly after destroying their homes, the US is doing little to help them. Neither is the UN.

I cry for the thousands and thousands of Iraqi children dead and maimed at US hands. Don’t ever try and tell me the enemy is bad because they kill innocents and children. So do we and more of them.

I cry for the stupidity of the people who believed the lies.

I cry for a war of choice.

I cry for the loss of rights.

I cry for the ignoring of international law.

I do not exaggerate when I say I cry. Real tears flow at the waste, stupidity, the cruelty.

My goal now is to contact every single senator and congressman by phone or email and tell them to stop the war. I always use the line ‘I am an expat and I vote’ whenever I contact our alleged leaders.

Will it do any good?

Probably not, but I have to. I cannot live with myself if I do nothing to stop this catastrophe however limited.