My last post ended on a whiny note; I feel the need to replace it promptly. It’s tricky these days: a lot of the tension has gone out of my life, and, after reading some of my archives, I am pretty sure that my blog-writing has suffered for it. It’s either that or the lack of tremendous amounts of down time. Whatever.
So I’m going back to basics: to the one thing that I know I can pull off when everything else is sticking.
I’m doing a bullet-point post.
Ready?
- I am marrying a psychopath. We were sitting in the living room the other evening, calm as anything, with newspapers, martinis, and a happy puppy. Out of nowhere, Nick’s head shot up over his paper. “You got the couch all diagonal,” he announced. What?
- I suspect that our families will have, at the very least, an equal number of surprises as they blend. Our mothers will meet for the very first time in a few weeks at the shower that I initially envisioned as a super-low-key thing (if I couldn’t avoid one entirely) with about ten people and some finger sandwiches. I have not the words for how much I underestimated this event’s importance to our mothers. Andrea might be able to think of a few, though. I was on the phone with her at nearly 2am her time as she was addressing invitations–to people in South Carolina. Andrea: Arthur Avenue? On me?
- The trees along our street grow out of square holes in the pavement, which are filled in with iron grates, cobblestones, grass, plain dirt, or some combination of the above. These little patches of non-sidewalk are considered fair game for dogs: for one thing, residents prefer that owners teach their dogs to pee on them rather than leaving little trails on the sidewalk. A woman stopped me once when then-tiny Jolie was sniffing around and begged me to train her to only pee on grass. “She’s so young,” she pleaded, anguished enough to be willing to have the whole conversation in English. “She has a real chance to learn!” But the real upside is that there is an unspoken rule that these spaces are exempt from the poop-scoop laws (the much more elegant French term for this activity, by the way, is “remasser“). It’s just this happy little bonus whenever Jolie runs that way. So the other day I happened to glance at one, and saw all these tiny little wild strawberries growing all through the iron grate. First: how amazingly French is that? And second: how nasty must those strawberries be?
- Our baker is a 50-something woman who wears tons of make-up, massive jewelry, and, occasionally, pleather. Nick and I–and Kristina, who is lucky enough to live right across the street from her–find the look puzzlingly 80′s-rock-star for a neighborhood baker. It is especially discordant in contrast with her husband, a short, stocky, anxious-looking man with a fringe of white hair that sticks straight up, creating the impression of a living cartoon character. Since he is usually in the back with the ovens, he can never be seen wearing more than shorts and a wife-beater. We have, however, seen him wearing substantially less on one or two awkward occasions. But I swear: the baguettes that they make are entirely worth it.
- It stays light well past 10pm here now, but yesterday it got fully dark around 6:00. I didn’t notice it at first, because Jolie and I had just gotten back from a 3.5-hour walk (she did 2.5 hours of it on her own four legs). She passed out immediately on my lap, and barely stirred when I carried her into the kitchen to see about mixing up something involving rum. When Nick called to say that he was coming home, I still had not separated the gloomy weather from my own exhaustion, so I thoughtlessly asked him to pick up some bread. “Um…I was actually thinking that I would just try to get home before the massive storm breaks,” he countered, compelling me to notice that there in fact was an incredible storm brewing (the darkness was not, surprisingly enough, just the sky reflecting my state of mind). Ten minutes later, doors were slamming, large objects were flying off of our windowsills, the puppy was beside herself, and poor drenched Nick was trying to get his scooter home while watching lightning fork into the Seine. He eventually arrived looking like he had taken a bath in his clothes, but an hour later he did go out for bread, because he’s just that kind of guy. Also, he really likes bread.
- Jolie goes completely ballistic if we sing or hum. She gets all frenzied, and can’t seem to stop licking us. I don’t really know how to take that.
The thing that’s really been bothering me, of course, is not so much the going-back-to-the-U.S. thing as it is the not-having-a-return-ticket-or-a-visa thing. And we keep hearing all of this conflicting information about the visa stuff, and I wrote to the consulate and they never wrote back, so Nick’s coworker is talking to the people who give the consulate their orders, but they’ll be off until Tuesday, and I leave Thursday, and…
- The French have a word for the soft inside part of bread–you know, the non-crust. We have no such word. Theirs also means “sweetheart.” I find this very telling.
- We live behind a tourist hotel. And while that means that most of our obnoxious neighbors are only around for a night or two, it also means that we have some really obnoxious ones. The worst are always the British bachelorettes, who get all drunk and shrieky in their rooms at all hours on weeknights. Yesterday morning, after a long, long night of this, I happened to pass the front of the hotel, and I saw them at brunch: about ten women who looked like ruddier versions of Soprano wives, all wearing matching t-shirts that said “Beccy’s Hen Do.” The best part? They were all also wearing matching red berets. Andrea, I do hope that you’re taking notes.