The vacation issue has turned into a pride thing. In the last few weeks I must have been asked about twenty times by people who really don’t even qualify as acquaintances whether we’re going. “We just got back–you haven’t left yet?” asked our upstairs neighbor, after fussing over our bandaged dog.
And while people pretend to be understanding when I say that we are waiting until December, they’re really not particularly good at it. “That’s just…a long time,” my dry cleaner mused. “I mean…is it even really vacation by then?”
So I tried to make the best of an upcoming trip: “Well, we are going to Barcelona for a week and a half in August,” I told Wheelchair Woman, shortly before she disappeared for a length I’ve time that I’m sure will be commensurate with her obviously near-royal lineage. “Ah,” she commiserated. “So no; no vacation this year?”
Even Kristina is gone, although I suppose that, with a thoroughly French boyfriend, she would be. They are traveling all over the countryside with Aston and their brand-new Jack Russell puppy, Chloé. “I don’t think the hotels know that we have two dogs now,” she worried. “Well…they’ll find out.”
Pretty much the only people still around are Olivier and Penny (who suspects that their trip to Japan didn’t count as “vacation,” since they left in early June), so we had dinner in their newly redone garden on Saturday.
“They were absolutely insistent that we not bring anything,” said Nick. “Apparently they have a plan.” So our long walk that day was over to one of our favorite wine stores, wine and flowers being the gifts that are virtually guaranteed not to mess with people’s plans. And, after the well-over-an-hour that it takes to get there, we found ourselves standing in front of the (predictably) firmly-shuttered store.
Welcome to August in Paris.
A bit of walking later, though, we found a lovely bottle, and came back on the Métro, in spite of summer construction service interruptions and this horrible woman who–right. I’m not getting into that here. But I wanted to kick her in the shins, especially about ten minutes later when the pieces fell into place and I realized that she was being so obtuse because she went into the conversation with a certain assumption, and, rather than revising that assumption in the face of contradictory evidence, instead kept revising her opinion of us downward as necessary to make us stupid enough to still be saying what we were saying given her moronic initial assumption.
Anyway.
After we got back, Nick got a text message from Olivier. “They’ve asked if we can bring bread,” he chuckled. “All of their bakeries are closed.”
I’m ready for the rentrée.