August 2011

The month of August has been steadily full – house guests, dinners, the approaching conclusion of my world religions course, medical consultations and arrangements, and a plethora of email and list correspondences that have remained for the most part unanswered. Eamonn and James, Shawn and Karen on their honeymoon, Richard’s exposition in Aups, wonderful times with Becky, Leonard, Peter, Jason and Michelle – two dinners chez nous, one dinner chez eux + an impromptu something when we caught them all just as they were arriving at Le Couvent, and Leonard’s birthday luncheon at the Bastide de Moustiers (an Alain Ducasse restaurant).

For Eamonn’s birthday we had a feast of truffles at Bruno’s restaurant in Lorgues. But following the dinner with Penny, Hamish, Jo and Richard, our poor frightened babies had a coronary scare – James woke the following morning with a serious erratic heartbeat. We learned locally that the upper part of his heart was not functioning, and as the bottom half was then forced to do all the work, his coronary rhythm was all over the place. At least I got a deep hugging intimacy with Eamonn when in a peak of panic. The scare evaporated when its hurricane wake had passed – all had stabilised and returned to normal once they reached the cardio clinic in Draguignan, and, once home again, the two collapsed in exhaustion. By coincidence, my appointment with the cardiologist was at the same clinic a week later. And the doctor is just darling. Best yet, he told me that my heart condition was nothing for the time to worry about.

As the day before the August feriae was virtually the only one between guests, Richard and I ritualised for the eve of the holiday sequence, and we had ominous plenitude – one synchronicity after another. And all this followed our delivery of the honeymooning couple for their Paris connection in Nice. While waiting for them to touch ritually La Mer before going on to the airport, Athena and the geo-local power section of the Nike citadel seemed to have given us a magical and solidly heavy ring – even though we had attempted to refuse it. We did learn later from Molly that it was a scam – she got one almost the same in Paris, but for the time we took it and accepted it as a magical intervention.

The United States was founded during one of the most intellectual/rational peaks in human history, and look how far from that America has fallen! I continue to find it utterly baffling that as a nation we have become the terrified and selfish people that we now are. Our CIA is able to conduct without restraint extrajudicial killings. The human rights illiteracy of the American public that leads into our inability to ratify international treaties that deal with basic rights and freedoms, our national denial of global climate change, and the ruthlessness of party dictation of governmental policy all illustrate a fundamental inability to be who we once were. Instead, we seem to be increasingly wedded to trivial information, anti-thinking and narcissistic communication. The sadness of the world at large and America in particular remain for me currently punctuated by the unbelievable Midi oasis.

Graham and Molly arrived for a week, and, while they were here, Gin and Warren came for three nights, the last of which they treated Richard and me to dinner at the Calalou. Richard and I began with margaritas. Warren is one of ‘the Family’ – our old San Francisco/Amsterdam communal group, and Gin is my daughter’s mother. Earlier this year, they have both fallen mutually in love. It may be ‘incestuous’, but it is lovely to see them both happy.

The Aups fête also occurred from the 19th to the 22nd. We attended two of the aperitif non-concerts but had a rollicking time over cocktails at the Café du Cour. Jim and Joanne joined us on the Friday evening for a corn-on-the-cob supper afterwards chez nous. Gin and Warren arrived just as they were about to depart. The final fête day we attended the aioli feast in the town square with Penny, her friend Caroline, Stephen and Roberto and their Danish friends with their two daughters.

The following day, the Volcanalia, Richard and I left Graham and Molly at home for Richard’s pre-cataract surgeries’ cardio and blood lab consultations before doing our traditional ferial retreat for the day. Since Richard had had a banana that morning, the lab postponed his blood test until we were back in Draguignan for my anesthesiologist appointment two days later. All was happily uneventful, and we returned home wasted but happy for the day at the lake with a dinner prepared by Graham waiting for all of us that now included Heather and Moses who had arrived that afternoon.

Graham and Molly departed the following day by train back to England. And Paige, travelling with Heather and Moses, arrived that afternoon. Their visit was delightful, and they were all most fun – plus great cooks who produced several meals. In addition, Moses repaired the floor tiles in the first floor bedroom. The weather was pure summer for the most part – scorchingly hot. But we had multi-directional winds for a couple of the days and even a brief but hard rain one evening that forced us to move inside for dessert. The Provençal wind somehow linked us to Hurricane Irene as she tore along the American East Coast and in the direction of my mother’s ‘bay side town house’ in Narragansett. We seem to have been lucky on that front for this occasion. Santima arrived from Amsterdam on the day that it rained in the evening. The rain cooled the next day, the Volturnalia, down remarkably. That evening Moses and Heather cooked us a ‘Tellus chicken’(rather than ‘Napoleon’s chicken’) dinner. We preceded it with champagne.

On the Sunday and the day that followed the August feriae, the town had a brocante. I purchased a nineteenth century bedpan for the grenier bedroom. Also got a glass-covered dish for a single cheese. The following day, we fetched Marcia and Roger’s daughter Jette from the train station in Les Arcs, brought her back to Aups where we first stopped to see if Rosalie Basten was here (Jette is looking for work; Rosalie was but was away for the day), stopped next to see Liliane and Jean-François at La Tuillière, then had lunch with Jette and Annick at Tellus, and later in the afternoon we took Jette back to Les Arcs. We had not seen her since the Yucatan, and she is looking exceptionally lovely. That evening, Santima prepared a dinner that began with salade niçoise followed by a risotto – both superb – and concluded with Richard’s fried bananas with Lambert vanilla ice cream to which Heather added some of her delicious butterscotch sauce. Jim and Joanne joined us, and though it was an evening of abstinence for me, it was a highly inebriated soirée in all.

With Moses, Heather and Paige departing the following morning, it was Gassin for Richard and me for Richard to meet his anesthesiologist. It turns out that Dr. Farines sells truffes at the Aups Thursday truffle market. We talked about the resumption of the season on the 24th of November.

So it has been a busy month – very busy – with our more gentle routine and contemplative space lost in the shuffle. But all in all, it has turned into a veritable summer experience. Though I do my ear operation tomorrow on the first of September, our fig tree is now furnishing us with her superlative fruit, and we have had endlessly lovely times with many lovely people.