Southern France Part III - Uzès

After the potluck meal we got back in the car. I happened to mention to Sophie that the ride from Nimes had made me a little woozy; dad found it necessary to follow up with a story about me vomiting on a Swiss postal bus at six months old. We drove down another set of winding roads to Uzès, to Sophie and Brayton´s home that dates back to 1550. This house is twice as old as America, I thought as I navigated the stone spiral staircase that led to the guest room. It seemed that everything around me could be calculated in terms of how much older it was than the country I live in. We visited the Pont du Gard, an ancient Roman aqueduct built around 19b.c., and olive trees that were 1100 years old. These trees are five times older than America, I thought as I looked at them.

Dad and I dropped off our luggage and walked through the cobblestone streets of the hillside town while Sophie cooked the first of several delicious meals - in the three days we spent in Uzès I don´t think we had a meal that didn´t include local wine and cheese. Dad and I walked past The Duchy of Uzès, where the red and yellow Catalan flag flapped in the wind, and I heard the sounds of a children´s choir practicing from a building somewhere nearby. The dramatic sounds of a pipe organ mixed with the children´s voices, and as they practiced it began to sound oddly familiar. I stood in my tracks for a minute listening, and then it came to me - through their angelic voices I made out the tune and the words to Beat It. My eyes widened, my jaw dropped and I rummaged through my purse looking for my audio recorder, this was one sound I wanted to remember forever. I quickly set it to record, and stood underneath the window where the music was coming from with my arm in the air as people walked past me with quizzical expressions. Unfortunately, in my hurried state I´d jammed the microphone jack into the headset plug, so I´ll just have to remember that incongruous meeting of medievel and Michael Jackson in my mind for the rest of my life.

To say that Sophie and Brayton were good hosts is an understatement; somehow they unlocked the secret to dad´s mannerisms, not just tolerating him but even managing to direct him at times: when dad interrupted me mid-sentence to announce that he´d found a store up the street that sold lavender sachets, Brayton stopped the conversation and pointed it out; when dad poured the last of a bottle of wine into his own glass that Sophie had just reached for, Brayton stopped the conversation and pointed it out; and when dad approached the proprieter of a vinyard to ask for a tasting while another customer was still being helped, Brayton stopped the conversation and pointed it out. I have discovered the secret to visiting dad, and it is to bring Brayton along with me. Perhaps dad has respect for Brayton because they are both mathematicians, or perhaps its the novelty of getting a reaction from someone who hasn´t been worn down from years of exposure to dad. Sophie´s kind manner and unending patience added a dimension of calm and tolerance to the experience.

The rare moments when dad wasn´t talking it was as if his voice were lodged in my head, I was unable to think of any normal topics of conversation, and remained silent for fear that I´d start talking about the history of dental floss or the particulars of my gastro-intestinal system. He remained strangely silent at the Haribo factory museum, where displays of candy, antique advertisements and Matthew Barney-esque videos of sugar being melted and poured into molds kept me and about three hundred kids enthralled. Dad claimed no knowledge of the brand, though I ate it constantly as a kid, and still indulge in the odd packet of gummy bears or raspberries. Dad´s view of sugar, unless its part of a rarified chocolate truffle, is rather preachy. He held back on paying entry to the museum, prompting Sophie to pay for all of us, and as I spent all of €9 on a gigantic box of candy and a refrigerator magnet, he hovered over the cashier and pronounced: "wow, that´s a lot of money for all that crap." His thriftiness didn´t stop at the Haribo museum, at The Medieval Garden he was willing to pay the €4 entry fee, but didn´t want to part with an extra €1.10 to walk to the top of the tower.

After three days together we parted ways at the Nimes train station; dad was taking a train back to Geneva, and I was headed south to Barcelona. There were cringe-inducing moments, to be sure - while walking to the Pont du Gard, dad asked if we could wait for him so he could step into a grove of olive trees to "do what men do", and his perennial inability to pass by a small child without waving and saying "hi", but I can´t think of the last time a visit with dad went this smoothly, and I have Sophie and Brayton to thank for it.

97 In The Shade

It is hot as blazes. According to WGN chief meteorologist and Chicago institution Tom Skilling, the 1913 record of 97 degrees might be broken today, with heat indexes reaching 105. We've been indoors all day, moving as slowly as possible and turning the air conditioning on when we can't take it anymore. I'm dressed in a tankini top and summer weight pajama bottoms, my hair up in a clip and contact lenses in my eyballs because its too hot to wear glasses. M is in a t-shirt and madras shorts. This kind of heat causes me to hibernate as tightly as severe cold, but for some reason it makes me feels worse. Maybe it just feels that way because its summer - ask me in six months and I'll probably dream for a day when I sweat the afternoon out in my kitchen.

There's almost nothing to eat in the house but neither of us wants to go grocery shopping, so I've been excavating the pantry. I would have food delivered, but I can't muster up enough appetite to think of something I want to eat badly enough to pick up the phone and talk to someone about it, and I'd feel responsible if anyone died of heat stroke on the way to my house just so that we could eat a plate of cold sesame noodles. Here's what my spelunking has uncovered:

The remains of a 16 oz. bag of farfalle;
Two 6 oz. cans of tuna, dusty;
One 15 oz. can of Del Monte sweet peas, dusty;
One 15 oz. can of Trader Joe's whole kernel corn.

I don't really want to boil anything, but it's better than our microwave option: one freezer burnt Trader Joe's southwest chicken quesadilla to split between us, and there's no way I'm turning the oven on. I set some water to boil and grabbed a cucumber from the fridge, along with a container of kalamata olives and a jar of mayonnaise. I boiled and drained the farfalle, opened a can of tuna and plopped its contents into the same saucepan used for boiling the pasta, the heat from the pan igniting the aroma of canned fish and a sudden interest from the cat population of our household. I cut up some olives and cucumber, and tossed them in with mayo, salt and pepper. The final product looked like something out of a 1950's cookbook for children, and smelled like cat food. I plated two dishes, arranging tomato slices on the plate edges in an attempt at presentation.

It's been three weeks since the triathlon, and I've been floundering between projects. The week after the race I volunteered as a camp counselor for the final week of summer camp at the Alliance Francaise, I'll get a free class out of it. I worked with a group of five to seven-year-olds, and one week was about all I could handle. From 8:45 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. every day I herded them towards whatever project was on the schedule. I was the oldest counselor by about twenty years, which made me the obvious choice for dealing with the behaviorally challenged kids. I found myself saying things like:
"Is that really working for you?" to the seven-year-old girl who pouted and cried her way through the entire week because two children who she'd decided should be her best friends were ignoring her. When she wasn't whining and pouting, she was interrupting people, and rolling her eyes and neck.
"They're being mean to me," the pouter said, leaning into my leg and resting her tear sodden face onto my breast.
"Well, you're not being very pleasant right now," I'd say, "I don't really want to be near you either. Is pouting and crying really working for you? Maybe you should try a different strategy."

The highlight of that week was a tossup between some misunderstood lyrics to a Michael Jackson song, and signage in the break room. A sign by the coffee pot read: "It would be nice if everyone would bring some ground coffee so that we all can enjoy a cup of coffee once in a while. Thanks." It reminded me of something my teacher Tim had said about the French cultural penchant for understatement. If a French person really likes something, he explained, they're likely to say "it wasn't terrible," rather than "it was great!" A sign by the sink read: "Please wash your plates and cups after you use them. Please "DO NOT" leave them in the sink. Thank You", the quotation marks undermining what they meant to stress.

One little girl kept singing Billie Jean, but it came out: "Billie Jinx is not my love, she's just a girl who says I am the one, but Chan is not my son." At one point she asked me if it was Billie James or Billie Jinx. I asked her which she thought it was, not wanting to ruin the entertainment.

We took them on a field trip to Oak Street Beach, leading them past a sleeping bum on the sidewalk, and steering them away from an empty fifth of vodka and clusters of beer bottles scattered underneath the lifeguard's perch. One boy was transfixed by something floating in with the tide that appeared to be a decomposing tampon. "It's garbage," I said to him, "leave it alone." This worked for a few minutes, but he turned his attention to it repeatedly.

Lunch for the counselors was provided by the Alliance, and consisted of a few plates of thinly sliced cold cuts, off-brand bread, iced tea and candy bars. Every day after lunch the director asked if I'd had enough to eat. I always said yes, but I was lying. I began joining the children at their 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. snack times, and carried granola bars with me in my purse. On one particularly tiring day I walked to the closest Starbucks for a strong coffee at lunch, and witnessed a bum being asked to leave Mr. J's Dawg 'N Burger. The counselors ate together in the atrium next to a baby grand piano while the kids ran around the courtyard, and conversation usually revolved around campers who were being particularly difficult.

I took a shine to one of the girls who worked with the 8 to 12-year-olds. She had long dirty blonde hair parted far on the right side of her head, the strands cascaded across her face creating a slight Flock of Seagulls effect. The braces on her teeth were offset by a small dark hoop pierced into the right side of her lower lip, and she texted constantly on her iPhone during lunch. She wore blue metallic shorts over her pale chubby thighs, tank tops that exposed her soft belly, and flip flops. She developed an instant crush on the teenaged son of one of the instructors, he'd assisted during a cooking demonstration.
"Mireille's son?" I asked.
"Do you know her?" she asked, eyes wide.
"No, sorry," I said, "I don't have any inside information for you." At the end of the week she asked if we could be facebook friends.

That weekend M and I went to Michigan with his parents, his sister, and our seven year old niece, who was a breath of fresh air compared to the children I'd worked with all week. The six of us spent three days in a cabin on Magician Lake with no internet access. We played Clue, Scrabble and Boggle when it was cloudy, and swam, canoed and fished when it was sunny. With no computers around it felt more like a week, and we returned to Chicago refreshed, our car packed with blueberries, peaches, corn, beans, tomatoes and cucumbers from a local farm stand. I turned on the computer almost immediately after returning home, logged onto facebook, and there it was - a friendship request from my teenaged co-counselor. In her profile picture she's leaning over in a tank top with six inches of cleavage visible. I haven't decided yet whether to accept.

Michael Jackson

I was watching season four, episode one of Six Feet Under when M said:
“Whoa, you want to hear a celebrity death that will blow you away?”
“In a minute,” I said distractedly. The episode onscreen was heavy, and there were only a few minutes left. From the distance of fiction I watched Nate Fisher bury his deceased wife at the top of a mountain, and then scream into the air at the absurdity of life until the credits rolled. I turned the TV off and walked to where M sat. “Okay,” I said, “who?”
“Michael Jackson,” M said, in a tone of genuine astonishment. I stood for a moment with my hands on my hips, staring at the computer screen with my jaw slightly slackened, and then headed back for the TV.
“He’s not dead,” I said after watching NBC news for a few seconds, “he’s just in the hospital.”
“The TV news can’t say it yet because of HIPPA,” M said, “TMZ already broke the news on the Internet.”
“TMZ”, I said dismissively, and got back on the computer to search for headlines. The TV caught up with the Internet within an hour, and soon we were watching montages of Michael Jackson’s life.

I’d been indoors all day – it’s been hot in Chicago this week and I’ve been moving as little as possible, sitting in one spot like a reptile under a heat lamp, absorbing information through my eyes and ears and only rising to my feet when the occasion absolutely necessitates ambulatory movement. The combination of indoor confinement and uninterrupted television watching was making me twitchy, so I stretched my muscles and went for a run in the waning sunlight, the humidity be damned.

I left the house and started towards Horner Park. I ran slowly, but turned a bright sweaty pink anyway, even the skin between my eyelids and brows turning the color of a watermelon Jolly Rancher. When I got back M was mowing the grass, and our upstairs neighbor and her five-year-old daughter were in the yard. The little girl stared at me as I doused my face with water.

I first became aware of Michael Jackson in grade school, and my friend Anna gave me a copy of Thriller, on vinyl, for Christmas in 1982. I was eleven years old and I thought he was amazing, and – dare I say it, cute. But then I was always a sucker for non-threatening, androgynous male pop stars – I had a raging crush on David Bowie circa the Serious Moonlight tour, even though he was way too old for me; Nick Rhodes, the heavily made-up keyboardist from Duran Duran; and Prince (who I still adore). I broke the plastic seal on the LP and opened it up, revealing the soft-focus picture of Michael Jackson in the center fold, reclining in a white suit and snuggling with a couple tiger cubs. It was the era of disco bashing, and when Miriam Celedonia - one of the preppy girls, saw me carrying the album with me through the halls of I.S. 88, she said:
“That’s disco you know.”
“No it’s not!” I insisted.

This morning on the Red line I heard “don’t stop ‘till you get enough” blasting through someone’s iPod headphones, and the man sitting next to me read the front page news of Michael Jackson’s death in the Chicago Tribune, discarding the paper when he got off the train. I picked it up and brought it with me to the Alliance Française, where I had a volunteer librarian gig for a couple hours. It was a slow shift; they’re between sessions, and only a few patrons came in. On my way out I said hello to Hamid, an Algerian man who’s been working at the front desk for almost as long as I’ve been taking classes, and Frédéric, the shiny bald-headed director of the learning center. Over the years Hamid has shared bits and pieces of his life with me, and his stories have ranged from curiously funny to downright terrifying; he worked at Air France for a number of years and has traveled the world. I’ve never seen him or Frédéric dressed in anything less formal than a suit and tie, even on this Friday afternoon between class sessions.
“Si vous voulez,” I said to them, “j’ai un copie du Chicago Tribune. C’est en anglais, mais…” Frédéric took the paper from my hands and stared at the front page.
“Vous en avez déjà lu?” he asked Hamid, before commandeering it. Frédéric doesn’t speak English well, I’ve only ever communicated with him in French, and I was moved by the fact that he wanted to read the Tribune’s English language coverage.

On the train ride back home I heard “don’t stop ‘till you get enough” a second time, through someone else’s headphones. At home I logged onto facebook, where seemingly everyone’s status updates had something to do with Michael Jackson’s death. I opened a link to a video of “I’ll be there,” and listened to a sweet, pre-teen Michael Jackson sing, music coming from his original, beautiful face. I was doing all right until the line “just look over your shoulders honey,” and suddenly became a soppy, weeping mess. The video ended with the young Michael appearing in the doorway of the grown, troubled, altered-in-appearance Michael, the two of them glancing at each other briefly. I was embarrassed at how much it affected me, and dried my tears with cheap paper napkins. An actual box of facial tissue lives on top of the toilet tank, but I wanted to avoid being seen in this state by my husband, who was taking a shower.

I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes me so sad about Michael Jackson’s passing, and it’s this: he had so much promise, and he was so beautiful, and then over time he became completely unrecognizable. When he spoke his voice sounded familiar, but he looked nothing like the Michael Jackson of Thriller, or Off The Wall, or the Jackson Five, and I stopped paying attention to him because I couldn’t relate to him anymore. He was like the childhood friend who had amazing potential; maybe the one who was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, only to end up broke, living in a squatter’s apartment and sniffing glue out of a paper bag. Only Michael Jackson’s story was sadder than that because he had it all, and nobody was able to stop him from self-destruction. The problem with achieving that kind of fame and success is that nobody ever says “no.” It’s the reason Donald Trump has ridiculous hair, it’s the reason Oprah gave cars to her studio audience and spent fifty million dollars on a single school in Africa when with the same money she could have helped so many more, and it’s the reason nobody ever told Michael Jackson not to get any more plastic surgery. I’m sad for the wasted potential, I’m sad to have watched him self-destruct over the years, and I’m sad for how unreachably strange, troubled and alienated he ultimately became. In the coming days the preparations for his funeral will undoubtedly be covered with the same unrelenting vigor as the rest of his life, and if there’s one wish I could be granted from my voyeuristic perch it’s for child stars to become, if not a thing of the past, then at least recognized for what they are – children.

My efforts to avoid detection by M were for naught, he exited the bathroom and saw me sitting at the kitchen counter, staring at the computer and holding back a new wall of tears.
“Are you sad?” He asked, and I nodded silently. I finally went into the bathroom to get some tissue and saw my reflection in the mirror, the skin between my eyelids and brows as pink as after a three mile run.