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.

Southern France Part II - Languedoc-Rousillon

I went to breakfast at 7am, as soon as the dining room opened, to find dad already there in his running gear, his pale legs poking out from under a breakfast table like matchstick potatoes. His glasses lay on the table and he was absorbed in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. As I approached the table he said "bonjour" and then his entire body spasmed for a moment as if he´d been struck by lightning.

"I didn´t see that it was you!" he said, returning the glasses to his face, and then, as if picking up on a conversation thread from a previous discussion: "By my calculations, we´re number four and five in here for breakfast," and began a discouse on the wisdom of choosing hotels that cater to the business traveler on weekends, because that´s when the rates are cheapest. "I hate to tell you what I paid for our rooms," he said conspiratorially, his index finger resting on his lower lip. I stood up to get some orange juice and he stopped mid-sentence, continuing right where he left off when I sat down as if I´d hit a pause button on him when I stood from the table, "Eighty-Nine Euros." Two more patrons arrived, prompting dad to tell me that the breakfast count was now up to 7. Some mornings I have patience for his line of thinking, other mornings its like having breakfast with Rain Man. I finished my coffee and told him I needed to make a phone call. "Hold it, you´re not calling from the room are you?" he called after me.

"No dad, I have a calling card."

I walked outside and found a glass walled phone booth on a street corner. Nothing good ever happens in glass walled phone booths. At least once in every spy movie an innocent bystander makes a phone call from one, only to be mistaken by a hit man and killed in a drive-by shooting. I looked up and down the street for any suspicious looking vehicles before walking in. It was midnight in Chicago, and I spoke to M as tiny dogs on leashes stuck their noses underneath the glass and sniffed me as they passed by.

Sophie and Brayton, friends from Chicago who own a home in Uzes, picked us up at the hotel. We drove along a narrow, winding two-way road that was perilously close to a deep ditch that ran next to it, and looked like it barely accomodated a single car. I gripped the door handle of the passenger side seat the whole way, though I´m not sure what use it would have done me if we´d tipped over into the ditch or crashed into an oncoming vehicle. Our first stop was at the Languedoc-Roussilon Quaker meeting, housed in a building that dates back to the 1800´s and is surrounded by olive trees that get pressed into oil every year at harvest time. We were greeted by a woman who asked where dad and I were from; dad said we were from planet earth, I rolled my eyes and didn´t care who saw it.

I was glad for the silence, I haven´t attended Quaker meeting regularly in years, but I was tired and it guaranteed me one precious hour of being in the presence of dad minus his incessant patter. I´m not sure I´ve ever seen dad quiet for that long. There were 14 of us present, I was the youngest by at least 20 years. At the rise of meeting everyone introduced themselves; dad presented himself by saying he was born in a town that had not one but two periodic elements named after it - Berkelinium and Californium. I said I was visiting from Chicago and left it at that.

An outdoor pot-luck lunch followed with oysters on the half shell, wine, and other delectable treats that I´ve never seen at any other Quaker pot-luck meal. I watched as the aging Quakers around me absorbed dad´s eccentricities like wine to sponge cake, and realized that I´d hit the jackpot - Quakers always tolerate eccentricities, there are at least five eccentrics in every Quaker meeting I´ve ever been to, why hadn´t I thought of this years ago? I relaxed at the table, absorbing the late afternoon sunshine and the pleasant buzz brought on by wine from local vineyards, confident in the knowledge that I was in good hands.