Solomon in all his glory
Posted by mofembot Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:57:00 GMT
I live in a village of older people, mostly retirees. There are a few families here with young children, but very few people a half-generation or so away from Mr Mo and me (that is, in their mid-to-late thirties with kids entering or already in their teens). Mr Mo and I are on the young end of the older folks — as much as a half-generation removed ourselves, and our presence here (due to Youngest’s having attended a tiny, now-defunct anglophone school here for a while) has occasionally fooled people into thinking that we are retired.
If only.
Anyway, the older people are very nice: I very much like my across-the-street neighbors and am on friendly first-name bases with quite a few people; I play French Scrabble with several once a week when I’m here at “Arts des Mains” at The Circle of the Future (the name of the small assembly hall); I go to book club; I attend the monthly village lunches when I can. Today’s village lunch incites me to write, and not because of the food, though the “moules-frites à volonté” (all-you-can-eat mussels and fries) were pretty good. I am writing because of who was absent today: Monsieur Jackie Bertran (not his real name).
Jackie is probably the oldest man in the village now; if there are others, they are too infirm to be out and about. The oldest women in our village were at the luncheon today, but Jackie was not. I saw him slowly walking up the street towards me as I hurried to lunch at the Bar du Cours (Terrasse), so I greeted him and asked if he was going to the luncheon.
To my consternation, he was not going: he said that he had not heard about it all. This surprised me, given that I’d heard about it in several venues, including earlier this week in places where Jackie had been; we had received our little quarter-sheet notice in our mailbox; hadn’t he received one?
Off I went to the lunch, sorry that Jackie wasn’t going to be there: usually he attends these affairs, greatly looks forward to them, in fact, and usually he happily sings the “Quinson” song at some point during the meal, asked or not. (He still has quite a nice voice.) When our former neighbor inquired about “the man who sings” today, I told those at the table about my encountering Mr Bertrand just prior. And that’s where the conversation took a disquieting turn to some degree: not the expressions of surprise about Jackie’s seeming lack of awareness about this event, nor even the concern about his walking about without his cane (and indeed, to judge from the state of his chin, he’d fallen fairly recently) — but because of a small inkling that maybe, just maybe he’d been deliberately kept in the dark as punishment for picking the village flowers.
Our village has been anxious to be awarded a “village fleuri” sign for a while now, and planters have been put up along the major thoroughfares and planted in tulips and pansies and petunias and so on. And apparently Jackie has been picking them regularly and presenting his little bouquets to the ladies of Arts des Mains, to the amusement of some, certainly, but to the frustration of others who don’t want to see village money wasted, and who really and truly want that “village fleuri” sign to go up. (It means being listed as such and in principle attracting flower-oriented tourists, I guess.) Madame la Présidente of Arts des Mains very nicely but very pointedly talked to Jackie just this past Wednesday about how he must not pick the flowers. But to all evidence, either he didn’t understand or forgot or feels no reason to cease and desist. “If you don’t want the flowers, I’ll give them to someone else,” has apparently been his response to those remonstrating.
Was he excluded from the luncheon? Probably not; probably forgot… although his daughter lives nearby, and would she have been similarly overlooked? Wouldn’t she have made sure her father would be in attendance?
Poor old man, he has outlived his friends in the village — his best friend, one he’s known his whole life, whom he palled around with daily, died last year — and he is bored and lonely. It would be too cruel, flower-picking notwithstanding, to choose to isolate him further, even though I share the dismay about this untoward habit of his (especially when he doesn’t manage to gather all that he picks, and I find dead flowers in the planters and on the sidewalk). There are no florists here, and even if the rumor is true that a flower shop is going to open in nearby Montmeyan, even that is too far away to do Jackie any good. He wants to give flowers to the village ladies, thinking that they will be happy and flattered, but instead he is driving them crazy.
Hopefully not so crazy as to be punitive. Hopefully not.