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.
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 30 May 2010 06:44:00 GMT
As Mr Mo knows all too well, I am apt to be teary-eyed and a bit surly after I emerge from another round of reading about the catastrophic BP gulf gusher, for all of the same reasons that other people are in tears of grief and outrage about the fish and birds and marine mammals killed, the beaches and wetlands irremediably destroyed. It isn’t just American shorelines and livelihoods that are mortally jeopardized: Mexican and Caribbean shores and workers stand to be victims as well. As I write this, the gusher is still going strong, with no solution in sight for weeks to come. With every passing day, the potential for damage beyond the limits of the Gulf increase exponentially: the eastern seaboard of the U.S. may be affected, and even Europe may get a taste of oil via the Gulf Stream.
To all this, I add my memories of going to the beach after the much-smaller, but still calamitous oil spill off of Santa Barbara in January 1969.
We didn’t go to the beach more than a handful of times each summer: although the beaches look pretty close on a map, it was a fairly long drive on the winding roads through the coastal mountains from our home in Tarzana to our usual beach, Zuma. (Santa Monica beach was closer, but my mom did not want to deal with traffic nor parking issues.) After the spill, the aftermath of such outings wasn’t just an inevitable painful sunburn, but also nearly always discovering patches of oil and tar on my skin after peeling off my swimsuit at home. It didn’t matter that I might not have actually seen any oil anywhere on the beach (though there usually were streaks on the sand, and nearly always oil just below the surface, as we would discover when making our sand castles) — visible or not, I ended up having to repeatedly scrub and scrub and scrub parts of my skin after every outing.
And now, because of criminal negligence, rampant deregulation, and holdover industry toadies still infesting the Department of the Interior, the Gulf of Mexico is on its way to being irreparably damaged — and my skin is tingling just as it did when I was a young teen. But perhaps it is my conscience, and not my skin, that is tingling: I write this knowing that in a few hours I will be driving Mr Mo to the Marseille airport, burning hydrocarbons as we go.
Tags Barbara, BP, Deep, Horizon, oil, Santa, spill | no comments
Posted by mofembot
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:30:00 GMT
I went galloping through a few chunks of my missionary letters and diary and weekly reports and all, and my overall assessment is — snooze city. My writing overall utterly and completely sucked. It was almost wholly narrative instead of descriptive, there’s tons of whining and pseudo-spiritual introspective drivel, I’m nearly always promising to follow up with more details — virtually all of which have now been lost to time and memory… in short, pleah. (Or “beurk,” if you want to get all French about it.)
So at the very least, “Sister Mish” is not going to be epistolary in nature, if it ends up seeing the light of day at all. And that’s a big honkin’ if at this point, I gotta say.
But I have to admit that I’m also a bit disappointed that I didn’t do a better on-the-spot job of describing my surroundings and the people I dealt with both intimately and “de passage,” and that I was more interested in projecting an image of being a Good Missionary, a Good Mormon — than in finding ways to best (or better) convey what things were like for me in a multi-dimensional way.
I suppose all is not lost, if I really want to pursue the idea of “Sister Mish”— there are enough memory-jogging anecdotes and possibly even images (among my slides, especially as accompanied by the slide-show narrations I sent home with them) to try to construct something different. I guess the real question I have is whether in light of my current disbelief and cynicism and all — could I do the experience justice?
I wonder.
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Posted by mofembot
Sat, 13 Feb 2010 06:43:00 GMT
The few, the proud will have noticed that “nonlynnear” is essentially offline for the moment. I am slowly figuring out how I want the site to look as The repository for my published and longer writings. In addition to Dying School, I am starting to handle some content for another long writing, which for the moment I am calling “Sister Mish,” based on my experiences as a mormon missionary in France some 30+ years ago… as related in the letters I wrote.
“Oh no,” I hear you cry, “not another epistolary work!” Well, yes and no. I have input a few of my letters home, and it’s really not clear how well I will be able to control my gag reflex if I continue along this path. Let me explain: one of the things that makes this particular project interesting to me is how differently I described the same incident or circumstances — depending on the audience.
For example, given that my parents were—well, not opposed to my going on a mission, that’s too strong, but certainly (and mind-bogglingly to me, given my clear and present youthful fanaticism to that point) they were caught flat-footed and unprepared for the event, I wanted to try to show them that they were getting a good return for their investment, as it were. So most of my letters home are “silver lining” and “best foot forward” and (name your happy-time cliché) in tone and content. Letters to my brothers, all of whom I was trying to encourage to go on missions, were filled with righteous encouragement. Mon frickin’ Dieu, some of it is so boring on top of being painful to read.
My missionary journal, as I recall (not having yet reviewed it in decades), unfortunately, tends to be a running lamentation about my perceived and real failures and weaknesses. Fortunately, I was able to vent to a few people, and if the carbons are still legible, I think the letters I wrote to them are worth a look. (My exchanges with a sister missionary in Holland were particularly, how shall I say, piquantes.)
Well. All of this is a lead-up to the title of today’s entry. As I was inputting a letter home last night, I found myself rolling my eyes and shaking my head at the following (and even inserting a few bracketed asides):
I have gained a real testimony of following— yea, verily, blindly following, if need be, the leaders of the Church. …
It’s true that the leaders on the different levels do make mistakes. But the Lord counsels us to obey/follow their counsel; even if they may be wrong in a given circumstance, we will be blessed for our obedience. We can’t receive the blessings if we aren’t willing to put faith in them and obey. Besides which, since we are limited human beings, we, individually, are not always in a position to understand the ultimate outcome of any decision we make or that we are counselled to make. If we listen to the leaders, there is more of a chance that their counsel is correct in the long run, even if (to our own perspective & according to our own individual reasoning) it doesn’t appear to be right.
As [for] “personal revelation”—when it’s in conflict with the leaders’ counsels, I’d still say “follow the brethren.”
Very scary stuff to me now, to say the least, and part of my brain is trying to figure out if there really is any (LDS or other) scriptural justification for the sheep-like thoughts expressed above. I’m amazed that I “emerged” from this mindset. — And I’m fully aware at how completely appalled my younger self would be if she could see the “inactive, apostate” me that she became. She would, moreover, point to a little semi-prescient sentence at the end of all the blather: “Eventually all of us are going to be asked to do something or to make a sacrifice that may seem outrageous— but it must be done if we want to obtain eternal life” … and yes, I guess I did find being told by a high church official to compromise my integrity “outrageous,” and that that was probably the point at which I began to “turn away” in earnest. But that is a tale for another time.
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Posted by mofembot
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:45:00 GMT
[Written in transit from Walldorf, Germany, to Marseille, France, on January 15th]
The catastrophe in Haiti saddens and appalls me — I am saddened for the loss of life, for the unfathomable sorrow of the survivors, the pain of the injured, for the fact that the survivors have lost so many and so much. Some have lost their entire families in addition to escaping with only what they were wearing at the time the earthquake struck.
I am appalled because much of the loss of life was preventable. Hmm. That may be hyperbole borne of wishful thinking: preventing the deaths in Haiti would have meant years of fixing so many systemic problems as to render “prevention” meaningless: replacing, for example, the shantytowns with affordable, built-to-code structures; providing meaningful employment; benefitting from competence rather than corruption at all levels of government, and so on infinitum ad nauseam.
The photos tell the story: there doesn’t seem to be one building anywhere in Port-au-Prince (among the ones left standing) that is undamaged. So much unreinforced or inadequately reinforced concrete! So many houses dwellings without any foundation whatsoever on inhospitable hillsides (many now in ravines)! It is catastrophe upon catastrophe.
The lack of heavy equipment and infrastructure will result in a death toll that will be far higher than the “should have been.” A 7.0 earthquake is nearly always going to result in deaths in any densely-populated area. But when people (notably the Haitian president himself) are speaking of a toll anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000, and possibly more, the world’s collective failure to pay attention to this poverty-stricken, wood-denuded one-third-of-an-island can scarcely be atoned for by rushing in trying to rush in however many search-dog and rescue teams and emergency aid.
…My saying this must mean that I think we, the world, the Earth, Earthlings, Terrans, human beings, including our governments and even our corporations, are indeed responsible for one another. And that we ought to think ahead and invest in our collective futures, rather than only reacting to disasters of such magnitude as to pique the most hardened heart and conscience.* (Oh, that does make me a socialist, yes, it must, and if so, I say: I am glad to be one.—But I digress.)
The lack of equipment means that many who are buried who might have survived will die for lack of water. It is hot in Haiti — 32/33ºC, and for better or worse, no rain is forecast. (Perhaps some water would have made its way to those buried, but I suppose overall it’s a good thing that there is no rain there. [16 Jan update: Now I wish that there were a bit of rain so that those going without water on the streets can fill up bottles and buckets, given the problems of distribution.])
Then there will be the aftermath victims: those rescued but injured whose wounds will be infected for lack of adequate medical attention immediately after. Whatever water infrastructure there may be (to say nothing of sewers and electricity) is hugely damaged, and the risk of cholera and typhus and so on is rising hourly. [Addendum: Apparently crush injuries are particularly insidious: once a victim is freed, the toxins that have built up in the affected limb(s) rush through the body and overwhelm the kidneys. This can only be counteracted by immediately administering IV saline solution plus “mannitol”… and of course most Haitians’ access to these life-saving substances is next to nil.]
Is there enough money in the world to fix what is wrong with the world? I don’t think there’s any way to answer that question: even if there is enough, it will never get into the hands of those who need it and/or those who are competent to use it wisely and well.
Scenes of looting and sheer chaos in Haiti seem to be on the screens of CNN International here at the Frankfurt airport. This social breakdown is not unexpected, certainly, but once again, a hideous tragedy is compounded by the failure of leaders on all levels and in all places and venues to address the problems of this locus of heartbreak long before the Earth ruptured.
How sad to see people trying through sheer brute force to move slabs of concrete with their own unaided strength. Dogs who are trained to sniff out the living will soon be replaced by cadaver dogs. (I’ve heard that rescue dogs get depressed if they end up dealing only with the dead.)
[At this point, it was time to board my flight to Marseille.]
*Apparently Rush Limbaugh has neither a heart nor a conscience.
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:05:00 GMT
(Pardon my instinctive response to this posting’s title; it is heartfelt: Ah hahahahahaha, ha! ha! ho! ho! Heeeeeeee!)
I just now finished a kind of second breakfast with Gisela and Gerald. As I have written elsewhere, my German is pathetic. Gisela’s English is slightly better than my German, Gerald’s English is much better than my German, but not fluent by a long stretch. So having a conversation is challenging, but do-able. They always seem fascinated by the bizarrities and (quite honestly) outright horrors of some of America’s ways, especially in terms of health care and workers’ rights and all. The fact that a long-time American employee can show up at work and find him/herself fired, entitled only to two weeks’ pay, and often escorted to their desk, supervised as they pack up their belongings, and escorted out — without even so much as the chance to say a proper goodbye to one’s coworkers — astounds them.
They worry that the German safety net, as with the French, is being slowly reshaped to resemble that of the barbaric American system. In Germany as in France, people on unemployment are having to show much more proof that they are actively searching for work, or they will be cut off from support. I don’t know if it’s the same in Germany as in France, but I’ve heard a number of stories about people being penalized for not accepting employment offers, even when the logistics of doing so are completely unworkable.
I think of the job that I interviewed for with an English-language learning center, supposedly in Manosque, a 45-50-minute one-way drive from Quinson. Well, for the princely daily rate of 20 euros, it turned out that the job was really in Sisteron, nearly an hour and a quarter away. I was very, very glad not to have been hired, and had they offered me the job, I may well have had to accept it or stop getting unemployment benefits. Such benefits didn’t amount to very much, but better than nothing. Ironically, of course, the gas and time and social charges and so on would have reduced my net earnings to less than the unemployment benefits, especially since I would have only had work a couple of days a week.
Yipes.
And yet America is so much more damned bass-ackwards about this sort of thing. When I finally got a job (= when I started my own business, given that at my age, the odds of being hired on a regular contract were practically nil, as the employment office people readily acknowledged), I got a surprisingly large lump sum deposited into our bank account (about 4-5 times the amount of my monthly unemployment sum). My initial reaction was WTF, someone’s made a mistake, I’m going to have to pay this back — but no. Apparently France recognizes that people who have been out of work for a while might need some extra help to re-enter the workforce, such as perhaps needing to pay a deposit on an apartment if they relocated to take a job, or if they have to pay for childcare, or even for work-appropriate clothing.
I was, to use a Britishism, “gobsmacked.” But it is such a sane, humane, sensible, and economically wise thing to do… one would think America would want to follow suit, instead of cutting off support the very damned instant a person is hired (never mind that they may have to wait several weeks before actually getting paid something). America punishes the jobless and poor, and (as Gerald and I discussed this morning) part of it has to do with America’s Calvinistic bent: people are poor because God is punishing them (wealth being interpreted in the American psyche as a sign of God’s approbation… really and truly).
Well. My object in writing this was not to digress into the politics and social dynamics of European v. American social policy and all, but rather to lament my inability to speak German, and once Gerald had to leave, my inability to completely understand everything that Gisela had to say about dealing with her kids (and me dealing with ours, specifically with Youngest). We both have our “unsupervised parties gone awry” stories, we both can share our unhappiness at the cost of living and the cost of paying for kids’ education and training, etc. But I swear to god that if we ever end up living in Germany for any length of time, I am going to make learning German a priority. I now wish that I had taken the time to follow the online courses… but I guess I didn’t expect to find myself here again.
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 08:56:00 GMT
It seems odd to be writing a little something about Chiune Sugihara while working here in Germany, and about whom I just learned in reading the second of the two Hark! A Vagrant! comics on this page. “Japan’s Schindler” went unnoticed and unsung back in his native Japan, after having risked his career (and possibly his life) to save anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 Jews by granting them transit visas as a vice-consul in Lithuania.
Had I known to look for the monument in his honor in Vilnius, and the other one in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, I would have done so.
Sugihara puts me in mind of Hamburg’s golden paving stones, sprinkled here and there in the sidewalks (usually in front of apartment buildings), and inscribed with the names and fates of the deported Jews who had lived in those places. Some apartment buildings were torn down, of course, and stores and markets put up in the spaces, but the paving stones remain, seemingly unnoticed by the hundreds of customers and passers-by.
I tried to notice.
I have not noticed any comparable tiles or stones or plaques in Heidelberg, though thousands of Jews were deported from here, and two synagogues were burned during the infamous Kristallnacht.
During one of my stays here, my landlady showed me a book of their family’s genealogy, including a photo of an ancestor in a Wehrmacht officer’s uniform. I did not ask her where he had been stationed nor what his duties had been. I am told that the rising generation in particular is taught and re-taught all about the atrocities of the Nazi era in public school, supposedly to the point of being thoroughly bored and sick to death of it all. I have to wonder about that; on the other hand, I do not recall having the greatest sins of America’s past (e.g., slavery, genocide of indigenous peoples) taught and re-taught when I was in school… but granted, I was in school rather a long time back and talking about such things, or feeling it appropriate to do so in public school, was only beginning to catch on.
Do German kids say, “Yeah, yeah, the Nazis, yeah, yeah, they were bad, they did horrible things, but that was a long time ago”? My landlord’s grown (and almost-grown) kids say yes. To which I have to reply (at least in my mind): maybe they’re not teaching the Holocaust in the right way.
I remember when Ingrid’s dad came to our seminary class to talk to us about what it was like to be part of the Hitler Youth and then conscripted into the army in his mid-teens in the waning days of the Third Reich. I remember the German army vet who was missing an arm and with whom I regularly played ping-pong at Skipper Steimle’s Pine View Lodge near Lake Arrowhead, CA. He was a good player, that one, with just a flap of his deltoid muscle remaining that would flex “reflexively” as he played. I never asked him how he lost his arm; I assume now as then that he lost it in the war. And I remember meeting a few Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, including some who had numbers (badly) tattoed on their forearms. Most of the camp survivors are now dead, and most of those who were part of the Nazi war machine (willingly or unwillingly) are dead as well.
It is too much to say that we as a species haven’t learned anything from the Holocaust, but given the continued slaughter of innocents in so many countries, the prolonged episodes of ethnic cleansing in many parts of the world, the best I can proffer is that perhaps things would have been worse without at least some people having taken to heart the horrors that Hitler unleashed on such a massive scale such a relatively short time ago. That is cold comfort, however, and as the world’s population continues to grow unabated, and as water and food shortages loom on an increasingly closer horizon, we may yet experience things even worse than those suffered by the targets of Hitler’s paranoia and wrath.
God forbid.
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Posted by mofembot
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:57:00 GMT
(With apologies to Lemony Snicket.)
So I am back in Germany for a few days, and as I told my landlady here in Heidelberg, I really would like to drop 20 kilos (more like 30, actually). If tonight is any indication, this weight loss is not going to happen while I’m here: it being a holiday and all, with everything (including most restaurants) closed, the von R’s invited me to have dinner with them and two of their sons and their sons’ respective girlfriends. And then proceeded not just to heap my plate high, but to re-heap, and attempt to re-heap yet again. Mercifully, there was no dessert. But Gerald & Gisela had already served me lady fingers with coffee in the mid-to-late afternoon, so I was “pre-desserted.” Gack.
This all said, I am going to try hard not to overdo things at the employee cafeteria while I’m here. If I do take extra food for an evening meal, I hope to confine myself to salad (and not of the potato or macaroni variety, either).
I’m beat, so it’s off to bed for me. (Yes, at this early hour. And yes, this is my second blog post for today and that makes up for the lack thereof yesterday.)
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Posted by mofembot
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:01:00 GMT
(Let me toss in a Shakespearean “forsooth” here to counterbalance the LOL-cat title.)
I didn’t post anything on January 5th. I thought I would, but got distracted (a) by a certain party (not me) who spilled her beverage onto a laptop keyboard (not mine), then (b) by cleanup (not particularly of laptop per se; Mr Mo kindly came back to Aix from Quinson, where he had driven just that very morning, to deal with this); then (c) by packing. But mostly, if truth be told, (d) by wanting to finish reading a book that I cannot take with me to Germany in a few hours. (I did not finish the book. It will keep.)
And thus it is. Amen. I will cut myself some slack if I manage to post another entry later today (at some sane time this afternoon, that is; this is a wee hours’ “I cannot sleep anyway” extravaganza).
Anyway, yes, back I go to Walldorf (the small one near Heidelberg where Johann Jakob Astor, aka John Jacob Astor of Walldorf Astoria fame, came from) to work for a few days. Too many technical questions to want to deal with off-site, given the tight deadlines. Fortunately, transport costs are surprisingly low and I will be able to sleep at Gerald and Gisela’s (the same people I’ve stayed with since the very beginning of my German gig; and also fortunately for me, while The Awful German Toilet is still there, other creature comforts, such as a shower curtain (!!) have gradually made their way into life at G&G’s).
The price of familiarity and convenience — the fact that I get to stay at G&G’s, who live fewer than 10 minutes’ walk from the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof, and whose neighborhood I now know well, etc. — is somewhat offset by the fact that I will have to leave my room by around 7h15 every morning, because Gisela tends at least one baby early on in the day. (I think by the time I arrive in Heidelberg this afternoon, around 15h if my flight and train connections go as planned, daycare will be over.) Ah well, I am planning on putting in long days at my client’s. At least the room is entirely mine on Saturday and Sunday. I expect to mostly stay ensconced, given that the forecast for Baden-Württemberg calls for snow showers essentially every damn day I’m there. (I have bought long underwear and more warm socks in preparation for the evil. How is it that at my rapidly advancing age, I’m still not living in a warm climate year-round???)
The other price of familiarity and convenience is yet another round of “omg, I wish I (a) had taken more German in college, (b) had remembered the German phrasebook” (not that it really helps that much for the context of my trip and sojourn, really; I’ll see if Larry has one here at the apartment in Aix), and “(c) had a prayer of remembering what I ended up learning the last time I stayed for awhile.” My conversations with Gisela are extremely limited, to say the least, and Gerald doesn’t usually get home until late, and while his English is better, it is far from fluent. (Much, much, much better than my German, however.)
I can only hope that I will form a few dementia/Alzheimer’s-off-staving neurological connections by all of these comings and goings. But now I should really try to get a bit more sleep. Gute Nacht (more like “Guten Morgen,” but hey, it will still be dark outside for hours yet).
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Posted by mofembot
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:27:00 GMT
Day Four of the New Year, and look-see at me, I’m posting another entry on my blog. This is a new record for most consecutive blog postings.
To blog, or not to blog. Do I have anything to say? Do I have too much to say that’s simply all pent up and jumbled up? At one point earlier today, I thought about writing something about the beggars in Aix, and how I usually give the ones I encounter 50 euro cent-pieces, and how I studiously try to avoid any contact when I have no change on me at all. I think about how hard it must be to beg, to be outside with a sign and a cup and (for some) having to endlessly repeat some variant of the French equivalent of “do you have any spare change?” And how many people (like me when change-free) don’t even look, or give without even the slightest bit of human interaction.
I also saw an elderly lady, functionally blind. (I think she had some sight left, even though she used a white cane.) This brought to mind the happy thought of how perhaps the only voices she hears, the only social contact she may have are the daily exchanges at the market or bakery. And she is only the tip of the veritable iceberg of the widowed whose days are… what? Alone? Lonely? Boring? I have no idea, but I find I am still adept at projecting how I think they “should” feel in circumstances that my imagination insists on painting in the most tragic hues possible.
At this point in the evening, neither beggars nor aged loneliness is achieving much traction with the Blogging Muse.
On an entirely different note, I see that Oldest’s flight has landed in San Diego. I am looking forward to hearing from her about her trip to Brazil. Hopefully she was well enough to enjoy it. Middle daughter’s flight is due to land at JFK in about 10 minutes. It was nice having her home for Christmas. She is a formidable Scrabble (and other word games) player. And I am glad that I have a full day here tomorrow in Aix to get ready for my ~10-day stint in Germany.
Fine, this piece gets no prizes, but at least it is a posting. Of sorts.
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