de pain

Du Pon? Deh Paan?  What Vowel IS that?  I just want some bread!

Spent the week or week end (3 fine days and nights) with my friend Guisane and her family in another little town South of Paris.  The last time the roof was re-done was 186°s or something, the house is old, and quaint, and sturdy with thick walls and those doors that open on the bottom and on the top.  There are rings mounted in the stone walls, to hook the horses to.  There is a hey barn and an old mossy apple tree and pine cones that must be gathered and put into a big basket by the fire for burning.  There is bread in the morning and at lunch and at dinner; there is tea in the morning and wine at lunch and dinner.  There is coffee after lunch and Guisanes father is a sweet man with a bright laugh who tells stories with his hands and her mother is a sweet woman who talks to me first in french and then when she is sure I don't understand, she translates.

Guisane and I went to the forest, le foret, and took the horses out to get fresh grass, and listened to french and american music on the speakers in her little room.  There is a pull out bed that is a couch in the day time, the sun comes through the window when it shines and everything is like after the rain.  Outside, the fields go on until you cannot see or maybe there are hills.  The clouds are busy, but slowly busy, so that one day might be for covering the sky and the next day might be for uncovering it, and the day after that maybe, is for playing marbles, so we dont do anything too fast.

Except get on a train and go back to Paris.

Now you must picture me at Versailles.  I am in sort of torn sweats with shoes that I dont dare take off because the sweat plus time equals smell, and my fussy fuzzy hair and beard connection.  My pockets are full of a passport, train ticket, bread recipt, french childrens book I am struggling through, anglais dictionary, striped gloves with horse hair on them, glasses case with a careful cigarette saved from Tom Travel.  I have an audio guide, which is like a cell phone that explains information on various sculptures and paintings, but it is in French and I like it that way.

I have never seen a palace like this before.  May be the rumored taj mahal, or the fabled eldorado...

But there are the gates wrought with gold, horsed men statchuwing them from both sides.  Beyond the gates is room for an army of 17000 men.  More.  They are all there; in their pompador uniforms.  Napolean is leading them, rallying them, preparing them to go conquest the world and everything.  Preparing them for the Tour de France, Le Tour de Monde.  The air smells like thousands of hopes, and swet metal, and sword holsters, leather glove hands on spear handles.  Horses with spurs in them.

And then my companions, a generous bunch of Americans and a German one, skip across this former field of war, which is now a major tourist spot for people of all tungs and colors.  Inside there are hallways full of statues of long dead somebodies, with folded hands or fat swords.  They are on peaceful on their death beds, or triumphant in their pride.  Big hands, big scepters, big hair.  Oh you men of valor, you.

My friends and I wandered through the halls and then the gardens, marvelling, listening to our cell phones talk about the lighting on a certain picture.  Then we played with ice on the frozen lake, and I decided I like things that are living more then things that are dead.

Tada, Halleluiah Paris, happy Sunday everybody!