Bordeaux 15144

            For the eight years that Cynthia and I lived in Florida, we spent a lot of time looking around public places and saying, "We're the youngest people here." For the past 4 months we've been looking around and saying, "We're the oldest people here."  This is definitely better but I'm still not too shot in the ass with being 60 so it's good to be living in a place that reminds me of the United States I grew up in.

            Like Springdale, where I was raised, Bordeaux sits on a major river, the Garonne. It is, however, missing the array of smokestacks that bracketed both ends of town. But Springdale is missing the ruins of a third century Roman amphitheater like the one just down the street from our apartment. In fact, this city like the rest of France, has places that went up centuries before the sprouting of the trees used to built the Pinta, Niña and Santa Maria. There is evidence that people lived here in the sixth century B.C. and they settled permanently a few hundred years later. The Romans came along at the time of Julius Caesar and the oldest building in town is their aforementioned amphitheater. In fact there's so much significant stuff here that Bordeaux is a UNESCO World Heritage site, an honor not likely to ever be bestowed on my hometown. But as beautiful as it is here, none of that is what takes me back.

 

             Four months isn't enough time to start drawing any hard and fast conclusions about the natives and their attitudes. I have noticed, and already mentioned, that they don't seem to mind stepping in dog shit every five yards. And our French friends claim that "The customer is always right" hasn't really caught on here in a big way but we haven't seen much of the stereotypes we were given to expect. But it does seem to me that, apart from the architecture, there's a continuity to life here that I think is missing in the U.S.

 

            When I was a kid, my hometown must have had a dozen little grocery and variety stores and they are all long gone. The bakery, butchers, shoemakers and hardware stores (two) are, likewise, memories.  Even Shoop's, the tavern and the town meeting spot that had been there as long as my mother could remember, closed up a few years ago and downtown Pittsburgh is almost unrecognizable as the place where I went to work in 1971.

 

             Walking around Bordeaux, I can still find these sorts of places. Within spitting distance of our apartment are two different cordonniers, shoemakers,  that look like they've been there since de Gaulle was a corporal. Every time I walk past it feels like Johnny Basilone ought to be inside. Johnny, Springdale's shoemaker, was a little guy with black curly hair who didn't say much and always had a lit Pall Mall in his lips that was generally about 2 1/2 inches of ash. I was at least 20 before I ever saw him take a drag or heard him talk. If one of these places does happen to be run by the same kind of guy smoking a Gaullois, at least I won't have to worry about talking to him.

 

            The Wal-Martization of America seems to have made it certain that the Steve Mikus, Lou Mazolli and Pete Cincilla kinds of store are gone for good. But those places still exist here in spite of and side-by-side with mega-stores like the Auchan at Mériadeck. This French chain’s local branch takes up 3 floors and sells everything from bulk walnuts to washing machines. (I admit, though, that I love it, especially on what we've been calling Alsatian day, when they set up a big wok-like tub and cook choucroute garnie, sauerkraut with sausage, ham, potatoes and anything else they can think of, and it’s only €13 a kilo. I like to stand right beside it for a while and just breathe deeply) 

 

But everywhere there are little épiceries, charcuteries/boucheries, patisseries, boulangeries and variety stores that I’m too lazy to look up the French word for. Sometimes there’s more than one of the same type on a block. How they stay in business, I don’t know but a few of these shops have on the wall a little photograph of the place from about a hundred years ago as the same type of business. (These pictures almost always contain at least one woman that looks like my Aunt Min, a sturdy farmer’s wife.) A hardware store near us has been in business since 1831, although it has been forced to move a couple of times.

 

There's a possibility that I’m over-idealizing all of this. I did, after all just have a birthday and there’s something about having that 6 on the front of it. Like all those things from my hometown, my youth is gone for good so maybe I’m just fighting against the day when I have to admit to being old. But I can tell you that being in a pâtisserie in France is just like being in the Springdale bakery when I was 9 years old.  And I still can't have one of everything. 

 

It's also occurred to me that a big part of my motivation to come here in the first place was the fear of aging. Some guys buy Harley's, some dump their wife to chase women half their age. My wife brought me to France so I spent more than one, less than the other and more wisely than both.  

Ruins of Palais Gallien

Photos ©2013 Cynthia Hinson

            

In Sourzac

            The day after Christmas, 2012, marked the 60th anniversary of the birth of a poor white child in the hospital at Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania, so Cynthia and I planned to celebrate by renting a car and driving into the country. A few years ago we had visited Sarlat, a village in the Périgord, known to people like my wife as one of the best preserved medieval towns in France, and to people like me as the place that served one of the best steaks I've ever eaten.

 

            To get to Sarlat from Bordeaux you take the A89 east toward Perigueux, follow it for about 20 miles, realize how boring it is and how much the tolls are going to cost, then get off and find a more picturesque route.  Fortunately, in this part of France just about any two-lane road will do. For us it was the D6089 which parallels the Isle River and the D47 from Perigueux, much of which reminds me of U.S. 30 between Ligonier and Gettysburg in western Pennsylvania. The scenery is the same kind of rolling farm land but missing the barns with the faded "Chew Mail Pouch" signs and the "See Indian Caverns" billboards. I swear that more than once as we rounded a curve I expected to see Storybook Forest. 

 

            Not missing, however, was the inevitable line of cars trailing a pensioner- piloted RV and the experience here is exactly the same as on Route 30. There is virtually nowhere to safely pass and when an opening finally comes, the opposite lane, which for the last ten miles has been nearly deserted, okay, right, you know what I'm talking about.  Here the problem's compounded by the Citroën C1 you're driving being able to accelerate to the requisite passing speed only if it's driven off a cliff. And the European Manual of Conduct for Men over 65 apparently prescribes the same headgear for operators of slow moving vehicles as the American version, because the vieux chevres here, like the old goats at home, are always wearing the same hat. Again, you probably know what I mean.  My sister used to say they looked like toilet seat covers. 

 

            So when your chance comes, you whip and flog the little C1 to within a red centimeter of throwing a rod until, finally, you make it past M. & Mme. Hulot. This will all turn out to have been futile when within the next kilometer will emerge a scene that your wife absolutely has to capture in pictures. In this case it was something you definitely won't find along Route 30 - a tiny village built into the hillside and, according to the roadside sign, the site of continuous human habitation for 24,000 years. (I guess if you believe the earth is 6,000 [or is it 9,000?] years old, this could be metric years.) 

 

            In Sourzac, a little town on the Isle River, we found something else you won't see in Pennsylvania, or anywhere else in the U.S.  Next to the little riverside park where we stopped to eat lunch was the town war memorial. Every city, town and village in France has one of these and I always feel compelled to have a look. The inscriptions are often touching  and usually include the names of the enfants who never came home. Even in small towns the numbers from 1914-18 are astonishing. But here, along with the names of dead soldiers was also inscribed "FUSILLES PAR LES ALLEMANDS LE 11 JUIN 1944" (Shot by the Germans, June 11, 1944). Below this were the names and ages of 18 men, the oldest being 47 and the youngest 16. Across the street was an old, rusty street sign reading, "Avenue du 11 Juin 1944."  

 

            If you're French, you don't need an explanation. Over 350,000 French civilians were killed in World War II,  230,000 of these between 1940 and 1944 in reprisals by the Germans. But I wanted to know what happened here and found the story on the internet. On the night of June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, Resistance members attacked a German troop train in the neighboring town of Mussidan. The SS troops involved easily fought off the guerillas, killing nine of them in the process. The next day, in retaliation, every man the Germans could find, 350 in all, were herded into the town square. Those over 60 or disabled were eventually let go. The remaining 52, including the 18 from Sourzac, were shot. 

 

            As an American I have a hard time trying to imagine this since nothing in our history compares. What was it like to have your country invaded, your army beaten and then to suffer the humiliation and indignity of over 4 years of occupation? What was it like to live day in and day out knowing that the armed strangers might someday decide you were the one to shoot. And what effect does an experience like that have on a country and its people?

 

            Then I  thought about what's gone on in the United States since 9/11.  As bad as it was, we were never seriously threatened with anything remotely close to what Europeans suffered and yet life in the U.S. has been fundamentally altered. Americans now seem to live in a state of almost constant fear, so exercising a constitutional right isn't the only reason there's a firearm for almost every single person.  The current state of discourse in America has the country being split almost 50-50 and intransigence is the order of the day. Conservatives don't just disagree with liberals, they hate them. Mass killings have become so commonplace that some don't even make the front page.  Not even 20 children being rounded up and shot can make the National Rifle Association consider that arming everybody might not be such a hot idea.  And, in anticipation of the next time, more people buy guns. 

            Americans don't need the Germans. We've got each other.

              

            

LE JAZZ BOEUF

            One of the things I'd planned to do here was get back into my horn since I wasn't going to have a whole lot to do anyway. And I'm finding out pretty quickly that, especially for a trombone player, you have to find your own way. So I was excited one Thursday when I passed a little place near our apartment where a hand lettered sign read "Open Swing Acoustique, Jazz Manouche, Jazz Boeuf, 19h30". Jazz Manouche is the French term for what Americans call "Gypsy Jazz" (music made famous during the swing era by Django Reinhardt) and "Jazz Boeuf" is the local term for a jam session.

            Chez le Pépère, like a lot of places here, would have to double in size to be "intimate". A small bar, a few high tables, a wall of wine bottles and the flags of a bunch of rugby teams decorate the room, and the night I walked in the sound of a piano came up from the basement, or cave as it's more appropriately called. Descending a tight spiral staircase, I recognized the tune as "Sunny Side of the Street" and took it as a good sign - a tune I can play when I work up the nerve to bring my horn. Like jazz clubs everywhere, the musicians were packed onto a tiny little stage but the instrumentation was not what I was used to at home. A little console piano, bass, two acoustic guitars and a violin. No drums, no amps, nobody who looked over 30 and everybody could swing. I'm not sure I'll fit in with these guys.

            Tuesday nights there's a straight ahead session that I have hopes for since it seems to be also young guys but they're still trying to find their improvisational voices.  This was one of the aspects of going back to school in my 50's that gave me the most pleasure. For years I had been surrounded by people who didn't really share my musical tastes. Then again, anyone into jazz can probably make the same statement. So it was a good thing to have others in the same musical boat, wanting to make an improvisational statement but not yet having the tools. I've always said that my life has been a series of events leading to the next humbling experience. So in relating the following story, I freely admit that I have no room to talk.

            I spent most of the last year or so in St. Pete trying to work up the nerve to play at one of the local jam sessions. I was fortunate enough to know a lot of the best musicians in the Tampa Bay area and when it comes to people on my level, they are gracious, tolerant and encouraging. They are also light years beyond me musically and too intimidating, so I usually went to listen. Ironically, the best way to build confidence is by allowing yourself to screw up. There are those who don't seem to be burdened by any of these issues, no matter how badly they solo and I wish some of that was contagious. It is not, however, always a good thing.

            Every form of human endeavor has its Inspector Clouseaus.  People who, despite all evidence, are completely convinced of their talent and oblivious to anything that might indicate otherwise. Most of the musical Clouseaus I've noticed fall into three basic categories, not necessarily in this order - singers with no sense of pitch, guitar players trying to play far beyond their capability and drummers with no sense of time. In fact, in almost every amateur group I've ever been involved with, there was always at least one guy with a set of drumsticks whose sense of rhythm was most charitably described as idiosyncratic.  Jazz jam sessions are usually spared these folks probably for the same reason there's no "Trombone Hero" for your Xbox.

            One night I got to Chez Pépère about the time I always get to a live music venue - right after the band went on break, which seems to last about an hour here. And when you know you'll have to nurse the only beer you can afford for awhile, it's not necessarily a bad thing if you can't speak the same language as the guy beside you, especially if he seems to be scatting to music only he can hear. (Remember when someone loudly singing or talking to himself was a indication he had a bolt loose? At another time in France, I might have suspected this guy had once been standing in a trench when an artillery shell went off right over his head.) I noticed the wire hanging from his ear but still thought I'd go downstairs and wait for the band to come back. A couple of minutes later, the scatter, who looked to be about fifty, came downstairs, wandered over to the drum kit, sat down and started tapping around with his hands. He kept up the same monotonous rhythm for about fifteen minutes until the real drummer came back and Scatman took his seat in the audience.

            The set started with a blues and the solos worked around until Scatman took one and I realized that the thing I'd noticed in his ear was his own personal wireless mike.  Any idea this guy might have been a real singer disappeared after about 4 bars and midway through the first chorus I found myself involuntarily thinking, "It's a simple blues, man" but this guy's wailing (I mean in the banshee sense) continued obliviously along. After his fourth chorus I thought maybe he was somebody's father and a few choruses later found myself thinking for the first time since I left the states that I was sorry to be in a country with no ready access to baseball bats. The band, however, politely did their best to follow.

            For the next tune Scatman Clouseau pulled out the only set of bongos I've ever seen at a jam session and the tune after that he took his turn at the drums. I don't know if the band knew this guy, if they were humoring him or being polite or what but if there was ever a time to call "Cherokee" this was it. He wasn't any better at this than scatting and I didn't wait around to see if he went for the hat trick on guitar.

            I'm not sure what to make of all that but in one way the effect on me has been almost as bad as everybody being way better.  I haven't been back to this session for a couple of weeks now because I'm afraid the same guy will be there. The good thing is now I'm practicing with a little bit more diligence just to make sure that, when I finally do work up the nerve to take my horn, I'm not the next Clouseau. I might even ask Cynthia to help as soon as I figure out what a musical Cato does.

           

             Videos are from the Jazz Manouche session. Bill Cosby needs no explanation.

For Mum

           My mother was really something. Everybody said so. She knew how to fix everything and there was nothing on wheels she couldn’t drive. And I was her favorite.           

My sisters gave me this last bit of information long after I could have exploited it.  To me, she treated us all the same and, like most good mothers, always put herself last. Then again, she did that with everyone, especially my father.  We got to keep her for over 93 years so I should probably consider myself lucky, but for the nearly 2 years that she’s been gone it’s felt like I’m being cheated. Today I would have called her to wish her a happy 95^th birthday.

            As she neared the end of her life, Mum told us her life wouldn’t have been worth anything if it hadn’t been for my sisters and I but we know that’s nonsense. She had worked for 5 or 6 years at Gimbel’s department store in downtown Pittsburgh then, during WW II, got a job at Gulf Oil’s Research and Development Center in Harmarville, a few miles from where we grew up. Mum’s job at “The Lab” was to keep bench mounted automobile and truck engines used in fuel testing tuned up and running right so she knew more about cars than my father, but he'd never have admitted that. She was still working there when she married him and that was the end of that, just like most women her age.

            Six months after my father died in 1998, my mother had a stroke and 6 months after that she went to assisted living for good. While cleaning out her house in preparation for selling it, we found all of her and my grandmother's old photos, including some that I had never seen before. It sounds stupid to say this but that's when I realized she had a life before us. The person in these pictures, while definitely Mum, is a person I never knew although we got glimpses of her from time to time. This was Martha Kapteina and she was young, single and having a good time. She just has a look about her that doesn't exactly mean she was a party girl but that she and her friends enjoyed each other.  A lot of this got packed away, I think, when she became Martha Gunia and took a back seat to all of us.

Mum on right.

Mum,right. Aunt Jane with sign. Grandma between them.

           This was the role Mum had taken on for herself and it came naturally. Her mother, the only grandparent that lived long enough for us to know, lived with us and while we loved her and she us, there's no denying she was pretty self-centered. My grandfather had died when the shotgun he was cleaning went off and killed him, or at least that's what we were always told. Mum was 7 and she and Grandma were the only ones home when it happened. Even at the age of 90 she could describe pretty clearly what she had seen. This was in 1925 and she, Aunt Jane, Uncle Jim and my grandmother had to move into a small apartment where she was still living in 1950 when she married my father. Grandma came with her.

            My father was a frustrated actor who'd become a civil servant. He craved and sought being the center of attention so when he and Grandma ended up under the same roof, well, it probably doesn't need much explaining.

            Mum loved me as she did because of what I was like as a little boy. I'm not sure exactly how that was but I can tell you that at the age of 4 or 5, I worried an awful lot about 2 old ladies on our street who lived by themselves. Whatever he'd been, that little boy gradually disappeared, helped along the way by his father, schoolyard bullies and a career for which he was completely unsuited - but he was always there to Mum. On one of the last trips to see me that she made before her stroke, after witnessing yet another tirade brought on by some forgotten but doubtless trivial outrage, she looked at me and said, "What happened to you? You were such a gentle soul." 

            I don't know, Mum, but he turns up from time to time. Anyway, Happy Birthday. I miss you.

At "The Lab"

           

Le Serrurier, Part deux

     I’ve been trying to do a music related post for a while now but events seem to be dictating otherwise. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about getting locked out of our apartment and calling a locksmith. The guy that showed up from Artisans Girondins not only wrecked our old lock and door latch but charged us €1,403 for the privilege. His explanation was that our insurance would cover the whole thing and, just to show his good intentions, he’d hang onto our check until we got paid. At the time, this all sounded fishy but we didn’t have a lot of choice so we wrote the check and hoped for the best. After all, this is France, not Italy where I would have known better.

     As soon as we started checking the price of locks, we knew, I mean we confirmed, we’d been taken to the cleaners. And telling this story produced gasps, wide eyes and oh-la-la-la-la’s in absolutely everyone, so we were beginning to think that we’d been pretty stupid, at least I was anyway. (By the way, oh-la-la [not oo-la-la] is an all purpose conversational intensifier and the number of la’s is in direct proportion to its intensity).

     So first we went to the bank to try stopping payment on our check. In France, this is called an opposition and obviously doesn’t happen much because, after they finished gasping and oh-la-la-ing,  it took a couple of in-house phone calls to produce someone who actually knew the procedure. But almost as soon as we got home from the bank, Cynthia checked our account and discovered that about the time we were trying to stop payment, the money was coming out of our account. We’d been had. So we gathered up our evidence, consisting of the shrapnel that used to be our door lock plus the bill, and headed down to see the gendarmes.

     At the police station there was more eye-popping oh-la-la-ing and the explanation that, as in the U.S., this is a civil matter and we were going to have to take our troubles to the Tribunal d’instance, more or less small claims court, conveniently nearby. Here we got no reaction (used to it, I guess) – just the forms and instructions on filing a complaint, plus the name and address of the city’s mediation service, which it was suggested we should try first since the civil procedure could take months.

     A few days later, one of our friends emailed us a copy of a magazine article about fraud and consumer protection in France that lead off with examples of how serruriers routinely screw people all over the country with pretty much a carbon copy of what had happened to us. The article also provided a rundown of the many regulations and laws our locksmith had violated, plus the phone number for the Direction Départmentale de la Protection des Populationes, the consumer protection agency,which Cynthia called. Then, with the help of our friend Joëlle, she wrote out a couple of letters to the mediator and the consumer people, then wondered if we’d ever see any of our money again.

     About the time Cynthia was finishing the accounts of our tale of woe, the bank called to tell us our check had been presented for payment, did we still want to oppose it? I don’t think there is any way to translate into French, “You’re fuckin’ A right we do” but Cynthia got as close as she could. This time somebody had to call all the way to Paris to find out what to do. I have yet to figure this out but as near as I can guess, funds are deducted from your account before actually going into the payee’s, so money we thought was gone was simply in transit.

     Next day, a Thursday (and, coincidentally, Thanksgiving),  €1,403 magically returned to our account and the day after that, Cynthia answered her cell phone to find an irate French locksmith on the other end. She faked not really being able to speak or understand French very well while managing to get the point across that we were being cheated. Clement (this time we got a name) threatened us with a variety of annoyances including the aforementioned Tribunal and standing at our door until he got every last sou. To all of which Cynthia responded with some French equivalent of, “Bring it on, mo-fo”.

      Then the guy relented somewhat and decided to drop the price a bit, opening the door to negotiations. We went back and forth through several phone calls, culminating at about 9 that night in our final offer of €500, which we made clear was still too high. Telling us it was impossible but he’d ask his boss and call us on Monday, this was the last we heard from anyone and it’s now been over a week. 

      Cynthia and Joëlle polished up our letters and mailed them out last week, so now we wait. I wonder how this is going to turn out? I’ll let you know but I think it’ll be a while.

"Is this the date?" "No, it's the price...including tax!"

"And the duplicate new key, its a gift."