A Last Word

This picture illustrates in a woefully small way what the people of Russia went through in the last century, one such horror being this Great Patriotic War - World War II to us - that cost some 20 million of them their lives.The once beautiful city of St. Petersburg became Leningrad after Czar Nicholas II was overthrown in 1917 and it was renamed. Then, just 25 years after that, this 'Leningrad' became.... a graveyard: Hitler's Nazi troops laid siege to the city in early September of 1941 and held it by the throat until the end of January in 1944.For those 900 days, it was surrounded. Supplies of coal and oil were cut off. Then, because the siege began in the autumn, the cold weather began bearing down, bringing nights below freezing as early as in October.As winter set in for real, and with no heat source, the pipes all froze.There was almost no food. Potable water was scarce.And then there were the daily shellings.According to an account by someone who lived through this unimaginable time in Leningrad, the unlucky souls who collapsed in the streets in the morning were just a few more snow-covered mounds by night. Even after the ground thawed enough to allow for burial, the dead were interred without coffins, their families standing by hollow-eyed and in silence. One witness to this history reports that "on the whole men collapsed more easily than women, and at first the death-rate was highest among men." Was that because women have more adipose tissue you wonder? He goes on: "However, the women felt the after-effects more seriously than the men. They stopped menstruating and many died in the spring, when the worst was already over."People no longer smiled, it was reported. The city's four-legged creatures began to disappear, killed and eaten, even the rats. By some silent accord it was agreed that one would not speak of 'real' food. In the end, by the time the siege was lifted ,fully a million of the city’s residents had died.It is hard for us Americans to even imagine this kind of suffering. I have learned from reading my own family's diaries and letters that during that 900-day period here in the States my mother was pursuing her life as a hale and energetic woman running the family business, ordering all the food, hiring and managing staff and maintaining its 120-acre grounds. Her 70-something father was, for his part, still happily working as an attorney and a district court judge and keeping a journal in which he marked the comings and goings of the birds he looked for on his long strolling walks.It's true that there was some privation stateside: gasoline was rationed, as were shoes. Butter also 'went to war' so folks had to make do with oleo.But as far as I have been able to learn, people didn't go hungry ,and women didn't stopped menstruating because their bodies had shut down all functions not necessary for survival. In fact mother and my aunt were living so far from survival mode that they were still delivering babies well into their 40s.Here is my mom now, pregnant with her first child a few months after Victory over Japan Day in August of 1945. (VE, or Victory in Europe day had of course occurred the previous April.)  The only thing World War II did to her was to deliver to her doorstep the blue-eyed coast Guard officer who would one day become my father.I've been home from Russia for more than two months now but I still can't entirely process what I've learned about its history. There was this war, and then there was rule of Stalin who with his purges and the famines his decrees caused brought about  the deaths of another 20 million people - and 20 is the conservative estimate. Then there were the grim years under Khrushchev, and Andropov, Brezhnev and  Chernenko. Then came Gorbachev in the 80s with his talk of Perestroika and Glasnost but all that ended with his resignation when first Yeltsin and finally Putin took up the reins of authority.Now, those Russians who remember the Soviet era look back in a kind of sad wonderment at all that has changed in their country and in their lives.“The Soviet regime?" recalled one in Secondhand Time, The Last of The Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. “It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than what we have today. Worthier. Overall, I was satisfied with socialism: No one was excessively rich or poor; there were no bums or abandoned children. Bela Shayevich who was Secondhand Time ‘s English translator, called the book a kind of update of 19th-century Russian literature for the 21st century. “People read Russian novels not for the happy endings because there is great catharsis in great pain and then something that is sublime.” I get that.But then what happened? The abandonment. The Save Your Own Life phase of Russian living that arrived almost overnight. It had a devastating effect on the people:"Imagine working that hard, your whole life, only to end up with nothing. All of it took the ground out from underneath people, their world was shattered; they still haven’t recovered, they couldn’t assimilate into the drastically new reality. When they started selling salami at the privately owned stores, all of us ran over to ogle it. And that was when we saw the prices! This was how capitalism came into our lives... Wild, inexplicable avarice took hold of everyone. The smell of money filled the air. Big money. And absolute freedom—no Party, no government. Everyone wanted to make some dough, and those who didn’t know how envied those who did.""I get indignant whenever people start talking about Marxism with disdain and a knowing smirk," says another. "It’s a great teaching, and it will outlive all persecution, and our Soviet misfortune, too. It wasn't just about labor camps, and informants, and the Iron Curtain, it's a bright, just world, where everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. "I find this last the most touching part of all: the feeling we all have about what our country could be. I think of a section from Reg Saner's short poem "Green Feathers" which expresses our universal longing:

In the early air we keep trying to catch sight of something lost up ahead,

A moment when the light seems to have seen us exactly as we wish we were.

Like a heap of green feathers poised on the rim of a cliff?

Like a sure thing that hasn’t quite happened?

Like a marvelous idea that won’t work?

Routinely amazing -

How moist tufts, half mud, keep supposing almost nothing is hopeless.

How the bluest potato grew eyes on faith the light would be there.

And it was.

We all still look for that light and we pray, like the small and buried potato, that it will one day reveal itself to our sight.

Even More to Learn

Soon I'll go back to reporting on the kind of personal, certainly more trivial, thoughts I have been posting on this site for the last ten years - although even on the subject of Russia I seem capable of great foolishness: I found in my notes just now the observation that on sampling a thimbleful of homemade hooch at a Russian couple’s home, I felt my eyebrows instantly pluck themselves. But how can I end this series without offering one last glimpse of what I saw and learned in my brief stay in this vast country, only the small northwest portion of which I actually visited?The answer is, I can’t.One thing I have learned with all the reading I have done about the place, both during my two weeks in the country and during the two months since my return, is how sharply its citizens feel their loss of status since the time when Gorbachev, in their minds, simply ‘caved’, as they see it, ‘giving away’ much of their nuclear might along with their standing in the world. A further shame-inducing is the fact that this country, so vast, so rich in natural resources, today stands in only 12th place for GNP according to the International Monetary Fund’s annual tally. That’s after the US, the EU, China, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, India, Italy, Brazil, Canada and South Korea.A woman interviewed by author Svetlana Alexievich in 2011 about the brief moment of hope after the Soviet Union was first dissolved put it this way. At first, she said, "everyone had very high hopes for the future. I remember the conversations we had in the staff room: 'Socialism is ending – what's next?' 'Bad socialism is over, now we're going to have a good socialism.' We waited… Pored over the newspapers… Pretty soon my husband lost his job and they shut down the Institute. It was a sea of unemployed people, all of them with college degrees. The kiosks appeared, then the supermarkets where they had everything, like in a fairytale, only there was no money to buy any of it. I'd go in and come right back out. I'd get two apples and an orange when the kids were sick."How are we supposed to get used to this? Accept that it's how things are going to be from now on? How? It hurts your pride. That's why people seem so tired these days. God forbid you were born in the USSR but live in Russia!"The wealth in Russia is now concentrated at the very top. It is held by the oligarchs, as this gangster class is euphemistically called since the early 90s. That’s when the State stepped away from ownership of the factories, the farms, the oil and the gas, and this class of enterprising bandits stepped in to grab everything up.Oh, to be sure, Moscow today shines like a jewel. It's the prime showcase for all this wealth. But Moscow is also the place where, as our Russian tour guide advised us, the great preponderance of housing lies miles beyond the means of all but the very prosperous. And the GUM store, situated in Red Square formerly the world’s largest department store? The GUM store is a department store no more. Now it is merely an immense Fabergé egg of an indoor mall housing shops that as far as I can tell, not even prosperous tourists can afford to patronize. I spent two hours in the place, walking past the Louis Vuitton store, the Cartier store, the stores under signs reading 'Pierre Cardin' and 'Versace' and 'Hermès' and did not see a single soul in the process of purchasing anything in any one of them. I saw only the sales personnel inside and the security personnel standing at the doorways. As one disillusioned Russian said in an interview “Right now there’s a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for?”Oh but see here, the government will say, the older folks still get their pensions. Only the skyrocketing inflation that followed the dissolution of the USSR almost immediately rendered those pensions worthless. As one older woman told oral historian Svetlana Alexievich “There IS no surviving on today’s pensions. What can you afford on them? You get yourself some bread and milk, and then there isn’t enough left over for slippers. It’s just not enough! Old people used to sit on the benches in their courtyards, carefree. Prattling. Not anymore. Some collect empty bottles around town, others stand in front of the church, begging. Some sell sunflower seeds or cigarettes at the bus stop…”I saw those begging elders, as I wrote in my last post. I also saw countless other Russians at these kiosks or under improvised canopies or just out in the open, attempting to sell what they could sell - and for sure most were NOT the glowing young people such as the one pictured at the top of this post.Some, like this grimacing man, sell trinkets outside the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, this on the June day when it was 38 degrees with a windswept sleet and all of us tourists were quivering like so many aspen trees.Some sell CD's outside the Catherine Palace, like this versatile gent who exemplifies three different ways to sing for one's supper, all in this 14-second video.[wpvideo qRqekmuP ]Maybe you can even argue that the Russian husband and wife we met are in the business of selling their very privacy - to the touring company that brought us to them - in the sense that many times a month they allow the various tour boats' large cushy couches to lumber down their narrow rutted road and visit them for a mid-morning snack.The man of this couple built the house himself, with the help of his dad, he told us through our interpreter-guide, adding rooms one by one over the years so that it is made of several different materials. Out in back, the two have a small vegetable garden, and chickens, and a tiny screen house that would maybe fit two webbed 1970s-style lawn chairs but when we were there was being used to store a bent plastic baby pool propped up on its side.They showed us some family photographs, like their wedding picture below......and with great grace they offered us food: half a piece of toast and a slice of cheese apiece, as well as a cut of an oblong pastry lathered in a red glaze.Oh and a plate of the ubiquitous pickles you find everywhere in Russia.And, to wash it all down, shots of that powerful hooch.But as I noted at the start here, it isn't mainly the straitened circumstances under which most folks live that they find so disheartening. For those old enough to remember, it is also the sense of all that is lost - and that topic I can address in greater detail tomorrow.

Old People, Begging

On my recent trip to Russia I saw so many lovely sights, both in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, both on the waterways linking the two cities and finally in the city of  Sergiyev Posad, some 90 minutes northwest of Moscow.Here, in this last place, stand several churches within the walls of a monastery said to be the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church, which these days, I can tell you, is doing a booming business: Ordinary citizens stand for whole hours together waiting to get into the holiest sites here, in order to pray and commune with the icons. I watched as the they stood, patient long queues of elders and children and people of every age in between. I watched  as they lifted receptacles to catch a little of the holy water from the fountain in the 'square' around which all these churches stand.The site in summer was nothing short of breathtaking.And in winter, from a distance like this, it simply glows.It's when you walk outside the monastery walls and no longer stand at a distance, that you see something:You see people begging, old people, stooped and bent.I myself saw old people, and especially old women, again and again at the edges of the prime tourist sites in Russia. They never looked up; they all each just held out the battered cup into which they hoped you might drop a couple of rubles.But who were they? Who are they? Simple math tells us they are among the Russian men and women who survived it all, from World War Two to Stalin's disastrous collectivization plan and purges and, on into this century, the spying of neighbor upon neighbor and the arrests.Quite obviously, these things did not kill the people I saw, yet the way they live struck me as a kind of death. What was going on here? By the time I came home from our one-percenters' tour of Russia  knew I had a lot to learn. I had enrolled in an eight-week course in Russian history before I left and had in that context taken reams of notes and pored over both our textbook and our many handouts. Still, by the time I got to the end of my visit to Russia itself I knew I understood very little.And so, on returning in mid-June, I began reading and I have been reading ever since.I read a book on Russia's cultural history. I read War and Peace. I read a book about Chechnya. While I was 'in country',  I read Secondhand Time, a vivid firsthand account of what happened to the real people, in their own words, after Communist ideals were replaced by the cutthroat capitalism that took over when everything that had been controlled by the state was offered for private ownership. It's an oral history very much in the Studs Terkel vein compiled by Belarussian writer and Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich who returned again and again to the people she interviewed, to be sure she understood all that they were trying to convey to her.I read the whole book on my Kindle, got to the end and read it all again. Then I sent away for the print edition and read that. From this book I learned of the privation the common people have suffered, with the inflation that followed quickly on the great move away from State-owned industry.Older people have suffered most especially, these survivors of the Great Patriotic War as World War Two is called therem this war that killed 60 million people worldwide, 20 million of whom were Soviet citizens.Inflation has reduced these elders' benefits so drastically that as one interview subject put it in her conversation with Ms. Alexievich, "“There is no surviving on today’s pensions. You get yourself some bread and milk, and then there isn’t enough left over for slippers. It’s just not enough. Old people used to sit on the benches in their courtyards, carefree. Prattling."Not anymore. Some collect empty bottles around town, others stand in front of the church, begging. Some sell sunflower seeds or cigarettes at the bus stop."This man is selling cucumbers. To judge by the many kiosks that have sprouted up everywhere, there's very little that isn't for sale - but there'll be more to say about that in my next post.  

Russia, on Closer Inspection

I saw things in Russia, yes, but I saw them from a distance. I saw them either as they were offered to us through the refracted lens of our Viking tour guides, or as I gazed out with my own eyes from the decks of the beautifully appointed ship on which we journeyed through that vast country's northwesterly parts.From on deck I saw both swelling waters with pastoral landscapes........and intimate-looking villages such as this one.On the one morning that I didn't keep the light-cancelling stateroom drapes drawn and so woke fully up at 4am, I caught a spectacular sunrise and even at that early hour saw householders patiently fishing for their breakfasts.I also saw from on deck this abandoned building, just between two other tidy structures, and I'll admit that the contrast took me aback some.Then this same juxtaposition was on display once again, on one of our long land days, when we spent time in the village of Uglich.Near the end of our walking tour there, we were meant to take 20 minutes to enjoy the riverside vistas and ponder  the local art.  All I could do, however, was to study the burned-out house just across the street from the riverbank:The contrast seemed so pronounced: On my right hand side, pretty awninged booths offering exquisite hand-painted jewelry boxes and delicate watercolor depictions of St. Basil's Cathedral; and on my left, this scene of  devastation.What seemed especially strange to me was the fact that no official attention had been paid to these burned remains. It was as if the building was invisible to the people parking their cars here.Here in the States you couldn't even get near a place in this condition. It would be boarded up, and even the lot it sat on would be crisscrossed with yellow crime tape.In the States you couldn't so much as look inside such a building, but here?Well, you can see for yourself: I could have crawled right in this window if I'd had a mind to (and if I were fearless and/or insane) for here it all was, open to its god as the saying goes, and open too to any interlopers bent on the scavenger's task.And so it was that on this day, fully halfway through my two-week visit to Russia, I began to realize that this whole Russian trip would be offering a study in contrasts. Tune in tomorrow for specifics and the decidedly darker chapters my curiosity had me turning to.

No Easy Life

One day, traversing Lake Onega on our way from St. Petersburg to Moscow, we stopped at the island of Kizhi, a remote windswept spot first settled in the 1400s, where there now exists the Unesco World Heritage site known as Kizhi Pogost. Here, we saw this fairytale of a church constructed centuries ago entirely of wood without the use of so much as single nail.It still reminds me of nothing so much as the popsicle-stick houses we kids used to make at summer camp and yet with the help both of the Soviet government 50 years and today's careful restorers it has survived winter snows and icy winds since it was erected in 1714.Here on Kizhi, we saw historical impersonators practicing ancient arts. This short video I took shows a woman who that day was submitting brittle stalks of vegetation through the exceedingly long  (three, or four, or 27-for-all-I-know)  part process that would eventually render it into thread. (And to think I complain about the three days it takes to get a dress I have ordered online!)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNFdrWB2KI8I watched fascinated as such ancient crafts were practiced by these modern Russian citizens - and I wished neither for the first or last time that I could speak their language, as they surely did not speak mine.Our tour guide, however, did speak English and she spoke it very well. Here she is describing how the people stayed alive on this island where arable land was so valuable and so scarce due to the very short growing season, that exactly none of it could be set aside for pasturage. A book I just referenced tells me that "because only small parts of Russia are south of 50° north latitude and more than half of the country is north of 60° north latitude, extensive regions experience six months of snow cover over subsoil that is permanently frozen to depths as far as several hundred meters (italics mine.) The average yearly temperature of nearly all of European Russia is below freezing, and the average for most of Siberia is freezing or below. Most of Russia has only two seasons, summer and winter, with very short intervals of moderation between them."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovEpRFXeED8&feature=youtu.beWhat she is saying, in case her accent it too thick for you, is that before they skinnied out entirely, any horses and cows that villagers owned would be transported to the mainland on wee fragile crafts like this one so as to have at least some chance of staying alive.Staying alive remains very much a concern in many parts of our world of course.Assured survival has never been part of life and certainly we in the west are kidding ourselves if we think it is.As Shakespeare says "we owe God a death," each and every one of us. But in the meantime, we can build beauty like this, that can outlast our own short moments in the light.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubcBHSl7gaU

Russia from on Board Ship

At 6 o'clock every night as we sailed along on our route from St. Petersburg to Moscow,  we passengers would be gathered like baby ducklings for an update about what we'd soon be seeing.One night the talk went like this - and I should say I purposely pointed my camera outside at the ship's deck rather than at the speaker's face so that I could better focus later on the cool throaty sound of his Russian-accented English:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TK9WWSNCEM&feature=youtu.beOur man was talking here about the Moscow By Night tour, which I turned out to skip, on account of how wiped out I felt after our Moscow By Day outings. By that point I had been marched through so many civic buildings, monasteries and churches I'd begun to feel that if never again saw another icon in my life I would still be able to draw half a dozen of them from memory, because there are just so very many images of New Testament apostles, Old Testament patriarchs and members of the Holy Family lining the walls of all these holy places: a whole race of sorrowful-looking, skinny-faced folks with improbably dark tans.Here, for example, is a typical Mary-and-Jesus pair: And here below you will see  one of our party, my own mate in fact, walking in the tourist's typical 'let's-get-this-done' fashion through one such sacred space. (I speak of the man facing away, the man with the white hair - and you may also note that all the women wear requisite scarves while even some dopey guy with a mullet gets to go bareheaded.So there was this aspect to our trip, where it was all your typical foreign-visitor stuff, with hordes of tourists jostling one another to snap more pictures than even Mother Teresa would lack the patience to look through later. One night we Viking Cruisers got hand-carried in our fancy coach into the heart of St. Petersburg for a cooked-down performance of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and were the only people in the little jewel-box of a theatre. Another night we were transported to the hills above Moscow for an evening of music where again the passengers on our ship constituted the entire audience.Here are some of our shipmates waiting for the curtain to rise and those long-legged tuu-tuu'd swans to skitter out onto the stage.So as I say, it was all typical tourist stuff. But then something happened. At some point, very slowly, there surfaced, for me, another aspect of this two-week trip.And that is the part I'll be writing about in the days ahead.

What Big Eyes

In one of the little towns on our Waterways of the Czars tour of Russia, we visit an actual school, where one is struck by the disparities: 800 children, ages six to seventeen, gather five days a week in a building that looks to have been built by a team of inebriates wearing blindfolds. There aren’t a lot of right angles, in other words, and many of the lintels seem to slant and dip. And yet, the curriculum appears to run circles around our typical courses of study.Here on the left and below, a typical classroom, not at all fancy, as you can see.And yet our Russian tour guide has this to say about the curriculum, "The pupil’s courses are compulsory, yes?"They study the Physics, the Chemistry, the Mathematics, the Literatures."All children are also studying the English beginning in Fifth grade and in high school are adding a second foreign language to that, either French to German, yes.'My guess, based on information we have so far exchanged in the last week?  That of the 25 well-fed Yanks stuffed into these slender desks not a one speaks or understands Russian. We are spotless in our ignorance.Next, we file into a small auditorium which I suspect also serves as lunchroom and gym as the auditorium did in my own 1960s elementary school. (We called it the Cafetorium, in my mind a wonderfully jaunty, sort of Jetson-ish Space Age name. ) Here, three young girls in peasant garb sing us a lengthy folk song, during which, at regular intervals the music calls for periodic vocal yips which the girls dutifully provide even as their faces remain bland. They also swing little wooden gadgets back and forth that look like miniature venetian blinds and make the kind of clattering sound you might get on tossing a handful of Scrabble tiles down a set of stairs. The girls sing, yip and clatter for a good five minutes before bowing, shyly and adorably, and hurrying off the stage, offer us the chance to buy fanciful cloth dolls which both the boy and girl students have themselves sewn.The dolls are female dolls, all with voluminous skirts and THIS one, we are told, is Little Red Riding Hood. But one has only to upend her, toss back her skirts and - whoops! - here under the ruffles of her petticoats is the child's own grand-mama,  of ‘What Big Eyes You Have’ fame! She has spectacles and grey hair covered by a babushka. Another flip of the wrist, yet more tumbling and here appears the head of the Big Bad Wolf in all his ferocity!Many of our group buy one. I do not, I think because as a child in the long ago Ozzie and Harriet years I had the American version of this doll which always unsettled me.On our way out of the schoolhouse, we pass a handmade poster honoring a young graduate of this school who, serving the Russian army, was killed in Chechnya. In this portrait, dressed in his new uniform, he gazes manfully at the camera and we study his gaze. His story, carefully inked in block writing around his image, remains a mystery to us however, as people who can neither speak nor read the language of this country.As we depart the school building, small and antiquated looking as it is with the cords for its electronics stretching from here to there in a way that no stateside Fire Marshall would allow, I get the feeling that these 800 children have minds far more fully furnished than our own minds here in the 'Like Me, Buy Me, Like Me' west.And it comes to me at the door that perhaps the reversible doll unsettles me still not for any Freudian beast-under-the-skirts reason but because it reminds me uncomfortably of the ostrich, who also hides his head so as not to acknowledge what he does not wish to acknowledge. 

That's MISTER Jackass to You

Heard onboard ship as four individuals find themselves lingering for a moment in a stateroom corridor:Passenger One, pleasantly, after introductions: So what is your husband’s name?Passenger Two: Jackass.Passenger One, not having heard quite right:  I’m sorry? You say your husband isn't traveling with you?Passenger Two:  Nah Jackass left me years ago for his secretary.Merry laughter all around.

Napolee-o-leon (& Others)

It’s two weeks now since my man and I got back from France, where the number of pictures I took as compared to the amount of food and drink I consumed stands in a ration of 1 to 1000 - and now here I am with little more to remind me of the experience but my new fat tummy. Lucky for us , we took this Viking Longboat cruise with two close friends who took tons of pictures. Even better, ‘she’ has written the whole trip up on her travel blog, a site which in my greedy way,  I have boarded as a pirate boards some poor sitting duck of a vessel, and helped myself to the photo booty. ‘He’ was my first friend when I moved at age 9 to our new house and found myself caught up in endless rounds of kickball and the chase-hide-and wallop game we called  “the Commies vs. the Americans. Good times.We two couples had also gone, via this same Viking cruise company, from Budapest to Nuremberg back in 2014, when the world felt to be in far less trouble than it feels to be today. That was a dream of a trip on which I got to hang out for a while with actual Mozart, or anyway an official Mozart impersonator.  He spoke about the hard life of a professional musician which he actually is. He's a serious guy.This time though it was not Vienna but Paris, a city which appears to do a lot of looking back. We passed the place to which poor Marie Antoinette was brought to meet Madame La Guillotine, she  paraded for mockery's sake in a crude wooden cart, her hair shorn and her wrists bound behind her back. We saw the monuments Napoleon brought back from Egypt where he went to further foil the British by messing up their trade routes. And, in our fancy tour bus as wide and serene as a clipper ship full-bellied with the breeze, we billowed along down the very route the Allies took after the brutal 100-day Battle of Normandy to at last reach and liberate this famous City of Lights.On other days we went to Giverny, the estate and gardens established by the Impressionist god Claude Monet who smoked 60 cigarettes a day, slept with his best friend's wife, and quarrelled sfrequently  with his one surviving son that the son wanted nothing to do with the place after the old man died at 86.We saw castles and clambered over their ruined stones. We marched up and down streets with ancient stone and timber houses and even a few thatched roofs. And finally we went to Napoleon's country house, where we saw with our own eyes how small of stature the man  really was. This is his bed, which, in the flesh looks like the the popsicle stick nest you might build for your pet hamster. Poor Josephine lived there as well until he divorced her for failing to give him a son.  We walked in the gardens of this estate, known as Malmaison, but the tour guide apparently ran out of steam because with an hour to go before we could board the bus and go back to our cozy longboat, she told us to enjoy the gardens and disappeared .It was 55 degrees,  the hospitality center/gift shop was closed and a layer of low grey clouds hovered above us like an omen of old.Our two pals duly circled the large garden, admiring the roses and chatting up the other members of our expedition.  The two of us did not. We went and sat on a stone bench - until  another Viking cruiser, from the American  South to judge by her accent, came by, declared us 'cute', and snapped this picture.Then she made us get up and walk to a spot 100 feet away  where she snapped another.The lesson of that moment? Stick around long enough and you too can become a monument. 😛 

Musings at the Museum

Seeing France by cruising alone the Seine is amazing enough but then when you disembark and wander on your own, the wonders just multiply. The Museé d'Orsay in Paris which I spent three hours in was by far the most instructive and inviting museum I have ever visited, shocking as it was to see how laid-back the staff is. Dozens of people snap away with their cameras and camera apps with nary a word of admonishment from the guards. In fact, in the many small galleries, they don’t even have guards. It's true that a thin wire at about shin level walls each pictures off from the public but I felt sure that if I'd really wanted to I could have leaned in and licked the very paint on any number of them.I loved the sculptures too. The young David who slew Goliath is there. Not Michelangelo's David in his famous beefcake iteration,which you see above, nor Donatello's David either who looks like a sweet fey youth in his mother's Easter bonnet.These are both in Florence.Here at the Museé  D'Orsay, you see the Antonin Mercié David who looks like this: But really the  place is most known for its 19th century stuff, works by artists who looked not toward Biblical or Classical themes but more toward landscapes and still lifes and intimate 'candid' portraits, of ladies, say, undressing for the bath.Here inside these walls is Van Gogh, not dead by his own hand at 36, but alive, his spirit shimmering away in the lines of this cathedral he captured in paint.Manet lives at this museum too as I said here the other day and Gauguin with his island Edens,and  Cezanne, and of course that long-lived patriarch Claude Monet who could make the same haystack, the same cathedral front at Rouen look a hundred different ways by painting them at different times of the day in a variety of different lights.   The visit was just thrilling to me. I sat looking at the works as much as I walked those halls and chambers, all oblivious to the fact that inches away on the other side of the wall Time was also ticking away my own life as this video I took will show. I suspect it was a stiff wind and the limber shafts of the clock's two hands that did it but still, that minute hand is really moving. Signs and reminders all around us, folks, signs and reminders.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUGebbL2igA   

Another Fun Couple Takes a Trip

You get to the airport and find that your flight has been cancelled.It’s a flight to Iceland. And it’s cancelled.So much for the strange beauty of wide skies, and treeless plains!You wait an eternity to be told that now you will instead be flying to Frankfurt. Bring out the ketchup and mustard!Still, you know you can’t be TOO mad since your final destination is Paris and sure enough you do get to Paris eventually where, you are interested to see, the old sidewalk pissoirs have long since been replaced by wondrous new unisex sidewalks booths called Sanisettes, in which, when you touch a final button, cascades of water swirl in, washing everything in sight clean, clean, clean and disinfecting it all too. And the pissoir, in case you don’t know was for over 350 years the standard Parisian accommodation for any man who felt the need to make water. It featured a panel from knees to shoulders that blocked out the key parts of his anatomy while still allowing him to stand and chat companionably with his pals.

Hard to believe, right?

Anyway, now here you are wearin’ out your Nikes and seein’ the sights, and then at night inhaling the great food and tossing back the complimentary mealtime beers and wines on a riverboat that will take you, via the Seine, from Paris the City of Lights to Normandy and back with several bracing stops along the way.The ship’s windows are wide and the sights are lovely. (Here now: A man who looks to be straight out of a Van Gogh watercolor standing in the water and fishing! Here now: A windmill that goes back to the time of Marie Antoinette and her Marge Simpson hairdo!) And the rolling waters! The waters alone!You feel like a baby, and a fat happy baby at that. You turn to your travel buddies while dunking your face into your second glass of the good red wine.“What could go wrong from here?” you burble, “unless we break a tooth and see a giant jagged crater open up in our mouth.”You laugh hilariously at your own joke, and then, not 12 hours later, while eating the good French bread, exactly that happens, and it happens to you.But hey, it’s your all-too-short visit to this place. Your dentist will be there when you get back, and for now you're just another stylish couple having fun in France. :-)  

Mangia Mangia

The way that last post ended  “Nice eat you?”  really rings true for me because food does eat you, in the sense that it slowly consumes the “you” you once were, leaving in its place a much more, shall we say, upholstered version. As recently as 2001 I looked as thin as Flat Stanley. For at least a year after my romance with the Atkins Diet. I looked like an Aerobed just pulled from the box.Now though? Well let’s just say I inflated, largely due to trips like this one in Italy where they bring fresh hot bread to the table the second you sit down and leave you alone with it for a whole ten minutes before then setting down several carafes brimming with the local wines that taste like the kiss of God himself on a hillside in springtime.We’ve been eating this week in Italy my seven college pals and I, sleeping walking, eating, sleeping, walking, eating - all under the watchful eye of an eighth pal who has lived here for 25 years and so can say all the hard words like the one for ice – ghiaccio – which when I try to say it sounds like I’m about to spit a wad of chewing tobacco clear across the room and which in any case the bartenders can't understand.Here’s the evidence, with my hand pointing to it like all those funny Renaissance paintings where the St. John character looks right out at the viewer as if to say. "Do you see this?  Do you see what’s about to unfold here?"Suffice to say it's unfolding. As my sister used to say we'll just have to be careful not to let TOO much blood get in our alcohol stream. :-)

Lost in Translation

You think you’ll be fine in a place like Italy - unless you fail to pick up that instructional phrasebook until two hours before you go there.  Still, I was sure I could read all the road signs, just by recalling a couple of super-old French lessons and intuiting the rest. For example I saw many that said “Sit Down and Shut Up” - if the ‘ferm-’ root In Italian means to ‘close’ or to ‘shut’ as it does in French.  Saw a picture of smiling young men on a billboard advertising inseminations – at least I thought that’s what they were advertising if my method was working on the words ‘insieme’ and ‘studiando.I was on top of it all; ready at every minute to yell “Ho Vomitato!” which is funny all by itself and basically means, “I pray you, kind hospital sir, I have felt the nauseation for all the day.”Luckily on this trip with my old school chums we have had many kind angels helping us figure out what what we are trying to say. The last one was so excited to learn I was from near Boston and told of his colleague's new establishment about to open up there. "Pizza Beach" he said it was to be called and wrote a hand-written note for me to give to the main guy the first time I go there.So here's to Pizza Beach then, with a name no funnier than the one chosen by an equally enterprising  person new to our shores reading "Chinese Take-out. Nice Eat You?"

Jealous of Julia

I couldn’t finish Eat Pray Love. I was too jealous of the author who got to self-indulge for one whole year and still end up looking like Julia Roberts. I also resented her literary success: she got an advance for going and having all that fun and all I got was this lousy T-shirt as they say.I’m in the land of gelato myself right now as  a matter of fact. Last night I slept like the dead in this Piedmontese hotel which was super-comfy if a tad short on the towels. (You get one bath towel and no washcloths at all.) Still, when it comes to hygiene - and to a nice unsleazy take on sex - the Europeans are light-years ahead of us. When my boy was little he misheard the name of the Chevy Chase movie My European Vacation: "Can we watch My-a-peein' Vacation again?” he used to say.) And speaking of both below-the-belt functions, what these hotel bathrooms do all have are bidets, just in case you’d like to rinse out your doll clothes like my little cousin used to do in the toilets that were all just her height.Well then! Think I'll walk to the shops, maybe trade a few of my own lousy T-shirts for a gorgeous bra and perhaps a pair of killer panties. This is my third time in Italy and it’s true about the food; the lamb dishes alone are so fancy they come wearing little paper panties of their own  Buon appetito to me and to  my seven college pals on this five-day flight from reality.

Kill Me Now

I can never sleep on a plane and it makes me want to bite everyone who can, which is most people. Thirty minutes into any flight nine-tenths of the passengers are out cold, their heads back or tucked over to one side or chins resting on those little foam doughnuts. Even 7  hours into a night flight I’m still staring at the label on my pretzel sticks and going over the safety literature and who are they kidding with that stuff anyway? That In-case-of-an-emergency-landing-your-seat-cushion-becomes-a flotation-device baloney? They straight-out admit that your life jacket might not inflate in which case how are you going to bob along in balmy waters before being welcomed ashore by handsome natives in skimpy loin cloths? They should just tell the truth: if the plane goes down, chances are it will be over the hard-packed earth which will act on your body as a Cuisinart acts on a tomato. And if you go down over water it'll be in a place like the North Sea and Kate Winslett will be faintly calling your name as, shivering, with icicles in your hair, you sink away into the depths.

All I can say is next time I come to Europe I’m taking an Ambien, a Tylenol PM AND a shot of the velvet hammer that is Nyquil.

I Wouldn't Trade

Just so you know, that sailing trip I took last week wasn’t some lazybones cruise where you’re always waddling to the midnight chocolate buffet. It was a lean mean expedition where the rules were all about having the smallest possible impact on our poor little planet.  Example One: right from the start you were told straight up how UNCOOL it would be to wander around your little stateroom brushing your teeth and looking for your underpants with the water in the sink even on 'trickle'. Example Two: you couldn’t flush your toilet paper ever, which is evidently the norm in many parts of Europe.  In fact sometimes all they have are ‘Turkish toilets,’ plain old holes in the ground over which you have to stand to relieve yourself, which can make you feel pret-ty peeved if you’re among the unlucky half of the human race NOT equipped with one of those dandy retractable gadgets the other half is so vain about.Here’s some comfort though: On a morning’s trek through the ragged terrain of one Greek isle, the expedition’s botanist pointed out the female of the cochineal bug, which (a) lives on the prickly pear cactus, (b) secretes white fuzzy stuff  and (c) when squashed, yields up the deep red-dye that was first used by the Aztecs but after the arrival of those pesky Conquistadors became All The Rage back in the Old World too.But it wasn’t until we were back  on the ship eating lunch with this same botanist that I learned the best part: the male of this species lives so very briefly - only long enough to get the female pregnant - that God didn’t even give him a mouth. So BOTTOMS UP and pass the popcorn, girls! Turns out there are compensation after all!

(some critters really don't have mouths!)

Also: to see what these little kids at the top are saying click here

Where Going?

Our guide warned us the minute we began picking our way among the rubble on the ancient isle of Delos: we could Look Where We were GOING or we could Look Where We WERE, lest we stumble - ‘bite the dust,’ as Homer said to describe what happens in battle. (Picture it: crying out in anguish as the solider falls and sees his mouth suddenly stuffed full with the muck undefoot.)For the hour I spent in Delos's museum I did only the Look Where You ARE Thing, living fully in the present as I gazed at this statue and the curve of its supple back. Like most moderns I spend much of my time Looking Where I'm GOING Thing, thinking “What next?” and “After that?” and “If the rain falls?”, “If I miss the train?” If I lose my job?”If I’m honest though I’ll admit I spend most of my time Looking Back. Where is my mother who I think of every day, even these 22 years after her death? Where are the kitchens of my childhood, my baby feet in my naps as I so clearly remember seeing them? Where are they now? Where is this young person caught in stone? This couple of the exquisite garments? Where ? Where ?

French Kissing

It’s not that Americans scorn the French, we love the French, where would kissing be without them? It’s just that when Pee Wee Bush was trying to get us to turn on them for not supporting his Big Adventure in Iraq he tapped into one of our deepest inferiority complexes: we’re all pretty sure we sound like fools when we try to speak their language.Dave and I speak French with a Boston accent, as we found out when we went to Paris once. Me I thought I was so great in languages in high school (“98 for the year in Latin, 96 in French!” I’d boast to my few (and where's the surprise there?) friends but when I GOT OVER TO PARIS I could only speak the language in a way that made them fall over laughing: “A thousand pardons is it that I might purchases some of these purchases why not because?"  And, “Excuse me if you please step on your foot could tell me perhaps how many monies these object are costing?” - And then when they answered - after they finally stopped howling - I could not understand a single word.Lucky for us, Old Dave, who would speak French with a Boston accent if he’d agree to so much as open his mouth and try, saved the day because he seems to be set on ‘receive; where I am set on ‘transmit’. He understood everything they said the whole week and conveyed it all to me, so I could try composing my next baroque utterance.We had a great time anyway, mostly because in Paris all they do is sit in cafés drinking the good coffee in the morning and the good red wine at night while smoking cigarettes and laughing at Death and there sure as hell is none o' that timidity and guilt we have here in Les États-Unis I can tell you.Sigh. Now I want to go back - brush up on the vocab and see if the strengthening dollar I read about in today’s paper might permit another trip sometime down the line.'Pamplemousse’ means ‘grapefruit’, I know that, and ‘douche’ means nothing more than ‘shower’ and it makes me furious every time I think how it got twisted into some nasty slangy insult here. And as for ‘Nescafé’ that means ‘I never-did-learn-to-make-coffee-so-here’s a fake-French-word-to-go-with-your-instant, BABE.’