Brings me back to a trip to the country with a couple of friends. This was
an hour and a half outside Paris. Maryse had bought on the cheap an ancient
farmyard, a square of buildings the oldest of which was 14th century, and
hadn't been tended to since, and was fixing it up on weekends. It sat in
the middle of someone else's fields, and desperately needed windbreaks. So
in mid-winter we set out to plant trees. Using hand tools.

Neither Maryse nor her boyfriend Simon had much experience at this stuff,
or they would have hired a farmer with a backhoe (and maybe waited for warm
weather): she was an avant-garde theater performer, he was a clown and
circus director.  Lovely people, they would patiently correct my French,
but only when they finished laughing.

So I get up in the wee hours, as Maryse had demanded, and wait on the
appointed corner, where I'm picked up as scheduled for what Maryse insists
will be a long and necessary day of work. As we enter the village nearest
her place we discovered it was market day, and Maryse remembered that the
butcher down the road had won a medal from the government for his boudins
noirs--blood pudding--and she exclaimed something like "Wow! I bet that
would taste great cooked over wood in the fireplace!" Which soon became a
salad, bread, three bottles of wine, pastries, and the boudins. And it was
delicious. At about 3 we reluctantly staggered outside to dig the holes. It
was bitter cold, and the ground was full of flint--the pick would send up
sparks at each blow. Murderous work, especially after all that wine. I
remember thinking that we had discovered the true reason Northern France
had always been rich--not the soil and the wheat it produced, but before
that, as a source for arrowheads.

Long story short, for our efforts we managed to dig two holes, when Maryse,
who was the driving force, announced that we should think about dinner.
Simon remembered that a nearby chateau had been turned into a good, cheap
hotel and restaurant. Naturally, it was closed for the season, but the
caretaker said he'd serve us a meal if we were willing to eat what he and
his wife had prepared. Fine with us, and many thanks.

It began with a white soup. Recognizable at first spoonful, tho served
warm, and I exclaimed: "Vichyssoise!" which excalamation was greeted with
the familiar laughter and "do you know what you just called it? 'female
collaborator!' "

That's how I came to dicover that vichyssoise, a slight variant on the
traditional potage parmentier, never appears on French menus. Invented, in
fact, in New York. And that the word itself has become a sort of curse. I
didn't think to ask what a woman from Vichy would expect to be called these
days.

Mark


At 11:00 AM 1/8/2005, you wrote:

>You Don't Know Me
>
>Sometimes you hear a xylophone
>deep in the forest and you know
>that things are just not right.
>Vichyssoise beneath a canopy
>with several unnamable beautiful
>peekaboos may have gotten me off
>to a less than promising start,
>so a chickadee gyrating in my ear
>and a catbird spilled the champagne
>and a dog waygone chainsawed
>some pleasure I left on the table
>for a tip, an itsy-bitsy gratuity.
>I got home on the back of a grackle,
>poky me. In the big chair I started
>whistling and singing a melody:
>It was the forest tune, about bugs
>and sunlight and snakes and mumbo jumbo.
>And now it is your turn to burn,
>the song said, but first you must travel
>to Cameroon unapprehended
>in the eye of a cold, dead hurricane.
>You're starting to annoy me, I said.
>I was trying to annoy you, the song said,
>to see if you were really listening.
>There's a hole in my head, I said,
>I was hoping you would help to fill.
>What do you take me for, skillet biscuits?
>Perhaps. But you are also the forest song
>which is long and deep and clear.
>I exist but I have no purpose, the song said,
>but I'll pour some cool water over you
>that you will not soon forget.
>
>--James Tate
>
>fr. *Memoir of the Hawk*
>[New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2001]
>
>Hal
>
>Halvard Johnson
>===============
>email: [log in to unmask]
>website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
>blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/