Le temps d'un été

The month of July has been and will continue to be busy. The weather is cooperating. My birthday celebration began on July 3 with an early morning bike ride to Ballard, with Walt, and ended on July 15 with a bike ride to Colman Pool (and a swim in the fabulous outdoor saltwater pool), with Caroline, pour fêter l'après 14 juillet. In between, many fun things I don't have time to write about just now. Including an evening with Gloria Steinem! I don't have time because the fun continues. Caroline, Jacqueline and I plan to ride to Colman Pool today for a swim. My friend Linda arrives from Toronto tomorrow for a four-day stay. Wednesday we're going to see the Cowboy Junkies at the Zoo. Friday we're going to Ellensburg for the Jazz in the Valley Festival. We return on Sunday for a BBQ with my distant cousin Shavaun, who coincidentally used to work with Walt years and years ago.

Sometimes I look out at the sailboats in Puget Sound and miss mine just a little. She is still there, in La Rochelle, and still mine, but not easily accessible for obvious reasons. Like mountain climbing, sailing is a great experience and I am glad to have had both of them in my life so far. But there is so much to do and see in this world, and sailing takes up so much time.

I used to run. After running in a few 10K's, I decided to run a marathon. I was working fulltime and had little time to train. So I followed a 50-mile a week plan for three or four months. Every week, I did a 10-mile run during lunch on Wednesdays. Every weekend, I did a long run, adding a mile each week. On the other days of the week, I did what I could - usually three to five miles. I finished the race in just under three-and-a-half hours and was ecstatic. Up to the day of the race, I had never run more than 20 miles and hadn't even done a half marathon. From 20 miles to the end I was in uncharted territory and it was both fabulous and horrible. I wanted to stop. After completing the marathon, I found that I didn't enjoy running as much. I became acutely aware of the aches and pains I felt in vital places, like my feet and knees. When it got to the point where I only felt good about running when I slowed down to walk, I decided I had had enough. And I had done enough. I had gotten through a marathon. Since then, I have been a dedicated walker. My feet thank me; my knees thank me. In fact, in retrospect and although I am happy to have done a marathon, I would have been better off just walking. I have not undone the damage to my knees, feet and hips, though I no longer feel pain in those places all the time. So I am happy to have finished a marathon, and happier still to know I will never put myself through that again.

Le café

Diane and me last summer near Chambonnet, her summer home ("La Belle Ruine") in France.

Today we went for a bike ride with our neighbor, from Mount Vernon to La Conner and back. It is an easy, flat ride through the farm-studded Skagit Valley. The tulip season is over. Nothing that magnificent can last. We had a quick lunch at the brew pub in La Conner. It was supposed to be quick. The service was slow so we had to rush out and get back on our bikes so that Walt could get to the ball field by 4 pm.

I thought about the hundreds of lunches I had with Diane in Paris over the years. I lived near where she worked and getting away from my home office was a pleasure and a necessity. We would meet at the aptly named Ailleurs (Elsewhere) most of the time. As we got to know the waitresses (relatively rare in France; most restaurant servers are career waiters) over time -- Marlène, from Cuba, and Lulu (short for Ludmilla) from Madagascar -- we became friends and were always well taken care of. Every once in awhile, they would make a great ceremony of presenting us with a bill for "zero francs" (later, "zero euros"). A free lunch. Just because. I was thinking about how in France every lunch, whether with ma copine Diane or a client, ends with coffee. With an expresso usually. And the petite tasse de café almost always comes with a wrapped chocolate. Sometimes the chocolate is covering an almond. It is such a lovely way to end a meal. I miss this ending.

All the way home, I was thinking about how nice un petit café et un petit chocolat would taste. I love the moment when coffee meets chocolate: the coffee gives up a tiny bit of heat, the chocolate a tiny bit of hardness.

Diane, if you stop by and read, I want you to know how much I miss our lunches. They were often the highlight of my day. I miss you, my friend. I feel a trip to Paris is needed. Coffee and chocolate.

Liberating the Nazi Librarian within

Yesterday, Mr. Wonderful, Neko and I went to pick up my snowed-in, stir-crazy mom and take her to her boyfriend's place before she went berzerk and killed a neighbor or the postman. Remember how I said we used to love to sled on Fentonwood hill? It seems that is still the tradition, although my inner child took one look at the ice and said no fucking way do I want to do that again. My inner child seems to have matured along with me, and now prefers indoor activities and sipping hot chocolate when the weather outside is frightful. Give me a warm indoor fire any day. And a project or two, the kind you never seem to get around to.


Every adult I have spoken to is organizing closets and deep cleaning kitchens. I got this sudden rage to organize our bookshelves. Actually, this was not so sudden. We built them last year, after my books and many of my belongings finally arrived from France. This was a 25-year accumulation of stuff, people. Mostly books, music and knick-knacks. We needed someplace to put the books, fast. I tried to find a suitable system at IKEA and other places, but nothing seemed quite right.

So we talked to Sean, our friend and the architect who designed our house, and he came up with the perfect solution for a space we really did not know what to do with anyway. It is not really an entryway, but not suitable for anything else. Except the three bookcases we installed. Walt had his shop guys weld the frames and we bought the wood at Home Depot. We used rusted rebar that was lying on the ground in the scrap yard at Machinists Inc to support the wooden shelves. The great thing is that the shelves can be adjusted to any height, since they rest on the rebar, which itself rests on the welded metal.

But we built them one-by-one and started putting the books on them as we built. Well, okay, I did that. I couldn't wait and I couldn't stand tripping over all of our books. We have a lot of books, many in duplicate or triplicate. As a result of this piecemeal arrangement, once all the shelves were in we had to move stuff around and the organizing system I had put in place fell apart. We repeated this same mistake for our CDs. The result in both cases is that for the past year, we have been unable to find any of the books or CDs we might wish to get our hands on. Plus, we had no light in the area, so after dark we could not find them even if they were organized. We finally (And just so you know, whenever I say "we" it usually means Walt executes what I mandate. I mandate and mandate until it gets done.) got some little clip-on lights at IKEA, and that's when I realized just how jumbled all the books and CDs were. A few days ago, I tackled the CDs. I already had these cool wire baskets from Staples; now all of our CDs are neatly arranged. Listening to the music we own has been an indescribable pleasure.



Now for the books. I just dove into the project this morning and kept at it until it was done. Now Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis are reunited, as they should be, although Amis junior's biography of his father is not, as it is shelved among the biographies. Not to be confused with the autobiographies. I started with fiction in English and, now that it is done, I have conflicting feelings. On the one hand, it doesn't look like there are too many books. Even though we have two of an embarrassing number of works. On the other hand, I saw many books that have been shelved unread. Somehow, between the urge to buy and the trip home, fell the shadow. But there is an upside, as usual. Now I know where the many bought but unread books actually are. If anyone wants to read Bernhard Schlink's The Reader before the film version comes out, just ask. I have it, filed between Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) and Riotous Assembly (Tom Sharpe). Alphabetizing books leads to some incongruous pairings, though. I had a hard time allowing Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita to stand beside The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen (who? you are asking yourself, I know you are). Vladimir, forgive me.