Espirit d’accord

The Homemoaner’s holiday.

Bon jour! Recently, Melissa and I were lucky enough to connect ourselves to a to a tour group bound for Paris, France! As a public service to our readers, and with possible positive tax implications, I am using this column to dispel some myths and suggest some truths about Paris and Parisian culture.

MYTH #1: French Food is rich and delicious.

We love shopping, but since the dollar has no value at the moment, we chose to blow our budget on food. After all, we do, as our groaning bathroom scale will testify, like to eat, so where better to disregard our diets than in the countless bistros and restaurants of Paris?

An average block on a Paris street, Rue du Chapeau Hamborg for example, goes something like this: on the corner, a sidewalk café, next a patisserie (bakery) followed by a pied-à-terre and then an eyeglasses store. The next shop is usually an ethnic restaurant: Japanese, Senegalese, Thai , Moroccan, followed by a shop specializing in a product that is unclear and, unless you know the language (and we don’t), mysterious. Finally, back at the corner, another sidewalk café. Now and then, there is something called a “Tabac,” which is a place you go, not only to buy horrible French cigarettes, but virtually everything else necessary to survive in Paris: subway tickets, phone cards, tiny little cups of espresso, etc.

This layout means that you have a minimum of three dining opportunities on each block of the city. In order to complicate things, each dining establishment displays the bill of fare on a chalkboard propped up on the sidewalk. On the one hand, this makes it easy to scope out the individual restaurants, but on the other, not understanding the language, we often had to make our selections based on penmanship.

The results were often surprisingly disappointing. We had about twelve meals in restaurants and probably only three of them were even vaguely mind-altering. Yes the sauces were rich, the vegetables properly cooked, but the results often left us underwhelmed and on one occasion, exiled to the hotel room for a full day suffering from “Napoleon’s Revenge.”

MYTH # 2. All Parisian Women are Beautiful.

This is true. So are the men and the pets. The denizens of Paris all dress fabulously, never a hair out of place. We were there in still chilly March, and every living organism within the city limits, including houseplants, wore a scarf. Since I did not bring a scarf of my own, I tried to find a shop where a Parisian might purchase one. When in Rome, right? I could not, for any price, find a decent scarf. There were plenty of scarves for sale on the street, but most of them were manufactured, off shore, for the tourist trade. I never once saw a Parisian wearing a scarf that said “J’taime Paris.” Not once. Also: there are no fat people in Paris. I tried to find one but the only one I could find was in the mirror.

MYTH #3. The French Make Bad Cars

Here’s the thing. The French took a bad political hit a few years back. It got so we started renaming things like French Toast, “Freedom Toast,” (The French call it Toast.) I think we might learn a lot from the French when it comes to national pride. The French try not to buy non-French goods. This is nowhere more prevalent than on the streets of Paris. Peugeot. Renault. Citroën. These are brands that prevail on French bumpers. While they have Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans – even Fords – the French buy French and they also buy small. Gas is really expensive. There seemed to be endless models of tiny little cars that have no trouble dodging around confused tourists in crosswalks. Easily 85 percent of the cars in Paris are French made.

Even the subways, which are efficient, safe and run on rubber wheels, are of French design. Are they badly engineered? I can’t say, but maybe we could learn something. I’m just saying.

Final MYTH: The Parisians are Rude

I was ready for this, but a seasoned tourist told me to remember to say hello to everyone I meet. In the shop: Bon Jour! In the street: Bon Jour! Bump into someone: Pardon! Someone does something for you: Merci!

Storekeepers love money. Anyone’s money, but when the little bell rings over the door, the first thing they say is, Bon Jour. Not “may I help you?” If the first thing out of your mouth is “How much is this?,” you have broken a cultural expectation. It is so easy to be polite. I believe Parisians have gotten this rude reputation based on their reaction to rude tourists.

More than once we were helped by passing strangers who spoke far better English than our paltry French. As long as we said “Bon jour,” up front, and “Merci,” on the way out, all of the Parisians we met were helpful, friendly, scarf-wearing people.

Non, c’est le tourist, with their backward baseball caps and t-shirts that read “I’m With Stupid.” With their flip flops flapping, their cameras flashing and their voices raised on the principle that, louder is easier to understand, it is they who are rude. And it’s embarrassing. There I said it.

Like our trip to Paris, I have run out of time. Merci.

Combien d'argent? WOW!

Never Mind.

All this stuff about Tiger Woods - does any body, except his wife, kids, etc., care?
Infidelity, addiction, stupidity happens all the time. I am not condoning it, in fact I make a living off of the victims and perpetrators of all these things.

When a politician gets caught with his pants down, it is only important if it is a politician who has run his/her campaign on the moral highroad. All these gay-bashing latent homosexual a-holes should be held in complete contempt for their hypocrisy. Lawmakers who swoon with indignity when an opponent amasses additional, covert dry-cleaning expenses outside the matrimonial boudoirs, only to later admit to their own peccadilloes, should be skewered and roasted with sprigs of fresh rosemary and fed to brawling, inner-city pit bulls.

I am inclined to feel that a person's private life should be private even if their life is public. UNLESS their behavior is counter to their ability to do their job. OK?

I am not condoning this behavior I am just saying it is none of OUR business.

Now, as far as Tiger Woods is concerned this is how I feel: they could remove all golf courses, golf balls, golf channels, magazines, hats, shoes - whatever - It could all be gone tomorrow and the world would not be effected one iota. Even half an iota.

So, who cares?

In fact I just burned up way more caloreis writing this than neccesary.

Barberism

Prior to February 9, 1964, every American male got his haircut once a week. That was the day the Beatles made their American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. The lads from Liverpool with their long locks and lurid lyrics, plowed furrows through popular culture to the extent that, within a couple of years, even Richard Nixon had John Lennon sideburns. The era of the local barber shop had come to a close.

Until that day, there was at least one barber shop on every Main Street in every town. On the main street of my town I recall three barber shops with a minimum of three chairs and three barbers. There was always a wait for a chair and always a pile of ratty old magazines to read while waiting.

The barber called you over and, using only a pair of scissors and a comb, removed all superfluous hair from your collar line up. When he was done, he’d wet down what was left with a bottle of smelly green liquid, comb it into submission and in an hour or so your hair would have hardened up enough to skate upon. The young folks would be offered a lollipop from a big glass jar. Two weeks later: back in the chair.

I grew my hair long as soon as I was big enough to face down my father who, in spite of his own sideburns and mustache, was unbending when it came to how his sons appeared on the street . When I hit age 43, I decided it wasn’t worth fighting conformity, and I began getting regular haircuts again.

This is not as easy as it sounds because I am a purist. I am dead set against paying for frills like mousse, expander and tea tree fire-proofing or any of the other options offered at the modern “salon.” One by one, over the years, I have frequented the rapidly vanishing shops with striped poles by the door; places where the barber’s license is taped to the mirror and the long, tapered combs are kept in a jar of blue disinfectant.

Eventually, I started going to the local beauty school. There, for a really good price, they’d throw you at the mercy of student, who would very slowly, painfully and methodically cut each of your individual hairs, sometimes several times. Now and then, when a student seemed to get stuck, an instructor was called in. Soon, the two of them would be staring at the back of my head, the frustrated student being chided by the scissor-wielding instructor.

“How many times have I told you NOT to do it that way?” The instructor might ask, or worse, “how do you plan to fix that?”

Whatever happened while I was in the chair, eventually they peeled off the drop cloth, my pate lathered in fragrant, waxy goo, and with any luck there would be no major divots reflected back in my rearview mirror.

One of the benefits of risking my carefully-crafted public image to the sharp blades of an untrained and often pregnant beauty college student, is that a trainee might eventually become your permanent hair care coordinator. Such is the case with Helena.

Helena is an artist and has the gift of gab and a natural gift for hair styling. In her chair, I was regaled with tales and adventures of the local grim youth. She would unravel wonderful travelogues of vacations at Disneyworld with her husband, and occasionally whispering the latest beauty school gossip into my newly protruding ears.

After graduation, Helena brought her scissors over to “Salon Niçoise,” a well-established salon in a nearby town. I faithfully followed her. Every couple of months, I would call the reception desk and get my name on the schedule.

When I got my nursing license and began working, I quickly realized that, in spite of the rigorous training, a job, once obtained, is still a job. And once in the work place, one soon finds themselves ensconced in a situation that is full of co-workers. Us new kids, freshly scrubbed and altruistic, learn – day one – that for every skilled and competent professional at the workplace, there is the equivalent number of disgruntled, incompetent, lazy do-nothings that complain all day and find new ways to avoid working.

Such was the atmosphere in Helena’s new salon. From where I sat, it appeared that the other salon workers did not have nearly the dedicated work ethic and skill set that verily gleamed off the tips of Helena’s scissors as she toiled over my shoulder.
When I called last week she wasn’t there. “We haven’t seen her in a month,” the woman on the phone told me. Was she OK, I wondered? How am I going to find her? I didn’t know her last name or anything about her other than where she worked and that she liked the Monkees.

And now she was gone.

I considered sitting in the parking lot of the salon and waiting for a familiar face to emerge and then attempting to pry information out of her former co-workers. That seemed not bloody likely.

Hallelujah! A google search of the salon led me to their web site and soon I was directed to Facebook where I quickly located and “friended” her. Lo and behold, a couple of days later I was hearing a blow-by-blow description of the straw that broke the camel’s back at her former employer, and the story of why I was sitting on an old stool in her grandmother’s kitchen.

Sometimes, thankfully, a mullet is a fish.

Indoor Swimming Pool

When we recently had the house torn up and put back together, I saw it as sort of a maturation process. Until then, the old house on Rusty Hinge Road was a modified version of the previous owner’s decorating tastes. Sure, we painted and put up shelves when we first moved in, but when we redid the bathrooms to our own specifications, the house was officially ours.

This, in my mid-50s mind meant growth, which translated to Melissa and I needing to purge the pile of pointless pollution that we had collected over the decade. How did this happen? First, there was the doubling of debris when we merged our two households and second there is our mutual, almost pathological hording disorders, also known as “collecting.”

We had postcards, pots, paintings, empty plastic nut jars, brown paper bags, Clementine boxes, shoe boxes, shoes, hats, food processing equipment, sheets, sheets, towels and more towels, etc. and more etc.

Our initial thought was to get rid of a bunch of this junk, and regular readers might remember the under-attended tag sale we held last summer. In spite of our best intentions, most of the stuff stayed on the porch. We couldn’t even get the local roving bands of teenage punks and wise guys to steal the stuff. So, as prearranged, nothing went back into the house. It went into the big Volvo and off to Goodwill.

As a natural consequence to our recent bathroom renovations, Melissa and I discussed purchasing new towels. Grown-ups, it could be argued, had towels that “went” with the décor. Up until this discussion, we had a grouping of mismatched, leftover linens, selected from the mountain that had formed in the basement. I agreed to the new towel purchase, but had to include a clause about the aforementioned mountain of reject towels in the basement.

“We’ve got to get rid of some of the junk around here.” I said.

I knew that’d never happen. Now and then I vow to myself to open the Bilco door to the cellar, back up the big Volvo and fill the cargo bay with some of the stuff that waits, neatly folded and untouched for years, and lug it off somewhere.

Our new, Egyptian cotton towels arrived, and Melissa hung them on the towel bars in the master bath. They were luscious, soft and the right color. Very grown up. I don’t, in fact, remember every buying a towel in my life, but the old bathroom towels ended up in the stack with the others, down in the basement by the washer and dryer.

Then came the day, not long ago, when Melissa and I went to Costco to buy a rotisserie chicken, some mixed nuts and a skid of toilet paper. As we pushed our oversized cart down the aisle, Melissa noticed some towels on sale. Needless to say it was a fancy brand that I had never heard of, let’s say they were “Elite Deluxe” brand.

“Oooh, “cooed Melissa, “Elite Deluxe towels on for only $7.99! What a deal!”

Apparently if I had been up on my towels, I’d have been equally excited.

“Ain’t that a shame?” I said, “and we just got new towels!”

Melissa said, “Oh, you’re right, but that blue goes with our color scheme!”

A week later, while I was stuffing clothing into the washer I noticed two new blue towels on the stack. I would never have noticed but for the shiny, new “Elite Deluxe” tags still on their hems. My initial reaction was to flip my lid but I changed my mind. After all, who was I to throw stones in the basement of my glass house?

I set the washer load to “XL” and waited for the agitator to kick in. It’s been known to run and run and overflow and fill the basement. (Homemoaner, February 2008) The agitator kicked in and I went upstairs and got lost in the usual ongoing rigmarole that fills the hours between sleep. In a day or two, if the opportunity arose, I’d mention the new towels to Melissa.

One fine Saturday, it popped into my head during a debate. I was losing, so I casually mentioned the new “Elite Deluxe” towels. She was surprised that I noticed them, seeing as how there are so many old towels among which they were concealed. I didn’t win our debate, but it was close enough to a draw that we were soon sitting at our respective computers, busily whiling away the rainy day.

At some point Melissa went downstairs for a cup of tea or some cat-related medical emergency. A few minutes she was hollering and hooting so loudly, I thought she had fallen down the stairs.

As I rushed to her side, I realized the washing machine had overflowed. She’d put in the new towels, and in an effort to conserve water and assuage her guilt, pushed the “large load” button and forgot about it. “Large load” is notorious for causing floods and sure enough the water in the basement was more than ankle deep.

I said nothing to Melissa, no words would have made her feel any better or any worse. I turned on the pump, which is set up for just such an event, and in a couple of hours the water had been sucked out the window and into a convenient nearby street grate. We just swept the puddles across the floor and into the big hole in the floor where the pump is installed and moved the soggy cardboard boxes full of unnecessary junk up to higher ground.
Fortunately we had plenty of old towels around to soak up the last of the water.

Smug as a bug in a waterlogged rug.

Crock Plot

If we were to move, we’d have to have a two car garage and a fireplace. These are things we don’t have in our house on Rusty Hinge Road. So this is the criteria I use search the real estate web sites.

Recently a really interesting property popped up, so I called my old real estate buddy, Bryce. He was happy to get us in. In fact he’d bring along his significant other, Lily, and we make a day of it.

The property itself was an old creaky cape, not very photogenic, but cheap, and it had a two car garage with a rentable apartment - plus it was on 7.5 acres of land!

It had snowed that week and the weather had stayed chilly, so the ride up into the back country was lovely. Somewhere, as we chatted away, Bryce and Lily told us about their crock pot.

I think I can pin point when crock pots suddenly became such a huge part of our lives. It all started at our lazy, family Christmas in Vermont where my Sister, Barbara, and her husband, Charlie, non-chalantly pulled a vintage Rival two and a half quart out of the pantry and put together a beef barley stew right after a gut-busting country breakfast of butter-smeared pancakes drowned in Charlie’s own maple syrup and hickory smoked bacon from the smokehouse down on the highway. While Melissa, my son Alexander and I draped ourselves like wet mittens on comfortable chairs around the wood stove, Babbs and Chaz put dinner on, slow and low.

We thought nothing of it, eyes at half mast, intoxicated by the Green Mountain ambience, and would not have even been aware of their labors had the house not slowly began to fill with a delicious aroma that seeped out from around the heavy Pyrex lid, stimulating our appetite glands, making us quickly forget that after that huge non-Jenny Craig breakfast, we’d sworn off food for the duration.

No matter, Christmas night, we inhaled the sumptuous stew, mopping up the last rich, brown, dribblings with redundant slices of buttered bread.

So as we sank up to our elbows in the equally sumptuous leather upholstery of Bryce’s car, we were hearing wonderful tales of hearty stews, and fricasseed chickens, all prepared far in advance, spending the day simmering and filling the house with a wholesome, heady, heavenly bouquet. So, when you walk in the door – rode hard and hungry – dinner meets you at the door like the old family dog: kissing your face and filling your senses with love.

We could imagine just such a scenario as we arrived at the old creaky cape. Built in 1918, she boasted of a stone fireplace and wide-plank floors (gaps chinked with rope, of all things), two need-to-be-redone bathrooms, an unremarkable kitchen, several teeny tiny bedrooms, and a (real) wood paneled den. A total fixer-upper.

The apartment over the two-car garage definitely needed work. Most of the walls were painted shrill lilac and chartreuse.

Through the kitchen window of the apartment, right on the edge of the tree line, you could make out the unmistakable, weathered colors of barn board, put together in the form of some sort of shed. Against our realtor’s advice, we trudged through the ankle deep snow to inspect what would be, were we to go so far as to actually buy the place, a potential art studio/junk storage/source of kindling.

An “outbuilding” is on our wish list of any potential property we may, in our dreams and in the future, buy.

This particular out building grew more interesting as it came into focus over the field of snow. It appeared to have originally been some sort of tractor shed, judging by the two garage-style doors on the long side.

We wrestled the operating door open and when the low light streamed in, the four of us gasped in unison.

It felt as if we were the first people to set foot in the space in 30 years. A 72 inch Locke mower sat rusting, right where it had been parked the last time it had been run over the lawn. There were work benches wrapping around the space and multi-paned windows on three sides. There was a table saw and a radial arm saw and jars of nails and screws. There were old cracked fan belts and ancient, empty beer bottles and old wooden crates filled with darkened chunks of who-knows-what and cob webs.

In the center of it all: a pot-bellied stove. And rust: rust on everything. It was a man-cave on the brink of crumbling back into the soil. But it was also a place that a few replacement panes of glass and a few trips to the metal recycling center, could be transformed into a remarkable work space that Melissa and I could spend our dotage competing for.

We talked about making an offer. Bryce advised against it, citing “too much work,” and uttering my two least favorite words “tear down.”

In spite of the huge potential, the initial attraction to the property and the acreage, did not push us into a place that we could comfortably consider complicating our lives and our budgets for untold years to come. In spite of the possibility of income potential from the apartment and the romantic charm of the pot belly stove in the dilapidated shack, we decided it was much too far away from civilization so we passed on the property with a bit of reluctance.

We did, however, buy a shiny new crock pot. Now, our old house is full of the wonderful smell of winter.

Now we don’t have to get a dog. ben.guerrero@sbcglobal.net

Driving Down Memory Lane

I used to work in a record store on Sundays.



I made a little extra money, and to be truthful, it got me out of the house and allowed me to hone my interpersonal skills. When I was of such a mind, the occasional socialization with attractive women was another motivation.



I have exhibited hermit-like behavior in the past. When you don’t really have any money or anyplace to go, hermatism ensues. Part of me felt sorry for myself and another non-sorry part sort of exhibited my midlle finger to the rest of the human race: didn’t suffer fools gladly. Bastards! I was deflecting the slim possibility that if I put myself out there in society, I’d be rejected. Wow. Self-discovery.



I have always considered myself a non-conformist. The old home town was pretty conformy: everyone is a republican and a church goer. They are all slim and coiffed and rich. I was never any of those things. Never wanted to be. But being the opposite of all those things made me stick out like a democratic, heathen, chubby, disheveled, welfare recipient sore thumb.
So without veering off into some sort of epic, PhD in Psychology thesis, let me just point out that





I have mellowed a bit. But still…



The clientele at the record store would typically walk in the door and immediately ask me or an associate what was selling the most. This was information we had on hand. Whatever people were buying, they’d buy. If it was a recording of vomiting, and it was in the top 10, out came the gold AMEX card.



This flock mentality had always bothered me. It still bothers me.



When I was younger, back in the late 70s when my liver still had a chance and my muscles were visible through the flab and none of my joints ached, I made some observations. Everyone in my home town had one of two cars: a Volvo Station Wagon or a BMW 2002. Some families had the former for Mom and the latter for Dad, but I am not generalizing. If you walk down the main shopping street of my old home town that’s what you would see parked at the curb. Volvo Volvo BMW BMW Volvo.



The men of my age wore Lacoste Alligator shirts and the women had disco hair. They went to bars at night met up and followed each other’s Beemers and Volvos off up onto the ridges for pre-aids sexual adventure. I’m not bitter.



For a while, after the 2002 rotted out, 325s were parked in the town spaces. Then there was a brief minivan epoch.



I am not going to fill this space with a complete vehicular timeline except to fast forward to today where the entire town (and most of the rest of my fellow countrymen) drive SUVs.



It’s stunning, shocking and embarrassing. Huge gas guzzling behemoths where the humbler, smaller cars of my youth once parked. They block the view and the rays of the sun.



No one rives a car older than 10 years anymore. Except me I think.




Anyway, I was tooling down the road in my 1987 Volvo Station wagon when an odd vehicle pulled onto the highway in front of me. It was tiny, dwarfed by the Suburbans, Land Rovers and Expeditions that sped by in both directions. As I crept up behing the tiny car, which was holding it own in the velocity sweepstakes, I suddenly realized it was a BMW 2002. Wow! It survived the rust plague! Some guy had fixed it up nice. So I took a picture and here it is. By the way, I plan on buying a Ford Flex as soon as I can.

Negativity

Pop a cork and light up a Churchill! We’ve been on Rusty Hinge Road for 10 years! In the early months of our residency, as the sawdust levels began to subside and the patina of the previous tenants faded away, I began to collect ephemera related to my new home town. Just post cards at first. In those early days, when EBAY was just a little more than an idea, I could win auctions without much competition: two dollars here, five dollars there, before long I had quite a collection. Then it was on to pottery and books, anything even vaguely related to my zip code was fair game. I would seek it out, bid on it, and for a while, there was a fairly steady stream of envelopes, padded bags and boxes arriving at my door.

Once I figured out how to do it, I set up my EBAY account to run automatic searches specific to my desires. Borselino hats is one of my favorites, as are Volvo parts and antique banjos. The one I get every day centers on items related to my home town.


Not too long ago, I received an EBAY notification offering old photographic negatives that were alleged to have been snapped by a renowned local WPA muralist. It promised images of street scenes (I like those), old cars (sign me up) and people (I’m into people).



I won the lot for $3.95 plus postage and a week later I was running 4X5 negatives through my scanner. As anticipated, my computer screen delivered photos of old houses and cars and old-fashioned people in a 1930s back yards, sipping lemonade and pretty much doing what we modern folks do on a summer’s day (without the technological gizmos).




One of the things I began to do with my postcard collection was to get in the Toyota and drive to the various locations pictured in my 80-year-old images, with the idea of replicating the exact image as it looks today. I had some success with this, but it often required some research, since occasionally streets are renamed and in some cases entire neighborhoods have been paved over in favor of a commercial enterprise. My newly acquired negatives sparked a renewal of this interest, especially since I had the name of the photographer and some possible landmarks I could use to identify the scenes I now had on my hard drive.

I googled the artist with limited success, save for a whole lot of images of his fine murals which are still on display in many local government buildings. My next step was to go to the local library to search the town directories.

After finding a “Jim Rockford” parking spot in front of the library, I walked in the door and practically knocked over Gilbert, the unofficial town historian. I had spent many hours in various places listening to Gilbert rattle off his boundless knowledge of local lore and on this particular day, I merely mentioned the name of the muralist I was researching and Gilbert was rattling off reams of valuable information that was priceless for my research. He gave me so much data that I decided not to pursue the reference desk for the old directories and set out to photograph modern digital versions of the vintage images that I now owned.



In what I thought was a delightfully karmic twist, the address Gilbert sent me to happened to be right around the corner from my property at Rusty Hinge Road. The house was one with which I was quite familiar. Gilbert’s description of how the artist’s family used the property all made sense, but I instinctively felt that it was not the one depicted in my photos.




I won another EBAY auction of negatives of identical description and while I was waiting for them to arrive, I returned to the library to do more research on the photographer. I found three different addresses from three different decades. My subject had moved several times. From the driver’s seat of the Toyota, I took three new photos, I also discovered that, unfortunately, one of the locations was now a more modern strip mall.

Maybe one of these properties could have been the location of the back yard in my photos. I continued to poke around and email Gilbert while I watched the mail for the new (old) negatives.
In a week, I was scanning the new material. There were a series of interior shots, taken around a Christmas dinner table, and a few others of folks sitting on a back porch and then, hallelujah, one of the properties I had photographed came up, exactly as my modern photograph had captured it.

I get an immense sense of satisfaction I get when I am able to bring the past to the present. When I am able to replicate a shot that had been taken before my father was born and study the two images side by side, every little detail and grain silently tells the story of the passing decades. I posted these images to the internet in a photosharing site where I have found neighbors with similar interests. I explained what I was doing and revealed my sources. There was some response and I was given some useful suggestions.

More negatives came up on EBAY the next day, and some of the images look like they might contain a few shots of the house around the corner.

I put in my bid and rubbed my hands together in anticipation. Lo and behold, at the last minute, I was outbid! Drat! Now someone out there has “my” negatives!

I know where you live!