The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can ...

... pursuing it with eager feet, until it joins some larger way, where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say. - Tolkien, The Hobbit


I find I am something of a hobbit, myself, of late.

I was talking a few postings ago about life here in Prat, where I've been left to muse quietly on the variegations of cheese degustation. It's funny; it's as though after whining for ages about being discontented, Toulouse shook my sweaty hands from her apronstrings and dropped me into an isolated corner of the country, 'to think about what I'd done.'

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Of course, I always do.

Another thing Bernard, my host father, is particular about is coffee. A man after my own heart, eh? They give me coffee - the lovely, excellent, perfect coffee from a drip coffeemaker that I have been craving for months - every morning, in a swollen cup like a bowl on a saucer, and I sit by myself and dip my bread in it and read my book and sip my coffee and look out the window at the foothills of the Pyrenees. But Bernard also has a little Nespresso machine that works with these little pellet things of espresso that he orders on the internet and of which he is charmingly proud. He loves to demonstrate the ease with which one can drop them into the machine, and then the two of us stand with folded arms and wait for the espresso to appear ('The pressure, the pressure is the thing, Avie,' he always says, and I nod as though I had no idea until he told me), staring anxiously at the spout as though waiting for an explosion.

He just walked in, actually, as I was writing this. 'Est-ce que tu veux un cafe, Avie?' No joke.

We share espresso a couple of hours after breakfast, again just after lunch, another around four or five in the afternoon, and the final cup after dinner. (After the first few nights of lying in my bed wondering how many verbs I could conjugate in my head, I found out there was decaf.) He loves to see if I can taste the difference between the ristretto, the arpeggio, the roma, and he was delighted when my preference was for the strongest one. I think my presence here is an excuse for the family to have all of their favorite things as often as he wants - if his wife notices how many pieces of chocolate he's had, or he flicks his eyes over her third glass of wine, it's all in the name of letting Avie try things.

I actually find myself lying quite a lot, for simplicity's sake. People are much happier when they can introduce you to something as though they invented it. And that's true, in a way. Everyone has their own manner of enjoying quelques choses, and thus, in France at least, each time is the first time. But more on that another time.

I do think that the quiet tasting of cheese, of wine, the appreciation of truly wonderful coffee - and indeed the insistence upon the necessity of such things - is quintessentially (attention: this is not to say *exclusively*) French, and is in itself a kind of resistance. We have a petit pause for a cup of espresso, and we have ten minutes where we sit on the terrace and talk about my studies, or the neighbor who insists on burning all his brush, or what lovely weather we're having even for the end of october, or how remarkably fine is the coffee.

Yes, it's irritating that the shops close for three hours in the middle of the day. It made it easier for me when I discovered this was irritating to the French, at times, as well. But one shrugs one's shoulders, raises one's palms, and says 'eh.' It's France. The culture of preservation and conservatism involves a distressing amount of navel-gazing, it's true. But it also cultivates a connosieurship that is built upon things that can all too easily be lost, or squandered. And it's incorporated into the rhythm of life with a minimum of fanfare.

It's a morsel of Zen, in its fashion. It's an ability to enjoy small things without impinging upon the rights or freedoms of any other person. And it supports itself, creating the space it needs to grow and thrive.

Life is nice in the little French garden of my mind. I'd like to stay and wear pink gloves and cultivate tomatoes and pansies. I'd like a little apartment three floors over the narrow street, with lavender shutters and rosemary in the windowbox.

I will also be happy to go, to get back to my cellphone and my literary theory, my madcap furious rush to learn everything there is to know from books, and in one day.

I will continue to take on too much, to try too hard, to fill my days too full of classes, works, aims, friends, troubles.

But life is long, and more than that, it's broad. There's room in it for the wrinkle between my eyebrows, for the callouses on my heels. You have to be willing to be unhappy, for a while. You're going to be anyway, from time to time. I would like, myself, to be able to see that not as a failure to live properly, as an affront to my sensibilities.

There's a French coffee press that's waiting for me in some box in some person's house, somewhere in Colorado. Sometime around three months from now I'll be living in my next apartment, my own apartment that's only mine, to which I have the only key. I'll be laughing at my students, laughing at my friends, laughing at myself again. Recognizing all the things I forgot I owned. And sometime around three months from now - it'll be quick because I'll tear through all the boxes looking for it - I'll find my coffee press. I won't make the coffee any differently than before; I like the way I've always made it. And it probably won't be French; in Boulder, I usually buy Mexican or Costa Rican. And I won't sit on the terrace, because in Boulder, in January, it's snowing and freezing.

But I will think about France, about drinking coffee in France. About how you can't see a thing until you walk away from it. About the pause.

I might even buy a cup swollen like a bowl, so there's room to dip my bread in.

A map can tell me how to find a place I have not seen but have often imagined.

When I get there, following the map faithfully, the place is not the place I have imagined. Maps, growing ever more real, are much less true.

In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born in have traveled all over the world. The journey is not linear. It is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.

Fold up the maps and put away the globe.

If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.

At this point in my life / I'd like to live as if only love mattered / as if redemption was in sight ...

... as if the search to live honestly / is all that anyone needs : no matter if you find it. - tracy chapman

She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear?
- jeanette winterson, sexing the cherry

I think it is so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

I’ve been having a Monkees moment in Toulouse, of late. Even though it’s France. I walk every day past rows of houses that are all the same. The mother in me complains about how hard life is, and the kid just doesn’t understand.

When you start dissecting your life in terms of a Monkees song, let alone speaking of yourself as multiple persons, you need a change of scenery.

Right now I’m staying in the petit village of Prat, in the departement of Ariege, with the foothills of the Pyrenees in view when I open the shutters of my bedroom window.

I like it here.

I’ve also developed a strong desire for a pair of Wellington boots.

This morning, a ray of light shone through the fog. I was dipping my pannetone (a brioche-y sort of Italian bread thing with raisins and orange peel) into my bowl of coffee and thinking about a conversation my host father here in Prat, Bernard, and I had had the previous evening about the very important manner in which one must slice a wedge of cheese: one cuts perpendicular to the apex of the triangle up to a certain point, at which time one switches to the sides of the cheese and begins to slice perpendicular to the base. Evidently children often fail to do this properly, which is highly irritating.

I’m mentioning this not to bore you into leaving off this narrative or to point out once again how fussy and peculiar the French can be, but because I realized how practical is this insistence. Simple, and indeed intuitive, and yet it hadn’t occurred to me. But if you don’t cut it that way then you get down to the rind and you’ve wasted a great deal of cheese that you can’t really carve away.

We also debated the difference in taste the pasteurization of milk makes, and whether cow, goat, or sheep’s milk makes the best cheese (I prefer goat, which he says women usually do). But don’t think about feta, or about that soft white chevre that you often see with the herbs around the sides of it. I’m talking about a plate with three wedges of pale yellow cheese, darker beige rinds that, essentially, look the same. But he could see the difference immediately.

All this sounds like blatant snobbery, doesn’t it? This was the kind of thing you were expecting, when I came to France, for me to write about all the nuances of the cheese I was tasting, for me to come back babbling about wines that are oakey or fruity or floral or ashy or earthy or lalala. It is snobbish, on the surface, and I have striven to err on the opposite side of caution in my interpretation of France, of the French. I am afraid, in a way, to write about cheese or even to enjoy cheese when I know that people (even people I know) are hungry or lonely or exhausted or unhappy. But there is, I confess, another side to it all.

For one thing, before I make him sound like a pedant, Bernard – late fifties, retired, loves to make intricate photo presentations with music and special effects on his computer, runs for two hours every day with his eleven-year-old Weimareiner, Leika – also likes Pink. Yeah, that Pink. Nevermind that he doesn’t understand a word of the lyrics. He also likes Christina Aguilera, but I think we can forgive him for both because he doesn’t speak English.

We in the United States, as we leftist yippies in our Patagonia jackets and our rope sandals and our Thai fisherman’s pants made from organic hemp (they have a word for us in French, too – they call these sorts of people “bobos,” or bourgeois bohemians, which needs no explanation, eh?) love to point out, are a culture of consumers. We have things like SUVs and 200 channels and iPods and limitless supplies of hot water and enormous refrigerators and dryers for clothes and petrol that is, despite everything, still cheaper than in Europe. And 24-hour grocery stores (not to mention 24-hour gyms or gas stations or restaurants or anything at all that never closes) – these things are uncommon, and some of them are nonexistent, in France.

And for what? Well, the obvious answer is that they’re available and generally affordable and quite nice, thank you very much, and why not be comfortable if one can be?

Why not, indeed?

Well, in a way, it’s all insulation, isn’t it? Yes, I know I’m being philosophical from here in my little French village, but indulge me. I already warned you that I wanted Wellington boots.

In our way, we as Americans make a kind of helter-skelter, madcap attempt to stay happy. To remind ourselves that we’re not famished or exhausted or all that poor. To barricade ourselves against unhappiness.

I have a friend whose grandmother emigrated from Russia as a young woman. She’s been in America for over half a century but she still keeps the pantry absolutely stuffed with canned goods and powdered milk and preserves as though waiting for the apocalypse.

The inverse of that story is an anecdotal account of the siege of Carcassonne, a medieval village in the south of France, not too far from Toulouse, as it happens. The story goes that the town had been besieged for some ridiculous amount of time, a year or something, with no sign of letting up, and when the people were just about to run out of … well, everything, the leader of the town (who I think was a woman, actually) had them catapult the last pig stuffed with the last bit of grain over the ramparts into the enemy’s camp. The idea was to impress upon the opposition that they had provisions to waste, that they were so well-stocked that they could afford to use food as ammunition. And, so the story goes, it worked: the other army decided they were beaten and packed it all up and went home.

Oh, to be Prince Caspian, afloat upon the waves …

Here’s an interesting meditation. One of the things that has occurred to me is the difference between coming to a place like France and going somewhere, like, say, to India. In some ways, coming here is more difficult. What I mean is, if you go somewhere like India, you’re just so absurdly different. Your clothes, the color of your skin, the manner in which you comport yourself. Every facet of your existence confirms your separation. If you go to France, on the other hand, well … you look just like everybody else. Okay, fine; you’re probably less painfully fashionable. You wear too much North Face and bootcut denim for a native, and you probably don’t knot your scarf properly. But it’s one of the issues I think we all have with life here – that it’s too close to the same.

The same but not the same.

If you’re in India, you take your difference as read. Franchement, as the francais love to say. You know your life is going to be less than facile. Of course one doesn’t speak the language. Of course everything looks / tastes / smells / sounds bizarre. Of course one feels the continual buffoon.

It would be cool if I could learn French to Schoolhouse Rock. Right? A squat little cartoon Napoleon in a tricornered hat and epaulets, with his hand tucked between the gold buttons of his coat (although I don’t know if he would ride a huge white horse or a donkey in the cartoon version), who would teach me, through a catchy and cunning song about some glorious victory, when to use the imparfait and when the passe compose. Or a troop of charming student revolutionaries who would take me on a tour of Paris to illustrate the difference between quel and lequel, or celui-ci and celui-la, or the impenetrable prepositional mélange that is dans, en, a, de, pour, and par. (Throw in vers, envers, and the difference between sur, au-dessus de, sous, and au-dessous de, add some champignons, and you have a recipe for a French aneurism.)

I’m sure my grammar teacher (who is without exception the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person and who, I am convinced, never says anything that isn’t accurate) would not agree with me, but French prepositions prove that there are some things about languages that work just because they do. It’s the same thing we’d say about English – uh, I’m not sure why you say it that way. It just sounds right.

What fun is being cool if you can't wear a sombrero?

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

All of us here en France are struggling. Of course they’re fake struggles, the struggles of the first world. The ways in which the civilized individual tousles with itself, and I’m worn out apologizing to myself for that. But. We’re all tired of cheese, as well.

Tired of Turkish toilets, of neat little piles of French dogshit everywhere on the street. Broken bottles and everyone’s litter, but all the shops close at seven o’clock at night. Of sausage with everything. Of weird little pillows with buttons in the center.

The French LOVE to ask, ‘What surprises you about France?’ Toujours, this is the question. Out teachers (who are French) ask us; our host families ask us; the people we meet ask us. What surprises you? What kind of question is that? I ask myself if this is something we demand of people in the United States, and I honestly don’t know. If it is, then I’ve learned how irritating is this query. Why irritating? Well, why the question? It’s because one perceives the glee behind the inquiry. Perhaps one envies the ability to ask such a question, because to ask it implies an intimate acquaintance with the thing interrogated. I know France; let me see how your assessment measures up. Because you don’t know it. Okay, fine – I’m well aware of that. And that knowledge is the rhizome of that elusive malady called homesickness. No, it’s not that you’re weak, you miss your mama, or your friends, or your favorite hamburgers. What you miss is that peculiar understanding of your surroundings. The conventions of commonplace everyday interaction. Knowing how something will feel, before you touch it. How to call a thing by name.

I was taught a month ago / to bide my time and take it slow / and then I learned just yesterday / to rush and never waste the day / Now I’m convinced the whole day long / that all I learn is always wrong / And things are true that I forget / but no one taught that to me yet. – phish, character zero

This is something that I’m well aware is not a unique sentiment, but if I have been surprised by one thing, it’s that I had to come so far from home to acknowledge things I already knew. Case in point – I had a meeting with my advisor here recently in which she, in her gentle manner, remarked that one of my biggest handicaps (in French, en France, in life) is that I hate to inconvenience people. Thus my rabid independence stems less from some overflowing fountain of courage and intrepidity than from a desire to avoid at all costs any instance wherein I might have to ask for help, or impinge upon the time, space, patience of another person. As we say in the South, I don’t like to be beholden, not to anyone. But it’s a problem for me here, because in order to get through the demands of my program, I have to essay into the community and work with people who don’t speak English, and who have to put up with my wretched and sickly French.

I hate that. I hate it more than anything here. I hate it nearly as much as I hate beaurocracy, and given my dealings with such things of late, that’s saying something.

What do I love about Toulouse?

I love a market called Afro Don Ton. They have pisco and tortillas and an absurd number of spices and hot sauce, and banana beer, and fufu, and hair extensions, and key limes, and datura root, and purple potatoes. And a lovely balding man who is always there behind the counter, always in a short-sleeved blue buttondown, always remembers that my name is Avie and who has never told me his. I go several times a week, who can say why, perhaps to smell pimante forte, perhaps to look at spiky horned legumes, perhaps to remind myself that forty-six kinds of hot sauce do indeed exist, and someone is buying them … perhaps to be the sort of person who is comforted by a place like Afro Don Ton. From time to time, the lovely man whose name I think I will never know, because he’s never told me, because I don’t know how to ask, because it doesn’t really matter, gives me a banana beer. Gratuit. And I take it home and drink it, the same day, and it tastes like beer, and it tastes like bananas, and it doesn’t matter at all that it’s warm.

You already know that I love the glaces at Cornet d’Amour. Ugh – have discovered a new favorite flavor – excuse me, parfum. The honey-and-pine-nut. It’s absurd. This is a disaster of epic proportions. I may exit France having become someone who likes ice cream. What will the neighbors say?

I love the Argentine girls at my favorite empanada shop, who laugh when I try to speak French and laugh when I try to speak Spanish, who play fantastic music and make absurdly delightful empanadas. One is tall and slim, with café crème pale skin and hair, always in long stovepipe black pants and an apron that looks like a starched tablecloth tucked into her waistband. She makes the empanadas, and she doesn’t really speak French. The other is shorter, darker, speaks patient French and rapid Spanish. She takes the orders, runs the cash register, and fiddles with the dial on the radio. Wears crazy tight jeans with random frayed and patched bits. Has a tiny braid of hair near her right ear. Rolls her own cigarettes. Like anywhere else in France, half the workday involves chatting with the people who wander in. At this place, there are faded Argentine glories who come in for huge sacks of empanadas in long coats, uncomfortable-looking shoes with large ornamental buckles (like Pilgrims), scarves, dyed hair combed like lacquered candy floss. Delivery guys with big plastic trays who interrupt whoever’s talking. Men in black jeans and leather jackets.

I love the availability of wonderful cards and stationary. (In passing: a librarie, en France, is a bookstore, while a library as we think of it is a bibliotheque, but a bibliotheque only has books; anything else comes from the mediatheque, which is a separate entity.) I discovered the mediatheque recently. Here’s another time when one traverses the globe to learn what one already knew: I love libraries. This one reminds me of all the ones I love back home. In Boulder, in Memphis, the library is the same: painfully modern architecture and so forth. The funny thing here is that, of the books they have in English, they’re nearly all fantastic books. In the same manner as the English language section at the Librarie Privat (my favorite bookstore, and the place where I spend too many hours pretending that it’s raining too heavily to go back home), the selection includes many of the books you really ought to read and precious few that you really oughtn’t. Also, they all come from Britain.


I love the girl at the vendor at the corner where we all buy lunch, inaptly and obscurely referred to as the pizza cart – obscure because there’s no suggestion, even, of pizza there, only salads and sandwiches on baguettes and yogurt and crepes and apple tart every day. She’s heavyset, rare in France, with blonde hair pulled severely back from her face and in a blue apron with stripes, and she makes your food precisely when you order it, slicing the eggs and tomatoes for your sandwich right in front of you. She never smiles, until she finishes her methodical and unhurried architecture, hands you your food and its accoutrements, never forgetting your little knife and fork, your spoon if you got yogurt, your single napkin (because more than one of anything is unheard of in France, double-bagging groceries is a totally foreign concept, but that’s a whole other posting), and slips your change into your palm with Voila and a beaming grin. Every day.

I love the way you can buy a drinkable bottle of wine for less than a euro. Really, it’s far cheaper than soda. And a decent bottle costs you around five euros.

I love seeing people at museums, gazing at paintings with little dogs tucked under their arms.

I love the Toulouse-Lautrec museum in Albi. I love his little pencil and ink sketches, his lithographs.

Oooh. How have I failed to share with you the changes I have wrought in my host family? D’abord, I have introduced them to hot sauce. I suppose it’s a condition of the French palate; perhaps the food is so fresh and so perfect in itself that they don’t require spices with which to mask any unsavoury flavours. Alors. I require them. And coming to France, I discovered that I didn’t wish to live without spices. So (at Afro Don Ton, of course) I bought Mexican hot sauce and chipotle sauce and cayenne and cumin, and set them on the table, and there was evening, and there was morning, and now everyone in my host family has to saturate their food with extra sauce – that it’s from Mexico is my own private joke, and yes, I do chuckle to myself often. Maybe it’s politesse or maybe they really like the stuff, but either way it’s fun for me.

I think, perhaps, that I’m always going to want the thing that shouldn’t be wherever I am. The immigrant, the import, the bizarre. I don’t know if it’s a fascination with the unobtainable, a desire to appropriate the mantle of the exotic, the continual reinforcement of the grass on the other side of the desert.

I also think that I’m never going to be happy, unless I relinquish whatever it is that I keep looking for. Thanks, Dorothy. Not sure if I can, though, to be fair.

The less I seek my source for some definitive / the closer I am to fine.

All that shit I cared about back home is still here; I’m still dragging all that worry and self-doubt around. It seems a chronic malaise. It’s drowned and forgotten sometimes, by adventure, by anguish, by work, by books, by opium dreams. But it’s easily exhumed. Yes, I question everything, and most of all I question and second-guess myself. Am I doing it all well enough? I’m old enough to know better. When will I be tired enough, far enough away, working hard enough to forget to ask? Ay, me, Juliet says. It’s when you’re tired and far from home that it means the most. If I am ambivalent then I have not yet chosen, and if I have not chosen then I have not settled. There’s no challenge more difficult for me than contentment. It is, I think, a peculiar sort of depravity, of cowardice. It makes me tired.

When you’re three days down the highway, / and you’re lookin’ like I feel, / and it takes a lot to keep it goin’ / and it takes a lot to keep it real, / take some time for yourself / and learn to yield. – indigo girls

Morning Song (Sylvia Plath)

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.


From "Ariel", 1966

Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta (Reetika Vazirani)

To replay errors
the revolving door of days
Now it's over
There's no one point thank god in the turning world
I was always moving
tired too but laughing
To be a widow is an old
freedom I have known
vidua paradisea a bird
Singly I flew
and happiness was my giraffe
in the face of Africa
me among daughters
and my son at work
me pregnant with them
taking in the glamour days
town and country mirabella elle vogue
cosmopolitan We have made this world
brown these beautiful women
laughing and crying till we cleared the dining table
In hotels men asked my girls to fetch them towels
In restaurants they asked us for bread
Today I'm a civil servant on the Hill

From the Mall what colorful sarongs
my children bring to drape my ankles
the gifts we give
to Mina a necklace of Mikimoto pearls
Tara a Paloma purse for cosmetics
Lata a pair of lime shoes for the miles
Devi gives me her eclectic lit eyes
the glamour of our wilder regions
Bombay weavers on the twenty-four hour looms
shocking pink is the navy of India

Listen I am listening
my mind is a trip
I flew over oceans
I flew in the face of skies
orienting my loss of caste
my dark complexion
the folly of envy
wishing all my life to be fair
My jealous god leaves
Hello son this is your mother
Daughters take these maroon saris
these maroon bras
I am proud to have borne you
When you gather around me
newness comes into the world

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction.

My best friend's birthday is today. Oddly enough, we are often apart on our respective birthdays; only rarely have we celebrated together. A phone call across the miles, the overheard background murmer of other people's fetes, the Birthday Song and giggles on voicemail - such are our traditions. This year the miles are slightly more in number.

When she turned twenty-one, she was in school in Massachusetts; I called from my porch swing on a balmy not-quite-autumn evening in Tennessee, one bare foot tucked under my thigh and the other resting on my dog, the hand not holding the phone wrapped around a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. She was in Amherst drinking red wine, freezing in boots and a turtleneck sweater because it was her birthday, and she insisted on wearing a skirt. That's my girl.

Hey, Reethie!
Hey, Boo. If you were here I would ...
I know. Me, too.
I know.

I dislike the Birthday Song, as it happens. It's the same as the disdain for cartoons and chocolat chaud, although it takes on a peculiar venom when situated in a public place, magnified tenfold when sung by waiters. I don't understand why the tune has to be the same in all languages, either. I bet in Micronesia, they have the same damn song, and I don't even know what language they speak there.

(My poor children. No cartoons, no chocolat chaud, no birthday song. This is why they'll always be hypothetical children. During a long van ride on a recent educational excursion, my friends here made up - and loudly sang - a song using the imagined names of my hypothetical children. I suppose that's as good an illustration as any of how tired we get of speaking French.)

The only time I like the Birthday Song, in fact, is when Morgan sings it on my voicemail. She always calls, always sings, no matter where she is, even if she has to sing into the phone in public. Happy BIRTHday, dear Reethie ... I never wonder if it's coming, because it's there, every time. I hear Dear Reethie once a year because she loves me all the other days, too.

Hey, Boo. If you were here I'd bake you un bon gateau. Take you dancing. Buy you a glace at Cornet-sodding-d'Amour.

If I was there I'd take you to the Deli (which you always write as 'the Delhi,' and it always makes me smile, every time), to Boscos, to Le Chardonnay, where we've still never gone together but always talk about. To the Flying Saucer, to Swig, to Do.

I'd buy you a seven-dollar mojito at the Beauty Shop.

I'd make you a chocolate martini.

If we were together we'd eat samosas and bengan bhartha, as spicy as they'd make it, and drink Morgan Pinot.

Late at night we'd sing without shame to the Phish that WE put on the jukebox at Printer's.

We'd sit on the patio and smoke.
Pass a clove between us.
Break into the Eagles.

Watch the sun come up.

If you were here or I was there I would ...
We would ...

You know.

Hey, Boo. I love you, and I'm so glad you're my Dear Morgan every single day of the year, and I'm so glad I've got today to tell you.

Happy Birthday, from France this time. Next year, Jerusalem.

Or maybe just home.

Recoil

to all the people out there tonight / who are comforting themselves /
if you should happen to see my light / you can stop and
ring my bell / i'm just sittin here in this sty / strewn with half
written songs / taking one breath at a time / nothin much going on - ani