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.