Friday, October 17, 2008

"Flavor Week," French style

It’s so much fun to stereotype the French. The berets, the baguettes, the Pythonesque outraaaaaageous accents, it all begs for satire. Many of our preconceptions are, as one might expect, outdated, purely regional or just plain nonsense. Frogs legs, for instance. Yes, the dish exists, but after three years I have yet to see it on a menu. And berets, despite many Americans’ vague association of them with leftist European intellectuals, tend to be worn only by old French farmers, and even then they are not so common a sight anymore. And as far as I am aware monkeys, even here, do not eat cheese.

But this week I have been reminded that the legendary French obsession with food is, if anything, understated. The French are totally indifferent to breakfast, often sending their children to school on empty stomachs (which, when I think back to the Frosted Flakes of my youth, may not be such a bad thing). But the idea of a simple sandweeeesh for lunch is considered barbaric. So our village school has the luxury - deemed a necessity and sacred right in this blessedly civilized place – of its own kitchen for supplying the children with hot three-course lunches.

The things that come out of this kitchen are not quite what you’d find kids eating across the suburbs of America. The first course is generally soup, salad or cold cuts. Then meat and a vegetable side dish. We’re not talking turkey dogs and fries here: recent offerings have included duck breast, confit de canard (a traditional farmer’s dish of duck leg preserved in its own fat), veal ragout, quiche and courgettes gratinées, often followed by a cheese course. And then, yes, the occasional hamburger (the French way, no bun and blood rare).

But this masks the more important side of the Gallic food fixation. While it’s important what makes it onto the plate, more crucial is that the food be eaten from a plate, at a table, with others, and slowly. Food is not only about eating, it is about tradition, culture, a way of life. Process is as important as product. Montcabrier’s elementary school students – all 31 of them – sit down at table and eat their three course long lunches like little ladies and gentlemen. Comme il faut.

To shake things up a bit, this week Sebastian’s school is having its Semaine de Gout, badly translated as Flavor Week, intended to introduce the children to more exotic foods. In a country where they eat snails and reeking unpasteurized cheeses, that seemed to me like an ambitious goal, especially for first graders. But there I was losing track of the bigger picture. The French generally have little interest in foreign food – even in Paris you’re hard pressed to find much more than the occasional Vietnamese or North African restaurant as a nod to France’s colonial past. In a farming community like this one, where locally produced tripe and paté are the norm, Italian food counts as a cultural experience.

So Sebastian’s foray into international cuisine has included pizza, sauerkraut, and an unidentified meat in sauce which was meant to represent that most exotic of cultures – France. After all that excitement, I’m sure he’s relieved to come home every evening to his familiar old standbys like Thai green curry, and next week for the school menu to return to the comforting norm of duck confit.

Monday, October 13, 2008

This morning's visit

It’s a tricky thing for any man to admit an affinity for sheep. But they’re here again, and I can’t help loving them.

The visits started early this summer. I often hear the dull clank of the sheep’s bells when they are grazing in our elderly widow neighbor's field, an idyllic stretch of grass, clover and wild thyme sloping down from the road about 100 yards from our house. But one morning they were louder than usual, and later I noticed our grass studded with little brown balls and looking like a giant green chocolate chip cookie. A few days later I heard the sound again, and on investigation I found nine or ten sheep in our field.

This is no problem for us, but sheep aren’t the brightest of animals, and I worried that they might wander too far from home. Visions of white fluffy road kill convinced me that I needed to do something. Their owner didn’t answer her phone. If those sheep were going to get home, I was going to have to take them.

So I pulled on my boots, grabbed a walking stick (shepherds always have sticks), and set out to shoo them home. Of course, growing up in suburban LA didn’t expose me to a whole lot of livestock and law school, sadly, teaches much about fleecing but little about sheep. Yet they were almost as wary of me as I was of them, so by simply walking behind them I managed to coax them down the narrow country lane that leads from our house to the neighboring farm. The entire way back, the rest of the sheep followed us on the other side of the fence, eager to welcome their friends back into the fold. As feel-good moments go, this one was golden.

Until we got to the farmhouse. No one was home, but figured all I’d have to do is get the sheep through the narrow gate that led into the field. The other sheep were waiting there, so I would simply open the gate and my little band would rush in. After a lot of tiptoeing and false starts I managed to get around behind my little flock and drive them toward the gate… and right past it. Again, I got behind them and closed in, and again they ignored the gate, this time making for a narrow open barn. I followed them among stacked hay rolls and old farm equipment to the end of the barn. They settled into a corner and wouldn’t budge. I tried luring them out with apples (they love apples) and was met with a stony silence. I tried getting behind them again, but just ended up chasing them in circles. I tried pushing one of them from behind, but that resulted only in a comic visual that makes me grateful to have been far from onlookers.

Eventually I gave up and returned home tired, defeated, and smelling of wet wool. Every morning we awoke to the sound of sheep bells. Our neighbor reassured me that the sheep wouldn’t stray too far and almost every weekend that summer her children arrived with new rolls of fencing and bundles of solid chestnut stakes, testament to her determination to keep her flock, both two- and four- legged, close to home. By August the sheep had stopped visiting.

The other day, when my son told me he’d seen a huge white dog in our field, I thought nothing of it. We often get hunters’ dogs roaming through. But this morning I heard the bells again and I knew. My friends are back. This time they can stay as long as they like.

Friday, October 10, 2008

In from the cold

Free at last!

For the past few days my poor newborn blog has been incarcerated and awaiting interrogation on suspicion of spamming. Some time last night, it was released without charge. I can only imagine what the guy who reviews suspicious accounts for blogger.com must have thought when he came across two short posts and a photo of Montcabrier. Like stumbling upon a little Jewish lady at Gitmo grumbling that her polyester orange tracksuit gives her the sweats.

My brief time as blogger non grata should not have felt like a big deal. A few days of silence are nothing to fly back to Washington for. But life out here, away from the daily buzz of world events, suspended in the amber of another language and culture, brings with it a sense of disconnectedness. There is no lack of news here, of course, or of concern for the outside world – Catherine the baker’s wife knows more about the US elections than does your average American “undecided” voter. But the feeling never really leaves, the feeling of remoteness.

The irony of it is that we are just as dependent as before on that big bad mechanized world we supposedly left behind. Sure we live small and local and simpler than before. I know the man who raises the cattle for our beef. I get annoyed at eating tomatoes if they haven’t been grown nearby. I’ve started thinking of Cahors (population 20,000) as a big city. But we still have television and internet (even a cell phone, tucked away in a drawer somewhere), and my relationship to these things seems ever more fragile and needy. They are all I have connecting me not just to far away family and friends, but to a culture that I have only partially have left behind. Computer glitches no longer just make me mad, they make me feel vulnerable.

So would we have embraced life in the French countryside without the internet? As I walk through the woods that stretch for miles from my front door, or when I drive up to the village and am greeted by familiar faces and a round of “bonjour,” it seems like a petty question.

But please don’t take my blog away.

Monday, October 6, 2008

The perils of acceptance

Last week my wife, in a moment of what I’ll politely term raving lunacy, generously volunteered me to be treasurer of the Montcabrier Parents’ Association. I am now responsible for a budget of a few thousand euros on behalf of the parents of 31 kids. And I am deeply stressed.

This should not be a big deal. As a former corporate lawyer I have been involved in multi-million dollar deals spread over a dozen countries. I’m no stranger to responsibility. Yet the weight of files handed over to me last night at our first meeting seems unbearable.

I suppose the financial responsibilities aren’t really what’s getting me. I’ll need to keep the books, write a few checks, and file receipts – all tasks I think I can manage. But there are other issues. One is language. I can hold my own just fine in a one-on-one conversation in French, so long as I don’t have to stumble over fast-spoken Parisian slang or the heavily-accented and patois-ridden mutterings of some of the local farmers. The problem is that last night they were not speaking French. They were speaking Loto.

The Loto, as I discovered when I attended one a few years ago in quest of local color, is more or less Bingo night. I’m a 38-year-old lawyer. I don’t do Bingo in any language. To me, “double quine” sounds more like a treatment for malaria than a game. But one of my jobs is to help select suitable prizes for this “double quine” thing as well as for the “carton plein,” which translates somewhat unhelpfully as “full box.” I am, quite frankly, out of my depth.

And yet the real problem is deeper than that. Ever since we moved here three years ago, we have endured the uncomfortable feeling that we didn’t quite follow what was going on around us. That is one of the stresses - and the joys - of living abroad. But this week it has become personal. I have been given the trust of my fellow villagers and fellow parents. They have opened a door and invited me in, and suddenly I can no longer smile and pretend to understand what’s going on.

It is not so much the fear of inadequacy that haunts me, but the burden of acceptance. This is a good problem to have. I’ll have to remind myself of that next month on Loto night – I’ve also been chosen to call out the numbers.

The Big Decision

I do miss living in Dunster Gardens. Pleasant Victorian architecture, a genuine neighborhood feel, good transport links and several great pubs within a few minutes’ walk all conspired to make Kilburn one of London’s most vibrant up-and-coming neighborhoods. From the window of my study I could look out over London, the city I’d dreamed of ever since watching Sherlock Holmes as a kid, and feel pretty smug about it.

I had bailed out of the stress and long hours of life as a corporate lawyer, a life I’d never wanted and for which I’d never really been suited, to become a stay-at-home dad. I spent over two years pushing a buggy, chatting with the mothers in Queens Park, shopping at our local organic greengrocer, and in my spare time writing a novel. I had it pretty good.

But that life had a dark side. My seemingly idyllic existence was only possible because my wife Sophia had kept her own high-pressure job in the City. She would come home every evening tired, grey, and battered from a long day at the office and a seemingly longer hour in the subterranean nightmare of the London Underground. Our son was growing up among pretty gardens full of hypodermic needles, lovely streets fouled by crime and pollution, and facing a choice of substandard state schooling or the expensive class-conscious bubble of private education. We were living the middle class dream, and it was killing us. A lot of our friends and colleagues felt the same, but we all kept going, stumped by the question: What else could we do that wouldn’t just be another cell in the same prison?

That was reality, but I’ve never been a big fan of reality. So we tried to think of alternatives. Returning to my native California would simply give us the same issues with more sunshine and less curry. The Netherlands, Sophia’s home country, offered the same life packed into half the square meters. And then we took our first vacation to the Quercy region of France. We stayed in a little farmhouse, ate goat cheese, toured around from vineyard to village through quiet oak forests, and we were hooked.

We returned to the Quercy again and again, every time experiencing that same sense of happiness that had so marked our first visit. But the holidays just weren’t enough. It was a new lifestyle we needed, not a periodic escape from the big bad world. So after a couple of years went by, and we grew increasingly restless in London, our enthusiasm overtook us, and the idea of packing up and moving there started to seem not so crazy. City life is a trap, I said. It’s time for a change, I said. You only live once. Think outside the box, Carpe diem, Just do it, Have a Coke and a smile… Maybe my great escape from the urban globalized corporate media circus was a product of that very circus. Maybe you can never really escape.

In retrospect, it was a little reckless. But urban lawyer life had pushed us to the edge, and it was clear to us that we needed to do something drastic. So after a lot of debating and nail-biting and familial threats to have us committed, we did it, we held our breath and jumped.

Three years later, and we’re still flying.