Last Day in Tours

In Amboise, we visited Clos Luce, the residence where Leonardo da Vinci passed his last three years.  The house and gardens there were filled with his inventions and reproductions of some of his great art.  From there we walked to the town's great castle, Chateau d'Amboise for a tour of the grounds and battlements.

The students spent the morning at the College Jules Romains de Saint Avertin with their friends -- visiting classes, watching a very impressive dress rehearsal and having lunch in the cafeteria. But afterwards, they left them to their studies and we made our way into the city of Tours for a guided walk of the historic downtown.

We spent the morning walking in the local forest with Marc and Natalie, our host parents, while their children Antoine and Charlotte slept in.  In the afternoon, we reconnected with the students at Rochecorbon for a boat trip upon the Loire.  Elaborate houses and wine cellars (and even a silk factory) have been burrowed into the soft tufa limestone that make up the cliffs south of the river.

In the morning we were taken into the souterrains, des sources du Limancon - a series of underground tunnels and reservoirs that were excavated beneath St. Avertin long ago to bring water to the fountains of Tours.  From there we went to the town's cultural center at Chateau Cange where our guides took us to the glacier or ice storage cave that was hewn deep in the cliffside.




In the afternoon the host families took us all to Chateau Chenonceau, a magnificent castle set upon the Loire river.

In the afternoon the host families took us all to Chateau Chenonceau, a magnificent castle set upon the Cher river.

After the overnight flight to Heathrow, we met Monica and her dozen 9th-graders for the flight on to Paris.

From there we took the high-speed rail to Saint Avertin, where the host families greeted us with tremendous warmth.  (The train is famous for being on time, but I think we managed to make it late.)

After lunch on Thursday the French teachers and I gathered up a trio of 8th graders to head off to Newark Airport, for the flight to London.

Click on the link and you can follow Monica's travels in England with the ninth-graders of Pinepoint School.

There are always certain currents in the flux of living that press us with a stressfulness -- to tighten the muscles of the neck and face and scalp -- to erode our good tempers with anxiousness and impatience -- to grapple at our ankles and thwart the dance.

Usually it's just a buffet here or there.  But not the last few weeks.

At work where a big project was going off the rails; and in an academic job hunt that was getting little traction; and Monica was off to London a week ago and I am leaving for France the day after tomorrow; and my parents are arriving and I've got to pack up the boys and batten the hatches and prepare the pets for a week and a half of gone-ness; and Porter was behind on his big homework project; and I'm not getting any exercise and I'd like a doctor to look at my jaw; and the Crossing Over ceremony for the webelos is closing in while my attention and competence ebbs away; and the economy is bad and maybe even terminal; and global climate shock is liable to make it all moot anyway; and I'm not getting any doses of spirituality at the Unitarian Church; and on top of all that there's no bread in the house to make sandwiches for the boys' lunch.

And I can't tell whether I have any of my shit together or not. 

Yeah, well, tomorrow I make like a shaman and braid all my distressing and disparate stress-currents into a nice wet tapestry of competence and preparedness.  'Cause I have to get on a plane to Paris, dammit.

Forcing spring,

Monica snapped a twig from the quince and set it in a vase.

The swelling buds and blossoms are a cheat, of course, but then, winter never plays fair either.

Photos by P.B.

On Sunday we had brunch in Essex at the Griswold Inn.  Nico especially loved the old, cluttered space.  Mmmmm . . . waffles.  A man on the town green was carving eagles from wood with a chainsaw, making a racket and a stench and an entertaining spectacle.  In the harbor the ice was melting and a flock of mergansers preened not far from a bald eagle strolling along the ice-edge.

We drove northward along the Connecticut river, stopping briefly at the winter carnival in Chester.  Crossing the river at the Goodspeed Opera House, we made our way down to Gillette Castle.  

From the cliffs Monica and I watched the eagles that over-winter there, while the boys raced around the grounds.  It's stunning to watch the great birds as they ride the air currents and hunt for fish in the river.

The winter wired household:

I spent the evening filing a couple of months worth of household bills, reports, receipts, bank statements, pay stubs and so on.  

They used to view the Cold War as a great contest between opposing ideologies -- the capitalistic open society versus the communist closed one.  But in reality each Weltanschauung (such as it was) lost out to the reigning ideological practice of the 20th century -- bureaucratism.  It is the bureaucracy that won.

And now, the struggle for the soul of the 21st century is not really West versus jihad or state versus terror.  It's about the valences of bureaucratism: two extreme and contrastive versions of the praxis.  On the one hand there is the bureaucracy as a utilitarian construction for a rule of law, procedure and objectivity -- something that could conceivably serve to bolster equality and even the common good.  (This is the reason why bureaucracies are created in the first place -- so that people get treated "fairly," and according to the rules.)

On the other hand, there is bureaucracy's capacity to serve as a framework for cronyism, corruption and just another arena for Machiavellian power play.  

In the American version of this, the Bush administration exemplified the latter valence.  Their impatience with the rule of law and their co-opting  the offices and regulations of governing to enrich themselves and their cronies may pale in comparison to China or Nigeria, but they are radicals by our standards.  The EU is probably the mirror image of this, with all its elaborate institutional contortions meant to bleed politics dry.

In a sense, if Al Qaeda actually were to exist as they portray it, its true radicalism would be not in its tired Islamicist posturing, but in its frightening effort to bureaucratize the practice of international terror.  

Food for thought in any case.

If I were going to do something utterly and fatally insane, it would be this:

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Holy crap.

When I was ten years old, growing up in Pennsylvania football country, the Steelers beat the Cowboys in one of the great Super Bowls of all time, on the pounding of Franco Harris and the artistry of Lynn Swan.  That kind of thing imprints itself upon you.  Last night history seemed to come full circle as we sat before the screens at C.C. O'Brien's with 10-year old Porter screaming at Big Ben, "Throw the ball!  No!  Throw the ball!"  And the hundred yard interception return?  Good God, I think Steeler nation was as prostrate at the end as Harrison was.

Porter spent some formative years in Cork where hurling and Man U reigned supreme, and then, since we've been back in the States, we haven't hooked up the TV.  So he's football deprived and maybe he won't have developed that section of the brain that is irrevocably susceptible to the sound of helmets clashing and the sight of big men in tights.  But, at least for last night's gridiron thriller he was as crazed a Steelers fan as a father could hope for.

Porter and a half dozen of the other fifth grade boys have joined the school jump-rope team, the Pine Point Pouncing Panthers.  3 practices a week, uniforms, a trip to "regionals" in New Hampshire in the spring.  It's athletic, even gymnastic, but this is the first year that boys have taken any interest, and I can see the other parents effortfully trying to not impose any old-school gender-expectations on their boys' new enthusiasm.  As the kids would say - lol.

As dawn comes I've been waking to the crowing of the neighbor's rooster -- and the slide-whistle song of the goldfinches.

Cathie challenged me to write down 25 random facts about myself.  Here they are:

1. I have always hated cooked green peas.  I think I always will.
2. I once spent 3 days on the tundra without seeing a single sign of human beings.
3. On the boys’ birthdays I always buy a newspaper and save it.
4. My beard comes in red, but not as red as my father’s; and gray, but not as gray as my father’s.
5. On my first day in Europe an old Turkish man shared his plum brandy with me and let me feel the hump on his back.
6. Except for a vaccination I have no scars more than a year or two old.
7. I met Monica at the employee Christmas party for the place where our significant others worked.
8. In 1995 I could write fieldnotes after 700 ml of vodka.
9. I’ve never gotten an A in a language class – not German, Russian, or Chinese.
10. I was robbed at gunpoint in Philadelphia after I’d broken up with my girlfriend at a Bob Dylan concert.
11. I will go to Paris for the first time in March.
12. While tending my grandmother’s store in the Poconos I read Nikos Kazantzakis’ 900 page epic poem, The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel.
13. My first buzz was from home made root beer at the family reunion when I was about 8 years old.
14. I sneeze whenever I walk into bright sunlight.
15. I prefer icy mountain lakes to warm Caribbean beaches.
16. I think consumerism will be the death of us all.
17. I celebrated my 21^st birthday in Munich, my 30^th in Almaty and my 40^th in Cork.
18. I wrote an unpublished science fiction novel.
19. I had my first wisdom tooth pulled out in Tijuana (stone cold sober).
20. The college application to Penn asked us to write an imaginary interview and I interviewed God.
21. I hitchhiked from Saginaw, Michigan, et cetera.
22. When I was a kid I thought that if the universe were infinite then the night sky should be white, because there'd be a star in every direction.
23. I’ve never been into a strip club or a karaoke bar.
24. Monica and I had our honeymoon canoeing in Algonquin Provincial Park.
    
25. I have drunk warm, fermented mare’s milk from a shepherd’s saddle flask in Kazakhstan.