Hello Again

First Jim, what is the news on the tender process for your contract award. Having travelled around Melbourne with you that very enjoyable day I am sure no one has any complaints and your company will win the award. So please bring me up to date.

As for Ann I am sure like all good schoolteachers she working much too hard if not obsessively, and like myself in my own working days I am sure it has at least something to do with proving to “them”, (imposter syndrome)  that we are worth our salary and position if not our very existence. As we used to say, or what I used to tell Americans  was an Irish saying, you are a long time dead. So if the person who never learned to follow his own advice can say it – Ann please keep a little time for painting. All my friends love the one you gave me now hanging on my living room wall in Saint Denis.

Tell Keith to get the job settled, get some time in and come on up and make a trip around Europe and the US and even Canada and Ireland. The wine cellar is always full, more or less, and he has family in Boston and Washington that he really must meet and will be happy to provide him a bed.

Other more local news from St Denis.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday with my friends Claude and Violette Carlier. I don’t think you met them during your visit. I was sad to learn that Claude had recently had a small stroke which required a couple of weeks of hospitalisation. The good news is they seem to have dissolved the clot and he apparently suffered no long term damage. Mostly, take note, due to his having decided to go straight to the hospital when he noticed the symptoms.

But it is amusing or I try to find it so, that now no matter which friend I visit there are often large quantities of  medications in sight, or frequently they are filling as I now do,  their plastic pill holders with the next weeks supply of variously coloured and shaped tablets.

Naturally most of the conversation circulated around our ailments and those of our friends. A sort of puzzled and even surprised examination of and reporting on our new and inexperienced journey into increasing decrepitude, foreseen but somehow unexpected in the rapidity of it’s onset and domino knock on impact. Pending future challenges were examined briefly and with an blurred astigmatic focus by for example Violette describing other patients with similar maladies seen in the hospital, unable to walk or feed themselves. A situation observed but somehow kept peripheral to the reality of our own inevitable  journey.

Jessica continues to work enthusiastically at her new job which she still loves very much. Pat and Adrienne, with a little assistance from Dad,  are in the closing stages of buying a condo in Boston supposedly equi distant between MIT and Harvard. It is a real if vicarious pleasure to listen to them work their way way through getting a mortgage, having a bedroom for the first baby, fixing up the kitchen and changing the colours (Adrienne – big smile) in the bathroom.

And finally – I promise. Last night I had supper with Joseph and Jeannot two retired and now in their seventies, former farmers  in their very, very  old farm house with the food, vegetable soup, coustelous (spareribs) 2 ribs each,  prepared on the perpetual wood burning fire in the kitchen chimney, followed by cheese and an apple. I asked politely during the meal why some of the French put water in their wine. Joseph said the taste of wine is too strong and Jeannot after a pause said the taste of water is too plain. Is it possible these two old unsophisticated were messing with my widely travelled head.

Please say hello to my Auntie Madge and tell her I hope her cataract operation was a success and I expect to see her, having recognised me from afar, to come running to greet me with arms outspread and a cold bottle of chardonnay gripped in her teeth when I next arrive in Melbourne.

Be well, and if you are having a good day remember as Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle used to say on a sunny day drinking lemonade under a tree “this is probably as nice as it gets”

With love.

John