I finally charged my batteries so that I could unload photos from my first couple of weeks back in the States. This is how I know I’m home :
Fourth of July in Bel Air : white zin and fireworks in the Circuit City parking lot.
A little patriotism (or a little wine glow).
It’s a high school party ; we left our maturity at the do’!
July 18, 2006
scuttlebutt
July 13, 2006
sybaritism
My mother and I picked twenty pounds of blueberries this morning. That’s the kind of booty to bring home with your mama.
I made a first run of confiture. I scoff in the faces of all of the website writers who warned that the stuff wouldn’t gel. A more luscious jam I never did see.
The hot question in the Kramer household today is this : where will we store the nineteen remaining pounds of berries?
(In my belly?)
July 11, 2006
acumen
America time has been nice so far. It’s easy to forget all of those things you tell yourself, snug in your fauteuil with an accordeonist doing his thing in the street below your window, about how this time your expatriotism will really stick with you. I have consumed untold quarts (those are QUARTS, not litres) of diet cola in the past week, put upwards of 300 miles on my car, and scuffed down Target’s shampoo aisle, dwarfed and overwhelmed by hundreds of perfect rows of purple and beige bottles. I’m American again!
I’ve got two jobs now, too. Catering with Kris and Lauren promises to be not fun, but not bad. The job basically consists of wrapping a lot of picnic tables in plastic and then watching people eat. Sometimes things get exciting when you clear some dirty napkins off of a table or poke the trays of hot dogs with some tongs. The second job, babysitting and chauffeuring a little girl around Baltimore County, will be fun. She’s adorable.
Since I’ve been home I have left my intellect comfortably inert. I do stuff. I hang out with people. I read light summer literature. I bake bread. It’s nice. I guess that’s why I don’t have much to write for you, though. You’re probably busy, anyway.
July 3, 2006
lubricious
America is all sorts of different. At a restaurant on the way home from the airport, I turned excitedly when I heard people at another table speaking American. Loose shorts and flip-flops are everywhere! A lady stopped to chat with me in the shampoo aisle! The “small” ice cream cone I got today would have been called an “American” at Octave’s on the place du Capitole.
Hurray for home. Three cheers for unpretentiousness. Hats off to smiling strangers.
I have a job. I’ve got a new seven year old buddy who I’m going to drive around in the evening for a few weeks! Here’s to doing something useful with my time.
In my idleness at home I have been rolling and unrolling my various memories of Europe : prostitutes in ”uniform” (knee-high latex boots, tight pants, corset, fanny pack) on Oranienburgerstrasse ; the clack of my shutters against the brick when I opened them every morning ; Sunday stillness on the way to the market… wow. I am a lucky monkey to have had these two years abroad.
My shortened hot American summer is shaping up, too – Florida for my brother’s wedding tomorrow, work next week, Stewart in August. Que du bonheur!
analgesic
I wrote this, but didn’t post it, sometime in mid-June :
This city is my home. If it’s my home, though, it’s because I have populated it with memories that render the public personal. I’ve been having this incessant feeling of anonymity and impermanence – everywhere I go I remind myself that I’m just one little puff of air whispering through an ancient city. I can’t know anything about the Romans who came and imposed the grids of their streets on the land where my apartment perches, or even about the family that left their paintings and crucifixes here in the 20s. How can I expect this building to remember me? In Baux de Provence there’s a cute little resting spot at the entrance to the village with a balustrade from which you can overlook the scrubby Alpilles. If you turn your back to the view, though, you see the exposed ruin of a majestic medieval chimney – the sunny little patch of brick you’re standing on used to be the inside of someone’s sumptuous house. Generations of some family lived in this house, but now it’s gone and tourists stand here licking ice cream cones, complaining about the heat and waiting for their tour bus to come pick them up.
In class this semester we talked about the reciprocal relationship a society has with the things it builds. We make cobbly streets and flowery parks in order to be able to live in them, but those spaces end up being pretty powerful in defining our lives. I had nothing to do with the design of the Pont Neuf, but I’ve run hooting under it hundreds of years after its architect died. The narrow streets and yellow lamps behind Saint Etienne weren’t put there for me, but the sepia-toned bike ride I took there with Stewart made them ours. Toulouse is a maze of my ghosts.