Category Archives: writing

Three Vignettes From France

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Posted: December 5, 2018 at 3:13 pm

Having lived in France a couple of times, and written 200 fish-out-of-water blogs, I thought I’d exhausted my quiver of quirky stories highlighting the differences between Canada and France. Not so! Upon my recent return to Aix-en-Provence with Carol, three vignettes stood out. These situations would never happen in Canada:

1.      Reflected in Carol’s sunglasses, I saw the foulard at my throat was tied in the jaunty, insouciant, Aixois fashion. We sat at a spindly, wrought iron table, charmingly crooked due to its cobblestoned base, at a crowded outdoor restaurant in downtown Aix. We sipped from a carafe of Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages, not in a hurry to be served our goat cheese and arugula pizza. I spied our waiter coming from the bowels of the restaurant, bedecked in Aix’s standard straight-guy clothing: white wife-beater t-shirt, scarf wrapped thrice around his neck, dainty pirate boots with many buckles. He held a large pizza in his left hand, another two in his right, and balanced a fourth on his forearm. Since the patio tables were tightly squeezed together, his easiest access to his customers was the middle of the narrow street, dodging pedestrians and the occasional Smart Car. I could see our lunch on the waiter’s forearm. Laden as he was, you’d think the waiter would unload his pizzas as quickly as possible. You’d think that if you didn’t know the waiter’s male friend appeared around the corner at the top of the street. Our waiter stifled a squeal and hustled toward his friend, away from the restaurant, still carrying the pizzas. By the time he caught up to his friend, our waiter was a half block away, but the kisses on each cheek were still audible from our table. The friends’ chitchat was brief, albeit loud, and our waiter quickly returned to his job (after two more kisses good-bye). Our pizza was still hot.

2.      Finishing our pizza, Carol and I tucked into our salads. At a nearby table sat three fashionable young women, one of whom held a baby. Children aren’t encouraged to attend restaurants in France – there aren’t kid menus, or placemats to colour, or jars of dull crayons. Restaurants don’t supply high chairs or booster seats. And I’ve never seen a restaurant washroom with one of those fold down baby changing tables. If you bring your kid to a restaurant, they had better sit quietly and eat a grownup meal (and they do). But seeing a baby on a mother’s lap was even more unusual. As the mother continued her lively conversation with her friends, she deftly moved her cutlery, her wine glass and her table’s flower arrangement to one side. She rooted around in an impossibly large Hermès purse and found a small fuzzy blanket, which she spread flat on the table. You’ve probably guessed what happened next…she lay her baby down and changed his nappy. In a packed restaurant. Six feet from where we were eating. 

I knew I would write this story one day; in the interest of accuracy I leaned forward in my seat to get a better look. Yes, just as I expected: numéro deux.

3.      A day before we were to board the train in Aix towards Paris, SNCF workers went on strike. SNCF is the French national railway, and its workers often strike. It wasn’t a big surprise, but was inconvenient because, (a) if we didn’t get to Paris we would miss our non-refundable flight home, (b) Aix to Paris was too far to drive in the time we had, and (c) Air France triples its prices whenever SNCF is on strike.

In a normal strike, in non-France countries, all trains are cancelled. It’s disruptive, but travellers are calm because no one can get anywhere. During SNCF strikes, one of every seven scheduled trains will run. You just don’t know if your ticket is for that one-in-seven train. You have no choice but to arrive at the station and hope you win the train lottery. I don’t know how they decided running one of every seven trains causes maximum mayhem (not 1 in 3, not 1 in 10), but I expect they have PhDs armed with algorithms and supercomputers bent to the task. Suffice to say, running one in seven scheduled trains ensures the maximum number of people in the train station with the minimum number of these people boarding a train. Any train.

Regular readers of this blog will know when faced with an intractable train problem, there is only one solution: call my friend Nickipedia. Nick has run a Parisian travel company for 30 years, and possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of SNCF and every available scheme to game the system. His advice? Go to the station and sneak onto any train bound for Paris. How could this possibly work, I wondered.

The trick, according to Nick, was to slip past the ticket-checker on the platform and go straight to the bar car. Once there, no SNCF employee will kick you off the train (as they’re not paid for confrontation). We didn’t have tickets for that train, which would’ve warranted seats, but we could stand on any train travelling to Paris, Nick advised. I was nervous when the SNCF employee came through the bar car and checked our tickets which corresponded to a cancelled train. She didn’t bat an eye – even better, she eventually found Carol a seat two cars over. I stayed happily in the bar car; if you must stand, I feel that’s the best place. I was quite content watching the countryside race by at 300 kilometres per hour, drinking several single-serve red wines from plastic bottles.

Thanks to Nick, the pièce de résistance occurred when we arrived in Paris. He said our tickets were fully refundable since our train was cancelled. Even though SNCF transported us from Aix to Paris, a distance of 700 kilometres, on the fastest train in France, we were credited $250. 

Miss October 1981

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Posted: October 1, 2018 at 9:10 pm

As you may know, my first book, The Next Trapeze, is still looking for a home. In the meantime, I’m helping my friend  Kelly Tough, Playboy’s Miss October 1981, write her memoir. It’s entitled “Tough Enough,” for obvious reasons. Here’s a description I wrote for the back of Kelly’s book:

“Living in the Playboy Mansion was the least interesting chapter of Kelly Tough’s life.

Raised in a broken, dysfunctional family, Kelly suffered years of childhood sexual abuse. Homeless at 14, she survived on her looks, working in nightclubs until discovered by a Playboy photographer. She reached the pinnacle of sexual objectification as a Playmate of the Month, and thought this would satisfy her need for love and acceptance. Before she realized she would achieve neither, she slid into a decadent life of cocaine, B-list actors and group sex.

Once discarded by an industry searching for the next teenager to exploit, she had nothing to trade except her brief flirtation with fame. When her promotional opportunities dried up, Kelly supported her drug addiction for 25 years by manufacturing drugs for criminal organizations. During this time, Kelly lived inside a country and western song, looking for love in all the wrong places. Most men she dated beat her, cheated her, or gave her drugs. 

After an incident involving her near-death at the hands of a Hell’s Angel, Kelly went to rehab and withdrew from her gangster network. She relaunched her life on her own terms, without relying upon men to validate her worth, or drugs to dull her emotional pain.

Tough Enough is the intimate memoir of Kelly’s search for love and self-worth in a world of users, abusers, drugs and criminals. Other Playmates have written prurient exposés of life in the Playboy Mansion, step-by-step accounts of Hugh Hefner’s bedroom rituals. Tough Enough doesn’t shy away from Kelly’s carnal side; far from it. But the Mansion was merely one stop on Kelly’s journey from disposable sexual plaything to drug addict to crystal meth hustler, ending with her surprising redemption.

Part Playboy’s The Girls Next Door, part Breaking Bad, part A Million Little Pieces (but true!), Tough Enough is the ultimate story of survival.”

Rip Van Winkle

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Posted: September 20, 2018 at 10:01 pm

As the story goes, Rip Van Winkle fell asleep for 20 years and awoke to discover he missed the American Revolution. I felt like Rip last weekend when I visited my alma mater, Western University, in London Ontario, with my buddy Mark. SO much has changed while I slept through the last 40 years. Here are a few of the differences on campus from 1978 to 2018: 

In 1978, I ogled the lithe and nubile cheerleaders at the football games. They wore short, SHORT skirts, and I was glued to their every move, waiting for their skirts to flare up so I could see their underwear. In 2018, it’s almost the same, except they’ve saved me time and effort by just wearing the underwear, without the skirts.

About to enter the washroom at the campus Spoke ’n’ Rim bar (an action I completed about 9,000 times in the ’70s), I read a notice on the door: “Western respects everyone’s right to choose a washroom appropriate for them. Trust the person using this space belongs here.” We didn’t have that in 1978, but I think it’s a good thing.

It’s not polite to look at another dude at an adjacent urinal, but I spied a young man in the Spoke’s washroom, two-thumb texting while he peed (look Ma, no hands). There are a bunch of reasons why that never happened in 1978.

When I was at Western, there was a bar in the basement of the student centre called the Elbow Room. It was a chill oasis of calm where I drank beer in-between classes. Alas, the Elbow Room is no more, but there’s still a bar at the same location. Only it doesn’t sell alcohol and it’s called Wax Bar. Their corporate slogan is, “There’s a Brazilian number of reasons to get waxed.”

My old dorm, Saugeen, was a co-ed, 1200 student, hormone-bursting apartment block of debauchery. From its inception, it was deservedly called the “Zoo,” owing to its collection of uninhibited animals. The residence symbol was a monkey, which I designed as a student and which graced the cover of the Saugeen yearbook. At Saugeen last week, the residence proctor (kind of like the president of the residence) gave me a tour of my old haunt. She brought out the 1978 yearbook to jog my memories, but then balked. “Oh no,” she said. “Does that say ‘Zoo’ on the cover? We can’t say ‘Zoo’ anymore. In fact, we’ve forbidden anyone in this residence to ever say ‘Zoo.’” I assume they were in the middle of a failed attempt of rebranding, trying to convince parents their children’s residence wasn’t wild. The Zoo: “The Nickname That Shall Not Be Named.”

My dorm room in 1978 accommodated two guys, on a floor of 30 young men, bent on mayhem. Saugeen has long since integrated every floor with boys and girls, a calming influence on the drunken idiots. The proctor used her skeleton key to let me into my old room, now decorated with ruffled pillows and darling stuffed animals. The current inhabitants of Room 754 are two gals named Balpreet and Jordynne.  There was no one named Balpreet or Jordynne at Western in 1978, but there probably should have been.

I visited Saugeen’s cafeteria. It’s now a beautiful, distressed-wood-and-planters ashram with organic quinoa salads and an Asian stir fry bar. When I lived in Saugeen, the cafeteria was a cement-block hangar that held pub nights with drugged-out rock bands, always ending with a wet t-shirt contest. The food was boiled until it was grey, or fried until the batter calcified. A mainstay was what we called Mystery Meat.  We dubbed the Swiss Steak “Swiss Mistake.” Once a week they served fried chicken and fries in a little red plastic basket, lined with a red and white checkered paper, called Chicken-in-a-Basket. It was greasy and disgusting, renamed by the students as Chicken-in-a-Casket. Those were the three best entrées.

Near Saugeen’s cafeteria, there was a photocopier where our drunken selves photocopied our bare butts so we could give pictures to girls. Hilarity ensued. For some reason, probably linked to hygiene and the #MeToo movement, the photocopier has been removed.

One thing hasn’t changed since 1978. The Western football team, once again National Champions, won Saturday’s game 77-3.

Bluebeard

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Posted: August 2, 2018 at 11:09 pm

That evening, I sat in my favorite chair in la Pistache, the one beside the best reading light. I underlined incomprehensible phrases in La Provence in preparation for coffee with Cécile. The children watched The Adventures of Tintin on our tiny television.

“Daddy, can you help me with my homework?” asked Devon, five minutes before bedtime.

“Poor planning, Dev,” I said. “You’ve had all evening. Why are you doing it now?”

“I just remembered.” How could I be angry with him? I was a more skilled procrastinator in my youth. “I have some grammar and I have to review two pages of a story my teacher gave us.” I put down my newspaper.  

“Let’s sit at the dining room table,” I said. I interrupted my reading with pleasure; I liked doing homework with my children more than, well, anything. They both had a curiosity about learning I found satisfying. They were also petrified of being unprepared for class, and wanted the highest score in any academic pursuit. There was no disputing these traits were paternal in origin. 

“Dev, even though it’s late to start your homework, I love we have the time to do it together.”

“You always help me, daddy. Ever since I was a kid.”

“I appreciate that, Dev, but it’s not true. There were lots of times in Vancouver when I was working, or too cranky, and I couldn’t do this. In Aix I don’t have excuses. And you’re still a kid. You’re only in Grade Three.” 

We started with grammar, my weakest subject. Devon delighted in correcting me, with sly grins of superiority. He often forgot I was the reason he was bilingual. At lesson’s end, I used the incorrect French verb for “to know.” The word “savoir” means “to know,” in the context of knowing how to do something. “Connaître” also means “to know,” but it’s used when referencing a person or a place, as in, “I know Paris well.” It’s easy to mix them up.

Devon looked like he swallowed a canary. “Dad, you can’t use connaître like that. You have to use savoir.”

“You’re only eight,” I said. “How can you know that?”

With a straight face, he said, “I don’t know, dad. I just savoir it.”

“Okay, enough grammar. What’s the story about?”

“Get it, dad? I savoir it.”

“It doesn’t get funnier the more you say it,” I said. “Tell me about the story.”

“It’s called ‘Barbe-Bleu.’ That means Bluebeard in English.”

“Thanks for the translation.” I knew this story, a well-known French folktale. We read it together, and I wondered what sadists chose the curriculum for eight-year-olds. The story is summarized as follows:

A wealthy man lived in the country. As a consequence of his unattractive blue beard, none of the local ladies would date him. His neighbor had two daughters, and Bluebeard asked to marry one. The daughters refused, citing Bluebeard’s ugliness, and the small issue of the disappearance of several of Bluebeard’s former wives. Bluebeard had some swinging parties, allowing the ladies to see he was a fun guy, and one daughter finally married him.

After a month of marriage, Bluebeard told his young wife he was taking a business trip. He gave her keys to the house, the safe, and the cabinets holding jewels and gold. He also gave her one tiny key, and made her promise not to use it to open the small door at the end of the hall. Of course, as soon as Bluebeard left, the wife entered the restricted room. It was covered in blood, and Bluebeard’s former wives, throats slit, hung from hooks (did I mention Devon was only eight?).

In a panic, the wife left the macabre scene and locked the door. Unlucky, she smeared blood on the tiny key, and being magic, it was impossible to clean. When Bluebeard returned, he demanded to see the keys, and asked his wife why the tiny key was covered with blood. 

“I don’t know,” she said. 

“You may not know,” said Bluebeard, “but I know all too well. You have gone into the little room! And now you will re-enter the room, and take your place among the others.”  

The wife threw herself at Bluebeard’s feet, crying, and begged him…and begged him…and…

And that’s all we had of the story. Devon’s photocopy ended, mid-story, mid-sentence. He couldn’t read the ending, in which the wife was saved by her two brothers. They slew the serial-killer, rendering the widow both wealthy and Bluebeard-less. I worried about Devon going to bed with the image of Bluebeard’s many wives strung up on meathooks. As I tucked him into bed, he said, “Dad, you know what I was thinking about?”

Uh-oh, I thought. “Uhh, no. What?”

“You know what would be cool? In 1,000 years, people will look back and study us, like we’re prehistoric people. They’ll say, look, they actually reached down and used their hands to pick up a glass if they wanted a drink. Today, we have robot arms which bring the glass to our mouth.” 

How am I going to give up these precious moments? I couldn’t go back to Vancouver and resume my regular job. I couldn’t be like I was before, I couldn’t miss out on my children’s ephemeral years, those unrecoverable years, being an absent father. I pinkie-swore with myself I would structure my new Vancouver life to allow for maximum family interaction, maximum mental engagement, Provence-level. I immediately regretted binding myself to the unbreakability of a pinkie-swear, despairing I could not construct such a life and still make a living.

I returned to my favorite chair with my laptop and a glass of rosé. “Just savoir it?” I had to record that story before I forgot it. I laughed out loud while typing. Why can’t my real life be like this? Crafting stories from the quirks of everyday living for my own amusement. Unfortunately, blogging wasn’t a career; my vignette would be thrown into the blogosphere’s yawning maw, where it would be read by fifty friends and be lost in the beast’s intestinal tract along with millions of blogs written by unfulfilled millennials.

That thought threw me down another well of depression, too deep to escape. While I was down there, I came to a woeful conclusion.

He Who Hesitates Is Flattened

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Posted: January 14, 2018 at 4:16 pm

I figured out the secret of success in life while learning how to cross the street in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Let me explain.

I’ve circumnavigated a Renault Super-Cinq through the confluence of twelve roads at the Étoile traffic circle in Paris. I’ve fought the crowds on foot through the streets of Manila, Hong Kong, Beijing and Guangzhou. One time, I even stepped in front of a throng of Lululemon-bedecked, West Van yummy-mummies ordering their morning grande, extra-hot, non-fat, low-foam, extra shot vanilla lattés at Starbucks. So I understand the threat to one’s person when crossing  against the flow.

But nothing prepared me to wade into the vehicular insanity of Ho Chi Minh City. Home to 10 million people and an equal number of motorcycles. I estimate 10% of the vehicles are cars, taxis and Ubers, while the rest are motorcycles and (for the hardy) bicycles. No one walks. Motorcycles are used to transport what SUVs and trucks carry in North America…..bags of rice piled on the seat behind the motorcycle driver, taller than his head.  A bouquet of wire lanterns ten feet in diameter. An ancient, hand-operated cement mixer on a wooden trailer, only connected to the motorcycle by the driver’s left hand. And a family of five: father driving, a toddler standing on a metal platform placed between dad’s feet, a 5-year-old sitting behind dad, followed by the mother, with a breastfeeding infant in the crook of her left arm, a cellphone at the end of her right. Only dad wore a helmet.

If there are driving laws, they are spectacularly ignored. Lanes are imaginative, traffic lights mere suggestions, safety a quaint fiction. More than once, I saw a motorcycle driving at the side of the road, against the traffic, on the highway.

There are few crosswalks, and their faded white lines mock the tourists as traffic speeds by, unabated. Remember watching the Tour de France on TV, and the peloton races by, maybe 200 riders in a pack, wheel to wheel, shoulder to shoulder? It’s like that, but motorcycles. Standing on the crumbling curb, you see no breaks in the traffic, no windows of opportunity, no Frogger-like path to weave back and forth, side to side.

If you wait for a convenient or safe time to cross, you will never cross. Here’s the key: forget there’s any traffic and walk straight across the road as if you’re the only one there. As Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” Also, don’t stop, hesitate, stutter-step, or look at the approaching traffic on your left (and it may come from the right!). Trust the cars and motorcycles and bicycles and tour buses and cement mixers will flow around you like water. They almost always do.

After two weeks in Vietnam’s asphalt minefields, I realized my newfound street-crossing philosophy could also be applied to achieving success in life: walk confidently, keep moving forward, and don’t break stride.