We spent a couple of days of aimless biking near the Ukrainian border. Nickipedia had planned, with his ten words of German and three words of Czech, an overnight train across Slovakia to Bratislava. We could then switch trains and head back to Vienna. Everything was timed perfectly: on our last day in Slovakia, we would cycle all day and arrive at the station in Čierna nad Tisou in time for a shower before boarding the train. Most large train stations in Czechoslovakia had public showers which could be used for a small fee. Nickipedia  knew scant Czech, but he could read train manual symbols in any language. Back in Prague he had memorized the list of stations with showers. Unlucky for us, our last day cycling it poured rain. We couldn’t sit in a café and wait for it to stop as we had to reach Čierna nad Tisou before our train left. We were a little tight for time, but rode our bikes right into the station, drenched, sweaty and splattered with mud head to toe, with a half hour to spare. It was then we learned the showers were out of order. Our train trip to Vienna was scheduled to take 13 hours.
Nickipedia and I stowed our bikes in the baggage car and dripped and squelched our way through the narrow corridors of the train to our sleeper compartment. We left streaks of mud along the interior walls of the train cars as we tried to avoid rubbing up against passengers walking the other direction, in corridors one-and-a-half persons wide.
We had sprung for the deluxe sleeping compartment, which consisted of narrow bunk beds facing a mirror and tiny sink. The space between the beds and the wall holding the sink was one foot wide. There was only a cold water tap, and the slow stream of water was the width of a drinking straw. I was so disgustingly sweaty and muddy this setup looked like a viable shower to me.
“Hey Nick, I know we’re in tight quarters here, but I don’t think we can last all night without cleaning up. This is our new shower.”
“Agreed,” said Nickipedia, agreeably. “You go first.”
“OK, but you had better take the top bunk because I don’t think I can use this sink without my bare butt hanging into the bottom bunk.”
“I get it,” replied Nickipedia. “There will probably be a lot of bending over and other stuff I don’t want to see.”
Nickipedia clamoured up top and I stripped off my soggy and bespattered clothes. I am not overly shy, and spent my teenage years showering with various sports teammates. But I had never been the sole showerer with an audience, especially one in such close proximity. I know Nickipedia had no interest in watching, and wasn’t watching, but I hardly knew the guy! Standing naked on one foot, with the other in the sink about four feet high, washing my mucky leg, was particularly awkward. After 30 minutes, the majority spent rinsing shampoo out of my hair with that pencil-thin trickle, I was remarkably clean. It was then I realized I had no towel.

As an 18-year-old factory worker, I spent my summer learning why I was indisputably better suited for college. I also had a crash course on what my co-workers delicately called ‘fucking the dog.’

One of the company’s lifers, René Muckleson, was a scrawny, greasy-haired slacker with a florid, vein-crossed nose. ‘Mucker’ was a legend in the factory for his unparalleled ability to avoid doing actual work. I would often see him slowly walking through the factory carrying one two-by-four, and then passing the other way 20 minutes later empty-handed. Another 20 after that, Mucker would retrace his first path, holding another two-by-four. This could go on all day, except for scheduled breaks and the work-avoiding procedures that preceded them. The pre-break ritual commenced 15 minutes before the contracted break time, because it wouldn’t be fair if the workers wasted valuable break time playing the coffee game, an elaborate number-choosing contest to see who would pay for everyone’s coffee. The coffee game could only be played during scheduled work hours.

While the factory workers, and Mucker in particular, devised creative ways to steal time from their employer, head office focussed on worker safety. To be avoided at all times was a ‘lost time accident,’ a work-related injury requiring someone to miss their next shift. This was a management obsession, almost as severe as their need to also record the number of injury-free hours, and plan elaborate celebrations of injury-free milestones. An enormous illuminated sign fixed to a trailer was parked in front of the factory, scrolling through the cumulative number of man-hours without a lost time accident. Long before the total reached one million hours, preparations had started for awards presentations, speeches by politicians and other dignitaries, a parade, and a party with elaborate gifts for all one thousand workers, as soon as the sign hit six zeroes.

One of Mucker’s least-original work-avoiding techniques was enjoying a long and comfortable, twice-daily stay in what was affectionately known as ‘Mucker’s Palace,’ the wheelchair-access washroom stall. Mucker didn’t use a wheelchair, but needed the larger stall space for reading materials. One Friday, as Mucker visited the Palace for his morning constitutional, factory activities reached a fevered pitch; it had been calculated that the one million hour safety mark would be reached at noon that day. No one questioned the strange coincidence that this milestone would conveniently be reached on a Friday, at lunchtime, allowing for an all-afternoon party without too much disruption to the work week. The local television station was also grateful that the timing was favourable to reporting the celebration on that day’s evening news. Food was prepared, cakes were decorated, musicians warmed up, politicians reviewed their speeches, balloons were heliumized. A lot of nines were slowly turning on the big light board. As he settled onto his throne, Mucker was oblivious to the flurry of activity outside of the washroom. He skimmed some articles in Reader’s Digest, did the New York Times crossword and a Word Search, and reviewed the annual Gear Guide in Sailing Magazine. Now drowsy, Mucker’s head started to bob a bit, and he gently drifted off into a well-deserved slumber. Only to be rudely awakened when he slipped off the toilet, crashed onto the urine-slicked floor, and promptly broke his arm.

The party was cancelled and the giant numbers were reset to zero, thanks to Mucker’s ‘on-the-job’ accident.

“I thought it was supposed to be hot all the time in Provence, Billy,” said Pixie, the gentle half of the Corey and Pixie roadshow, married friends visiting from Ottawa. “I need my slippers.”

“Well, it is November, and it is nighttime,” I said. “It cools off fast around here.”

“Are you sure your furnace is working?” asked Corey.

Corey is a brainiac engineer, nicknamed MacGyver. He can take anything apart, can fix anything, understands everything, and draws schematics of electrical circuits for fun. Pixie, cute as a button, is scary smart, but instead of Popular Mechanics, she reads cookbooks, from start to finish, like novels. When it comes to anything broken, except eggs, she defers to the expertise of her husband.

“It’s definitely cold in here,” Pixie said. “Maybe you should look at the furnace Corey.”

“Oh boy,” said Corey, with all of his buttons pushed: something was broken, it was big, and he had never seen it before.

I led them into our laundry room to introduce them to our space-age, Apollo mission furnace, which was most definitely off. It was an impressive looking unit, a ‘de Dietrich Chaudière,’ a white and shiny monolithic block, of a size apes dance around seeking enlightenment. Corey’s eyes were as big as saucers.

“Maybe we should call Rebecca first,” said Carol, referring to our landlord.

“Since she lives in England, I don’t think she’ll be over here with her toolbox anytime soon,” I said.

“No problem,” said Corey, “I can figure this out.” He had already pulled off the furnace’s front panel, a sheet of thundering metal larger than him. I had never seen anyone so happy that a furnace was broken. Corey dreamt of intellectual projects like this, but this one doubled the fun, as the machine was built in a foreign land and there was no owner’s manual. He poked around a bit, with his arm inserted up to the elbow into the machine’s innards. Corey turned this and readjusted that, and the crease between his eyes deepened. Stymied, he googled the furnace’s schematics, an orderly explosion of numbered parts, tagged and arrowed but undamaged in the blast, and pored over those for a while. In the 25 years that I have known Corey, I have never seen him stumped by a mechanical or electrical problem, so when he said, “Let’s call a furnace repair guy,” I knew it was serious.

Pixie and Carol had been in the other room drinking wine, which is what I wanted to be doing, but I felt it was a guy thing to stand in solidarity with Corey while he examined the furnace. As Pixie entered the laundry room, she said, “Why don’t you try pushing that big red button on the front?”

“Pix,” Corey said, “I’ve read everything on the internet on this furnace, and I know that button has nothing to do with restarting.” And then in an unCorey-like way he pointed to his iron engineering ring and added, a bit exasperated, “I’m the engineer, so I’ll handle this.”

Pixie held up her left hand and said, “See this ring? I’m your wife, and I’m telling you to try pushing the big red button.”

Every married guy knows which of the two rings won that argument. Corey pushed the unidentified button, let’s call it the ‘restart’ button, and the furnace roared to life.

We lived in a barn in Verbier, Switzerland for a week.

We were the guests of our friends Jill and Victoria, the latter of whom owned the barn. A rustic and ancient looking structure from the outside, the barn had been converted into a luxurious home of multiple conveniences on the inside. It was also walking distance to one of the most famous and exclusive ski destinations in the world, which would have been helpful to me had it been winter.

Carol and I decided to thank our hosts by taking them out to a concert at the Verbier Festival, and then a late dinner. Verbier is old European money come to be entertained, and an evening of classical music brought out the smoking jackets. It also brought out women of a certain age willing to spend any amount of money on clothes and jewels and surgical procedures, in vain grasps at their long-vanished youth. And most curiously, I stood at the pre-concert bar beside a woman in her sixties seemingly dipped upside down in a vat of orange dye. She may have been a redhead in her younger days, but her bouffant was dyed an unnatural shade of bright orange. This would not have been terribly striking except that her face was the same colour. The woman must have used a sunless tanning lotion, the kind that promises golden bronze, and delivers carrot orange skin. She wore a shiny, fitted, orange leather jacket, and carried a matching orange purse. The enormous stones in her earrings and rings, each an inch square, were pale orange as well. She had an orange woollen scarf artfully tied at her throat. Smart silk pants (guess the color) led to her screamingly orange pumps. She looked confident that all of the colours of her ensemble matched. No argument there. I also felt confident that my blue jeans matched my black golf shirt…we were living out of our backpacks for the summer, so my concert-going choices were limited. Beside the pumpkin lady and her ascot-wearing consort, I feared I looked like an English country bumpkin.

We settled into our seats as the enormous orchestra warmed up. I was already hungry, and dinner was a long time to come. After the first movement, the featured pianist was introduced, and with a theatrical sweep of his tuxedoed arms and tails, he slid onto his bench. What followed was a virtuoso piano performance, completely overshadowed by his elaborate and exaggerated arm gestures when his fingers weren’t touching ivory. He raised each hand over his head with a flourish, paused for effect, and crashed them down on the keys as he grimaced in mock ecstasy. Over and over again. His shoulder length hair was flying in disarray, and his bow tie quickly untied itself. Giggling, I realized he reminded me of Bugs Bunny playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody in the famous Looney Tunes’ cartoon lampooning concert pianists. I couldn’t look at Carol, knowing that would release my pent-up laughter. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her shoulders bobbing up and down as she silently suppressed her chuckles.

After an intermission armed with plastic flutes, sipping cheap champagne at Dom Pérignon prices, my hunger had taken on a personality of its own. That personality was cranky, desperate, insistent. My hunger became a high-maintenance, attention-seeking child, who I tried to ignore without success. To add to my discomfort, the second half of the program was a long, long section of a Wagner opera. I like opera. I own many operatic recordings. But Wagner operas seem a bit ponderous to me, and always make me think of another Bugs Bunny cartoon, “What’s Opera, Doc?,” and Elmer Fudd’s immortal refrain, ‘Kill the waaaaaaabbit, kill the waaaaaaabit!” It was not lost on me that this was my second Bugs Bunny recollection in one evening, but I should not have been surprised. Most of my humour comes from cartoons, Seinfeld, School of Rock and Superbad.

Back to Wagner. When you don’t know the opera, there isn’t an English translation, it’s 10 p.m. and you haven’t had dinner yet, it can be a bit challenging. I found it difficult to concentrate. Several times the male and female leads reached dramatic and dizzying heights in their operatic parries. Each time, I thought their characters would soon die so we could all go to dinner. But no, they refused to die. After each elaborate crescendo, they would whisper/sing the next few bars, hug a bit, and then take us on another emotional, ear-splitting roller coaster. We snuck out before the encore, exhausted and famished.

A short drive away was an upscale Relais & Châteaux restaurant. The host looked us up and down, and I heard an audible sniff as he considered our casual clothes. It was 10:30 p.m., and there was no way I was leaving without dinner. I was prepared to make a bit of a scene if we were refused, but we were tremendously relieved when the snooty host resigned to seat us. His grudging acquiescence may have been related to the European recession and the paucity of diners at that late hour. Of the three other occupied tables, two had dogs roaming around their owners’ feet. It’s not that I don’t like dogs….it’s all the sniffing and nuzzling of my body’s private areas that I find off-putting. I have seen dogs many times in restaurants in France, usually in family bistros or outdoors. But this was a Relais & Châteaux, where I thought I could be spared the eau de chien while I nibbled on la braserade de bœuf, my 60 dollar main course. An interesting Swiss staple, la braserade consisted of raw slices of beef, some sauces, and an individual mini barbecue placed before me. Sixty bucks and I had to cook it myself!

The interesting meter experienced a sharp uptick as a party of four was seated at the adjacent table, extremely close, in the near-empty restaurant. The elderly gentleman sported the standard Verbier blue blazer with shiny buttons of the moneyed set. An ascot, of course, which matched the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. But in a rare doubleheader for me, he was the second person I encountered that evening wearing bright orange dress pants. He distinguished himself from the carrot lady by belting his pair barely south of his armpits. The man’s attractive wife/mistress was at least 30 years his junior, smartly dressed without a shade of orange to be seen. They were definitely paramours, pawing each other in a decidedly un-father/daughter manner. Rounding out the party of four were the couple’s two poodles, a bit distressing for hyper-allergic Carol. As soon as the couple was seated, the haughty host brought the dogs a large water dish, and I was surprised that it went on the floor, not the table. As it happened, it wouldn’t have mattered, since the dogs spent the next two hours jumping on and off of their owner’s lap, nibbling food from his plate. Well, not the entire two hours. Part of the time the poodles were either barking or begging. Carol spent those two hours sneezing. The waiter treated the dogs much better than he would treat children. Unlike their Italian counterparts, French restauranteurs don’t want parents to bring their children to dinner. There are usually no highchairs available, because toddlers do not belong in restaurants. Your host will sneer a bit when you arrive at a restaurant with children, even those as beautifully behaved as my own. However, when you bring your poodles to dinner, they roll out the canine red carpet.

“This is going to be cool, daddy,” said Devon.
“Are you excited, Slugger?”
“Mmmphhh,” mumbled Devon as he took a huge bite of a three-merguez baguette sandwich bigger than his head. We were at an outdoor café about a block away from Marseille’s soccer stadium. We had great seats for Devon’s first professional soccer match, the hometown Olympics against Valencienne.
“Okay, eat up. The game starts at seven.” I drained my Orangina.
“What time is it now?”
“Six fifteen. Giddyup.”
We arrived at the main gate, which was closed. The security monoliths weren’t letting anyone in yet, but only a smattering of fans were waiting.
“Where is everyone, daddy?”
“I don’t know. This is weird. There are 50,000 seats in this stadium, and hardly anyone is here yet. How will they get everyone in their seats in time for the game?”
“And I want to go to the OM store to buy some OM stuff,” whined Devon.
At ten to seven, about 500 fans were waiting with us, and after practicing my question in French in my head first, I turned to the man beside me.
“Do you know why they haven’t let us in yet? The game starts in 10 minutes.”
“Oh, didn’t you know?” said the man. “They changed the time of the game to 9 p.m.” This was mildly irksome, as I had printed the tickets at home the previous day, directly from the team’s website; they clearly showed a seven o’clock start. It was difficult enough to wait for half an hour with an excitable Devon at the gate, but I now had another two hours to amuse a hyper eight-year-old.
We were finally allowed through the gate at 7 p.m. Entering the bowels of the stadium, all concrete and echoes, we followed a sign for the OM boutique. It couldn’t have been more difficult to find or have a less-imposing entrance. We wandered lost through the stadium’s tunnels, avoiding the drips coming from overhead pipes, blinking from the flashing florescent lights, turning into dead concrete ends. At the end of a long, cold corridor, the kind that you walk down when you know you shouldn’t, because you’ll likely meet nasty brigands styling themselves as amateur vivisectionists, there was a small white sign on the wall, 10 feet from the ground, advertising the boutique as just around the corner. Following this clue, we were led out of the concrete labyrinth for 100 metres, and then re-entered the building by following a father and son through an unmarked door into the glittering boutique. My strong impression was that the entrance to the store was designed to discourage anyone from entering it, and yet, there it stood, brimming with fans and every conceivable article of clothing or equipment ever manufactured on Earth in its history, printed with the OM logo.
After an hour touching every conceivable article of clothing or equipment ever manufactured on Earth in its history, printed with the OM logo, Devon said, “Daddy, I gotta go pee.”
“Good idea, Slugger. Let’s rock.”
Now I have travelled widely in my life, and the appalling bathroom conditions in much of the world outside of North America phase me no longer. However, we were in a major professional sports stadium, and our tickets cost about $80 each, so I expected a minimum of serviceability. It was also an hour before the match, so presumably the restrooms would have recently been cleaned. The lone toilet was your standard French porcelain hole in the floor, the kind with ribbed foot pads so you know exactly where to stand, ensuring that you get an unhygienic soaker when the tsunamic flush washes over your feet. There was no door on the stall and the dispenser was out of toilet paper. The washroom’s urinal, a room-wide metal trough, should not have been overflowing, considering the loosey-goosey directional attitude of the patrons holding their secondary brains in their hands. A non-mysterious liquid wetted the floor and ran towards an open drain without a metal grate. It was slippery in there, and if Devon fell down I would have burned all his clothes. I’m funny that way.
I couldn’t get out of that washroom fast enough, and went straight for the concession/bar. I needed a beer. This is where I learned that no alcohol was sold at the stadium. A dry venue, in a country where wine could be purchased at my eight-year-old’s soccer practice? That Saturday was the first day since I arrived in France that I drank no alcohol, breaking my enviable string, and I hoped it to be the last. To compensate for the lack of alcohol revenue, the concession did a brisk business in cigarette sales, which fuelled the feverish chain smoking during the match by every adult (save one) in the stands.
The match was about to start, and even though it was already past Devon’s bedtime, he was wide-eyed and excited. We made our way down a long, tight row of 20 or 30 fans, no one standing up to make our passage easier, and at the midpoint of the row I found one empty seat. My seat. That couldn’t be right. Someone must have been in Devon’s seat, and I quickly went over in my mind how I would awkwardly argue with the trespasser, in French, in front of 50,000 people who didn’t know that Céline Dion and I share a birthday. Before the accusations starting flying, I checked Devon’s ticket and saw that a ‘pair’ of tickets meant that you have bought two tickets. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the tickets share any other properties, like a pair of sevens. Devon’s ticket was four seats over, two rows in front, which meant he sat on my lap for the entire match. As the game wore on, I reigned in my irritation at the usual French administrative deficiencies, and realized that this seating fuckup greatly enhanced our enjoyment of the spectacle. Holding my son for two hours, a slight chill in the air, the sights and sounds of Devon’s first professional match, the raucous crowd, I was overwhelmingly happy; my mind drifted into the contented bliss of one knowing he is on the right path, without any idea of the destination.
“That’s my move,” Devon shouted, as a Marseille player performed a graceful spinaround move, twisting an opponent up in knots before advancing toward the goal. He forgot that he learned his move from an older kid at school, who learned it watching old Maradona videos on YouTube.