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The Meat Nazi

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Posted: September 23, 2022 at 6:09 am

At Place des Prêcheurs, I weaved through outdoor bistros, dodging waiters running between packed outdoor seating and the empty restaurants serving them. Nestled between restaurants was Boucherie-Charcuterie du Palais, aka the Meat Nazi. Streetside, a faded red awning shaded a glass case on casters, full of roasted chickens. But the splendor of the meat display inside was almost indecent. Laid in perfect rows was a yoga class of headless, skinned rabbits, performing sun salutation stretches. There were orderly groupings of magret de canard (duck breast), rognonnade d’agneau (lamb kidney), andouilletes (pork sausages), and fourteen kinds of pâté. Tied in precise bundles were alouettes sans tête (larks without a head), which weren’t larks, but beef stuffed with bacon, sausage and spices. Carol cooked them in a traditional Provençal sauce she perfected.

Some displays were not for the faint of heart. Our butcher arrayed lamb and veal brains, looking exactly like wet, mini, human brain models used in medical school. The brains flanked a cow’s tongue, the shape and size of a football. Who bought the unidentified animal knuckles and feet? There were a bunch of bloody, sweating, grossities left over from some satanic ritual which I didn’t want to look at too closely.

Except for one portly man in a white apron stained crimson and terracotta from nipple to thigh, the butchers were no-nonsense, severe women demanding strict adherence to the unwritten rules governing requests for meat and payment for same. 

I waited at one end of the long, glassed-in meat counter. There was a queue every day. I planned to buy chicken thighs for poulet aux lardons (chicken with bacon), but the chicken was at the far end of the counter; if I couldn’t see the meat I wanted from my place in line, too bad. I was not allowed to leave my spot to look at meat further away. As customers were helped, the line advanced, everyone shuffling along one position. With each shuffle I saw more of the meat display, but once past a section, there was no going back. It was my turn when a butcher, the one with the spiky copper hairdo, doing her best Jacques Brel impersonation, shouted, “Suivant!”

I knew this woman well; when I arrived in Aix, my ignorant meat questions provoked much eye-rolling and shrugging. But she taught me something valuable the previous month, when I asked, “Could I please have one and a half kilos of stewing beef, madame?” 

“What are you making?” 

“Bœuf Bourguignon, madame.”

“When are you making it?” she asked, with sidelong suspicion.

“Tomorrow.”

“Come back tomorrow and buy your meat for tomorrow’s meal.”

I never repeated that error; imagine, buying meat a day early! What was I planning, to keep it refrigerated for a day? Put it in the freezer? She knew I would come back. As my meat-buying skills improved, so did the friendliness of my tormentress. When I asked for chicken thighs that day, she almost smiled, not grilling me about their imminent preparation. Wrapping my meat in brown butcher’s paper with a deft hand, she said her signature, “Avec ÇA?,” shouting the second word, asking if I needed anything else. She kept my package on her side of the counter. 

“I would also like some bacon, cut into lardons, please.”

I saw a hint of a smile. She nodded, knowing lardons were part of the chicken recipe, to be used that day.

Before moving to France, Carol and I took turns patting each other’s backs while serving lean and salt-reduced turkey bacon. What great parents we were, saving our kids from future health issues. In France we were addicted to sizzling hunks of pig fat. No self-respecting French man or woman would ever eat turkey bacon.

Marbled, thick-sliced butcher’s bacon was cut into quarter-inch, bite-sized pieces to create lardons. At the supermarket, several shelves were devoted to pre-cut lardons, in every variation imaginable. How could I avoid buying this? Not only was it bacon, inherently irresistible, but they even cut it up for me! In the lardons aisle of Casino supermarket, I was Homer Simpson, drawing out “baaaaaaaaay-con” in a low, sensuous whisper.

“Avec ÇA?” my butcher said. I hoped she couldn’t hear me thinking about buying lardons at the supermarket.

We continued our dance until she held four brown bundles and I said that was all for today. This is when you think I would receive my packages and pay, but you would be wrong. My butcher traversed the length of the shop, and I matched her step along the customer side of the counter. At the end of the display case, she put my order in a red plastic shopping basket and pulled a plasticized number from her breast pocket. She placed the number in my basket, regarded me solemnly and said, “Thirty-seven.” As I thanked her for my basket, I could see the back corner of the shop. The male butcher was serving people in a line of two or three. I learned later this line was for important people, family and friends of the butchers. So much for égalité.

Basket in hand, I was required to immediately take two steps, and place it on a roller conveyor belt, a smaller version of the one at A&P when I was a kid; at my hometown supermarket, groceries were packed in brown paper bags, arranged in plastic bins and placed on a conveyor which disappeared through the wall. A teenager would load them into our car outside. The Boucherie conveyor was only six feet long, and it was blocked by customers standing beside their respective baskets, waiting for the cashier. In the crush, I could not approach the conveyor to unload my purchases, so I stood there like an idiot, holding my basket of meat. Understandably, all hell broke loose. The lady butchers stormed from behind the meat counter in a race to be first to explain why my foolish actions could lead to the end of 400 years of diplomatic relations between Canada and France. My basket was taken, and several people in the cashier’s line were asked to move, allowing my basket to be placed in the correct order on the conveyor. I felt relieved to be standing basketless, like the other customers waiting to pay.

Each basket inched along the conveyor when another order was rung in. We stood beside our baskets; why couldn’t we stand in the correct order holding our baskets? When it was my turn to pay, the cashier moved my basket to the little shelf beside her cash register. She tossed my number thirty-seven in a pile without looking at it. The number was unfailingly taken from the basket before the meat; otherwise, it was anarchy! The purpose of the plasticized numbers, and the payment system, remained a mystery to me. My instincts warned that questioning the procedure in fractured French could result in banishment from the shop, a risk I was unwilling to take.

The Boy Named Alice

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Posted: May 17, 2021 at 8:16 am

We were lost on a two-lane road twenty kilometers from Aix-en-Provence when Devon said, “Dad, this boy back here is going to throw up.” This boy back here.

         The Boy Named Alice, eight-years-old, had not spoken since he got in the car. A Marcel Marceau fan, he didn’t say he needed to vomit. He poked Devon and made throwing-up motions. I swerved my newish car to the shoulder and Carol pulled a plastic bag from her purse. Too late. A small dollop of puke made it into the bag. The rest splashed The Boy Named Alice, the backseat, the floorboards and the inside of the door. Neither Carol nor I are squeamish about vomit; we’re parents. But this was someone else’s kid, he seemed mute, and we didn’t know his real name.

         “Kcchhhchhh,” said Sophie in the backseat, retching.

         “Ghllghlhl,” said her brother beside her, holding his throat.

         I scooped vomit from the upholstery with a Kleenex. Carol cleaned The Boy Named Alice’s soccer uniform, standing in the ditch. He remained silent, indifferent to the situation or the stranger scraping barf from his shorts. We left the putrid plastic bag and the vomit-slathered contents of a box of Kleenex in the ditch, to lie with the detritus common to the shoulders of French roads.

         “I feel awful leaving our pukey garbage in the ditch, Billy,” said Carol. She looked down, and saw a spot of vomit on her shoe.

         “I don’t like it either, but what choice do we have? I don’t know how much longer we’ll be stuck in the car.” I swallowed back something rising in my throat and gagged.

*

         Every Saturday, Devon played a match for his Aix-based soccer club. The club employed a comical system to get players and parents to the out-of-town pitches each week. If I ran the club, I would send an email to each player’s parents on Monday, asking if their child could play that weekend. I would include the name of the hosting town and soccer field, the time to arrive there, and imbed in the note a Google map. A lawyer’s preparation. Call me crazy, but I imagine that would work out pretty well.

         Devon’s club had a different system. On Thursdays I received a message from an anonymous texter, something like: “come to the stadium on Saturday at 2 p.m.” There was no information about the text’s author, the game time, the opponent, or whether the text had anything to do with my son or soccer. Was it an invitation from a Marseille wiseguy to pick up a suitcase of drugs? I felt like a Luddite, but an email would have been nice.

         Being my father’s son, I had my family at the stadium five minutes early. That was my first mistake, forgetting about le petit quart d’heure (which allows every French citizen to be at least 15 minutes late for everything). Over the next thirty minutes, parents and players would drift into the parking lot. The first time this happened, I ignored the tardiness, and picked the least-late parent to befriend. I targeted a sallow-faced smoking father, held out my hand and said, in French, “Hello, I’m Bill, I’m Devon’s father.”

         The man gave me one of those handshakes which offers only fingers, no palm. “Yes. Hello,” he said, without giving his name.

         “We’re here from Canada. We’re living in Aix this year.”

         “Yes. I know,” he said.

         “Devon is enjoying playing for this club. Is this your son? What position does he play?”

         “Oh, here and there.” The man tossed the remainder of his cigarette to the asphalt.

         That was the end of the conversation. I made similar attempts to engage other parents on other Saturdays, but had the same results. With no parents to befriend, every Saturday we waited in silence for the latecomers, staring into the distance like models in department store catalogues.

         Eventually, the coach told us the name of the town we had to find. I asked him the address of the soccer pitch. Every time the coach replied, “There’s only one stadium. It’s easy to find.” This was patently false.

         The plan was each driver would follow the car in front, and we would arrive at the pitch en masse. Within thirty seconds, all the cars were separated. The soccer pitch was never plunked beside city hall in any of these towns, and was often outside the town’s borders and down an unmarked dirt road. One cannot find secreted and unnamed soccer pitches accessed by unmarked dirt roads without stopping several times to ask indifferent locals for directions. In French. With a Québécois accent. And we were late. Did I mention this scenario played out every week?

         Well, not exactly like that every week – one Saturday had a vomitous twist. Sure, we had the mystery location, lack of directions, and chronic lateness. But as we were leaving our home stadium, the coach pulled me aside.

         “Could you take another player in your car to Peynier?” he asked.

         “Of course,” I said, as a uniformed boy peered up at me. It was his first game with Devon’s team, so I asked him his name.

         The boy spoke to the asphalt. “Ah-leece.” What did he say?

         I didn’t think it polite to ask him again since it was likely a normal French name I didn’t hear clearly. I let it slide.

         “Do you usually play with a different club?” I asked the boy. He looked at me warily and whispered something to his father. They kissed each other on each cheek and the boy silently joined Devon in our car.

         “Thank you for driving Ah-leece to the game,” said his father, strolling away.

         His name couldn’t be “Ah-leece,” I thought, as “Ah-leece” was French for “Alice.” Was it an homage to Alice Cooper, or “A Boy Named Sue” knockoff? I decided to drive this kid to the match without knowing his name. As The Boy Named Alice’s father opened his car door, I thought, hold on, shouldn’t a parent know the name and number of the foreigner driving his son out of town? He didn’t even ask how he would collect his kid when, or if, we returned to Aix.

         “Wait a minute, monsieur,” I said. “Shouldn’t we exchange phone numbers?”

         “Yes. I guess so. If you want,” he replied, retracing his steps.

         “Otherwise, how will you know when to pick him up?” Using a pronoun was a clever way to avoid saying the boy’s name.

         “I was going to come back here in a few hours and wait for you,” he said.

         Waiting, again. The French could plan better, but in France everyone waits for everything; it’s built into every process. This man was content to sit in a hot parking lot with only a vague idea of when a stranger might return his son sometime in the future.

         “I think it’s better if I phone you when we’re close to Aix, and you can meet me here,” I said.

         “OK, if you want to do it that way.”

         Thirty minutes later, we climbed back into our car with The Boy Named Alice reeking of vomit, to continue our tour of Provençal roads which didn’t lead to the Peynier soccer pitch.

         “I can’t sit beside this boy anymore,” said Sophie in English, to spare the feelings of The Boy Named Alice. “He stinks, and I threw up a little in my mouth.”

         “Hang in there, Soph,” I said. “It’s rough, I know, but after a while you’ll get used to it. It’ll become our new normal.”

         “Ewwww.”

         We acclimatized to hurtling down the road in a metal box, the inside smeared with a thin film of puke. I was not surprised that once we reached Peynier, the soccer pitch was nowhere to be found. We approached a local man stuffing a mattress into a SmartCar, and I called to him before we were too close. I thought he would be reluctant to provide directions if he smelled our vomitorium.

         “Excuse me, monsieur,” I said. “Do you know where the soccer pitch is?”

         The man advanced toward the car in a friendly fashion, stopped abruptly and made a face like he had sucked a lemon. He reversed two steps and said, “I hope that’s a rental car. Heh heh. The soccer pitch, yes. Do you want the one beside the school or the new one that was recently built beside Monsieur Beaudrie’s estate?” He pulled a cigarette from where it was wedged atop his ear and flicked it to his lips.

         “I was told there was only one soccer field. Could you give me directions to both? I have a feeling the game will be at the second field we drive to.” Prophetic.

         Both sets of directions were unintelligible. We thanked the man with the sincerity he deserved, and drove away aimlessly.

         “Dad, are we late?” asked Devon, drumming his fingers against the back of the driver’s seat.

            “No, we’re not late.”

            “Are we going to be late?”

         “I don’t know. Maybe. It would help if there was a sign or something to tell us where the field is.”

         “I’m getting worried. I can’t be late, daddy.” Devon’s finger-drumming intensified. “I hate being late for anything.”  Like father like son, like grandfather like grandson, like great-grandfather like great-grandson.

         We crisscrossed the town’s major streets, and chanced upon the school where the deserted soccer field was a stony, hardscrabble playground with rusted goals, the memory of nets blowing in the breeze. That couldn’t be it. We stopped an ancient woman shouldering a straw shopping basket with three baguettes sticking out.

         “Excuse me, madame, but do you know where the soccer field is?” I asked.

         “The soccer field?” she said with a screwed-up face, as if soccer was an obscure sport, like Quidditch or hockey. What we call “soccer” in Canada, and “football” in England, is “le foot” in France. When the French named their national sport, they chose an English word that none of them can pronounce. It sounds like ‘le fute.’ “There isn’t a fute field around here. The only field I know is down that way, about halfway to the next town.”

         “Merci, madame.” This information would have been helpful when I asked the coach where in town we could find the pitch. Devon became increasingly agitated, and bounced his feet on the floorboards. The Boy Named Alice remained silent and unflappable. Scouring the roads between the two towns, we prepared to drive back to Aix when we passed a game of boules, bocce for you Italians. Like all games of French boules, the players were ancient, smoking men, with high-belted pants, ratty cardigans and cock-eyed cloth caps. A serious game for squinty-eyed competitors, mouths set in bloodless sneers. I was deathly afraid of interrupting this crowd with my stupid question in my stupid accent. But I love my kid, and he wanted to play soccer. I mentally prepared my question in French. And chickened out.

         “Carol, I’m driving the car. You go ask them,” I said, looking out the window, away from her.

         “No, Billy, you do it.” Carol crossed her arms. “You’re way better at French than me.” I hated when she said that. While true, her statement extracted her from making linguistic errors in front of car salesmen, immigration officials, doctors, the optometrist, the telephone company, the cleaning lady, the school board, the mayor’s office, and many people working in industries where knowing all the French words related to hockey (as I do) was useless. Carol spoke acceptable French, and was perfectly capable of asking directions. I exited the car to confront the boules players.

         As I approached the group, the game immediately stopped. The players and spectators looked at me, not moving a muscle. Ten people standing still as stone, unsmiling.

         “Hello, everyone,” I said. “I’m very sorry to interrupt your game. I’m trying to find the stadium near here. My son has a soccer game starting in a few minutes.” Blank looks all around. No one was happy I barged into their game.

         “Where are you from?” asked an old woman with a kerchief tied to her head.

         “Aix-en-Provence, madame.”

         “No you’re not,” she replied. “If you were from around here, you’d know where our stadium is.” That witticism garnered laughs all around. “Americans,” the woman added, under her breath. More laughter.

         “Well, we live in Aix now, but we’re from Vancouver. In Canada.”

         A light switch was flipped somewhere as the woman broke into a bright smile and said, “Canada? Céline Dion? I absolutely love Céline Dion! You have a lovely accent just like her!”

         I despaired for my country. Why did everyone in France equate Canada with Céline Dion? Couldn’t we do better than that? I felt it was an inopportune time to mention Céline Dion was my most intolerable public figure, music division, in the world. I had enough of her anguished theatrics when I lived in Québec City.

         “You like Céline Dion?” I asked, faking enthusiasm. “We have the same birthday!” This was true, to my everlasting shame. My disgrace was almost cancelled out by the knowledge Vincent Van Gogh and Eric Clapton were in the same ignominious club.

         “Lucky man,” she said, and gave me perfect instructions to a soccer pitch in the middle of a forest, covered by a Klingon cloaking device.

         Once at the pitch, I was happy to see there was a bar.

         After the game, The Boy Named Alice continued the silent treatment until we returned to our home stadium’s parking lot. The father of The Boy Named Alice was staring at the sky while sitting on a large rock, the kind put in parking lots to prevent French drivers from parking beside fire hydrants.

         “Ah, there you are,” said the father of The Boy Named Alice, pushing up from the rock. “How did it go?”

         “Fine, fine.” I said. “Well, there was a small problem. Your son was a bit carsick on the way there. He vomited a little in the car but he’s feeling better now.”

         “Oh, I’m very sorry about that.” There was genuine concern in his voice. “Is your car okay? Can I do something?”

         “No, it’s all cleaned up,” I said, shaking the hand of the father of The Boy Named Alice. “Don’t worry.”

         As father and son wandered away, The Boy Named Alice said excitedly to his father, “……and we won our first game, but that team wasn’t too good, I was playing midfield, but in the second game, which we also won, they put me at striker and I scored two goals, the second goal was the best, I used the outside of my left foot so it was really hard…….”

         It was considerate of The Boy Named Alice to let me know he could speak French. Sadly, his consideration had not extended to the previous three hours, when he could have said, “please pull over,” or “thanks for the ride,” or “sorry I puked all over your new car.” And the true name of The Boy Named Alice remains a mystery.

Excerpt from “Tough”

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Posted: September 21, 2019 at 3:42 pm

In the upcoming book I’m writing with Kelly Tough (Miss October 1981), Kelly recalls some childhood trauma:

Sitting in the middle row of my Grade Two classroom, trying to be invisible. The cool kids sat in the back and the keeners in the front, and I was neither of those. For the thousandth time I stared blankly at the alphabet row above the blackboard, 26 squares, each with a capital and lower case letter, and a picture of something that started with that letter. Apple to zebra, except the ‘P’ was missing because Brian Castel stole it and drew a penis on the other side and the teacher caught him trying to sneak it back into place. School was torture for several reasons. I was the new kid, and on welfare, and the other kids never let me forget it. I had blotchy skin and stringy hair. It didn’t help that Dawne, a year behind me in school, was pretty while I was ugly,  smart while I struggled. The fact that Dawne was also new and on welfare didn’t seem to register with anyone. The kids chose me as the weaker sister and aimed all their teasing and abuse my way, progressively worse each day.

I had mixed emotions as the recess bell rang. I liked to play tetherball, depending on who played that day. The game could take a nasty turn in a flash. By the time I got to the tetherball pole at the back of the playground, I could see most of my usual tormentors, including my sister,  already assembled. I turned on my heel to escape, but too late; I’d been spotted. Uh-oh.

“Hey, Smelly Kelly, where’re you going?, said one of the girls from Grade Three. Most of the girls called me Smelly Kelly because I have a brown birthmark the size of a nickel on my ankle; the kids decided it looked like a plop of poo. “Don’t you want to play with us?”

The situation looked grim, but it would be worse to refuse. “Uh, yeah.” I shuffled up to the group and hoped they’d forget I was there.

Tetherball at my school was based on the pyramid system. There was one kid at the top, then two kids at the next level, then three at the next. No matter how many levels there were, I was predictably on the bottom. When it was my turn to play, I always had to battle the girl at the top of the pyramid, Marcie McCormack. She was two grades ahead of me, bulky and mean. Marcie bullied me the most, and tetherball afforded her another opportunity to humiliate me. She pounded that ball so it swung on its rope so fast it was impossible to hit back. All I could see was a white blur as I pathetically stabbed everywhere the ball wasn’t. Marcie was setting me up for her standard move, one I fell for every time. With her most vicious and powerful blow, she smashed the ball so it swung directly at my temple, knocking me to the ground. 

I lay with one side of my face in the dirt, pebbles pressing into my cheek. 

One of Marcie’s henchwomen bent over and poked me in the ribs to see if I was dead.

“That was a big mistake, Karen,” said a girl out of my view. “You just touched Smelly Kelly. Now you have fleas!”

“No way! Look!” Karen rolled up her sleeve and I knew what was there without looking. She had ‘SFP’ written in blue ink on her forearm, a practice that had spread thorough the school like wildfire. Super Flea Protection. With this indelible safeguard, Karen could touch me without receiving a flea infestation. 

As the girls erupted in laughter, I saw Dawne with my one available eye, pointing at where my t-shirt had risen slightly.

“I’m telling Mum, I’m telling Mum, you’re not wearing an undershirt!”, said Dawne.

“Shut your face, Dawne,” I screamed.

“An undershirt?”, said Marcie. “Only little kids, and poor people wear undershirts!” The girls howled.

“I’m telling M…” Before Dawne could finish her threat, I lunged at her, grabbed her hair, and pulled her to the dirt. We wrestled and punched and scratched, making non-human screeches like racoons. The crowd egged us on, but I rolled off of Dawne when she started crying. I rose slowly, hoping the bell would ring. Someone pushed Marcie into me but I didn’t fall.

“You pushed me, Smelly Kelly,” said Marcie.

“No I didn’t. You pushed me.” I knew that was a mistake, but either way I was doomed. Marcie said nothing, a thin smile on her lips. With one hand she grabbed my hair, and with the other, the collar of my jacket. She swung me around in a circle a couple of times like the Olympic hammer throw and let go. I flew through the air, bounced in the dirt and rolled twice. The bell rang and the girls, including Dawne, giggled as they walked past me. 

I thought my ordeal for the day was over. When I entered the school, covered in dirt and dust, Marcie jumped from behind a pillar and punched me with all her might in the shoulder. Just a regular recess.

 I watched the hands of the wall clock slowly inch ahead the rest of the afternoon while Miss Lawson droned on about times tables and division. It seemed like a waste of time since I wasn’t planning on multiplying or dividing anything when I was older; I turned my brain off so it wouldn’t get full of stuff I’d never need. I awoke from this dreamlike state when the bell rang and the floor squealed from 30 chairs sliding away from desks. Everyone talked at once, well, 29 children talked at once, chattering about their plans after school. Children  grouped in twos and threes to walk home together, to hang out at each other’s houses until dinnertime, where moms made them hot chocolate and peanut butter cookies. There weren’t any moms making hot chocolate at my house. I held my spiral binder close to my chest and walked alone, hoping the kids would forget about picking on me for the rest of the day.

On the way home, I usually stayed off the main streets as much as possible, even though this made the walk longer. I thought no one knew I used a long alley past the school, but something whizzed close past my head. Did someone just throw a rock at me? A rock ambush wouldn’t be unusual. The next missile hit my cheek and rebounded to my feet. It wasn’t a rock, but a dog biscuit. A Milk Bone dog biscuit because I was a dog. A dog with fleas, if recess was any indication. As I examined the biscuit, a volley of ten or twenty biscuits bombarded me from behind a peeling wooden fence. And another volley. Not as painful as the rocks I often endured, but those biscuits were still hard enough to sting. The real sting, however, came from the barks and muffled laughter of several girls behind the fence.  Dawne’s pink scrunchie, the one Mum bought her at Value Village but told her was new, bobbed above the fence’s top.

Baptismis Interruptus

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Posted: February 19, 2019 at 9:37 pm

When our daughter was an infant, Carol and I wanted to please our Catholic mothers by arranging our child’s baptism. We made an appointment to see Father Holland at our local parish (the same Catholic church in which 52 year old Pierre Trudeau married 23 year old Margaret Sinclair, but I digress). I figured it’d be a meet ’n’ greet, fill out a couple of forms, choose the baptism date, easy-peasy. Father Holland was a soft-spoken, rotund man in his 60s, with that blank expression many priests have which says they’re trying hard not to judge you, but you know it’s in their job description so they’re doing it anyway. We sat across from Father Holland at a scratched table in the Sunday School hall attached to the church offices. Crude, child-drawn pictures of Jesus with blood running from his brow and hands adorned the walls.

“It’s nice to meet you Carol and Bill. Before we get started, I’d like you to watch this short presentation about baptism.” From a cupboard, Father Holland brought a cassette recorder and an ancient slide projector, the kind with a circular carousel on top. I’d last seen this projector in elementary school, in the late ‘60s. He drew the blinds and pulled a string which unrolled a white screen from the ceiling. 

“Every time you hear a beep on the tape recorder,” said the priest, “click on this little button and the next slide will pop in.” He switch off the lights, started the tape, and shuffled out of the room.

 Father Holland left us alone to watch his baptism slide show entitled something like, “Your Child Won’t Rot in Purgatory.” The story was comically outdated, by all evidence produced in 1940. In every scene, the wife wore a dress, high heels, a frilly apron and yellow rubber gloves…because she was always washing dishes. 

Watching those slides, I was taken back in time to Ascension Catholic Elementary School. Each week in religion class, we were entertained by similar slide shows with uplifting titles such as: 

Resist Temptation

Creation: The Real Story

When Man Walked With Dinosaurs

Suppress Those Feelings

Mary’s Special Friend

Your Duty To The Priesthood (striking fear in alter boys everywhere)

We loved those slide shows in the way movie buff hipsters flock to see Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie so bad it’s great. However, what we liked most about the slide presentations is that they invariably resulted in chaos. This was because class clown Marcel Thibault could perfectly imitate the tape recorded ‘beep,’ the beep that told Sister Theophane to advance to the next slide. Marcel always sat at the back of the darkened classroom, and it was impossible to distinguish where his beep came from…he could throw his beeps, like a ventriloquist. He made untimely beeps, causing the nun to advance the slides at all the wrong times. The slides became hopelessly unsynchronized with the narrator’s voice. Sister Theophane became frustrated and confused, and general hilarity ensued. This happened every week.

Back to Father Holland, who re-entered the hall once the baptism slide show ended. He held a form secured by a clipboard, and asked for some basic information.

“…and where did you two get married?” asked the priest, pen poised.

“In Huatulco, Mexico,” said Carol.

“In which church?”

“We eloped,” I said. “A Justice of the Peace married us on the balcony of our hotel room.”

“Oh. Oh my,” said father Holland. “That will never do. You’re not married then. Okay, well, the first thing is that I will have to marry you in this church.”

“But we’re already married…”

“And before you two can get married here, you will both have to take the marriage preparation course.” Father Holland folded his hands on the desk. “Which I will teach you.”

“Let me get this straight.” I could feel my heat quickly rising. “I’ve been in a monogamous, loving relationship with my girlfriend, now wife, for 11 years. You, single, never married, and celibate, YOU are going to teach ME how to live in a committed relationship with a woman.” 

“The course is only 6 weeks. I’m confident you’ll pass if you have an open mind.”

I calmed myself, and let father Holland drone on about the marriage course he was going to teach to a couple married already a year, and who dated for 10 years before that (don’t judge me, that’s my mother’s job). I didn’t want to cause a scene, in a church, but then the meeting veered on a bizarre tangent. In the middle of nattering about Catholic education and our obligations to our child, Father Holland pronounced that the Harry Potter series was the work of the devil. He forbade any Catholic child to read the books or watch the movies. Now, I am prepared to listen to differing opinions, and suffer some lonely priest devaluing the relationship I have with my wife, but I’ll be damned if I’ll sit quietly while anyone disparages Harry Potter. There’s only so much a guy can take. Our friendly baptism education session took a dark turn at that point.

Suffice to say, we weren’t remarried, neither of our children are baptized, and except for weddings and funerals, I haven’t darkened a church door since.

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.