Happy Thanksgiving, North Americans!

     As I wake up at 10 am, I realize it's the first Thanksgiving in years that I have nothing obligatory to do, no turkey to rush into the oven, no linens to iron, no bathrooms to clean, no harried last minute shopping to do, or send Dan to do and no tables and chairs to bring up from the basement, arrange, rearrange and arrange back again.  It's all being done elsewhere by others and I'm feeling that increasingly familiar prickle of loss vs. relief, a relief that isn't the "great sigh of" type but more the "well, how about that" type, so maybe relief isn't the right word at all.
     I use to say that Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, our only obligation being to eat, drink and be merry but in those days it was my mother who did most of the work and we happily gobbled all day ignorantly blissful of how much work was being put forth for that twenty minute dinner.  I cherish those memories of each Thanksgiving spent with my Uncle "T" and Aunt Eunice and my four cousins.  My mother and Aunt Eunice would spend the day in the kitchen together while the rest of us played games, watched football, ran around outside, even threw snowballs a couple of years and generally just came to the table when the food was on it.  As we got older we would help with setting or clearing the table, thinking what a huge contribution we had made on the dinners behalf.  After hosting several Thanksgiving dinners where most of the guests participated by bringing a dish, baking the pies, setting the table and doing the dishes, the jobs that my mother would have done mostly by herself, I was always left exhausted.
     As a person in my twenties and thirties I would wonder why anyone goes through all that work for what return exactly?  The intangible parts of the day were lost on me.   We thanked god for the food and for those we have to share it with, wedging this third party into the deal.  All this work and god gets the credit?  Of course, I missed the bigger picture, the forging of memories, strengthening of bonds, the building of our own cultural connections etc...that is left for the elders of the tribe to think of, plan on and execute.  Now being an elder, especially with the passing of my own mother and grandmother, the very careful and important task of handing down these traditions along with their significance falls to me and my siblings. This is part of the loss I'm feeling right now, the obligation that gives us a purpose to the day, that sets this day apart from all the others of the year.  A day of hard work with an intangible return.  A day picked out of the year to celebrate family, friends and food and how much we love all those things and how important they are to us.
     Happy Thanksgiving! 
  

If I had a camera.....

     So it is day .......what......5? already in Paris and how many pictures have Nate and I taken? Zero.  That's right.  No pictures of the Luxemburg Gardens and the great children's play park there, or our lunch by the Eiffel Tower or our wide eyes at La Grande Epicerie or our puzzled faces in the Metro. These are now all left to our memories alone.
     The apartment that we're renting for a couple weeks  is on the fourth floor, 3rd etage ici, approached by circular, center-slanting marble stairs.  We have a small, no, miniscule kitchen that one can barely turn around in.  We've stocked up on coffee, tea and chocolate and really, not much else...which is good because anything else would be impossible to prepare.  We've done one load of laundry in the washer/dryer, taking about 12 hours to complete a cycle with fully dried clothes. 
     What is it that makes a Paris apartment so uniquely Parisienne.  Why do their sloppy bookshelves look better than our sloppy bookshelves, their cracked plaster more shabby chic than our cracked plaster?  Without a doubt, they've cornered the decor market on gold, maroon, olive and black with bits of that Versailles blue sprinkled about...those same colors of all the old Moulin Rouge posters.
     We visit the boulangerie around the corner in the morning and over-purchase coma inducing croissants, pan au poire, and other things that I don't know the names of.  Here, Nate knows the weakness of my willpower and deftly orders before I have a chance to object.  I sent him this afternoon, by himself, to buy some pizza-like thingys for lunch and in minutes he returned with a duplicate order of this morning's fare.
     So far, no one has allowed us to try our French.  As soon as the bonjour is out of my mouth, they are speaking English.  Perhaps it's our smiles that give us away.  The French as a whole seem pretty dour when walking about and carrying on their business in public.  A smile will get you nowhere here, nor will one Euro.  Touted as one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world, I am now deliberating whether or not to purchase anything here at all (with the exception of chocolate, of course).  Most of our clothes we've been wearing for seven months now and are becoming increasingly transparent.  I was going to buy Nate converse sneakers yesterday, but they were 70 Euros.  Ouch!  We had a mock argument and got the hell out of that store but not before I had to purchase a few Star Wars Legos.  I thought it was a good trade.  Boys trousers were 85 Euros and sweatshirts 65 Euros....where is the Marshall's of Paris?  I'm going to try Marks and Spencer in a few days when I've recovered from sticker shock.
     By the way, Happy Thanksgiving.....missing you all!

The Great Time Suck

     Sure it's November already and I haven't posted since Nate's birthday in September.  Where does the time go?  I'm not sure but I know that it has something to do with San Marcos, convergences and maybe a black hole or two.  I even think it has something to do with the house we are staying in.  For the last two days, our friend, Marta, has been staying at the house, falling into its dreamy spell and questioning what day it is and "How could that be?"  She left today aided by Andrea, our Shamballan friend, rescuing Marta from the great time suck.
     I feel that I need a bit of a rescue as well and so I've booked tickets to Paris for Nate and I, to get away from this place and gain some perspective and also to meet up with Dan after he's done his stint somewhere off the coast of Africa.  I hear Paris is gorgeous in late Fall.  From there we'll head south to the Riviera, perhaps to Venice and then to Croatia....that's the plan in my head so far.  We've got a few months to meander about.
     It feels like time is on our side, but I've found the opposite is mostly true, taunting us as we try to be productive and sneering at us as we try to relax and perhaps laughing at us as we try to make sense of it all.  And if time has an energy, just like everything else, perhaps it also can be manipulated, its march slowed by, I don't know, maybe something as simple as our attention.
     Another blue sky, warm winded day here in San Marcos. It's afternoon and I'm still in pj's, wondering where the last 6 months went.