WALKING ON THIN ICE

i have one happy wife, thanks to a private 10:00 a.m. wine tasting. we were walking down a country road looking for a place to buy wine, came across a small building i thought might be a garage, but was the Lotantique winery. kathy asked in french if they sold bottles. the owner called his wife down who opened the shop for kathy. gave her small glasses of 4 wines to try - sauvignon, lou papet, la muscadelle, vendanges manuelles - as they conversed in kathy’s limited french. bought bottles of all 4 for $28 total - and the lady threw in a 5th bottle of florette.

makes me sad i over drank my welcome on this planet back in the 1980s… had my last drink of alcohol april 21, 1991. if i didn’t have 16 years sober, i would have joined today’s tasting. o well, we all make our own beds, build our own prisons, choose our own paths - nobody for me to blame but me. and i can’t really blame me - i am what i am now because of what i’ve been along the way. i like me now, and wouldn’t be this me without that me. as the new testicle said, my father’s house has many conundrums.

kathy had 3 years high school french 1988-91. she’s spending hours studying every day now to get it back. so far she seems to understand every other word they say - while i understand zero. my first two french lessons were torturous - the language sings in my ears, but feels like novocain on my tongue. and to be honest, i never did enjoy studying, even in school. somehow i’ve faked most my life without it. i’m a master at monkey see monkey do, but a mere minor at monkey hear monkey say.

our village of abeilhan (abbey-on) > history dates back 2900 years with the Roman, but it was in 995 that the fortified castle of Abeilhan was built. This has since been destroyed, however the 11th century Church and “circulades”- the fortified walls and houses built around the castle - still stand… village is a quality wine producer.

i’m a wee bit lost here in france. have 24 hour internet access and little to say. have neither ambition nor drive. last night we watched a 33 year old jack nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (1970) - great movie, but totally sad… no hope for jack’s character from start to finish. now that i’m on a mission of hope, i wonder why i loved such hopeless films 37 years ago when i was a wee 24 years old - maybe in my immaturity the film’s artiness was enough. now days i seek redemption.

we’ve been window sitting in the sun on the sill absorbing heat energy and color. it hit 70 degrees fahrenheit… we’ve had 1 cloudy day and 5 days of sun so far. i like this place. if it’s this warm here in the winter, i can see why the stores close at noon and reopen in late afternoon - in the warmer months it would be too hot to work or shop.

took these fotos in an antique shop window in beziers, a town of 80,000 twenty minutes south of us near the mediterranean coast. in london and amsterdam we saw a mixture of all ethnicities, nationalities, colors - but in poland and croatia only caucasoids. we don’t know yet what we’ll find here in the larger towns in the south of france - but the villages are white.

the town of beziers (where we’re heading tomorrow) > The site has been occupied since Neolithic times, before the influx of Celts. Roman Betarra was on the road that linked Provence with Iberia. The Romans refounded the city as a new colonia for veterans in 36/35 BCE and called it Colonia Julia Baeterrae Septimanorum. Stones from the Roman amphitheatre were used to construct the city wall during the 3rd century.