La Famille Félicitée

11 July Today was a beach day that took us by surprise! Marie-Céline, a friend of Jean-Claude’s of the last 50 years, invited us to her lovely home just below Cap-Ferret on the spit of land wrapping around the west side of Arcachon Basin. Marie-Céline is the writer/director of Jean-Claude’s musical production, Quand La Guerre Sera Finie, an original (apparently quite successful) work about WWII. This region, JC shared recently, housed many Jewish refugees following the first world war. I leave it to your own reasoning to deduce what became of them during the second world war and concurrent Nazi occupation. Though not in our region, the very existence of the memorial town of Oradour-sur-Glane, left entirely as it was when the Nazis brutally murdered every citizen and passer-by, two-thirds of them women and children, four days after D-Day, serves as a reminder of how visceral the repercussions of the war(s) are felt to this day. Pardon the brief detour from an otherwise very happy da...

10 July Alice, Mona and Fañch left early this morning to visit Alice’s mother and extended family in Bretagne, before going home to Réunion (“I will miss Wilson!” said Fañch) and our family was split between an easygoing workday around the gîte (for Heather, of course, after Wilson’s chicken feeding work) and exploring a new castle: Chateau Duras. [Switch to reading in your best Stefan from SNL voice.] This castle’s got it all: being huge (do you see tiny Wilson in the photo?), tiny actual passageways, secret passages, a ghost room, and a falconry show! After work but before dinner – and far too late for the children already – Jean-Claude insisted on another one of his famous driving tours of la region – who has the heart to say no? We mostly had a cheerful drive and got to watch the sunset over the vineyards of lovely Fronsac, another world-renowned AOC, this time just to the west of Libourne (Pomerol and St Emillion are to...

12 July Beaucoup de travaille for Heather, sketchy weather, and just a general need for the family to have a wind-down day. Wilson visited his friends the poule, deciphered figures from the shapes of the stones in the walls (this one is a dog wearing a police hat!), helped Dada at the store, and was reunited with the stuffies he had forgotten – and shed a few tears over – in the Pyrenees. We closed the day by making dinner for Jean-Claude and Mathieu; we think we finally got the entrée (appetizer) – plate principale (entrée) – plates (sides) – salade – fromage – dessert (hypothetically) order of events down. We had a fun time testing Mathieu and JC on their ideal two days in La Gironde, learning that McDonald’s and KFC are actually “un peu chere” here, and revealing yes, Michelin evaluates restaurants the world-over – more than 16 thousand of them last year, in fact. Wilson requested we wake him up for dessert if he fell asleep…hopefully he won’t be too angr...

Day Douze Oh my. There are not the words in either French or English for the event that was this evening! When Jean-Claude picked us up at the airport, he was sporting a peculiar mustache that made him almost unrecognizable to us. We soon learned that the mustache was part of a costume for a play. Now, we were aware of our host’s connection with the arts (he was a longtime talent scout and cultural ambassador/educator for the French government), but we were not aware when we arrived that he was currently in a play, which had a “repetition publique” tonight. Brian and Alice stayed with the kids while Heather rode with Mathieu to pick up a longtime friend in a neighboring village before heading to a suburb just outside Bordeaux (the city). Mathieu parked the car outside a fence in a fine-but-wouldn’t-want-to-be-there-alone-at-night neighborhood between the tram tracks and the SNCF train tracks. Heather blindly followed. The gate opened, and a petite, kindly-seeming older gentleman i...