Maternal Dementia

This, my in-between week, between tours on the Camino, I found myself immersed in the world of errands. While I was away walking, the constant churn of the rest of my life continued, and I was met, upon my return, with a few loose ends to tie up. Like taking Short-pants to the podiatrist to replace the shoe inserts that she left at the country house last month (she’s probably outgrown by now anyway) or passing by the Conservatory, in person, to make sure that the form for her re-inscription was correctly filled out, so that she won’t be refused readmission next year based on a technicality. A trip to the pharmacy to pick up a few goodies for my backpack, like an extra pack of second-skin bandages, miniature packets of moist towelettes, toothpaste in a teeny tube, and other tiny toiletry items compressed and compact, to lessen the space they take and the weight I’ll carry. At home, the paying of bills, the folding of money into envelopes designated for various helpers or babysitters, the catching-up of laundry, the arrangements that must be made so that our household will continue in my absence, without taxing De-facto, who does me the largest birthday favor ever by going solo for the time I need to walk the Camino.

Yet I felt I was moving at a slightly different pace. Gentler, more rhythmic, with a confidence that it will all get done, and that when I return to the Camino I will feel good, having taken care of the responsibilities I’ve tabled temporarily but never fully relinquish.

In this vein I remained buoyant, even stretching my erranding to such previously procrastinated tasks as addressing household appliances that have suffered our negligence too long. The supply of vacuum bags ran out weeks ago, requiring a repeated manual emptying of the last remaining bag in order to properly clean the carpets, and the bulb in the overhead light in the bathroom has been dark for even longer. This took me the dreaded BHV, the department store you love to hate and hate to love; you can buy just about anything you want there, from designer clothing to hammers and nails, but there are consequences. It’s an enormous store that seems to always be crowded and yet within the throngs of shoppers, you feel absolutely destitute in the search for that one item you’ve come to buy, lost in a sea of commercial choices without single guide to assist you.

This is where the team of green-vested salespeople should come in handy. They are numerous and poised around the store, usually in clumps talking to each other, though you’d wish they were seeking out lost and confused customers – plentiful at BHV – but usually it’s necessary to hunt them down. Salesperson is actually misnomer, as is customer service agent, a more accurate title might be proctor or hall monitor.

Remarkably, I found exactly the vacuum bags I was looking for, almost immediately, but it occurred to me to confirm this with the proctor on duty in the department. A few meters away, a green vested man stood behind an official looking computer terminal. As I approached him, so did an older gentleman, holding in his hands a package containing a set of attachments to a vacuum cleaner.

“Do I have to buy all of these?” he asked, “because I only want this one element.” He pointed to the largest attachment, the one that really matters.

The green-vested man shrugged.

“But I don’t need all the other pieces,” the old man said.

“Non,” the green-vest pouted, “it’s only sold like this.”

The old man persisted. “Isn’t it at all possible to buy just the one part I want?”

“Beh, oui, if you go to the service commandé, but then you’ll pay a 20 euro fee for a special order.”

The old man walked away, muttering about the waste inherent in this entire transaction. I expected the green-vest to turn to me, and braced myself for his gruff greeting. To my surprise, he took off after the old man, yelling at him for being rude, for his unnecessary words.

Granted, the old man hadn’t been particularly polite. But the green-vest had been equally uncivilized. Having been exposed to the Stew Leonard school of customer service (Rule #1, the customer is always right. Rule #2, if the customer is wrong, refer to rule #1) I was shocked to witness a store employee actually chasing after customer in order to scold him.

I followed them. By the time I caught up, the green-vest was ripping into the old man. They both turned, looking just as surprised as I felt to be standing there with them.

“How can you speak to a customer like that?” I said to the green-vest. “It’s the purchases he makes in this store that pay your salary. He may have been impolite to you, but he doesn’t merit a response like this.” (And I can’t be sure, but I think in the storm of my indignation I still managed to use the correct conditionel form.)

Both men stared at me as if I was insane. Which I am, because it is insanity to expect kind customer service in France. Not that you can’t find it, not that there aren’t plenty of thoughtful, helpful French salespeople. It’s just that you can’t expect it.

When the green-vested man started to shout at me, I turned and walked toward the escalator, confident that the vacuum bags I’d selected would fit my machine, certain that I could buy them at a cash register on another quieter floor, perhaps closer to the light-bulb department. On the escalator, I said, out loud to myself, “he could use some customer service training.” The man beside me chuckled. “It’s probably because he didn’t like the outcome of the election.”

Later, I wondered if all those errands had dampened my take-it-as-it-comes pilgrim spirit, that I’d piled on too much, entered too far into the realm of my regular life to maintain my cooler, collected pace. It’s true that by the week’s end, the symptoms of my usual departure stress started to surface. I’m squeezing things in to clear the decks to be away again – this time for a much longer stretch – and I’m feeling the pinch. I’ve heard people say that once you’ve done the Camino, there’s a before and an after. I guess for me, it seems, I’m still in between.

Why is it a man who gets all the credit for Christmas?

Santa Claus, Père Noël, Father Christmas; they’re all guys. I don’t see this as a holiday powered by men. Sure, there must be exceptions – wonderful, thoughtful, fatherly anomalies – but I would wager that in most households, it’s the mother who’s driving the Christmas train.

This is not meant to dis De-facto. He even agreed to come with me, this year, to do the Christmas shopping for Short-pants and Buddy-roo. But on the designated day, our downstairs neighbor knocked on the door complaining about a leak (endemic to this ancient part of Paris) and De-facto felt obliged to take on the task of plumbers and insurance forms. As much as I dislike shopping with throngs of people in an overheated department store, it beats waiting for a plumber and filling out French paperwork. So I plunged into the store myself, and came out, two-plus-hours later, exhausted and thirsty.

Christmas is not a holiday for mothers. We’re working. Up to the event, and all through the day. There’s a lot to do: the wrapping – and hiding – of all the presents, the baking of cut-out cookies in all the Christmas shapes, frosting them when they’ve cooled and decorating them with colored sugar. The tree has to be trimmed. Okay, maybe we find some strapping guy to carry it in and string up a few lights, but it’s usually the chicks who are hanging ornaments and recounting childhood Christmas memories. Meals to be planned, food to be ordered, good wine and champagne to be selected – the day has to be at least a little bit choreographed if it’s going to come off.

I have it easy compared to my mother. She managed a much more complicated production than the modest holiday traditions we have. She pulled out the good china, silver and crystal for every meal, preparing gourmet menus for Christmas day brunch and dinner, all this while making beds for out of town guests and shuttling people to and from the airport.

With all due respect to my father – a fine man and a great dad – his contribution to the preparation of Christmas was, as most men of that generation, minimal. My mother was the engine behind the holiday. Most of the gift tags “from mom and dad” were written in her elegant handwriting. There’d be at least one present that you knew my father had selected himself, labeled with his distinctive signature, but it was always one of the last gifts to be placed under the tree. He was the king of Christmas Eve shopping and its end result, what he proudly called the hot wrap; gifts wrapped so close to the moment they’re opened that the paper hasn’t had time to cool.

That’s one tradition that my li’l nuclear family here has taken on with aplomb. This year is no exception. Another tradition that’s made the cut: the Christmas morning Bloody Mary break. With a fresh stick of celery, it’s a festive red and green holiday cocktail that quenches your thirst throughout a long morning of gift opening. This was also my father’s idea. So I guess he did contribute to Christmas, in his own way.

I remember my mother getting stressed out about Christmas, and I’d think to myself, “what’s the big deal? We’re all together aren’t we? We could eat peanut butter and be happy!” But when it was my turn to host a few elaborate holidays with out of town visitors, festive menus and thoughtful gifts for everyone, I finally got it. If you want the holidays to be special – the kind that makes memories your family will cherish – it takes work. And maybe a little vodka.

There’s an old Irish custom – I don’t know how much it’s practiced any longer – to celebrate Women’s Christmas on January 6th, the day of the Epiphany. Legend tells that on this day, the men take on the household tasks and give the women a day off. Now that’s a Christmas present.

So guys, give the moms in your life a break. And please don’t wait until January 6th to do it. Christmas is a beautiful day, but it’s hard work being Mère Noël. Lend a hand, and let her put her feet up.

Whoever said “it’s the journey and not the destination” wasn’t in the car with me yesterday.

We were slow out of the gate. The ritualized closing of the country house takes more time in the fall (heading into winter) than in the warmer months of summer. The refrigerator, as usual, is emptied, defrosted, wiped and left unplugged, open to the air. The floor is swept. The dishes and glassware are washed, stowed and covered. The water is not only turned off, but in anticipation of the cold it is siphoned from the toilets and the hot water tank, to avoid the catastrophe of frozen, bursting pipes. Electricity shut off. Doors and shudders latched. It’s a frenzy of cleansing and storing activity. Then finally, en route.

The back roads from our little village to the highway are bucolic and picturesque, but their meandering makes for uncomfortable stomachs. Buddy-roo lost her breakfast about fifteen minutes into the ride. I am smart enough to bring a few plastic bags – her car sickness is also a ritual event – but not smart enough to check those bags for holes before tucking them into the pocket of the car door. The little pink plastic sac I shoved under her precious, ashen face just before she puked had a teeny tiny hole in the bottom, which became big very quickly, dumping most of the contents of the bag into her lap. Who knew how fast I am out of the seat-belt? Or that I could be a contortionist, reaching around the front seat, wiping up the mess with the four paper towels left on the roll? Oh, happy drive.

De-facto had the idea to stop at a giant Decathalon store just before the on-ramp to the highway, for what was promoted as a quick errand. When I finally found him, he had set up house in roller blade aisle. Short-pants and Buddy-roo had each been fitted with a pair, and they were shuffling around, finding their legs like baby foals, while he examined roller-blades in his own size. Of course, each pair that he tried on required a test drive. He’d skate circles around the girls, their giggling filled the store despite the height of its hyper-sized ceiling. (He didn’t intend to buy them for the girls, by the way, he was just giving them a quick lesson, gearing up for the winter skating season, and keeping them occupied while he contemplated his selection.)

How hard is it to select a pair of roller-blades? Apparently not so easy when you’re deciding whether or not to splurge for the super-geared-up sexy pair or just go for the solid they’ll-work-anywhere ones. While he weighed his options, I explored the store and got sucked into the vortex of early Christmas shopping. Which meant the additional game of get-through-the-checkout-without-anyone-seeing-what’s-in-your-cart, which I managed to win, but without any help whatsoever from the very un-elf like cashier.

I should have known we were in trouble when De-facto whispered the forbidden word: “McDonalds.” It’s not at all in his nature, stopping to eat at a rest stop. He’s more of what-can-we-scrap-together-from-the-fridge-and-eat-in-the-car kind of road tripper. So while the peanut-butter-and-Nutella sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and sliced cucumbers aged in another bag (no holes in this one) at the foot of the passenger’s seat of the car, he ordered up a few super-size-me meals and we even sat in the restaurant to eat our fries. (It is absolutely in my nature, to eat fries.)

Our little pause would have been an exotic change of pace if the rest of the drive had been business-as-usual. But it wasn’t. On three different stretches of the A20, we inched along in the cruelest of single-lane traffic, passing through miles of orange-coned construction zones without the sight of even a single hammer. That meant three distinct opportunities to spend 45 minutes traveling the distance that normally takes about five minutes. And
then, when we were so close to home, with what should have been less than ½-hour to go, we found ourselves nose to tail-light with thousands of other idiots like us, stuck in rush-hour traffic during a (seasonal) train strike. The journey from our country house to Paris should have taken just over four hours. We were in the car for nearly eight hours.

The girls, it must be said, were marvelous. Napping. Reading. Coloring. Singing. The computer came out and movies were cued up. They are professional travelers. No whining, “Are we there yet?” Not a single complaint from the peanut gallery in the back of the car.

Just a few grumbles from yours truly in the front seat. Regretting that McChicken sandwich, or something like that.