Together Again For the First Time (In France)

Like Martin and Lewis reunited, a lost Lucy & Ethel escapade, or perhaps merely a low rent Gilmore Girls, daughter Hazel and I got back together during the holiday season. We had been a team for so long, as I guess often happens with single parent families. When she was preparing to head off to college I worried about what I would talk about with people, or even what I would use for stage banter as she was such a major topic and source of inspiration for me. Now she was coming to France to visit Eric and I, and I felt like I was about to have this missing part of myself back - the me that I could only automatically be with Hazel around.

Default mom will probably make grilled cheese sandwiches and pour juice when my daughter’s sixty, so I fell back into that mode immediately. I wondered about how transient we’ve been in the last couple of years, and would a house in a village in the southwest of France feel like home to her, but as long as there’s wireless, a working toaster and at least one or two Christopher Guest movies on DVD that’s apparently no problem.

And anyway, for months she’d been excited about visiting France. She’d been studying the language for the last few years of high school but, more importantly, had gotten into French pop music of the 60's and 70's in a big way, along with Godard and Truffaut. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that existential angst and remnants of ye ye fashion are in short supply in the French countryside, but of course she figured that out quickly. We enjoyed walking around the village when everything was covered in a magical Christmas frost, visiting the neighboring towns of Rochechouart, Saint Junien and Chalus, and Hazel loved roaming the streets of Limoges which is a good mixture of the industrial, historical, artistic and mundane. (Wait, I could be describing Cleveland there - but thankfully I'm not!) But the highlight of course, aside from hearing a rooster crowing for real, for the first time, had to be our short trip to Paris.