You sent a ‘Save the date’ notice to all the guests-mostly Americans and some other cultures-two weeks in advance.
You explained why the celebration has to happen on the weekend not on Thursday since everyone works on Thursday in France.
You went to the special butcher and ordered the turkey, asking again, as you do every year, that all the innards need to be out and, for a little extra money, could they start the roasting for you.
You arranged to pick up the turkey the morning of your Thanksgiving feast, so you’d have at least three hours to finish the cooking.
You sent out e-mails far and wide asking where to find cranberries in Paris.
You wrote a lovely invitation with the history of Thanksgiving, then explained how it is a myth, yet it is most Americans’ favorite holiday.
You requested that each person think of something to share that they feel especially grateful for.
You borrowed chairs from the neighbors feeling a bit guilty that you were having a party and not inviting them.
You then wrote a note reminding the neighbors of the American holiday Thanksgiving and thanked them for contributing to it.
You went to the local Fruits Primeurs and bought up two kilos of green beans and a massive amount of potatoes, wondering again why sweet potatoes had never made it to France.
You pulled out all your Thanksgiving decorations and your pumpkin pie spice that you bring back each year from California.
You put together the ingredients for pumpkin pie and stored in the refrigerator.
You set your table early as it made you smile every time you walked by it.
You instructed your cat that she is not allowed to jump on the table or play with any of the decorations.
You sighed as your cat stared at you with that look that said “Don’t tell me what to do.”
You wrote e-cards to all your friends far and wide wishing them a Happy Thanksgiving.
You set the delivery time for the e-cards for the morning of Thanksgiving.
You went to sleep knowing everything would be perfect.
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I’m surprised to learn, after sniffing up a storm today, closing my eyes, and hoping the olfactory part of my mind would wander down some ancient pathways, that I have no real smell memory, not even one that reminds me of ‘home’. I have three smells that take me back to earlier years. Someone taking the first puff on a cigarette. There was nothing like that smell to me and it was non-reproducible. I can picture a friend (different friends throughout my smoking career) lighting up, taking a deep inhale, and blowing out the smoke. All or much of it landing on my nose. Today I try to move away from cigarettes. Don’t really want the memory pull.
Then there is being outside on a walk and, suddenly out of nowhere, smelling marijuana. Usually, I never see where it’s coming from. But the smell takes me back to the most romantic of my memories of my hippie years when everything was in front of me, and I had left all the bad, all the painful back at home. I easily picture in my mind, friends sitting around in a circle. Sometimes we are talking. Sometimes we are listening to music. But always, it was friendly, and it was an invitation for my brain to take a break from whatever the day had held.
And lastly, there is just-baked bread. Since weight has always been problematic, I don’t have great associations with that smell as delicious and heavenly as it is. Since I’ve been in Paris and no longer worry about my weight (though I never eat bread), I’ve learned to just appreciate the smell, how aromatic it is. There is a boulangerie on the corner of my street and if I’m up and out early enough, I walk by and can inhale the staff of life while watching the cooks who have been up since 3:30 am take a break leaning up against the wall of the shop smoking cigarettes.
I must be an auditory memory person. I can hear the first three bars of “EaterPurple People ”, and I’m back in my youth, nine years old, lying in my twin bed with measles. A transistor radio propped on a chair in front of me where I first discovered Hy Lit on WIBG, Philadelphia.
I can hear the first note of ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and I’m in a VW bus with four other people riding up the west coast of Italy singing at the top of my lungs. I’m returning to Florence where I had spent my senior year abroad and I was buzzing with excitement.
I can hear three strums of ‘Silver Dagger’ from Joan Baez’s first album and I’m sitting on the floor at Christmas, down in the rec room, my parents, uncle and aunt, and Peggy all sitting there. I have a guitar and I’m playing a song I wrote. We’re at the far end of the room next to the doors that open up onto the backyard. I’m wearing my dark hair parted in the middle and trying to look as much like Joan Baez as I possibly can.
These are visceral feelings I have no control over. I recently listened to the Beatles on Spotify. Here Comes the Sun started the playlist. I was instantaneously overwhelmed with memories of being young, of being hopeful, of just wanting to have fun, and not worrying about money, family, or health. I had to sit down and take deep breaths and just let the feelings roll through me. It all feels so long ago—literally another time, a different person that was there.
Would I go back there? Not on your life? What hits me is always the best of those times. Music was absolutely the best of the best. I lost myself in music. I listened to rock ‘n roll around the clock. I don’t know when it stopped but it stopped. And now it’s like sparkling sand that flows through my fingers. I can’t hold onto the feelings, nor do I want to. But I do love that I have a magic key that takes me straight back and I get to relive a tiny part of the past.
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At 10 pm CET, Tuesday night, Voting Day in the USA, I was ready to go to bed. I’ve been sick and too tired to be anxious. I checked my e-mail from my sister who has worked her butt off for MI Elections: Her last e-mail reported: “We’re all going crazy with worry today–for Michigan and for the country. I’m having a small election “party” but we all fear it’s going to be a wake…” This last e-mail I received was sent one hour later and read:`’Most of the people I invited aren’t coming because they are so depressed and just don’t want to face it. So it’s going to be weird.” She followed with “Not much is going to be known for MI even by tomorrow (my tomorrow). And if the D’s win anything, they’ll call it fraud, so it’s all a big mess.”
I woke up Wednesday morning to two wins in MI, Governor Whitmer has retained her seat and a house member has also won. According to CNN, the Dems were very happy and relieved. I wanted to call my sister and wake her up but thought better of it.
from Frank Bruni’s Op Ed piece in NYTIMES.
People have had a rainbow of reactions. I wondered about my own lack of anxiety. Perhaps it was because I’ve been sick for over a week and didn’t have the energy. Maybe I’m just too far away living here in Paris or maybe I’ve started to integrate that it’s useless to worry without enough information. I did pray- before I went to bed—I think it was a heartfelt prayer to whatever Higher Power watches over us. I prayed for kindness to the US. The papers were predicting a blood bath for the Democrats, and, naive me, just could not fathom that the God of my misunderstanding would send that kind of facism to the US. Unless it was to teach us a lesson. That particular god sent Hitler and the Holocaust. If there was a lesson there, it certainly wasn’t learned. With the arrival of Trump and all the ugliness out from under the rug, there is clearly as much antisemitism and white supremacy as ever.
I’ve been watching the Lincoln Dilemna on Apple TV+ and, it seems to my untrained historical mind, that things were worse back then. Worse to the point that eleven states ceceded from the Union and were willing to go to war for their beliefs. And though the South lost the war, they’ve never really given up or given in. Then there was Woodrow Wilson….”Wilson defended segregation on “scientific” grounds in private, and (scholars) describe him as a man who “loved to tell racist ‘darky‘ jokes about black Americans.” – Wikipedia. I’ve never seen statistics but I’d be interested to know how many Americans sided with Germany during WWII.
People say there will be another Civil War. I’ve said that I didn’t see massive change without violence—as if there wasn’t enough violence now. With the US’s hands in so many other wars, where would there be people willing to fight in a full-out war. The question people over here in Europe are asking is how could so much money be spent on these elections? 9.3 billion dollars. Can that be right? And now more millions will be thrown at Georgia between now and Dec. 6th. I had some naive hope that all the bullying and demanding e-mails for money might stop but no. I’ve received at least 100 in my Spam since the run-off was announced.
There is great relief that there was no red wave. Biden called it a victory. My Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, says Democracy won. There are still outstanding contests to be called. This morning I learned that Mark Kelly has been declared the winner of the Arizona senate seat. Forty-nine to forty-nine. So it could be that nothing has changed—the Senate divided fifty/fifty. The Times says the big change is Trump. He had 330 personally hand-picked people running. Very few won.
Is there anyone who hasn’t seen this?
Trump disgustingly threatened De Santos if he ran against him for President in 2024. Two men with god complexes running against each other. If it wasn’t so sad, it would be fascinating. The media view, one which I agree with, is that the Republican party is moving away from Trump—but towards what? A more eloquent white supremacist or someone else?
There is still so much to learn from these elections, especially the two Senate seats in Nevada and Georgia. As of this writing, the two contenders in Nevada are neck and neck with a large percentage of mail-in ballots still to be counted. We won’t know Georgia’s outcome for at least a month. And now I learn that Nevada finished counting and has a Democratic Senator. A close call. Fifty/Forty-Nine.
Here in France, the midterms have been in the News. But my french friends say people are tired of us and these shenanigans (my word). Nobody understands what is happening to a great country like the USA. How could so much blatant hatred be tolerated? Of course, we have Marine Le Pen and her far-right but somehow to this American, it isn’t the same.
These are all thoughts. The next two years will be very interesting.
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If you mention baseball to a french person, they will either look at you incomprehensibly or roll their eyes. It’s not that they don’t know about the sport of baseball. It’s that they don’t understand such slow action and, therefore, the French do not do baseball. At the World Baseball Classic, an every four-year event that actually includes teams from all over the world, the Dutch have a baseball team, the Italians have a baseball team, but the French team is largely composed of Major League players who have some French in their ancestry.
Opening Nite in Houston-Game 1 (photo from CNN website as are all the rest of the photos).
So it is with great gratitude that I watch Apple TV+’s Weekly WrapUp every Saturday. In the US, it is shown on Friday nights, but as I live in a timezone that is six hours ahead of the East Coast, I get it on Saturdays. Now that the PlayOffs are in full swing, I get a daily report which I watch at noon. I can watch a nine-inning game in eight minutes. I’m so happy I get that. And for some people, eight minutes is just perfect. They get all the action and none of the stress of waiting, inning by inning, to learn who wins. For those of you who aren’t big baseball fans, the better team doesn’t always win. It’s part of baseball.
For Game 1 of the World Series, the Philadelphia Phillies were playing the Astros in Houston. I don’t know how fans in the US feel but, for me, the Astros have taken over from the Yankees as “the team we love to hate.” After the Astros won the World Series in 2017, it was discovered by Major League Baseball that the team was stealing signs. They did not lose their title. Fans were outraged. Maybe not Houston fans! Ok, then there is Dusty Baker who is now the manager of the Astros. He’s just about as nice a baseball person as you can find. It’s hard to imagine that he would be a party to sign stealing (any more than the rest of the teams). I know there are fans who are convinced that the Astros are still crooked.
Dusty Baker, manager of the Houston Astros
Back to Game 1 played last Friday. It went ten innings. For a fan like me, watching a nail-biter in eight minutes just doesn’t do it. As the lead went back and forth between the teams, I was just imagining what it would be like sitting in the stands, ecstatic when it is your team ahead and down in the dumps when the other team took the lead. In the end, in the tenth inning, the Phillies won. So a word about the Astros Opening Nite pitcher. I realize that for some of you this is way more information than you care to know. But it will help you understand why some people breathe baseball. And why as my friend, Darcy’s father used to say: “there are two seasons in the year. Winter and baseball season.” He was not wrong.
Justin Verlander, Opening nite pitcher for the Astros.
Justin Verlander was the Opening Nite pitcher for the Astros. He is and has been a great pitcher. He used to pitch for the Detroit Tigers. Back in the day when the Oakland A’s finished first in the American League West, somehow their first opponent in the playoffs was the Detroit Tigers two years in a row. And twice with the two teams tied 2-2 with one game to go to play the next tier of the playoffs, Justin Verlander would be on the mound for Game 5. It didn’t matter how tired he was, like Marly’s ghost, he loomed large over the A’s. And the A’s lost. Justin Verlander is moche ( french for ugly, total yuk) in the minds of A’s fans. And here he was, ten years later, Opening Nite pitcher for the team we love to hate. It may have only been an eight-minute game, but for this A’s fan, I jumped up and down when the stats said that Verlander was the losing pitcher!!!
I grew up for the first fourteen years of my life in the Philadelphia suburbs. Nothing about Philadephia says ‘home’ to me. My mother moved from Princeton, NJ to lower Bucks County in her late seventies. So it is easy for me to root for the Phillies. The last time the Phils won the World Series was in 2008, the year my mother died. The Oakland A’s started out in 1904 as the Philadelphia A’s. In 1954, they moved to Kansas City. After a short unsuccessful stint there, they moved to Oakland in 1967. I’ve always felt a kinship to the Philadelphia A’s and, at one point in my life, was given a lifetime membership to the Philadelphia Athletics Historical Museum.
Jimmy Foxx of the Philadelphia Athletics
Four World Series games have been played. The teams are tied 2-2. Only the first two games were tight with the teams matching each other play for play. Last night, the Astros set a WS record: 4 pitchers pitched a No Hitter. Not one Phillies player got a hit. So what’s left is the best of three!
fans in Philadelphia waving their rally towels
If you’ve read this far, thank you. People ask how I could have ever moved to Paris when I love baseball so much. I really don’t have an answer to that question. I can tell you that it feels very nice to write about baseball. I am hoping to go to Spring Training in Arizona next March. So I’ll end with a shout out to all Phillies fans around the world. Go Phighting Phils!!!
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Out My Window 