Actually, we did not smell it . . . All the French cheese notes and the picture of the TGV French trains fit well, since we are spending 10 days in France. Six days in Provence near Avignon, where I write this, and then for quick days in Paris, before we again board a true world-shrinker (for us, at least), the 11 hour Paris/LAX non-stop Air France flight home (no, we don’t miss changing planes in O’Hare).

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Our thoughts continue to be with you. The taste problems must be a challenge, but that challenge certainly has not dimmed your natural environment observations. (Actually, the “aerodynamically prudent blackbirds” [great phrase!! T-shirts, maybe, or the name of a new rock band] are so aligned because they are listening the your spouse’s organ piece included on your previous blog.)

Thoughts do continue to be sent your way. Beamed downward to you on the flight to Paris – route took us over the northern midwest, and then sent west to you as we flew through the shortest (and mostly sleepless, for me) night.

There is a curiously “spirituality” that I feel here in France. It is a Catholic country, yet the woman who I hope will be their next president is an unmarried woman with four children. Despite the county’s problems, even the unemployed youth near Paris have a more secure health care availability thsn Susan or I. If I can’t, or shouldn’t, drive as I age, I would still feel that public transit could easily get me where I want to go. And, there is truly a positive feeling to be in a country that is not destroying its young soldiers, its economy, and its place in the world, in Iraq. This is admittedly a broad (perhaps strange to many/most) sense of a positive spirituality that I do feel here.

So, take care, and keep those blackbirds aligned!!

dick (and susan, off to French fabric shops w/ her sister, and booker, the terrier, who is “vacationing” with susan’s mom and her small poodle in CA)

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booker@fea.net

But as a parent, I know slobber and stink on other levels…one of them being passed on by that sometime bishop’s assistant now residing somewhere in Minnesota who taught us all to sing:

Gertrude Steinmetz ate some beans
Had some gas and said “Oh my!
This is worse than pickle pie!”

Ah, dear Gertrude! How we loved ye!

As it would happen, while I was sitting with my laptop making discoveries about stinky cheeses I haven’t known, the spouse-of-me was attempting (being continually interrupted with my laughter, mostly aimed at the French who ride trains) to read a book by Thomas Lynch, in which he wrote of walking home one night in Galway with another poet friend, after having partaken of a particularly bad curry and plenty of lager. He wrote that they crossed the river bridge “with the elemental fire of flatulence burning behind them”.

It definitely didn’t fit into any existential classification of stink, but it sure was fun.

God bless the cheesemakers, the daughter who sent it, the one who helped us understand that it is far more than we realized, and also the one who cuts it, and eats it. Amen.

Carolyn

Good luck with the cheese! If I wake up some morning, and a north wind is blowing a particularly stinky odor into K.C., I will know that your cheese arrived safely.

Mindy

Actually, WebMd has nothing on it about the lost of taste or how to regain it once it is suppresed so I think that Janna has something – that girl has her existential stink going on!

Sorry – Its hard, really hard not to be a big sister in this malodorous situation

“When you get a good stink on, you are at one with the cosmos!” Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 200

Love! H