The first time I tried to write this post, it was nights sixty-one through seventy. The second time it went through seventy-three. Now I have lived another day, and I’m sitting here at the end of it searching for a some theme, some thread, some…connecting fiber, if you will, to coalesce the past two weeks into a coherent post. And, you want to know what’s nice? When you set yourself to that task, and the answer that comes back is beauty.
First of all, I stole my title from Zadie Smith’s gorgeous novel, which has kept me excellent company over most of the time that this post covers, and that I can’t recommend highly enough. So there’s beauty number one.
B of all (hi honey!), I spent an exceptionally lovely Thanksgiving week in Florida with my betrothed and his (soon, happily, to be my) wonderful family. Beauty number two.
Then, at the end of the week, I got to put on a pretty dress and hold on to my handsome man and be showered with love and luck and wishes for our happiness. This is a pretty extraordinary fashion in which to be welcomed into someone’s family, but, from what I’ve observed, a fairly ordinary expression of the enormous grace and generosity of my future parents-in-law. Sara and Mort, thank you.
Marc Dahl took this photo. You can see more of Marc’s work here: modi5.com/matt_and_holly
Then there was some ugliness with an airline and a 4 day-long return trip to France, but I’ll skip over that except to say that the Meilleur Ouestern at the Marseille Airport has an excellent staff and a very serviceable bathtub that may have actually saved my life that night.
If you have to spend four days in airports and on airplanes and in buses and hotel rooms, I recommend coming home to something like this:
It will make you feel a lot better. We’re up to number 4 now.
Number five is being invited over to dinner chez Sandra and Remy, eating delicious pizza (well, the tops of delicious pizza for me) and drinking Beaujolais (c’est le moment), trying (and mostly failing) to play a trivia game based on French pop-culture, but starting to feel like we have some actual, real, live French friends.
Number six is today, when The Fig, The Pineapple, and I went to Marseille with yet another of our new French friends. (Getting French friends is like dominoes. Once you trick one of them into falling over…) We cued an hour and a half to get tickets to Aida (Verdi is like Sting here. Wait! God I’m old. I meant to say Hannah Montana. Hannah Montana!), failed to get tickets, but ended up spending a delightful afternoon walking along the water.
This is me, searching for rocks
Then we went to Vierge de la Garde (or Notre Dame de la Garde – Our Lady of the Watch, the guardian of seafarers) which I believe to be the most beautiful church I have been inside in my lifetime.
And that’s number seven.
I almost forgot one. Last night we watched the Miss France pageant, which claims to concern itself with beauty. It did give us the gift of seeing a bunch of girls dressed like knit toilet-paper cozies dance with a horse in a pool, so there’s that.
Miss Pays de Loire was robbed.
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