Remembering 50 Years Ago

As hard as I try to be neat and tidy, I think I can wreck a straightened and clean room faster than anyone I know.  I have friends whose homes are immaculate, House and Garden beautiful, no matter the day or hour.  I do not know how they do it.

 So, I did housework this morning, and when I went into the tabac for my newspaper, the proprietress was sweeping her floor, too.  I told her that I had been doing the same thing in my apartment, and we both remarked that it's a never- ending chore. She has become my unofficial French teacher...she engages me in conversation and patiently helps me-every single day.

Be careful of frostbite

  

Then I went to Monoprix for cleaning supplies: furniture polish and good old cleanser with bleach.  The water here is almost as hard as the water of Paris, so I have to be ever vigilant about scale.  After six weeks, things still look pretty good and I want to keep them that way.  On the way, I passed my favorite florist, and stopped to admire the window display.  It's beautiful and artistic without being cloying for the holidays.  

The silver and blue tree against silver and blue skies

In fact, there is relatively little here that would indicate Christmas is as close as US merchants would have us believe.  Yes, the big silver tree is up, but somehow it's oddly unobtrusive; maybe because it's silver, it blends in with the silver skies.

Holiday window

And out of those skies, sleet/snow was falling as I returned home with my furniture polish and bleach.  The temperatures were definitely in the frozen precipitation range.  I don't want those pretty little miniature daffodils to get frost-bitten.  

I have been thinking a great deal about the event of 50 years ago.  I am sure that the "anniversary" media coverage here in France is nothing compared to what must be playing out in the States, but there have been some documentaries on French TV.  They don't feel exploitative; and most of them have been centered around Jackie. The French loved her.  One of the programs aired an interview with a French journalist who was in Dallas at the time.  He talked about the taxi driver who laughed and crowed about having gotten rid of JFK.  Have we always been so spiteful?

I had turned 12 about two and a half months earlier. and was sitting with my classmates in a basement classroom off of  "the tunnel" at Thurmont High School.  I think it was in Mr. Gernand's room.  Our class was one of "those" classes; the mix of personalities drove more than one teacher around the bend.  But on this afternoon, there wasn't a peep.  We were all glued to the square box of the PA system, as if somehow we could see what was happening.  I remember that we didn't change classes for the rest of the afternoon, but sat there, waiting, waiting, waiting for some scrap of news.  I was just a kid, too young to get really involved in politics yet, but I knew that something momentous, world-changing had just happened. 

Flowers for remembering

I don't think I will ever forget, or even need help in remembering, but I brought a little bouquet home as a remembrance.