It's the Same Old Song

I haven’t been the best poster for the past two and a half weeks. My excuse is that when I arrive here, it always takes me three weeks to a month to recover from my jet lag and to get onto a schedule. I’m just starting to get myself psychologically organized and tomorrow, I’m taking off for Switzerland for a week. So the net result is that I came to Europe for a month and just vegged out on the couch.

This weekend, after two weeks of lying around like a slug, albeit a dried out slug, in front of the fireplace, I finally got into the swing of doing my weight lifting. (In my defense though, I did work many hours on my novel.) After going a while without exercising, and then finally taking it up again, I marvel at how great I feel, and how much more energized I am; and then I berate myself for having ignored my body.

Last night, my husband and I went to dinner at our YOUNG neighbors – they’re our age. Roger also joined us, bringing a special cake that celebrates the three kings who showed up at Jesus’ manger. Baked in the cake, is a small porcelain figurine (now-a-days a Disney character). Whoever finds the figurine in their piece of cake is the king or queen for the year, and they are crowned with the gold colored, paper crown that comes with the cake. There were three pieces that weren’t eaten last night . . . one of them contained the figurine. So we were all disappointed that none of us would be crowned.

During the evening, I fell into my usual habit of quizzing the owners about the history of their house, and quizzing Roger about the war. When I asked him about the war last night, he asked me, “Which one? Fourteen or Forty?”

Roger was telling us about the Gestapo rounding people up to interrogate them. I asked where the Gestapo headquarters were located, and our hostess said she thought that it was where the gynecological clinic was today. The two of us women started laughing uncontrollably, commenting on the fact that both the Gestapo and the gynecologists probably have similar torturing methods. (This morning, I didn’t find the joke so funny, as I thought about all the innocent people who were tortured and killed by the Gestapo and how it wasn’t right to laugh about their plight, even though they were probably dead and gone. And then I thought about the torturing that our soldiers and CIA are conducting in my name, with my tax dollars, and how I don’t do a damn thing to try and stop it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12606-2005Jan15.html I’m just as bad as any French collaborator in the 40’s or German citizen who looked the other way.http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/05/01/edi05019.html)

Roger said that in his early childhood, the house of our hosts was a ruin, and an old widow lived in it. The house was falling down because she had no money to fix it. As Roger pointed out, “it was before social services” so she had to depend upon the neighbors to feed her. In the early thirties, he can remember his grandmother and his mother sending food over for the poor woman. (In the United States in the first quarter of the century, before there was Social Security, the majority of people over the age of sixty lived in poverty. Now in the United States, the government wants to dismantle the system. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6822964?rnd=1105972841870&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.872 or http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7862-2005Jan13.html)

As many of you who read my blog will recall, I’m trying to figure out the TRUE story about the local teenage girl who was shot and killed by the Maquis (the Resistance fighters) during World War II. Well, last night, I was handed another tiny sliver of the puzzle.

The young victim lived in the house of our dinner hosts, with a woman whose husband made his living as a truck driver for our Moulin when it was a thriving business making flour. (I was also given the juicy bit of information that people in the neighborhood consider the former owners of our mill to have been war profiteers. A trait which is rewarded in the U.S. with stock options, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1391431,00.html but here in France, people who do it are considered to be scum; in fact, I’m reading an article about how after the war, they executed thousands of profiteers.)

The husband of the seamstress, to whom the girl was apprenticed, went up to fight the Germans when they first invaded France in 1939. He was held as a prisoner in Germany for the rest of the war. Our hostess reminded us that her uncle miraculously survived two years in Buchenwald because the Germans didn’t like his political views. (Sort of reminds me of the “insurgent” roundups taking place in Iraq right now just before the election.http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=3&u=/ap/20050116/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq)

This additional factoid doesn’t solve the mystery of why the girl was shot or who killed her; but I find it interesting that the family who owned our property, owned the house from which she was abducted, at the time of her abduction. This just heightens the mystery, because obviously, the previous owner, and the other neighbors who were here at the time, know the real story . . . you don’t have your neighbor taken out of a house you own and then don’t bother to find out why her body was dumped not very far away from your property. But for some reason, people don’t want to divulge all the details.

So, as I write this, I see that the old adage is true: the more things change the more things stay the same.