The Odyssey

Last week, my husband put his back out moving some furniture we had bought at an auction. Even though he went to a chiropractor referred to him by a friend, his back wasn’t getting any better. So on Friday afternoon, I went in search of a heating pad.

I started my search in our nearby “big” village. At the first pharmacy, the woman said that they didn’t have any, but would be receiving a shipment the next day. I thanked her and visited the other pharmacy in the village, which didn’t have one either.

I decided to drive into our bigger town, 30km away, to a pharmacy that specializes in items for home invalid care and homeopathy therapy. They didn’t have a heating pad, but they had a new fangled “water bottle” that you put in the microwave. I explained to the woman that I didn’t have a microwave, could she suggest where I might find a heating pad. She told me of another pharmacy at the bottom of the boulevard.

The sexy young thing at this fourth pharmacy, told me that they didn’t have a heating pad, but they did have this gel pad that you put in the microwave. I said that wasn’t what I was looking for and thanked her for her time, thinking that it was a VERY good thing that my husband hadn't happened upon this pharmacy and this clerk because his back pain might worsen as a result of his reaction towards this young nubile clerk.

I visited three more pharmacies. No one had what I was looking for.

Feeling desperate, I went back to the compassionate middle-aged woman with the microwavable, micro-fiber “hot water” bag and ignoring her bemused smile, I purchased one. Then I drove out to one of the hideous BOX stores and purchased a microwave – something my husband had recently said we should acquire, to which I had responded haughtily that I would NEVER, NEVER have a microwave in my French kitchen. (But, as I’ve learned over and over again, as soon as I swear I will NEVER do something, I soon find myself zombie-like, doing it.)

I didn’t return home until after the church bells had signaled aperitif time and my husband had just started trying to figure out how he needed to go about asking the gendarmes to track me down.

I tell you this long, sad saga to bring you up to speed on YESTERDAY.

Yesterday morning, I sent my husband into the village to check and see if the shipment of heating pads had arrived at the first pharmacy I visited . . . and to do the bakery run. He was functioning well, albeit in pain, and I thought the outing would do him good. While he was gone, I decided to move the sofa in the living room and lay down a different rug.

Of course, it was inevitable that that I would put my back out, since I had been sort of teasing my husband, for the past week, about how he had turned into a crippled old man over night. There it was, my bad karma, searing through my immoveable back and reminding me that in the future, I should refrain from poking fun at the misfortune of others.

When my husband returned home, I asked him if he had purchased TWO electric pads . . . he said he hadn’t purchased one, because the confused middle-aged woman at the pharmacy said they didn’t have any and she didn’t know about any shipment that was to have arrived on Saturday. Through my pain, I mustered the strength to joke that I did want to grow old together with my husband, but I didn’t want it to happen so suddenly.

A few weeks ago, we had scheduled with the man who works as our mayor’s handyman-stonemason to start work repairing, and slightly enlarging our terrace (and perhaps putting on a balustrade railing to add a little elegance to our farmhouse), to start work this Monday morning -- with the stipulation that my husband would work as his day-laborer. Bernard arranged with the Mayor to take the week off, the materials were purchased, and we even found some cool OLD balustrades at an auction – so destiny seemed to be leading us smoothly along on our little This Old Hovel Improvement Odyssey, until my husband was struck down with that most pervasive and dreaded of French Plagues – THE BAD BACK. All seemed lost when I mysteriously contracted the malady.

I told my husband that he needed to walk to our neighbors Leonce and Yvette’s house and talk with their tall, strapping grandson who was staying with them. The guy is quite the stud, and with his muscular body, I predict he’ll go far in California politics . . . certain to be governor of that state in thirty years. My husband, who I never tire of reminding, ever so sweetly of course, that he actually studied French in school and was so good at it that he was able to test out of the language requirement at an Ivy League College, insisted that I, who have never studied French, spoke the language much more clearly and precisely, and he thought that I should go. Of course, he was eating his pain au chocolate and didn’t want to run any more errands, so I took his complement with a grain of salt.

I grabbed a bag of garbage, threw it in the basket on my bicycle, and rode the short distance to Leonce and Yvette’s. (I would throw the garbage in the communal container after I was finished with my mission.)

I rode in their yard as Yvette was just coming out of her house. Two of her daughters and their husbands were visiting, along with the assorted grandchildren, and Yvette was in the middle of preparing the big family Sunday dinner . . . cleaning a few chickens. As I was telling her about our sorry plight, the future Governor of California walked out of the house and told me that my French was much improved, and kissed me on both cheeks. Now this was something new, as I had just told my husband that the kid never seemed to be very warm towards me . . . I passed it off as a liability of growing up in the big city of Bordeaux. But yesterday he was very warm and gracious and I attributed it to the fact that he could now understand what the hell I was saying.

The grandson (I felt awkward calling him a petit fils, “little son.”) was very willing to come over and work for us, especially when I told him that we would pay; but desole ,unfortunately, he was leaving that afternoon for Bordeaux to start a new job the next day. Yvette said that she would have Leonce help us, EXCEPT, that he was building a stone garotte for a man in another village and that would take all week.

Dejectedly, I headed to Roger’s. He has a bad leg and he doesn’t volunteer to do lifting work or shoveling, (he has to do too much of it in caring for his vines) so I wasn’t going to ask him if he could help with the work, just if he knew someone we could hire. When I arrived he was going out the door to pick up his meal from the local restaurant. But he was pleased to see me and he invited me in. I sat down at his table which he had already set nicely for his lunch. His Sunday loaf of bread (he only buys one a week from the wife of the baker I’ve dubbed, Madame Tres Sexy) was sitting on the table whole and fresh.

He scoffed at the idea that there would be a young man we could find to help us. He said that the young men used to do physical work, but they don’t now. They just visit their grandparents on vacation with no intention of working. Would I be interested in a glass of ratafia? Well, okay, if he was insisting, but just a little one. And don’t haul out the “chips” – the assortment of snacks he keeps on hand in case Americana show up and he needs to defend his home against such insatiable locusts. He expressed surprise that I wasn’t interested in devouring a bag of potato chips, a package of pistachios, and an entire saucisson . . . I’m sure he thought I was ill.

We sat and sipped our drinks, and I told him that Therese had told me that ALL the women were after him. He turned a little bit red, and then I was proud of myself when I made a joke and he understood it. I told him that was his cross to bear in life and he laughed heartily.

I mentioned my grape vine that seems to have some sort of brown plague attacking the edges of its leaves. He said he’d come over and look at it . . .but that was after he sort of let out a little gasp, as if my vine had developed phylloxera (that’s the disease that wiped out the vines in France in 1870). I felt a bit guilty, and worried, that soon I’ll be known as a sort of Typhoid Mary among the locals.

(For some unknown reason the cat likes to hang out next to that vine, so it just dawned on me that perhaps the mysterious brown spots are a result of the cat spraying the vine with his urine.)

I wanted to let Roger get to the restaurant, so I bid him au revoir and implored him to ask at the restaurant if there was anyone who might want to work. He told me he was certain that there wasn’t anyone.

As I was pulling into our driveway on my bike, I saw Leonce on his bicycle, talking with my husband. Low and behold, Leonce had called up the guy he was scheduled to work the week with and postponed the work so that he could tackle our terrace with the man from the Mayor’s office. I gave him a big hug. Leonce said that it was more important to help out a neighbor than it was to help out some acquaintance that lived in a village 7km away.

My husband and I were both thrilled that our problem was solved, and emotionally pleased by the turn of events.

After Leonce left and our euphoria subsided, my husband and I started to worry about how the two egos of the master stonemasons would get along . . . envisioning a possible scenario of murder by balustrade.

My husband confided to me that he was embarrassed that an 82-year-old-man would have to take his place doing manual labor. I told him not to feel too badly. I had read an advertisement at the pharmacy claiming that 3 out of 4 French adults have back problems . . . and when I had mentioned this to Roger when we were sipping our ratafia, Roger said it must be true, because the only person he knows who doesn’t have a bad back, is 82-year-old Leonce.