There goes another one.

With two words, I have just ended a friendship of six years, give or take a few months. They—those words, best left to your imagination—have been waiting in the wings for a while; the other night I looked hard at them for about thirty seconds and then gave the nod. This is unfortunate for several reasons, the first being that email was involved, the second because it’s never a cause for celebration when you’ve had enough of someone whose company you used to like.

The world is full of advice on how to navigate relationships, whether familial, marital, amicable or commercial, and what to do with the ones that don’t work. We—and by ‘we’ I mean women, since men don’t seem to have the same issues—are often encouraged to free ourselves from the confines of judgemental relationships and one-way connections, to detoxify our lives, to cull the people who don’t fulfil us.

I don’t entirely disagree, but that kind of counsel seems lacking in nuance. Why toss people out instead of recycling/repurposing them? Could I have tried harder to understand her? Will I have regrets? Will she? And was I fair? The answer to that last question—which niggles at me most—is ‘probably not’, given my unavoidably subjective view of her behaviour, which I interpreted as critical, controlling and wholly lacking in self-awareness.

I have previously lamented the loss of a long-time friend who purposefully went radio silent without any warning, or at least none that I picked up on. It took me years to stop wondering what had gone wrong, and only then because I ran into her and asked for an explanation (there wasn’t one). I did, however, feel better for having been able to say, matter-of-factly, how much it had hurt to lose her.

Then there were other friendships that simply ran out of gas. Lack of communality, proximity or plain disinterest rather than a disagreement are, I would guess, the way many of us don’t bother to put energy into s long as both parties are lukewarm, it’s an understandable, unlamented outcome. We are enriched by situational and temporary relationships, but there’s no rule that says they all have to last a lifetime.

Last summer, after spending a week together on a boat, a friend of twenty years suggested we call it quits. Yes, it’s true that close quarters and stressful situations can make or break a bond, and in this case, the trip served to highlight things we didn’t appreciate about the other. Rather than opting out of future holidays together, my friend figured we’d be better off with an amicable divorce. Without enough love to counterbalance the dislike, it was a reasonable thing to do, although months later she second-guessed that decision. We are currently in a sort of DMZ, trying to figure out if there’s enough left to give it another go.

Nobody really likes confrontation. Some engage in it willingly enough, but I’m pretty sure that, deep down, they don’t enjoy it. Deliberately and openly ending a friendship—especially while pissed off—without getting into that superheated territory, however, requires a level of skill and control that I do not possess. In this most recent parting my irritation morphed into anger and, best buds with adrenalin that it is, overwhelmed any diplomacy I might have had.

In the days since, I’ve had to remind myself of the long lead-up to that moment and rationalized the positive aspect of being unambiguous. My friend and I would have drifted apart at some near-future point, of that I’m sure, but the whole thing feels like having to put the cat down—you know the end is inevitable, but it feels crappy to do it.

My youngest son, an astute observer of human behaviour, is perplexed by this sort of thing. He sees no point to drawing lines in the sand and thinks that friends should be appreciated for their good points without dwelling on their shortcomings. Guys don’t dump guys for the kind of behaviours that bother women, he says, and unscientific study of men I am acquainted with would suggest that he’s right.

On the other hand, when men do let a friendship go, they tend to get past it and not agonize over the decision. Maybe they’re on to something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will we have to get used to the dark?

In June of 1944 my mother crossed the Atlantic in a convoy of ships;  a hopeful war bride with a newborn on her way to join my father in England. My parents had  met in Calgary, where the British government had sent my father and thousands of other young recruits to learn to fly in airspace safely beyond the range of enemy aircraft. After completing his training, he was transferred to a base in Ontario where he and my mother married and lived for a year before he was assigned to a bomber squadron in England.

The voyage was a thrilling adventure for a twenty-year-old—one who could reasonably be described as wilful—traveling outside her country for the first time.  Ignoring the warnings of the crew, she spent much of her time on deck with my six-week-old brother clutched in her arms, seeking respite in the wind and salt-spray from the sea-sickened misery of the other, mostly female, passengers.  The convoys that regularly plied the north Atlantic were made up of merchant ships carrying supplies to Britain, troopships, passenger vessels and their naval escorts. She knew about the German U-boats that prowled beneath, but likely had no idea of the magnitude of the threat they represented. Over the course of the North Atlantic battle, some 3,500 Allied ships were lost.

If she was initially charmed by the picturesque setting of her new home, she soon found out what it meant to be living in a country at war. A few weeks after she arrived at my grandparents’ house, thirteen miles from London, Germany began to bombard the capital  with V-1 rockets—buzz bombs, so named for their noisy flight. Launched from the French and Dutch coasts at a rate of more than a hundred per day, the radio-guided missiles were intended to wreak both physical damage and psychological trauma, and were notoriously inaccurate.

My grandfather was the village air raid warden, responsible for getting people to the shelters when the air raid sirens sounded. My mother hated the dank and crowded bunkers and after a time, refused to go back. My grandparents were appalled; she took the chance that the bombs wouldn’t fall short of their target, and that it one did, she’d know by its sudden silence to take cover.

It seems odd to me now that she never revealed whether she had been afraid. If she told her stories with some  pride in her youthful bravado, it was only because she had survived, along with everyone else in the family. My grandparents, having already lived through the nightmare of World War I and the Blitz of 1940-41, were probably far more fearful of the toll the war might take.

Hearing about my mother’s wartime experiences—my quiet father said far less about what he had seen and done—was like being read a book with thrilling bits where the heroine is up against darkness, but armed with resourcefulness, luck and courage, she prevails. My mother’s real-life adventures became entwined with what I learned in school about the war, and my child’s conclusion was that everyone had learned a crucial lesson and would never make that mistake again. War would never threaten my world.

Although the list of regional, non-Western conflicts since 1945 is a very long one, my assumption wasn’t so naive. It was supported by reality: former enemies signed peace treaties, then trade agreements. Government ministers conferred with their foreign counterparts. Borders opened. Belgian students basked on the beaches of Eastern Bloc countries. The Common Market became the European Union; the League of Nations expanded to become the United Nations. Apologies were made, even if they were slow to come. The Berlin wall fell to human hands and hope. Gorbachev threw open the Iron Curtain.

Peace wasn’t a dream; it was a living thing. Cooperation allowed disparate peoples to travel, exchange, discuss, encourage, educate, benefit, assist, harmonize, understand. It’s hard to pick the single most significant word in that incomplete list.

In Europe, where I have twice lived for the better part of seventeen years, the opportunities were legion. They still are, for now, but doors across the continent are beginning to close. With Brexit looming, the rise of the nationalist right in France, Holland, Hungary and Austria—among others—and the terrifying news that the world’s most powerful country has elected an authoritarian demagogue who will sit at the head of the table with Putin at the other end, we may well be in for it.

Whatever the eventual sources of frustration and disappointment in the bureaucratic workings and decisions of the European Union —and they are numerous— its member countries signed on purposefully as partners in solidarity, joining a real-life experiment in economic and social cohesion. If, like a slo-mo images of an imploding building, the underpinnings of the EU begin to fail with the desertion of its member states, then a war in the West will no longer be unthinkable. Goodwill is not enough; nations need to be obliged to work together in mutually advantageous ways, to commit to the idea that they are stronger together in all ways, not just economic ones.

Inclusive and outward-looking foreign policy can temper tribalism—the source of one of our greatest comforts and some of our worst behaviour—but if populist movements halt or reverse the progress made towards international co-operation, then conflict between Western nations who’ve been doing their best to play nice since the Second World War will not long be unthinkable.

I have always believed that humankind was moving—and wanted to move—towards  breaking down barriers in all things. We were able to point to the evidence that ways had been found to accommodate and respect differences, that we preferred partnership over conflict and that the lessons of history continued to remind us of what could happen if we went off course.

Since the American election, I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother and wondering how long it took her to get her head around the fact that she lived in an unsafe world. Months? A week? An instant? Perhaps she did what I have been doing since November 8—uselessly returning in my mind to the day before the lights dimmed.

I never imagined that I would be afraid for the generations to come. My life, like that of much of my boomer cohort, was better in significant ways than my parents’ had been. I was confident that we would continue that course, and make the effort to equalize our society. Instead, our children and grandchildren face not only potentially catastrophic ecological problems, but social and economic ones that raise the possibility of conflict on a large scale.

My mother crossed the Atlantic again seven years later, returning permanently to Canada with my father and my two brothers. She was hopeful about the future, looking forward to its possibilities and promise, and I’m certain she wasn’t disappointed. Did the fact that she had known a global war in her lifetime make her more or less optimistic about the chances of it happening again?

Her stories were a link to a time that we all need to remember, and I can only hope that the memory-keepers among us will help keep the lights on.

 

 

 

When You Least Expect It

I had the advantage, in that I saw her first.  Fifteen seconds, in which I could digest the fact that the woman at the desk was the one who had haunted me for years. She was concentrating on some paperwork, while I waited for her to lift her head to ask,  presumably, how she could be of assistance.

Instead, she stared up at me, stunned. It must be fate, I said. Her face stiffened into, what? A kind of wary defensiveness, perhaps. Why would you say that? Without waiting for an answer, she said, almost angrily, What are you doing back here?

But I never really left, I said. I was sure you knew that.

We looked at each other for a long moment. Are you well? I asked.

Her expression softened. Yes, yes I am. She leaned forward, cupped her hand to her mouth and whispered, confidingly, I’m never going to retire. They don’t know how old I am, and you’d better not tell them!

My heart relaxed. If she could talk to me like this, then perhaps there was a chance we could find our way back, even briefly. The telephone rang. I have to answer this, she said apologetically. The call was brief; she put the handset down and leaned back, smiling. I have two beautiful granddaughters now.

I probably shouldn’t have said that I knew. She recoiled, her mouth forming a soundless How? I’m friends with K on Facebook, I said.  .

I don’t like Facebook, she spat. Have no use for it. She was clearly shocked by the fact that her daughter was in contact with me, even if from a distance. I hoped there would be no repercussions for the younger woman, while understanding that my former friend was hurt. I couldn’t blame her, although a part of me thought You see? You might have discarded me, but she had her own loyalties.    

I didn’t know where the conversation was going to go now, but was more intrigued than apprehensive. I felt like a clinical observer, watching the sea changes of my subject.

To my surprise, she began to talk about how the experience of having grandchildren had changed her, and how different was the connection with them than with her own children.  I realized then what I had forgotten about her over the last ten years – how lyrically she could express herself. Our shared pleasure in the beauty of language had been something so special that, as I was now reminded, the loss of it flooded through me.

I’ve missed you, I said. I used to dream about you so often, that we were friends again.

I dreamt about you, too, about a month ago.

Why did you disappear?

I had longed to ask the question for most of those years and now it came quietly, without emotion.  She cocked her head, looked past me. I don’t know. You know, I’d have to think about that.

I assume you got my letter, I said. The one I wrote about six years ago. She nodded, said nothing.

It hurt, that you never replied.  She was clearly uncomfortable. This isn’t the place to talk about it, she said.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a scene – I just tried to understand why you withdrew like that without ever saying anything. I imagined all kinds of possibilities: that I had offended you, that you disapproved of my choices at the time, that…well, I had no idea. Perhaps you were just tired of the friendship.

She jumped on that. Yes, that’s probably it. I think we were just done, she said,

So there it was. As simple, as enigmatic as that.

I didn’t want to let go just yet. I asked about her husband, a guy I had liked a lot.   And what about M? At the mention of her son’s name, she sighed deeply. You know, if you’d asked me about him a month ago, I would have burst into tears. He’s gone through so much, a lot of self-discovery, had to figure out what he really wants. But amazingly, now he seems to have done it, and he’s in a really good place.

She talked on about him, this boy I had known since he was born, had seen grow into a person of immense talent and spectacular intelligence. She confided in me as though we were back in those days when we’d have a regular date to eat Italian, staying late over endless cups of coffee, talking, talking, talking. Feeling through our fingertips – literally! – the electric charge of connection. Marvelling at how close we were.

She stopped abruptly.  What are you here for, actually?

I explained. I had been advised to borrow a CD on meditation from this, the hospital library, in preparation for heart surgery. Her eyes widened but she didn’t comment. Asked nothing about me, nor the kids whom she’d known so well. She pulled a form from a drawer.

Just write your name and address here. You know, it’s just like when you were in elementary and you checked out a book.  She laughed.  No need to sign it. Did you ever sign a library card at school? No. Not here either. She handed me the CD and said I could keep it for 3 weeks.

We had reached the end. I knew it. But even though I had been dispassionately assessing her behaviour and odd reactions, unable to avoid the conclusion that this was not someone I could be friends with again, I still wanted to draw something from her unexpected confidences and uneven warmth. It was a few minutes before noon.

Any chance we could do lunch?

She shied from the question, startled and uncomfortable. I ’d seen this reaction before in her, this instinctive aversion to unpleasantness. Maybe some other time, she said.

No, you don’t mean that. And you still can’t say it. I shook my head and walked away.

It had taken a long time to get over losing my best friend, although her daughter’s bewilderment over her mother’s refusal to explain my absence helped me to accept that I wasn’t likely to get any answers, either. I understood that it would have been very difficult for her to say, flat out, that it was over, but I never really forgave her for what felt like cruelty.

Until yesterday that is, when, in an unlikely coincidence, I was handed the chance to ask the question that had bothered me for so long.   And more than that, to let her know that it had been hard to lose her. Is it vindication? Maybe. Or maybe it’s because I believe it’s fair to face the consequences of our acts.

I’m free of my old hurt, while feeling some sympathy for her. Unexpected and unwelcome as it was, our conversation would have been unsettling for her, I think. In any case, the story has finally come to an end, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think the universe had conspired to make it happen.

We’re In The Army Now

Stuff’s been happening since I last wrote about the association.  After the president resigned – apparently because the secretary and I challenged him for sidestepping an committee -approved policy banning freebies for event organisers – his post was assumed by the vice-president.

The VP, a Belgian who spoke three languages, wasn’t the best person to step into top spot but he had his good points.  He was inclusive, listened to advice and had some good ideas about what could be done to make the association more dynamic.  On the downside, he reacted without thinking, couldn’t remember from one day to the next what decisions the board had reached, and was woodenly awkward with people, which was a bit of a handicap considering that PR is the president’s job.

The way things work in French associations is that all executive board members have to be re-approved by the general committee  immediately following the AGM.  If there are no challengers  for any of the board jobs, it’s a general shoo-in.  Nobody ever wants these posts, generally, and so it was highly unusual for a second presidential candidate to pop up.

The challenger was a Scottish ex-army type, an seemingly affable guy who hadn’t had much to say in committee meetings for the two years he’d been a member.  He looked after a few things, but didn’t have any big ideas.  It was generally thought that he was only semi-interested in taking on the presidency, and none of the executive board members (the president, secretary and me, the treasurer) thought he represented a threat to the status quo.

We all assembled a few days after the AGM, with the first item on the agenda being the election.  The two presidential candidates gave their spiels, and as soon as the Scot opened his mouth, I figured he was done for.  In perfectly decent French, he said that one of the first things he would change, were he to be elected president, would be to insist on English during the meetings meetings.  My inner jaw dropped.  The committee is comprised of 4 Anglophones, one Dutch and 10 native French speakers, of whom five are not terribly comfortable with English, and two are unilingual.  Of those last two, one is the indefatigable and efficient secretary, the best the association has ever had.

To suggest that association business be conducted in a language unintelligible to two members, of which one is charged with writing the minutes, was so pompously ridiculous that I was sure the guy had dug his own grave in one sentence.  I didn’t even bother challenging him on the point after he finished speaking, so inconceivable was the idea. We’ve never had a problem with those who have to temporarily detour into English to explain themselves, but once the translation is made we’re right back into the language of Voltaire.

Mais quelle surprise! The Scot won by 9 votes to 6, prompting the visibly shaken former president to resign from the committee on the spot.  I was gobsmacked, as was the secretary and a few others around the table.  Obviously quite a number of the Francophones had voted for the guy, and that made me think that they were voting against the Belgian’s woodenness  more than they were approving of an English-language policy.

The second the sceptre was in the Scot’s hands, he morphed from innocuous bystander to tinpot dictator.  The meeting would now be in English, he intoned, and the two Francophones who did not speak any English would have to just take some lessons.  He smiled when he said it, but it wasn’t a joke.  The secretary spit tacks.  One of the Francophones said quietly that no one, not even the Anglophone presidents previously elected, had ever spoken anything but French in the boardroom.  I saw red, and said that no one, not even the president, could impose English on a French association with a majority of French members.  I spoke up, saw a few heads nod, and figured that would be that.

But if I thought that a public remonstration would stop him from trying that stunt again, I was wrong.  Two days later, at a meeting of the five board members, which included me and the secretary, he tried again.  About twenty minutes in, he announced that we would switch to English.  I didn’t even try to be diplomatic this time.  To proceed in anything other than French was at best bad manners and at worst, a display of astonishing arrogance, I said.   He was forced to continue in French, but the atmosphere didn’t improve.  He indicated in unsubtle ways that he considered himself to have the final word on everything, the secretary to be beneath his attention, and that he intended to keep an extremely close eye on what I was doing.  My knee-jerk reaction was to butt heads with him at every turn.

The phone rang the next day, with a summons to his house for a one-on-one meeting to discuss our working relationship.  Nyet to that idea, said I – we’ll meet somewhere neutral.  I was brought up to be (in the absence of a really good reason) co-operative so my first reaction was to agree to a meet up, but my natural inclination is to go my own way.  After a bit of reflection, I wrote him an email, explaining in plain but polite language what my position was regarding the language issue, and the autocratic manner he seemed to think was necessary, and further said that I had had quite enough of committee meetings for the time being.  If he wished to respond in writing, I invited him to do so.  I know perfectly well that emails aren’t the best environment to sort out a problem, but I’m at my best when I’ve got a figurative pen in my hand.   He declined to reply, and insisted we meet.

I both hate and relish confrontation, in almost equal measure.  When my dander is up, I’ll fight for what I believe is right, and I don’t take prisoners.  But that reaction takes a personal toll in terms of stress, and it’s usually accompanied by serious doubts about whether or not I am actually right.  The one thing I’m afraid of is being unfair, which is just another way of saying I terrified to be wrong.  For two weeks, I wrestled with the knot in my stomach, trying to talk myself into not caring, trying to convince myself that was perfectly OK to speak my mind.  Despite the impression I give of unlimited confidence, I’m not a fan of hubris.  I prefer to get along with people, and I’m not at all disagreeable generally.  But there are limits to what I’ll accept, and the Scot tested them sorely.  I realised that I wouldn’t be able to calm my nerves until we both had a chance to say what was on our minds, and that if there was a chance to smooth the waters, I really should take it.

I got to the meeting point first and ordered a beer, paying for it before anyone else had a chance to offer.  I don’t drink beer, but my inner spin-doctor thought it would send a message.   My mantra for the previous couple of days had been ‘calm and confident’, and I was feeling pretty good.  I had tried hard to get past the deeply-ingrained worry about not being nice.  Tinpot duly arrived, and one of the first things he did was to comment on my beer.  He was taken aback.  I congratulated myself.

He jumped in with, ‘lots of people think the association is becoming far too French.’  There was no point in asking what nationality these ‘lots of people’ were, but I did ask him just how many they represented.  Well, loads, he said, but had the grace to admit that ‘loads’ was difficult to quantify.  Where do we live? I asked.  He seemed puzzled.  France, he answered.  Indeed we do, I said.

He went on to say that I did far too much for the association, that I took jobs away from other people.  Those same people who never raise their hands to volunteer for anything, I asked? I asked him what he thought I did, apart from keeping the books and filling in just this one time for the communications guy who abruptly quit doing the newsletter.  He didn’t really know, so I spelled it out for him.  In addition to those two things, one of which is strictly temporary, I had an idea a while back about how the association might assist the local junior high schools with their language exchange programs, which some students are not able to take advantage of due to financial hardship.  Our members come from eleven different European countries, plus a few Americans and Canadians, and being open to other cultures is a big deal for us. Our bylaws state that giving back to the community is a fundamental part of who we are, but that has been slipping away over the last few years.  I wanted to explore how we could fulfil that obligation while giving French kids a chance to travel to other countries.  I also am part of a working group to develop a new website, since I use the existing site every day and have an insider’s familiarity with it.

He tried to prop up his position by fixing the number of people who didn’t feel comfortable with my involvement at six.  If I were in it for personal power, I could understand that, I said.  But the simple truth is that I like to help, have energy, time and ideas, and I feel strongly about the aims of the association.  People who are bothered by that tend to be those who don’t do much, and are resentful that there are others who do more than they.  They want control without earning it.

He wanted me to stay in my corner, do the books, and keep quiet.  I declined, and told him exactly how things would go down.  I would continue to challenge any attempt to Anglicise the association meetings unless every member of the committee agreed to it.  I would continue to speak out against his efforts to quash dissent.  I would continue to do my job and most of all, in what I viewed as my primary role, I would continue to defend the interests of an association which had been of great benefit to me and many others.  And no, I wouldn’t play nice just to make his job easier.

I also called him on his treatment of the secretary.  How he’d ignored her during the meeting, and literally waved her away as unimportant.  I suggested that he had done so for one of three reasons:  because she was French, because she was ‘just a secretary’ or because she was female.  Maybe even all three.  He blustered that he’d worked with lots of women in his life.  And what does that prove? I asked.  He had no answer. There is an almost visceral pleasure in laying bare the inconsistencies, bias and self-serving justifications of an opponent.  I haven’t enjoyed an exchange so much since I acted as my own lawyer during my divorce.  After a period of wordlessness he said, You’re pretty aggressive.  I smiled.  That’s always the word men use when they run up against an assertive woman,

I’m not going to waste any time wondering if I did the right thing, if I was fair, if I was too hard on the poor guy.  I figure he’ll either shoot himself in the foot, or else he’ll get his way with a majority of the committee members who can’t be bothered, or just plain can’t stand up to him.  If so, it’ll be a loss for all, but I’ll have done what I could.  And by god, it felt good.  I think I might be on a roll.

Sometimes I wonder

What is the matter with me?

We have a guest, arrived yesterday.  He is the nephew of my husband, a man in his forties whose life is in a bit of a shambles.  Father to two boys, he and their mother divorced long ago and until a year ago, he saw his sons every other weekend and half the school holidays.  His relations with his ex-wife are difficult, but he has always held to his end of the bargain in terms of his responsibilities to his kids, as far as I know.  Nevertheless, his ex embarked on a systemic campaign to turn them against their father, to the point where the eldest, at 15, exercised his right to refuse to see him.  The younger one is not yet officially allowed that freedom, but his mother has flouted the court ruling and simply won’t cooperate with weekend visits.

In addition, the nephew’s 5-year live-in relationship with a rather nice woman came to an end a few months back, and he is now living under his mother’s roof while he tried to sort his life out.  He is, fortunately, gainfully employed and successful in his job.  I feel extremely sorry for his kids and for him, and wish him all the best in his attempts to reassert his parental rights through the legal system.

But I don’t really like him.  He’s a bit of an odd character, and not in an amusing way.  His company feels oppressive, and I don’t feel comfortable around him.  When he wrote last week to invite himself here, I panicked.  Pleaded with my husband to make sure that the ‘full week’ he wanted to stay would be limited to a ‘short week’, and husband wrote back to that effect.

Last night at dinner, the nephew mentioned that he wanted to see the Museum of the Confluence in Lyon on his way back to Austria, and then sadly added that ‘unfortunately it’s not open on Mondays’, leaving the clear impression that he didn’t intend to leave us for eight more sleeps.  I didn’t know what to say, and so said nothing.  But it kept me awake for a while last night, figuring out how to be diplomatic about telling a guest that you don’t want them hanging around for too long.

I can’t keep track of the number of times I’ve encouraged female friends to be assertive, and to stop worrying about conforming to that feminine ideal of being nice.  My daughter has learned this lesson well, I’m glad to say, and is as upfront as anybody I know, although she deals with pangs about being unkind.   Nobody wants to be mean, but sometimes that’s how it feels when you have to make yourself clear, when others don’t pick up on the unsaid messages or have different values that you do.

So added to my unease with this guy is my worry about saying anything that could make him feel unwelcome, especially considering what he’s been through, plus my fear of appearing to be un-nice.  I’ve been trying to figure out why I find it so difficult to be around him, without laying all the blame on his behaviour.  And it’s not even his behaviour,  but just a general way of being, which seems pretty petty to find fault with.

He’s heavy going, basically.  Dark and brooding at times, although not at the moment.  A sense of humour that’s a little bit off, and a marked inability to interpret the unspoken.  He doesn’t get social signals, and I think that’s what bothers me the most.   The autism label is trendy but I have only the slimmest notion of what that entails, beyond the frequently cited inability to ‘read’ others.  I had a twenty-four-year-old PhD student boarder a couple of years ago who was pretty much oblivious to social norms, and very poor at reading non-verbal cues.  Coincidentally he was also Austrian – extremely well-mannered about stuff like standing up when  a woman entered the room, but without the faintest idea that bringing a girl to the house with no introductions (walked right past me) and proceeding directly to his bedroom to make all kinds of noise audible throughout the house was not exactly the done thing.  His reaction when I asked him not to repeat the experience was a mixture of clinical interest and well-bred apology, without any apparent embarrassment.  It was as though he’d just learned something new to add to his etiquette folder.  He was bounced from the house a few months later for, among other things, a remark that was breathtakingly inappropriate, apparently completely unaware that anyone would find it objectionable.

Anyway, I don’t do well when I’m off balance, and that’s how I feel around the nephew.   By this morning I had figured out how to broach the subject of his overstay, but couldn’t summon the nerve at breakfast.  My stomach was in knots and I thought about all the times I have not been able to say what I wanted because of the fear of being unkind or not believing I had the right to express myself in anything but a positive way.  That did it, as well as taking to heart my daughter’s exhortation last night to ‘just tell him, Mom.  He’s the one who isn’t polite, by assuming he can dictate how long he can stay.’

I waited until he and I had a moment alone in the kitchen and then said, as mildly as I could, that we had only planned on him staying until the end of the week.  ‘But I want to stay until next Tuesday,’ said he.  What can you do with that, except be sniper-like direct?  I fixed my gaze on his and said, no, it would better if he left sooner, then  mumbled something about this being a hectic week all round.  He tried to bargain more, but in the end is leaving Saturday morning.  Interestingly, he then went to my husband and told him that I had said he should leave by Saturday, but not in a I’m-telling-0n-you kind of way.

If it helps me to accept his oddness by thinking he’s got some version of autism, then that’s what I’ll do.  Easier to accept that he can’t help the way he is than to be irritated by his lack of courtesy.

And what if they were underfoot all the time??

I’d rather drive a French autoroute than a Canadian highway any day.  Behind the wheel, the French, for all their vociferous opposition to radar controls, are predictable.  They don’t pass on the right, they don’t hog the passing lane, and when a fire engine approaches from behind in rush hour, they do the Moses-and-the-Red-Sea thing promptly and without head-scratching.  Driver training in France is more rigorous than in Canada or at least Alberta. and you don’t see any 16-year-olds behind the wheel, either.

So it was plain sailing down the A8 this morning from junction 39 to Nice airport, about 60 kilometres (40 miles), on my way to pick up the Swedish daughter.  She was getting a bit fed up in Stockholm, spending most of her uptime trying to figure out how to make the analysis of satellite images more accurate, as in being able to pinpoint  ‘there’s gold in them thar hills’ to within a 3 metre radius instead of 3000.  She’s clever like that, but it can get a bit tedious, apparently.

I was ridiculously excited to see her.   It’s only been four months since the last time, but she is so  entertaining and educational (no one else I know talks about rasters) that I could have her around every day and never tire of her humour and her company.  She had an early flight out of Arlanda airport, which meant getting on the bus sometime around 3AM.  It’s a long ride, and she’s been told that the night bus is sketchy.

The last trip she made here, she sent me a text when she got to the airport.  In fact, she had messaged me throughout the night, having decided not to take the night bus but to spend the hours between 11PM and 5AM at the MacDonald’s closest to the airport.  Text messages from your kids when they’re anywhere but in your basement have the effect of being both reassuring and worrying.  You know they’re ok because you just got a message from them, but at the same time, the fact that you now also know they’re sitting alone in an all-night restaurant in the Swedish nowhere kicks your imagination into high gear.

So when I woke up this morning, having not heard from her, and without a reply to the email sent to her while she was supposedly aloft (Norwegian Air Shuttle has Wifi at 30,000ft) I figured I better contain my excitement.  What if this meant that I’d be the last, lonely one after everybody else waiting for the Stockholm arrivals had had their hugs and back-slaps and gone home? Maybe I’d better temper my excitement – turn it down to medium-low so, you know, it wouldn’t be as much of a crash when I realised she’d missed the flight.   But then I’d have to try to find out why she’d missed it, and that wasn’t even worth thinking about.

I ran into somebody I knew who was also waiting for a Stockholm passenger, and we chatted, my eyes flicking to the arrivals doors every time they swished open.  It was better to have someone to talk to, to distract myself from the slight queasiness in my gut.  I’m stupid that way , worrying about stuff that will probably never happen.  My cousin told me it’s like paying interest on a debt you’ll never owe.

She was there, of course.  Easy to spot, six-footer that she is, with a head of auburn curls.  I excused myself from the acquaintance and launched myself at her, in our own little version of that choke-worthy scene in Love,Actually.  Apart from appreciating the fact that she’s exactly and conveniently my height, I loved the opportunity.  She’s not a hugger, generally, except for hellos and goodbyes of long duration, and this was an especially good one.

All the way back down the autoroute she talked, mostly about school, about the difficulty of working alone in a field that not many others are familiar with, and the exhilaration of finally finding somebody who speaks her language.  Raster language, that is.  She was bagged from being up most of the night but spilling over with news and excitement, partly, I guess, from having somebody who hung on to her every word.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever want to have children, she’s said.  Her reasons are lucid and thoughtful, and even if they weren’t, they’re hers and that’s enough.   If she stays true to her current thinking, she’ll almost certainly be better off financially and will be able to concentrate on the work that so interests her.  I don’t yearn for grandchildren anyway, and would be absolutely OK if none of my kids ever had any of their own.

I was thinking about that as I waited for her to come through those doors – that she’ll likely never find out what it’s like to love a child of her own.   She won’t miss what she doesn’t know, most likely, and maybe she’ll be able to give all the love she wants to somebody else.  If things go that way, she’ll have somebody whose arrival at an airport puts her into a state of high excitement.  But for sheer emotional fireworks, nothing can top what it feels like to love a child.  For me, at least.

My husband loves his kids and loves the time he spends with them, but doesn’t miss them when they’re not there and doesn’t yearn to be with them.  That’s where we differ, which might be a common-enough paternal-maternal reaction.  I don’t know –  what’s your view?

She’s upstairs now, catching up on some sleep.  I’m totally thrilled to have her around for a whole week, but will have to contain my hugs.  This little story hasn’t got a tidy wrap-up, but I care not.  I’m just happy.

Tsunami in the fishbowl

Gunshots echo throughout the neighbourhood as I write.  Any civilised person should react unfavourably to this, and in my other life, as as city-dweller in the Canadian west, I’d be punching 9-1-1 with a shaky hand.  Like the time I smelled natural gas from the demo site across the street, and my call to emergency services resulted in two fire trucks, a blog post, but no explosion.

Here in the So of Fr, people hunt wild boar.  I say ‘people’ but they’re men, most of them bearded, all dressed in camouflage gear and driving 4X4s.  Their dogs are nervous, spotted things that nobody would want as a pet, and to a pooch they sport collars the colour of butternut squash flesh.  Hunting season for wild boar runs from mid-September until the end of February, and is about seven months too long, in my view.  I’m OK with one day of the year being open season on furry pigs, and I really like wild boar stew, but I resent mightily that my life is at risk as soon as I’m more than 100 feet from the post office.  Hunters seem to have free rein everywhere outside villages centres, and that includes inhabited areas that may also be frequented by hikers.  The shots I’m hearing probably come from the woods behind the house, where there is also a recreation centre with a soccer field and an exercise circuit.  A headline might read: ‘Woman mistaken for boar while doing chin-ups’.

But more importantly, things have been happening in my amicable association since I last wrote about the woman whose vision of volunteerism meant funnelling freebies to herself and her friends, instead of ensuring that these occasional gifts, offered by the Ballet de Monte Carlo, benefitted the association as a whole.  At a fractious meeting of the committee last week, 10 people voted to let her keep doing this because, as one put it, ‘she’s old, and anyway, she’s been doing it for ages’, this despite the fact that a year ago these same people all voted to tighten the rules against such practices.  I disagreed, but had only two supporters, so accepting the will of the majority means I have to park my sense of injustice somewhere.   Tourner la page. But there is a second situation that bothers me more, and I’m still losing sleep over whether I handled it properly or not.  

A committee member, a fellow who is the editor of our newsletter, volunteered nearly a year ago to make a new website for the association.  It was widely understood that he would do the bulk of the work, with some assistance from me.  After months of silence, he let me know in early autumn while I was in Calgary that he had brought in a professional web designer and that this fellow had already started developing the site.  The pro’s assistance would cost 1200€ – a steal, he assured me.  I was stunned.  There had never been an instance of paying anyone to do work for the association, and not only had this idea not been approved by the committee, it had not even been raised.  I should have thrown on the brakes right then and there, but felt that I must have missed something along the line, being totally preoccupied with the painting of my house a continent away.      

You may have heard of the Ladder of Inference, which is what happens when one misunderstanding or assumption leads to others, all erroneous.   Well, that’s what happened here.  The committee members, including me,  had assumed that our volunteer had all the skills needed to build a website.  He assumed we knew he intended to get input from a pro. When he first told me that somebody was in on the project and had already made an analysis of our needs, I assumed that we, the association, were on the hook for the work already done.  The board would have to approve the expense, I said, but there was enough money in the treasury to cover it.  I assumed he realised that he’d have to put the brakes on until I was back in France and the board could meet to discuss the situation.  But he assumed, I later realised, that I had given him the go-ahead.

When the board finally met, the site was revealed to be well under construction.  I felt stupid for not having been clear and firm from the outset, and for not having clued in to the assumptions made by Volunteer Guy.  I acknowledged my errors to the rest of the board, who waved them away.  They listened to VG’s sales pitch, and took a look at the draft site.

I couldn’t believe – and said so – that a designer would charge 1200€ for a site based on a very basic WordPress template that I could have done myself.  It wasn’t much of an improvement on the old website and looked like the work of an amateur.  The secretary’s comment was, ‘All that money just for that?’   The rest of the board disagreed and outvoted us, approving the expenditure.

I decided to make the best of a bad deal and try to help improve the thing.  I worked on it with Volunteer Guy for about a month, but my heart wasn’t in it.  What did it matter if it didn’t meet my standards?  Who was I to say it wasn’t worth it?  It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong in thinking I knew better than everybody else, and maybe I just had to let go.  So I did, more or less.  I worked on text and left the design alone, although it pained me to look at it.

A few weeks before the grand unveiling of the website to the entire committee (and thence to the 400-odd members) I went to see a guy at our local web hosting shop to discuss replacing the old site with the new one.  Naturally, he asked to see the site.  Remember the story about the Emperor’s New Clothes? The web-hosting guy was that villager who pointed his finger at the emperor and declared: ‘But he’s NAKED!’

The design and functionality were most certainly not professional, in his view, and not worth a quarter of the price we’d been quoted.  Since there was a chance that his opinion wasn’t unbiased – he hadn’t been asked to do the job, after all – I thought I’d get a second opinion from someone who had no stake in the project.  I sent the link  to a friend whose 20-year-career in web design made him something of an expert, simply asking him to look it over and make some suggestions, if any.  His analysis was comprehensive and detailed.  It was an unsatisfactory job, for a whole lot of reasons.

The only good thing about this news was that we hadn’t yet paid the 1200€ bill.  I informed the board of what I’d discovered, and we agreed that we’d find out what could be done to address the deficiencies.  I then brought Volunteer Guy into the loop.   I felt bad about blindsiding him right before the launch, but better then than after it went public.  There was still time for him to put his head together with the original designer (who had promised that he wouldn’t sign off until we were satisfied)  to see what could be done to improve the site.

In retrospect, I should have told VG about the situation face to face, but I emailed him, including the original text of the second opinion.  Two days went by without a response, at which point I picked up the phone.  Could he give me an idea of where things stood with the web designer, and what I could report at the board meeting of that morning? Too busy with other things, he said, and hung up.  When I tried to view the site later that day, it had been withdrawn, replaced by, ‘Move along.  Nothing to see here.’

A few days later all the board members received a long email from him.  The essence of it was that we had no clue what we were talking about, and that his designer buddy was brilliant.  I was a double-crosser, and my two sources were unschooled and rude, to boot.  Etc, etc.  Oddly, he also said that showing the website to anyone else was unprofessional and possibly illegal.  The designer was not willing to change the site because there was nothing wrong with it, and to suggest otherwise was insulting.  He had chosen to remove it.   Frankly, I was pretty happy with that outcome, as it meant we were off the hook for the bill, and could proceed with something a whole better.

Here’s what bothers me.  Volunteer Guy is someone I liked, have socialised with, and who, along with his lovely wife, had been kind to my student daughter in Stockholm, where they live when they’re not in the So of France.  He’s not a close friend, but my husband  and I have had some pleasant times with him and his wife over the last couple of years since we first met.  I didn’t expect him to be happy to be told that a project he’d invested time and effort in wasn’t up to snuff, and I considered the possibility that he might take it personally, at least at first.  I could have been more diplomatic, certainly.

What I wasn’t prepared for was his refusal to consider that anyone else’s opinion had merit, and his view that I had been unethical in the extreme by soliciting a second opinion before approaching him.  I stewed about this for a couple of days, and then picked up the phone.  I hate confrontation (just in case I’m wrong…)  but hate leaving things hanging even more.  Could we meet for a coffee and sort out a few things? We could, he agreed.

It didn’t really help.  He listened to my explanation of how things went down, how I hadn’t deliberately sabotaged the project, how I wanted to get a second un-biased opinion just in case the first one (and my own) was off-base.  I said I was sorry that he’d had the rug pulled out from under him at the last minute, but that my obligation was to ensure that the association got the best value for their investment.

His response was very disparaging.  Clearly I didn’t know much.  The local guy was just a local guy, and whoever my designer buddy was, he obviously didn’t have nearly the brilliance of his designer buddy.  I had made mistake after mistake.  I had handled the whole thing badly from the beginning.  Etc, etc.

I listened.  But when it got to the point where he hammered home three times in the course of a minute the fact that I had made multiple mistakes, I got pissed off.  Not admitting to my mistakes is not one of my faults.  His condescension made me mad, the word bullshit was uttered, and the conversation ended.

I haven’t seen him since, but will eventually run into him.  It’s a small world here.  I’ll be perfectly pleasant, but I don’t think we’ll go back to being friends, which is too bad because I like his wife a lot.  If he and I had simply disagreed about ways and means, that would be one thing, but it’s probably fair to say that we both felt under personal attack from the other.

I doubt very much that we’ll be having dinner with him and his wife anytime soon.  On the other hand, he seems to be someone who is smoothly adept at compartmentalising and/or hiding his feelings, and maybe he can be perfectly jolly all while maintaining his low opinion of my management style.  That sort of thing smells to me like falseness, although maybe I see him in that light just because I’m terrible at putting a good face on things.

As so often happens, writing about something brings clarity.  I realise, while reading that last paragraph, that he doesn’t put up a facade.  I think he genuinely believes that he knows better than anyone else, and what I used to think of as an odd personality trait – his outright dismissal of things that others consider important, like  proofreading the newsletter! – is actually his sense of superiority showing.

To be honest, I also believe I’m right most of the time, the difference between the two of us being that after the dust has settled, I often have to grovel.  But not this time.