Quel dommage....buche de noel without a sparkler!

Buche de Noel

One year in the 1980s, we went to Paris for Christmas. We had thought at first of going to Portugal, just for a few days, for something different. Our travel agent--remember travel agents? what magic they were!--knew us and said, "No, you will just be bored. Go to Paris. That's where you really want to go." He was right. The worst part was the flight out of Miami, as we lived in Fort Lauderdale at the time; ten long hours across the Atlantic at night. But the best parts, and there were so many, far outweighed the misery of the flight.

When we landed on Christmas Eve day, it was snowing lightly. Magic already! We got a mid-day meal of some sort at a really horrid cafe near our hotel, the Hotel de Varenne, modest but nice and in the 7th arrondissement, to my mind the most lovely section of Paris. Then I bought a hair dryer as hotels did not regularly offer them in those days. I had memorized the phrases needed while being bored in flight. Then we took a nap, finally giving in to the jet lag. When we awakened at about six pm, we went out to seek dinner.

We found, on the Champs Elysees in the nearby 8th arrondissement, a restaurant called La Maison de L'Alsace. It is a panelling-heavy old-world restaurant serving huge trays of fresh shellfish, Alsatian specialties, and lovely wines.

It is impossible to get a table in a good and reasonably priced restaurant on Christmas Eve in Paris. But, for reasons known only to the gods of cultural appreciation, the maitre d' found us a table for two in a raised section of the restaurant next to a table for four--packed in, really--at which he shortly seated a couple, their ten-ish daughter, and a grandmama.

I had the Coquille St. Jacques. Sublime. What my husband ordered I cannot recall, but it probably had fish in it some way or other. We were enjoying the experience completely, not least because the service is perfect there and the French family, though we could not understand much of their conversation, was so engaging.

Finally, it was time to order dessert. I had never had, and had always wanted to have, a slice of buche de noel. Aha! There it was on the menu. Expensive, mon dieu! It was the equivalent of about ten bucks American at the time, VERY dear for the 1980s. What the heck? We were already spending three times what we had planned when the original cheap-date-Portugal-four-days trip had turned into ten in Paris. At Christmas. And New Year's.

My dessert arrived,  borne to me on a platter, adorned with a sparkler flinging points of sizzling light everywhere. I was charmed.

And so was the little girl at the next table. Her eyes went wide, her lips turned up into a wheedling smile, and we knew her Papa was about to spring for a ten buck dessert for his charming little girl.

I don't think I have ever, before or since, loved a dessert as I loved that piece of pure Paris in chocolate ganache on a silver platter.

How do you spell that?

Finally.

Finallyfinallyfinallyfinallyfinally.

When one is getting over an illness, one does first that which comes most naturally. When it is a malady of the soul caused by the logistics of life (that is, having houseguests all summer, which is not conducive to artsy thinking or doing), then one works one's way back by doing that for which the muscles of body or soul or both are most easily resurrected.

In my case, it was writing, and particularly, it was writing journalism, columns on the vicissitudes of modern life. I was a journalist for 40 years, after all, and only a part-time artist and equestrienne during that time.

So I dumped a tirade about the reprehensible current mayor of my birthplace (Michael Bloomberg of NYC) into cyberspace. Ah. Felt pretty good. (It would feel better to write a paean to the late Ed Koch, the best mayor of NYC there ever was...but the subject isn't "sexy." No one suffered, as New Yorkers are suffering now.)

Today, finally, a poem escaped me. It needed to. And it meant I had at least partly processed the upsetting events of last week, horrific environmental damage on a small scale by a truly reprehensible old geezer who lives next door and destroyed our common hedgerow.

And I worked a bit on two paintings.

I am turning a portrait of my dog into a primitive.

And, I have begun a painting of two dogs who frequent a pub in Gwithian and, as it happens, sit on bar stools covered with doggie-paw-print fabric. They are real dogs; I ate lunch with them one day in early spring.

Late discovery

I have suddenly discovered primitives. I do recall having seen a gallery devoted to Naifs in Paris 35 years ago. As I recall, the palette of most artists shown was either blue or green. And there were a lot of cats.

But I couldn't recall seeing many more naive paintings until I picked up a book including works by members of The Association of British Naive Artists during a visit to Penlee House, Penzance, last summer.

And then I recalled--doh!--a piece in my own collection. A small painting, about 6 inches by 9 inches, that I bought in Paris about 35 years ago, give or take. Possibly on the same visit in which I saw the gallery, possibly not. Back then, I went to Paris whenever the spirit moved me AND I had the wherewithal at the same time. It didn't happen all that often, not half often enough.

Anyway, I carried the little painting around unframed for a while, quite a while, while I ended a marriage and made a couple of long-distance moves. Plus, I had a horse to buy; I couldn't afford framing. But eventually, the little painting got framed. And since then, it has always hung in my kitchen. Not the ideal place for a painting, I suspect, but it is done in acrylics, so probably a bit less difficult to ruin than oils.

And I love it. Not for the subject matter. Not for the colour. Not for the style. Not for the artist whose name I haven't the foggiest idea of, although I recall he was a big guy, didn't speak much, and had hung his paintings on the fence around a church on Boulevard St. Germain. And I think I paid about 15 bucks for it, at whatever American money was exchanging for with francs back then.

What I love about it is this: Charcuterie is misspelled as Charcutrie.

Despite my almost obsessional demand that English should be written correctly, whether English English, American English or even pidgin English, all according to its own rules, the fact that charcuterie was misspelled said something to me.

It said that art was art and didn't really need to represent anything in a standard manner. Probably, the artist was simply a lousy speller. Why not? He was studying art, not French....if he was French. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe that's why he didn't speak much, because we tourists wouldn't want to buy art on the street in Paris created by an English guy, or a German or Italian or even an American in Paris, no matter how cheap the art or how charming the art or the artist. Maybe he was a foreigner and that's why he misspelled that common French word.

A feast of possibilities

So, there it hangs in my kitchen among the pots and pans reminding me as I create our meals that I can create other stuff, too. Stuff that doesn't depend on years and years of study, as my journalism and horse-showing lives did. I did study art, though, because that's the way I'm made, with a penchant to find out HOW things are done and to have the best instruction I can find. But I think, now, I might forget those studies, the magic of Robert Beverly Hale's anatomical drawing instruction et al, and do a little naif painting myself. It's happy, and lord knows happy would be good both in the big world and my little one at the moment.

But I don't think I'll have a green or blue palette; so far, both paintings seem to be a little red- and orange-heavy...but who knows? I still do love oils far more than acrylics. So, after a little waiting, and I can paint over it, change the palette if I feel like it, and maybe even misspell a common Englesh wurd.