25 Jan 25

In the morning Laurent is sitting at the kitchen table with a little knife shaving the pith off an orange. The night before he boiled the milk with the cinnamon sticks as the base for the crème Catalan and now is zesting the orange and lemons. Will add the eggs and chill it in the ramacans until it’s time to torch the sugar on top. Tonight he’s making paella for a dinner party and has tubes of saffron on the counter by the stove. We’ll go to the market for the seafood.

I’ve known Laurent since 1998 when my mom and John bought their house in Port-Vendres. We traced our meeting Laurent back to a guy named Jean-Louis who lived in Perpignan and helped the English find properties in the south of France. John would have been introduced to Jean-Louis through his friends Rob and Paul who lived in London, fans of John’s music from the 60s. Laurent’s parents were real estate agents in Port-Vendres but spoke no English. Laurent was our translator and instant friend, my age, another son to my mom and John—with John and Eberhard in fact at John’s deathbed. We reminisced about our time driving to Morocco in a rented Citroen, buying hash on the streets of Marrakech, what we remembered from that house we rented there for a week: how our personal guide Sidi said he could help us get whatever we wanted that week. Truly, whatever.

Laurent and I walk Rocket after dinner, their massive Australian shepherd that looks to have Bernese mountain dog in him. All the houses are made from the same sand-colored stone and look uniquely French with the iron work and smudged facades, all early 20th century with high ceilings, tall windows and terraces. Metz is a decent-sized city a few hours east of Paris and they live right in the middle. Laurent tells the story of his quitting cigarettes, now 10 years ago, tracing it back to the Christmas they spent in Helsinki and their trip to the North Pole, to meet Santa Claus, when Mathis was still young enough to believe. When they asked the kids what they wanted that year one of them said for you both to quit smoking and so Laurent did: he and Nanou realized how ridiculous their habit was on the overnight train from Helsinki to the North Pole in December, needing to smoke in subzero temperatures each time the train stopped.

Being Catalan, Laurent has all the terracotta-colored cookware he uses for the crème Catalan dessert. He fries two eggs for me in butter, each in a tiny skillet (one skillet for each egg) on the gas-powered range. Eating, cooking, speaking, living all feels different with the French. And though this is once-German territory on the eastern edges of the Alsace departement it feels not German one bit.

Nanou feeds Rocket slices of butter from the kitchen table and we gather our bags for a walk to the market.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, travel