Category Archives: Diving into the past

Spider story

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People who say they aren’t afraid of spiders always make me laugh! I used to say the same. I was NOT afraid of spiders.
Until that day, long ago, in the Philippines, when we rented one of those small beach huts on a volcanic beach.
I wish I could find a photo of the beach.
I cannot even remember the name of the place. All I remember is this black sand beach, by a beautiful lake, in the middle of which there was an active volcano, that we were due to visit the next morning.

Sunset

It looked like paradise on earth. The beach, the lake, the hut… We went into the water for a midnight bath and then went into the beach hut to get to sleep. When I was lying on the bet with the oil lamp lighting the straw ceiling, I caught sight of hundreds of small whitish spiders above our heads and told my husband there was no way I would sleep in that bed, with those spiders hanging above my head.
My husband always had a solution ready. He grabbed one of our beach towels, and with a big gathering gesture, got rid of the threatening spiders, telling me what a sissy I was!

Well, it didn’t matter. Now I could sleep.
The next morning, I got up and picked that beach towel to fold it, and guess what, no spiders there dead or alive, but huge holes in the towel!

Aren’t you glad I behaved like a sissy? I asked my husband. For all we know those little spiders may have been poisonous and in any case, they were quite able to sting their way out of the towel.

I think I have already posted this story in French at my other blog but am grateful to Virginia DeBoldt at First 50 Words for the nudge. I have not been much of a post writer lately.
That sunset photo was taken in Normandy. I just don’t have any photo of a real spider in my photostream and some of the spider photos I came across on flickr were just too scary :D

Last minute precision: the towel was not in the hut. I made sure he hung it somewhere outside!

Looking ahead

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Snowy Paris through a car window 4/365

The holiday season to me is a hurdle that I have to jump every year. Sixteen years ago at the beginning of December, my father-in-law passed away and less than a month later, after a rather weird Christmas holiday, on a bleak January morning, my husband drove away to a car accident that cost him his life and that was the end of the world as we knew it, my 6 1/2 years old daughter and myself.
I have, of course, survived! What else is there to do? And I have had great moments. Most of the time, I consider myself lucky to live the sort of life I am living.
There are so many things that I enjoy doing, such good friends and family around me. But once in a while, I’ll start thinking of my cup as being half empty instead of half full.

When I took this photo, some time ago, it was snowing outside and I was sitting inside a car. I pointed my camera towards that bike out there, and the person who was driving suggested I rolled down the window, but the drops on the car window just suited my mood of the day.

I never thought of all this while I was taking the shot and later on, wondered why I liked that snapshot.

The bike outside was blurred, just like my life in that passing moment and all I could focus on were the drops on the car window.

No more so… until next year?

Me, my mother and death

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divingintothepast.jpg

or how Gitta‘s attitude to death is still influencing me.

To listen to this post in French, click below

I don’t write much in the blog these days, too lazy, but Ronni’s post, And When I Die…where she also announces the death of Olive Riley, the Australian blogger who died at age 108, got me to remember.

Gitta was scared, I think, of anything relating to death, to the point that she considered it bad luck to even talk about it.
If you spoke badly of a dead person, which I enjoyed doing, just to rile her a bit, she’d do her spitting three times act, to ward off bad things.

Pooh, pooh, pooh! she would go! You don’t speak evil of the dead!

If I sat on the floor, which in my youth I loved to do –wish I were nimble enough to do it–, that was bad too and she’d grumble until I got up. It took me years before I understood that to her, sitting on the floor was wrong because of the expected behaviour of religious Jews, who will not shave or sit on a chair for a certain amount of time after a death in the family.

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise

She firmly believed that cemeteries were not places for children and I had to fight her to go to my beloved grandmother Lea‘s funeral, even though I was far from being a child when she died, since I had reached the ripe age of 16!
As for writing a will, the only reason that made her accept it was that she felt that thanks to that will, she could still control her children after her death.

I have told my daughter jokingly that when I die, she’d better make sure to keep my blogs online or else, my angry ghost would come and tickle her toes at night. I have even told her the general idea about my funeral –very general, mind you, as I don’t intend to organise anything myself. I hate organising parties, much less funeral parties!

And in a very remote corner of my limbic brain, I can hear Gitta whispering that it would indeed be bad luck to write a last post, while I am still alive.

Mais Maman, I won’t be able to do it once I’m dead!

and I can hear her say:

–Pooh, pooh, pooh! You don’t TALK about these things!

On my father’s shoulders

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divingintothepast.jpg

To listen to this post in French, click below

1954 on my dad's shoulders
1954 in Deauville

Whenever I see a child on his/her dad’s shoulders, I remember the feelings of power and elation that I felt whenever my father carried me so. My father was quite tall for a man of his generation, and when I straddled his shoulders, I felt like the master of the universe!
This photo was taken when I was ten, well past the age of straddling anyone’s shoulders and although I don’t remember the details of the episode, let it suffice to say that the year following this photo, in 1955, my father suffered from a massive backache problem and was bedridden for months on end. He had a lumbar disc hernia which caused excruciating sciatic pain, and for months, they couldn’t decide whether he should undergo surgery or not.
So six years after I had been forced to lie in my parents’ bed for something that felt like ever, it was his turn. I remember this well, how my mother bought our first TV, a black and white set, of course. In those days, there were only a couple of hours of programmes every evening, and they showed the same ballet over and over, for TV sellers to be able to show their customers something, during the day.
My father couldn’t move at all, he was imprisoned in some sort of plaster corset and my mother had resumed her nursing duties. She was never feeling better that when she could look after one of us.

En voiture !

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divingintothepast.jpg

To listen to this post in French, click below

It was Kenju’s post that set me wondering and remembering.
She wrote:

Do you remember when children used to ride in the window ledge above the back seat of cars? As a very young child, I used to love riding up there, warmed by the sun on the window. Being in motion always made me a little carsick, so climbing into the warm window ledge put me to sleep, and I could tolerate the ride without getting sick.

Well, let me tell you, I don’t remember anything of the kind. Have a look at the car below, and at its size: can you imagine a child lying there? I don’t think this is something I have ever seen in this country. I’ve seen small dogs or cats on the window ledge but never a child.

With my parents in 1954
Joseph was 47, Gitta, 45 and I was 10

Ever since I was a little girl, I have always hated riding in cars. I don’t remember my parents not having a car. The car was a luxury for many people when I was little, but to my father, it was indispensable for his work. First when they were working on open-air markets, and later on when my father travelled twice a week from Amiens and Rouen to collect items that they would sell in their Paris shop.
Sometimes, the whole family packed into the car, and we would go to Deauville where my parents had a small house with a garden. In those days, there was no motorway from Paris to Normandy and the 200 km trip took quite a long time, as we had to drive through small towns, which considerably slowed us down. On busy days, the trip could take up to three or four hours. Anyway, in those days, in my child’s perception of time, one hour in the car was sheer torture. One couldn’t really move around, and I was always being sick. When I said that I didn’t feel well, my father always said that I had to wait a little while longer, he couldn’t stop straight away, he had to find a suitable spot, but the truth, I felt, was that he just didn’t want to stop. And more than once did I end up throwing up on the edge of the road, or worse, in the car. But when it came to driving, my father just didn’t want to listen to anyone. He was the only one in the family who could drive, and that made him the sole master aboard.
My cousin R. , six years younger than me was even worse, when she warned that she was not feeling well, if Dad didn’t stop in the next few minutes, there we were, bathing in foul smells!
The car was the only place in the world where I could actually get bored! I always had a book at hand wherever I went, but I just couldn’t read in the car, it made me car-sick.
In those days, we didn’t have a radio, much less a cassette player and cd players didn’t exist. So when my mother was in the mood, we’d play games like telling stories about the shape of clouds, or guessing games in which she’d say the first and last letter of a name, and I’d have to guess which capital city it was, or we’d review the capital cities of every country I knew the name of. Or we’d sing songs.
Later on, they fed me Dramamine before each trip, and that made it even worse because it made me sleep hours on end, a sleep full of nightmares probably induced by the drug.
Those looooong, endless car rides felt like the world would be in motion and uncomfortable forever, a world in which I had no say at all.

About the photo, my father loved Peugeots, so the car in the photo was a Peugeot, and on the side, at the level of my father’s shoulder, there was an arrow that would actually stick out, indicating that you were about to make a turn, instead of today’s turning lights. One little detail I had forgotten, but I can still hear the click sound it made ;)