The Second Half

Driving up the Cotentin coast with an old friend, one of my oldest—some quarter of a century of putting-up with one another. He remembers me when, and I him. It’s a nice—but unsettling—feeling in this time of constant reinvention and managed public personae to spend time with someone with whom your shared and individual histories are so intermingled as to be almost one. Spouses, of course, are similar, although they have the grace usually to forget embarrassing details of previous lives, something old friends—usually good-naturedly—find sport in. It is a Sunday and we’re in search of something from the sea for lunch. I would have preferred mussels, but the only place we could wrangle a table at the height of the mid-day rush, thought of themselves as a little too haut for a simple bowl of wine, garlic, parsley, and bivalves. Instead, although not unhappily, I settled on a seafood tower—one of France’s greatest contributions to civilization—and he the loup de mer. Over the cracking of shells and generous dips into aioli we talked only of the future—the second half of our lives. Ideas aplenty, but the experience of life and its twists and turns offer both enthusiasm and caution in equal parts—something that gives support to whatever it is that comes next.
 
After a couple of days of warm, utterly blue skies, Normandy has returned to its usual self, the self that made it so appealing in the first place. Now, with a hazy drizzle at nine in the evening, the sun still 15 degrees above the horizon, I’m sitting in the summer house. A cigar of course. The camp chair sagging, not thank god, under my weight but the abuse it suffered under its previous owners. I’ve Chopin playing, an unusual thing for me. Not the Chopin, he has been a companion for many years, but listening to him out my phone’s speaker while sitting alone (an activity I generally undertake in the silence that is necessary for me to think). My brain doesn’t do well with multitasking, and despite my familiarity with him, Chopin still doesn’t allow me to stray, particularly during his Nocturnes…nearly perfect in every way. France, I’m finding, is changing something in me. And as my visits to the house become less frenzied (although no less strenuous—this trip including the usual assortment of ladders, a polychromatic field of hand and power tools, a vile heavy pickax, and unhealthy gallons of bile directed at French electrics), my mind is adjusting to the tempo and generosity that living slow offers me.
 
Friends, staying the summer at the house, have just found one of their own, nearby. Neighbors, again. The first time was in North Africa where proximity was a glorious necessity. Here it is just glorious. As they begin the journey of finding their way in the profond, it is nice to know there will be somebody with whom we can make mistakes, celebrate small victories, and fall into the future this place offers.