Last week I was jogging down Fifth Avenue, blissfully lost listening to live Grateful Dead music that I'd downloaded off the Internet, some hissy space jam from Berkeley, California, during the Reagan Administration and there I was on the Avenue, listening and blissing as the guitar went dee-dee-dee and bap-bap-bap-bap and the cymbals went whoosh-clang, and the bass went bum-bum-bum. I crossed the street down near the Met, one-two-one-two dee-bap-clang-bum and I sensed some motion to my left.

In a drawn-out moment I saw a dark Volvo race inexorably toward me, toward my legs; it screeched and skidded to a halt as I leapt to my right and held out my arms, palms out and fingers splayed, as though to block the giant object with my bare hands. I skipped away as the car lurched forward again, pursued by furious honking traffic. Bee-wee-wee-wop-bap-bap in my ears as I tried to think of how lucky I was to be alive, how close this really was; people stood around half-noticing, half-turned to me on the cobblestones. I kept running, bee-dee-whoosh, bee-dee-whoosh.

On the gravel in the station parking lot Sebastien eagerly took my bags, making me a little bit ashamed for every time I never lifted someone else's bag; his smile shined like a searchlight through the darkness and the rain. I had just about decided he was an all right guy when I got in the car with Mom to follow him and she told me what an insufferable pain in the ass he is, how you can't have a discussion with him because he always has to be right, you don't want to talk about politics or September 11th or anything because he's going to disagree and he'll say something about Americans and won't quit until you shut up. This is basically what she said anyway, as we searched the darkness for his furtive taillights disappearing and reappearing around each bend. So then I changed my mind and we talked about some other things.

The house was warm and lovely with a big fire and Yves sitting in front of it in his big chair, all wrapped up in his shawl with the tubes in nose and the oxygen humming nearby. I shook his frail hand and we said "Bonjour, comment ca va?" and that's almost all we said to each other the whole time. 

We all had drinks and I told Sebastien about my job and we talked but I had been made wary of him and I sensed I wasn't saying as much as I normally would. Anyway I wanted to talk to Mom. It was a matter of navigating between these two other figures, the extraordinarily quiet, unassuming presence and the noisy, needful one. We spoke French at dinner and afterward Mom and I lapsed into English when the others faced the other way, seeming to leave our world. I went to sleep early and slept late, a country winter night. 

The next day we sat around and I fixed some things on Mom's computer. In the late afternoon I went for a run in the cold wintry drizzle. I ran the twisting and dipping road, past fields piled with freshly cut trees, their wood dark yellow from the wet and bearing the loggers' inscrutable day-glo markings. It was foggy and silent and there wasn't a single car in sight. I tried to get a sense of where I was; the deep French countryside, the particularity of it, but it was hard.