VIRB

You hear things about the French that live in the mountains: they are a good people and kind but a little cold toward outsiders. Very warm once you get to know them and their suspicion has worn down some. I can think of a lot of historical and cultural reasons why this might be so, except that I haven't really found it to be so. The sometime-bourgeois cold and cliquishness of my own Lyon, something that has bothered me for a while, existing even in Charlotte in places to be sure, has gone sight unseen here in Chamonix, perhaps the most significant French Alps mountain town. All I find here in the shadow of Mont Blanc and her neighboring ranges is a warmth, a directness, an enthusiasm in a small town with adventure-seekers and outdoors enthusiasts the world over passing through to join in on what you feel was the town's passion before it was so for any of those visitors. I picked up the local newspaper yesterday morning as I was waiting to go up L'Aguille du Midi, the lift that sends you soaring up to a mountaintop at 12,000 feet or so just next to Mont Blanc itself. The paper had news from the front page to the back about outdoor sports activities in the region, and very little about international or even national news, unless you count the Tour de France. I saw a sign in town when I got here a couple days ago; apparently I missed the World Cup of Rock Climbing event by two days. I can't imagine. You see people walking through the picturesque center in packs and hiking boots, sometimes with crampons and ice picks in hand. They ride bikes, skateboards. They just generally seem to get out more. This has been the rather bucolic image my Chamonix-native roommate has been talking up this past year during his weeks in the city (he went back every weekend to work as a ski instructor on the slopes during winter), but I always quietly shrugged it off, finding it a little too idyllic for belief.

Turns out, he might have been right. You kind of have to see it to believe it, if you're the Thomas-type like me.

In other news, I was trying to get something with my train tickets back to Lyon worked out yesterday afternoon with an SNCF guy at the Chamonix station when a really pretty, tall blonde walked in and he asked her if she could help me instead. She turned to me a little impatiently.

"I lost my grandmother," I said.

"I'm so sorry," she replied earnestly.

"Me too," I said, then reflected a moment. "Oh. She's still living. She's just stuck at the next station down."

She bent her knees and turned as if she might collapse, breathing the way you do when you're WAY relieved. I felt pretty bad about accidentally giving her the impression that my grandmother had just died and I would involve her in the grieving process.

The story was that yesterday the telepherique lift broke down for a while, delaying our expensive ascent into the mountains. It looked like the trip would get us back into town after the last train back to Lyon. So I called the hotel to extend our stay one night, which they kindly did. Then we got back with just enough time after all. So I cancelled the last-minute reservation that was a few hours old and we hurried to the station. I found our train, well-marked and confirmed by a harried station agent. I put grandma safely on board with our bags, drinks, her sandwich, and my hot pizza while I went back inside the station to validate our tickets, roughly 25 minutes to walk 50 meters and back. Then, as I was walking along the opposite quay, the train left the station. With grandma inside. And my bags. And my pizza. I ran after the train from the other side shouting her name until she looked confusedly out the open window above her. I yelled for her to get off at the very next stop and she nodded her worried confirmation. (Apparently her fellow travelers in the compartment found this really funny.)

Then, with the train gone, the station agent whom I'd talked to was revealed standing on the other side. He looked at me quizzically. I looked at him pretty pissed. I yelled across that my grandma was on that train. He asked why I wasn't. I told him because it wasn't scheduled to leave for another 20 minutes. He said no, that was another train that was running late that we'd gotten on. I asked how I was supposed to have known that. He got my meaning. I asked where that train was bearing my grandmother off to. He said Switzerland. I thought I'd have an aneurism. He asked if I had a car. I said no. He asked if she had a cell phone. No. Does she speak French? Still no. I told him of the plan for her to get off at the next stop. He said that her train would cross with the one we'd wanted in the first place; she just had to get off of the one she was on and hop onto the next in the opposite direction. I asked if he could call the ticket controller on her train to tell her that. He said there was none, nor was there anyone at the next station. I said, if I'd known that I wouldn't have gotten off to go validate the tickets. He didn't laugh. I amused myself at the irony of it.

This began a flurry of calls and radio communication with train conductors and further stations in the region to try and get her on the next train back, which was also running painfully late. It finally arrived. No grandma, but there was a nice Scottish lady who, seeing me as I was running back and forth the length of the train trying to find grandma inside, stepped out and asked if I happened to be looking for an older American lady. Yes, by sheer coincidence that was exactly what I was looking for. Did she have one to spare? She's waiting for you at the next stop, the lady said.

I'd lost my grandma in France.

I finally got on the next train to find her, calling the hotel to re-rebook our room in the wait, and a joyful reunion was had at that next stop, Les Praz, which was comprised of one track and a dark, wooden shack in case of weather. Apparently a single train had been late in the region that day and had thrown off everything else that day. In a country where the trains are almost always exactly on time, it gives you respect for the consistency, the precision of that daily operation throughout the countryside. As for us, Grandma Richardson and I passed a lovely, if unplanned, second night in Chamonix in the very same room we'd had the night before. Still a pretty amazing view of Europe's highest peak from the room's terrace above a nice little bar/café.

Normally I write these letters with an idea of a direction being taken. The rest is simply going down the road I've chosen, seeing it as I see it. I don't imagine the road beforehand; I don't write the letters in my head. Yet this one I've had much difficulty writing. At the same time, it's the only one I can think to write, though I do not know how to write it, preventing any others from coming out before. It's a clogged artery. So I've tried working it out in my head. I've even tried putting down scraps and attempts, none of which met with much success. It's alternately a matter of not liking the way I'm saying it and not liking what it is I am saying.

The next thing for me is going back to the States, and that idea seems in some ways as foreign to me as coming over here last September. Maybe more. What will I say to people? Where have I been? What have I been doing? What has been occupying me all these intervening months, I imagine being asked. Living, as near as I can make out. Yet the more difficult idea, the one I've been much afraid of encountering, is that summary sweep of "intervening months." As if maybe they were something I'll have whistled away while shortly I'll be back and the real world will resume. The person I fear meeting will almost always be worse than any that I will; I am much better at paralyzing myself than others are.

But was that a bizarre paragraph? I would have found some way to spare you. Thing is, people get the idea that you'll go away and you'll be different, just being in a different place. You'll look out upon another countryside and be a changed man in some way at center - a whole new Stephen shall be born. I don't much believe that I could come to France and be different than the man I was getting on the plane in Charlotte with two bags for the year, one not quite even full but nearly over-weight. This was one more step on the very same path. Maybe just a more glamorous one for a time. However, the reverse seems more daunting, more possible - that I'll be different going back to the States. Isn't that odd?

Part of that is tied up in the truth that there really is no going back - not like we've passively talked about. There is no returning, only the act of arriving somewhere with the look of some other where you've known before. The streets'll be the same and yet much changed. Nothing is as you left it. Kids get big and start using words in between their screaming. Rooms get redecorated, people change position, weight. Scarier still those who've seem not to've changed at all. As much love as you have, as close and true as you feel, even if no change took place in your absence, you start to feel like a guest in your mother and father's home, somebody else's bed than your own. This is your moment to discover, and you hope beyond hope that others will feel the same, even about you. That it won't just be Stephen, ol' Stephen, predictable. That maybe one gets to know another as if for the first time. Because maybe you never believed you were very known by many to begin with. And I've got enough married friends to know the wisdom in that, how the years show how little, not how much, of a person you've gathered to the point of predictability. There is no such predictability. (Yes, I just predicted that. Let it slide.)

Yet at the same time, this will just be the next thing. Or maybe not "just," for that is much. The next thing, and I believe that that's alright. One of the most singularly true and comforting things I've heard, "Everything will be alright." Not so unlike Jesus benediction after all: my peace I give you. That you might have joy. And so forth. We've maybe only begun to take our own lives at something close to a day at a time, I think. Perhaps we'd do well to take the lives of those around us in the same way, patient and caring and open enough to wait and ask the question. Which means that I am my own problem of perception. I the perpetrator would claim to be the victim and suffer, though I warrant very little pity in the end as such.

Which necessitates the admonition to quit with this fearing the question. The best way I've found to scare somebody off? Ask some questions. Don't believe me? Well, I've pushed off quite a litany of people that way, asking questions. I've been doing it since I was little, driving even my parents crazy with them, so if I haven't gotten it by now, I'm not sure I will. Though I'm also not sure I should. As my grandmother recently said, "I like me!" If I am made this way, and to improve is sometimes to become more purely this, more lovingly this, who am I to gainsay the lord? There is only a Yes to be given. A Thank You too, perhaps.

So, I've seen Seville and Madrid, made yet another trip to Paris and one to the Alps since I've last written. Seville was enriched with a magic, a hot-bloodedness, a drifting heat and ancient resonance that I can only point in the direction of but cannot reproduce for you here. I have been utterly taken with Flamenco since I came back. And the idea of returning there later. I've just sent grandma back on a plane this morning, which gives me about 5 days before I drop back in on Italy once more to see Rome, Florence, and Milan before I jump on top of my two bags to zipper them and my few accumulations inside before they spill back out again on American soil after 1 Aôut. Again, those of you who write, who have written, thank you. I've tried to keep writing back. If you've written me and I haven't returned the kind correspondence in some time, it's very possible I've lost track. I'm sorry. Remind me. I'll get on it. I'll presently have some train rides for the occupying.

And thank you kindly for putting up with this, one more wandering and probably more than marginally convoluted missive. It feels like making it up as you go along. Or being left on a train by your grandson in a foreign country and moving uninterruptible to god-knows-where. There's great peace to be found in both places I believe. Just got to be looking. Just got to be there.

So, if you can suffer counsel from the likes of this correspondent, wherever you are today, today alone, be there. There are miracles to be seen if you're willing. Just don't worry when things start to go sideways or seeming-backwards, though. It's just the way it seems sometimes. Take heart and believe.