Mes Dépêches

It’s a sunny Friday on the Cote d’Azur, the late May heat still giving pleasant pats of love, nary a hint of the dripping assault to come within a month or so.

I choose a shaded spot in a plastic, faux-wicker chair, one giving authentic discomfort without the familiar, worrisome crunch from sitting in the real thing. The seat overlooks what I suppose to be the center of Mougins’ vieille ville, the view anchored on a monument to horses locked in either the consummation of battle or marriage. It seems regal, nonetheless.

How does this waiter not know English? I’d remind him of Admiral Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, or the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, and his resulting eternal subservience to the Anglosphere, but alas the language barrier. Given our inability to communicate, une biere is the only option, and thankfully I know the difference between petite and grosse. Grosse, it will be.

The day is peaceful, the crowd pleasant, smiling. In this setting I see Picasso, a late-in-life resident, or Cézanne, who camped in nearby Aix, studying a quiet drink, reflecting on the lack of issues of the day. I try to do the same but the urge to touch my phone is tempting. There is no lack of issues in this day.

Am I the only one? There is cellular service, yet I see no one with a phone in face. On a subway platform the twin lights of the oncoming steel tube are absorbed in a steady glow of screens, and yet here, in a land with nothing to do and no belligerent vagrant to escape, there are only faces. Pleasant smiles.

And a child. Androgynous, a confusion exacerbated by fresh couture on the curveless frame of early puberty. From his or her mother comes a glass of champagne, and, my God, the child takes a drink! My childhood was spent entranced in the low hum of monotonous Sunday sermons and eat-your-vegetables, only-grownups-may-speak family dinners, certainly not champagne on the terrace. I make a mental note to take this up with God.

The stone entrance of a small chapel is plastered in neatly arranged political ads. The far-right candidate wins the battle for real estate on this door, though one of her photos is torn, with scribbled anger expressed in French I don’t understand. Ignorance is bliss so in this narrative the messages are as pleasant as the surrounding scene.

I’m singing “Belle” from Beauty and the Beast, hopefully only in my head though can I say with absolute certainty? Watching for the baker tossing bread or the bookish princess-to-be turning away brutish suitors. Such a moment should not exist, such a place anachronistic to modernity, yet here I am, today in Mougins enjoying a moment from some century prior, some era of menial productivity and gratuitous reflection.

The restaurant next door hosts a wedding reception, an event not generally associated with moments of reflection, but here the crowd is subdued. Champagne flows, waiters quietly putter about, attendees reunite in subdued spirit, presumably so as to not bother the biere-drinking Yankees monitoring the situation.

If I am eventually to be married, I hope it to be as refined an affair. No wedding schtick from the Righteous Brothers or more age-appropriate contrived nostalgia from the Killers, but a silent penguin with a bottle of Dom Perignon, deftly stepping between quiet suits of late-spring tones, dutifully protecting the picturesque setting from half-empty coupes.

The mother scolds the child for unclear reasons, and he or she sulks over to a bench in response while the mother returns to laughing friends. The mind prefers binary to context, demands answers over questions. My eyes frantically lock onto the gender-less being in search of resolving him (or her), of pulling the scene back into effortlessly digestible form.

The pushback against a progressive world is perhaps strongest in the quiet of the old one. A cold beer, the sun’s soft glow, illuminating an artistically faded sign for La Poste above well-dressed, refined revelers. The scene’s innocence evokes memories of barefoot summers and the smell of crisping Ritz crackers atop my mother’s buttery casseroles.

Why in this moment would I want my phone, want a reminder of the world’s never-fading crises, of hurt and division and failures and social media’s sea of evangelicals and atheists cloaking their narrow-minded melodrama in vivid hues of martyrdom?

Why am I forced to confront the world’s realities every day? My shortcomings reiterated every hour? Can I not have just this moment, sugar fully coating the salt?

Just for today, let some other restless revolutionary manufacture his causes, paint purpose into his life with rifles and tears and zealotry in battles real and perceived, draped as some self-styled hero under Delacroix’s flag.

Let New Yorkers sit in traffic, Parisians in smog and Londoners in mildew. Let talking heads scream and executives scheme and artists wallow. Let people from home judge.

Monday will come, I know, and a modern world awaits, but for now I sit with my beer, wanting for nothing more than time, for fate to leave me at this table to see Van Gogh’s magical stars illuminate the cloudless Provençal skies.

For just a moment, I’ll have this afternoon in Mougins.