Life is good

The week of San Valentino has made me think of those moments when you get slapped upside the head by someone’s kindness, humor or grace and it lights you up inside, and how those moments can feel like a kind of love. I’ve been lucky enough to have had, or witnessed, a couple of these in the last week or so.

A village mystery

Friends rent a house in the village on a busy, straight, steep street that is often lined by parked cars. The friends do not live in Italy full time but visit often from their home in Paris, so the house is frequently vacant. There’s a hardware store next door to the house that is run by three generations. Our friends have fallen in love with the hardware store family, and vice versa. The son of the hardware store looks after some of their potted herbs when they are gone which is often rewarded with freshly baked cookies upon their return.

They threw a fantastic party before the holidays with about 60 locals in attendance. As part of the decoration they’d purchased two inexpensive, potted cypress trees less than two feet tall to put on either side of the front door and festoon with lights. The little trees remained guarding the door after they returned to Paris, joining the potted herbs.

One morning they received a text from the hardware store son who had terrible news to report. One of the cypresses was missing, he was horrified to report. Several texts followed to the effect of “What is our village coming to? Who would do this? Take an innocent cypress? People know you! I am deeply ashamed and apologize on behalf of the village.” Minutes later more texts arrived, this time from a lovely woman who does gardening for both of us. She texts that she just drove by and saw that one of the cypress trees was missing. She wrote that she was deeply sorry and sad that such a fate had befallen the potted tree, and also wondered how the village could have gone so deeply wrong. And both were puzzled by the fact that only one tree was gone. What kind of person would do that? (The remaining cypress, and assorted herbs, grace the hero shot above.)

About half an hour later our friend received another text from the son with a video of his mother triumphantly walking up the hill carrying a mangled cypress tree in a broken pot. She was beaming. The village had been vindicated. The cypress had not been stolen at all but clearly a car had managed to entangle the cypress under a bumper while parking and dragged it down hill before it was dislodged.

Peace and civility returned to the village. All the small potted plants can sleep more peacefully now.

Paris

We go to BHV, the large, wonderful 160-year old department store in central Paris near the Hotel de Ville—its full name is the Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville. I am searching for a very unusual size fitted sheet to put on a bed we are due to take delivery of. We decided after 26 years of marriage we’d earned the right to a proper bed frame, which we’d never had in our married lives, always sleeping on a mattress with legs. Friends led us to a woman restoring antique bed frames and we’d fallen in love with a very wide one with a curved base, necessitating not only new sheets but a whole new mattress.

I asked the clerk for this uncommon size and she said she’d have to get it from the stockroom. Winter sales were in full swing and I asked if the sheet was on sale and she said unfortunately no. I was paying and she asked if I had a loyalty card and I instinctively replied no. Then I suddenly realized that I actually did—I’d signed up for one when I bought the mattress. I corrected myself and we went through a long process of finding my loyalty account. Phone number didn’t work, I was having a hard time remembering my French letters to spell my name. She finally found it and said, “Ah, you live in the 11th arrondissement.” I said no, thinking there must be a mistake and that she had the wrong Nancy Raff—oddly enough there is another Nancy Raff who lives in Paris—she used to work for HP while I was doing consulting with HP and we often got one another’s emails. On a trip to Paris years ago she and her husband had us over for a drink. The patient clerk pulled me around the counter and showed me the listing on her screen, which had my email address. I realized that the address was for the workshop where I had the mattress delivered and that the 11th arrondissement was actually correct.

By this point I am a candidate for the world’s worst customer. I can’t speak the language and have gotten even the simplest things wrong. Like being able to spell my name. And my address. But yet this clerk was still calm. She then said something about 130 euros. I was concerned. Was the mattress delivery not free? Did I owe 130 euros? She then managed to convey that I could apply 130 euros to the sale, taking the price of the sheet from 145 to a mere 15 euros—a much better price than what was on sale. At this point she starts punching the air saying “Fantastique!” “Incroyable!” I add a “C’est chouette” and call her a goddess. She is beaming and it has clearly made her day to pull off this coup.

She then asks what brand mattress we’d purchased, which, of course, I can’t remember. She walks with me all around the extensive mattress department until I locate the model of the one we’d bought at the far end of the store from her area. She calls over the mattress clerk to get the measurement of the mattress to make sure that the sheet would be deep enough.

The humanity and generosity of this woman lit me up for the rest of the day. Her job can’t be easy and her grace at dealing with my ineptitude and linguistic incompetence seemed boundless. Such a lesson in how the most mundane of encounters can add such texture and warmth to life.

Paris: Groupies

A friend kindly invited me to Le Meurice for high tea to celebrate my birthday. This hotel is one of the fanciest in Paris and tea there is an event. We were shown to one end of a table for four that we shared with two Parisian women in their seventies. We nodded hello and then retreated into our own worlds.

The food part of the tea service arrived on a stand with three levels—savory at the bottom, scones in the middle, and some very beautiful and unusual pastries on the top. We work our way from bottom to top, as instructed by our waiter, and by the time we get to the pastry level we can hardly even think about eating them. Which is a problem as the desserts are a product of the hottest pastry chef working in Paris right now, Cedric Grolet, and not eating the top tier was out of the question. One of the pastries looked like a miniature mango, with an airbrushed surface that was indistinguishable from the real thing, except for its size. It wasn’t marzipan but an amazing few layers of white chocolate and something crunchy around a core of mango puree. There was a small, round chocolate tart in the middle, covered with hazelnuts. Then on the other end was a round chocolate ball constructed to look like a nut, sprayed with gold. You can see the mango and the chocolate ball below.

This was about two hours in and the going was getting hard. We were gamely sampling the desserts and my friend was telling me a little about the pastry chef when I realized that the woman to my right was talking to me. She was saying under her breath “He was right here! He was just behind you. He was standing right behind you!” Her friend went on to say that they were “groupies” (said with that fantastic French “r”) of Cedric and came often. The woman to my right whips out her phone and starts to show me his impressive Instagram feed (@cedricgrolet). She knows every video and photo he’s posted.

They then proceed to give us some of the best life advice I’ve received in years. Ignore what the waiter says about the order in which to eat the food—who says it has to be savory to sweet. They’ve learned to always start with the desserts and work your way down. This may just apply to more than high tea.