Reunion by the Sea

On Sunday, I said goodbye to my Paris studio apartment and caught the TGV (Train de Gran Vitesse) for Sète on the Mediterranean. Gran Vitesse – yes, when it finally gets rolling. About a half hour outside of Paris, the train headed back to the station. There was an electrical problem and we scrambled aboard an identical train on the next track – in a scene straight out of Jacques Tatí. Finally, the French landscape zipped by. In only 3-1/2 hours, I arrived in Séte, a small coastal city on a peninsula to the west of Montpellier. Catherine and Yves Lepere were waiting for me and took me to my hotel.

Days of short trips to nearby villages, breezy dinners on their terrace overlooking the sea accompanied long talks about our shared experiences over some forty years of friendship and reflections about our own lives. Yves and Catherine have just retired from teaching in Belgian universities. Their retirements were mandatory. When you reach 65, that’s it. Yves will still give lectures and short courses in architecture schools all over Belgium but, for Catherine it is an abrupt end to a long career of teaching philosophy and psychology courses for architecture students. For her, retirement came far to soon. Meanwhile, they have sold their house and Yves’s studio – both contained in a farmhouse at the edge of a small rural village. Belgium a small country and French-speaking Belgium (Wallonie) is even smaller so commutes to their schools were not extreme.

They are a marvelous couple. They are really opposites: Yves, the man of vision and poetry but with pragmatic underpinnings, Catherine, the passionate intellectual but also the organized businesswoman and manager. In some ways, their partnership reminds me of my own parents marriage of contrasts – possibly further reinforced by their retirement and Sète itself, surprisingly reminiscent of Orange County.

On Tuesday, we had oysters by the bay. It has been warm here too, but unlike Paris, you can wear shorts and loose clothing and there is always a breeze. We ate oysters that tasted of the salt water of Odysseus and the ancients then swam in the Mediterranean .

Yesterday, Yves and Catherine drove me to Avignon by way of Nimes. Avignon is a dense walled city - made even denser by the many tourists. Right now, there is a jazz festival and one of the residents of my hotel is a Flemish pianist who will play this evening. I reserved my seat for Dijon, tomorrow - slowly wending my way back to Paris and New Orleans.

Images: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/spjacobs70118/album?.dir=/4c19re2&.src=ph&.tok=phEYLSFBakmSyZb.