Pompidou

Some memories are so old that it's hard to remember where you were when you were first making them.

I remember walking into Valle Chadefour in the Auvergne in the early 2000's and thinking it was the most beautiful place in the world. It was a landscape where you could just keep walking and walking without ever coming to the end, of.

It must have been the same year Lea Ann and I sat at an outdoor cafe in Paris and wrote the autobiography of our relationship, from the time we first met in the late 1960's right thru our children, Drew & Spencer, up to the then-present time of being in Paris and being free enough and having enough money to do anything we wanted to do, at least while we were in France.

I remember that I drank white wine and Lea Ann drank hot chocolate and that the cafe was in The Marais, within sight of The Pompidou which we both loved to say. And that we wrote our autobiography on stationary from the hotel where we were staying.

Georges Pompidou had been President of France in the 1970's. In one of his official Presidential portraits he's pictured smoking a cigarette. I remember my neighbor in the village of Montaigut le Blanc, where Lea Ann and I lived for 3 months in the early 2000's, telling me that Pompidou was born in the Cantal department, not far from the Auvergne, and that he had died in office. Another former President, Giscard d'Estaing, owned a country house not far from Valle Chadefour, according to my neighbor.

The French are proud of their country, in a small regional way that's so sweet to someone from the USA like me.