I often use this blog as a memory jog and one of my favorite “jogs” is to review Melinda’s and my trips to France. Melinda left PSCS in June of 2017 and that summer we took what we intended to be our annual trip to France
The idea of an annual trip to France got blown up in 2018, the year I left PSCS. Instead, we moved to the Bay Area and stayed there until 2019. We came back to Seattle and bought a little fixer-upper house. But we really hadn’t made any money over those 12 months. And living on savings and then buying a house that needed a LOT of work, well, annual trips to France were out. Besides, in 2020 there was a little thing called a global pandemic…
Still, all was quite innocent during the summer of 2017 and Melinda & I made our annual trip to France. This trip included some extended time in Amsterdam with Christine & Bérnard, celebrating Bérnard’s parents’ 60th anniversary in Normandy, and lots of fun times with Laurent & Frédérique. One downside was that my beloved tram line in Nantes, Line 2, was closed in our old neighborhood. To help me cope, Bérnard took me dumpster diving to find some Line 2 souvenirs to bring home.
To easily see all the posts from 2017 in reverse order, click this link.
I’m fairly convinced that my family and friends think I’ve gone off the deep end with the amount of time I’m spending on Suno, the AI-music generator. I know I keep saying it but it’s so true. Doing this really brings me a lot of joy.
I’m spending the most time adapting my Tao of Kindness poems into pop songs. As a refresher, over 81 consecutive weeks beginning in 2018, I adapted the 81 verses of the Tao Te Ching into kindness-themed poems. After discovering Suno in March, I had the idea to take those 81 kindness poems and make them into pop songs. So far, I’ve completed 48 of them, all of which you can find on Bandcamp.
Here I am, 1985, age 22. But I’m just as enamored with taking song lyrics I’ve written over the years and using Suno to make them into full-blown songs. About the lyrics, I wrote most of them in the 1980’s, long before getting married, having kids, and starting a school. And most of those songs are about my romantic plights at the time. It’s kind of remarkable that through all of the moves and changes of the last 40 years I held onto the lyric sheets. But I’m a sappy archivist at heart and these songs serve as a kind of diary or journal, much like this blog has been serving as a memory jog for me over the last 14 years.
With that long introduction, I offer a song that I first wrote in June of 1985. I’m 22 years-old and know I’m heading off to Olympia and The Evergreen State College in a couple of months. My job as a statistician at The Daily Racing Form had been automated, meaning I had been laid off (truthfully, I was offered the opportunity to continue with the DRF but had to move to Los Angeles to do it, which didn’t really interest me). In short, I had a lot of time on my hands.
My apartment in NE Seattle, called Executive Estates, had an outdoor swimming pool. I spent a lot of time that summer out by the pool (well, in the pool, too). I also spent time with Matt, my “little brother,” part of the Big Brothers program. And I had a couple of women friends that I hung out with that summer, too. One, Janet, would come over to the pool quite regularly. We went to the Puyallup Fair in September to see Three Dog Night. She was a security guard at the time and we drove to Puyallup in her patrol car that had lights on top, like a police car. Driving down Highway 167 to Puyallup, it was fun seeing the drivers ahead of us slow way down when they caught a glimpse of Janet’s car in their rear view mirrors.
My other female friend was Cynthia who I’d known since my family moved to Washington State in 1974. She was in the combined 4th/5th classroom I was placed in upon our arrival in March. We went onto the same junior high school, Tillicum, grades 7th-9th. I remember being in the same English class in 9th grade, the year she was a cheerleader. We became more casual friends in high school although by the time we were seniors I had a pretty serious crush on her. Late in the school year, I asked her to the senior prom although we both had said we didn’t plan to go. She turned me down, perhaps because of that earlier pledge. I don’t know.
My feelings for Cynthia remained fairly dormant over the next couple years, during which I had the first adult romantic relationship of my life (Suno has helped me develop a whole album of songs dedicated to that relationship – stay tuned). But it had long ended and by early 1985 my feelings for Cynthia had rekindled. We hung out fairly often and my desire to be more than friends increased significantly.
After doing something together (what, I don’t remember – maybe a movie, a walk in the park, whatever), we’d say goodbye. And it was in these awkward moments of saying goodbye that I’d get flustered. I wanted the friendship to blossom into a romance so in each of these “goodbye moments” I’d imagine that we’d have a romantic kiss. Clearly, though, she wasn’t interested. So we’d say goodbye and she’d turn her head, offering me her cheek to kiss. Very European, a French bissou.
After one of these goodbyes I went home and wrote this song in which I imagined a time in which she wouldn’t turn her head, that instead of her cheek I’d be offered her lips.Original lyric sheet from 1985 (click to enlarge) Maybe it’s kind of sappy, maybe it’s kind of sweet. Over the years, I still remember the feelings of it.
Finding the lyric sheet in a notebook after discovering Suno in March, I tried a number of different genres and AI prompts, more than any other of my old songs. In the end, the one that I like best is as a country song. I rephrased a couple of the lines and got this final result.
If you like this one, I created an entire album of similar songs, all country-sounding and using my original lyrics, and posted it on Bandcamp. One of those, “Off Course, Of Course,” was also inspired by me wanting to date Cynthia.
Since we had taken two trips to France in 2014, one during the summer and one in December to celebrate Ella’s 18th birthday, we didn’t make a trip in 2015. In London, 2016.So Melinda’s and my next return to see our friends in Nantes was in 2016. This time, to do something different, we flew in and out of London, staying for a few days both times. It was my first ever time in England and I thought it was fabulous. Even though we weren’t in France, I tagged the days we were in London with the “France 2016” moniker so they will appear when you click the link below.
While in Nantes, we rented a house in the neighborhood in which we lived during the sabbatical year, just a couple of blocks from the Bertail’s. Part of what I loved about this decision is that it put us on the same tram line (Ligne 2) that I fell in love with when we were there initially in 2010-11. It also put me in close proximity of the Nantes racetrack (the hippodrome) which is where I began running in 2011. Each morning, I’d get up and go for a jog from our house over to and around the track, plus anywhere else that suited my fancy.
Also, this was another one of those trips that consisted of just Melinda and me. While we missed having the girls with us, there was something liberating about traveling “sans enfants.”
To easily see the posts from 2016, click this link.
Here’s another one of those posts designed to take the dedicated reader (I think I mean myself) back in time to revisit my family’s various trips to France. This time, the blog time machine is taking us to December 2014/January 2015 when we returned to celebrate Ella’s 18th birthday.
It’s fun to visit a familiar place at a different time of year, especially one in which you’ve experienced all four seasons. Because of our work responsibilities with a school, returning in the summer was fairly straightforward. Going in December, even over winter break, required a little more coordinating.
We began this trip in Paris which is where we celebrated Ella’s 18th, much as we had done in 2011 for Chloe’s 18th birthday. What an experience – to be able to celebrate both girls’ 18th birthdays in Paris!
We also had both the Boudeaus and Bertails visit us in Paris before we all gathered back in Nantes. This time around, Melinda & I rented a wildly cool apartment inside the Passage Pommeraye in the center of Nantes. Having access to this place allowed us to show off some hidden Nantes treasures to our friends.
To see the posts from this trip, please click here.
Last spring, I started adding posts that included links to Melinda’s and my return trips to France, something we vowed to do each year after our brilliant sabbatical year of 2010-11. I got away from that and am committed to getting back to it. So, yes, in the summer of 2014, we again returned to France with Ella and, um, a girl named Chloe*.
Boudeau Pool in Nantes, 2014But not our Chloe.
Ella’s best chum in high school happened to be named Chloe* so back in 2014 I joked that Chloe*, Ella, Melinda, and I were returning to France. But I added an asterisk next to Chloe’s* name to indicate that this Chloe* needed a footnote.
Pretty soon, I just called her asterisk.
The trip includes an extended trip to Normandy and the WWII beaches for anyone interested in this kind of history. To see all the posts from this summer trip to France in 2014, use this link.
So as I mentioned in previous posts, toward the end of our sabbatical year, back in the early summer of 2011, Melinda and I began dreaming of the idea of returning to France, and specifically to Nantes, for the better part of a month each summer. We worked out the details at PSCS to make this happen and in 2012 we returned with Chloe and Ella, as summarized in my previous post.
In 2013, Melinda and I returned to Nantes without the girls. At age 20 and 16, they kinda liked the idea of having time by themselves in our Seattle house.
How odd…
While not having the girls with us provided a lot more flexibility, I’d hate to suggest that we didn’t miss them. To be honest, some nine years later, I don’t really remember missing them. I do remember posting on the blog little tests for them, cryptic photos of places in Nantes that I invited them to identify. So clearly, I was thinking about them…
The point that really felt different without the girls is when Melinda and I spent extended time in Paris, just the two of us. That was, indeed, a glorious time.
To gain easy access to all the posts from our 2013 trip, use the France 2013 tag or, even easier, click here.
In my last post, I talked about how Melinda, Chloe, Ella, and I spent 13 months in France beginning in July of 2010. These 13 months got dubbed the “French Sabbatical” as Melinda and I were granted paid time off from our jobs during that time.
From our “bonus” night in Iceland after missing our connecting flight to Paris. Not surprisingly, while we there we grew quite fond of living in France, especially living in the city of Nantes. I’m not quite sure how to describe this, but living as we did in Nantes, as well as traveling to various destinations in France and once to Italy, felt completely ours. It was different than anything done by other members of our family and carved out a super-special context in our lives that the four of us will forever share.
Melinda and I would go on regular walks while the girls were at school and it was on one of these walks that we talked about taking a month off from work each summer to return to Nantes.We spent our first week in Pornichet where it was unfortunately quite rainy and cool. We starting seeing this as a focal point for the next phase in our lives, one that would ultimately settle with us living in Nantes and Seattle for maybe 6 months each year. At first, though, because of work and other responsibilities, this would need to be a single month in the summer when school wasn’t in session.
So in 2012 we put the plan into action. Our good friends in Nantes, the Boudeaus (who were responsible for us choosing Nantes in the first place) and the Bertails (who lived around the corner from us during the sabbatical and had become among our closest friends), were only too pleased to help us. And it was Christine Bertail who found a place for the four of us to live for the month of July, 2012. A colleague of hers and his family would be in Spain that month so it worked out for us to rent his house.
This is more like it. Summer in Nantes! As I had done during the sabbatical year, I decided I would post to my blog on a daily basis while we were there. Truth be told, I had kept doing this once we had returned to Seattle in August, 2011. All of these posts can be found here by using the “Monthly Archive” pull-down menu below and selecting one of the months. Still, the idea of returning to France in 2012 and not posting daily seemed sacrilegious in some way.
So here was are in 2022, nearly ten years after our “Return to Nantes.” It’s hard to believe that much time has flown by. Because of the pandemic and other reasons, it’s been five years since we’ve been back but we do have plans to go this summer! And, yes, we did return in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. I’ll be focusing on each of those trips in future “From the Archives” posts.
For now, I invite you to explore our trip in 2012 using the “France 2012” tag.
From our first visit to Paris in October, 2010.One of the highlights of my life, of Melinda’s and my marriage, and in our role as parents of Chloe & Ella was the 13 months we spent in France from July 2010 through July 2011. We were granted a sabbatical from our jobs at Puget Sound Community School (PSCS), both as a tribute to the work we had done to get the school going and keep it running since its humble beginnings in 1994 AND to provide the school community an opportunity to know it could exist without its founders being present (ie: the infamous “Pie Truck Scenario” – perhaps I’ll explain that in a future post).
The concept of the sabbatical being a real thing began while Melinda and I were on spring break in 2008. The concept of living in France with our children began as a pipe dream we’d tell each other before we even had children. That this could become a reality is a tribute to a lot of people, most significantly the PSCS board and staff at the time. I can vividly recall the months leading up to our departure like they were last month, not twelve years ago.
Our first family photo taken on July 6, 2010 in our adopted hometown of Nantes.Officially, the sabbatical began with the school’s 2010-11 fiscal year, meaning on July 1, 2010. But we didn’t leave for France until July 4th so we had a few days in Seattle on our own. Because we were renting our house(note, this link takes you a site we created in 2012 to promote the idea of swapping houses with someone for a month that summer) to another family for the year and they moved in on July 1, we were staying at a friend’s. The day of the 1st, Chloe was out with some friends on one of her many goodbye tours and Melinda & Ella were doing some last-minute shopping. I was alone in an unfamiliar house with my laptop for company.
I had recently been reading how a person had documented his life for a full year by posting a daily photograph and some quick comments on a website. The idea appealed to me so that afternoon, alone in the house, I investigated how to do something like it. I knew a tiny bit about WordPress since one of the PSCS teaching staff members had taught the rest of us how to use it to post our class offerings to the students. On a whim, I created a WordPress blog, calling it “frenchsabbatical.”
Outside the Castle of Nantes (Château des ducs de Bretagne)I had promised myself and told others that I wasn’t going to over-commit myself to projects while on sabbatical. I wanted some practice of living more spontaneously, freed from the daily requirements of being a school director. Indeed, Melinda and I would have parenting obligations but beyond that, I wanted a sense of freedom. That the PSCS board had agreed to supply Melinda and me with a monthly stipend helped tremendously with this.
Little did I know that the whim of starting my “frenchsabbatical” blog would propel not just me but many others on a daily adventure, one I never regretted for a minute. Beginning on the 1st of July from the home of our friends, I posted every day until our return (truth be told, I kept posting every day after that for another year or so, all of which you can find here). Conversations emerged, first just among Melinda, Chloe, Ella & me – “You could put that on the blog.” And, “Don’t you dare write about that.” To, “I get to approve any photos you use of me.”
The blog features a lot of silly posts, like my fascination with the sexiness of French fire hydrants.As the months went by, our French friends got in the act. My dear friend Laurent made sure I had a way to post when his family took ours to their cabin in the French Alps that didn’t have an Internet connection. I also learned that part of his morning ritual while we were there was to read what I posted the night before.
Around the corner from our house in Nantes we met the Bertail family, people who have become among our closest friends in the world. There are so many stories to tell about them, from Christine, the mom, twice stopping by to introduce herself to us only find Chloe and Ella at home, to how they helped me celebrate my 48th birthday in style.
Then, of course, there were our friends and family members back in Seattle who used the blog to keep in touch with us. As a writer, I often would picture a member of our family as the audience to what I was writing. Michele, my mother-in-law, my brothers, or one of our nieces were common “targets.” Certainly, my mother was always in mind (she’d regularly send me edits – catching my typos with her usual flair).
To this day, I pay WordPress a fee each year to keep ads from the site and to maintain its unique domain name, meaning you can find it in its entirety at https://frenchsabbatical.com. Two years ago as a holiday present, one of the best I’ve ever received, Chloe & Ella had the blog posts made into a two-volume hardback book set that will forever hold a place of prominence in Melinda’s and my home.
I took up running while in France. Here I am crossing the turf track at the Nantes racetrack to get to the inner trotter track where I regularly ran after dropping off Ella at school.Last week, in order to have all of my personal blog posts in one spot, I copied the content to this site, my ongoing personal blog. So if you’re interested in seeing what we were doing on a given day, you can do so right here. In fact, in the footer you’ll see a pull-down menu on the left for a monthly archive. Choose a month from the sabbatical year, July 2010 – July 2011, and enjoy some reading.
Andy & Melinda on Day Two. No, they hadn’t had too much to drink. They just were overwhelmed by how bright the flash was!Back in the day, as administrators/co-founders of PSCS, Melinda and I tried to do something special when spring break rolled around each year.
This included a couple of trips to Mexico, memorable trips to La Jolla and Palm Springs, staying with family outside of San Francisco, and a trip to Portland. In fact, it was in Mexico in 2008 that we first conceived of what became our family’s 2010-11 sabbatical to France, and it was during spring break in San Francisco in 2010 that we got our French visas.
In 2014, to save money for a future trip, we stayed home, a staycation! For fun, we chose a different restaurant in Seattle each day and experienced that restaurant’s happy hour. For fun, I recorded each day’s outing as a way to make it even more special, much as I’ve recorded each day we’ve spent in France since the year of the sabbatical.
To read the happy hour posts in order, start here. Then click on the next post in the lower right. Or click on each one in order below:
Heartman was a character I first created when Melinda and I began dating in 1990. Heartman was my alter ego, the superhero part of myself that would go on with his day while my real self, “a small man,” missed Melinda.
When Chloe was a kindergartner in 1998/99, I brought Heartman back. Each morning I quickly drew on a sticky note a comic involving Heartman and put it in Chloe’s sack lunch. Each image had something to do with what I had recently done, often with Chloe, and with Heartman waving to her and saying, “Hi, Chloe!” Some of these images made it home each night and I stashed them away.
Some time ago, I found a sandwich bag filled with the drawings and created a scrapbook of them. Then, in the summer of 2013, while seeing a Keith Haring art exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, I was inspired to scan these drawings and present them online as a way to preserve and share them.
I posted them in order of their creation, one at a time, with a little commentary tossed in for good measure. To start with the first, go here. Note, the drawings got better as I went along so for a really good one, check out this one, noting the chocolate pudding spilled on it.
The idea of an annual trip to France got blown up in 2018, the year I left PSCS. Instead, we moved to the Bay Area and stayed there until 2019. We came back to Seattle and bought a little fixer-upper house. But we really hadn’t made any money over those 12 months. And living on savings and then buying a house that needed a LOT of work, well, annual trips to France were out. Besides, in 2020 there was a little thing called a global pandemic…
Andy Smallman 