Movies and France

Earl works evenings, so most evenings I'm home alone or chaperoning Tucker and his girlfriend.
On Earl's two evenings off a week, we try to find something fun to do. Tuesday night, we walked down to the library and borrowed a couple of movies then went to a local coffee shop. We sat at tables along the sidewalk and enjoyed the beautiful September night.

When we had walked home, we watched one of the movies. Made in 1995, French Kiss with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline is a great romantic comedy for anyone who loves France, like I do.
Earl had never seen it before, and I only fell asleep for a small part of the movie. Kevin Kline plays a Frenchman, Luc, who is a thief. I wondered why they had chosen him to play a Frenchman and when I searched it online, I found that the role was originally written for Gerard Depardieu. I like Depardieu, but I can't imagine Meg Ryan falling for him.  Kline has since played other French-speaking parts. The plot is that Meg Ryan is petrified of flying so she doesn't go overseas with her fiance. He meets a French woman and falls in love. She gets up her nerve to fly over and win back the fiance, but meets Luc on the plane. He hides some contraband in her bag and they are thrown together.
Although I love France, I still prefer to watch American movies made in France. The problem is that comedies in France aren't generally  funny. Someone almost always dies. But the other movie we watched on Earl's night off was French, billed as a romantic comedy. We were prepared for bodies to start stacking up as the hilarity ensued.

The movie was called Heartbreaker with Vanessa Paradis and Romain Duris, French actors. The premise is that Duris plays Alex who, with his sister and brother-in-law, runs an elaborate business to break up couples. The examples they gave were a brother who paid them to break up his sister and her lame boyfriend, and a father who hired them to keep his daughter from marrying someone boring.
The beginning was fun as Alex and his crew went to elaborate lengths to convince a woman that she deserved more than the man who preferred to stay by the pool and watch a wet t-shirt contest.
Of course, Alex meets his match when he is asked to stop the marriage of Juliette, an independent woman, to a British philanthropist. Alex takes the job because he needs the money, even though it goes against his principles. He usually only breaks up couples who are unhappy or a bad fit. Juliette puts up quite a fight, which makes Alex fall in love with her. I won't tell you how it ends, but surprisingly, no one dies, which makes it 'ilarious, as the French say.
Both movies were full of lovely French scenes.

A Refreshing Walk

I want it established right up front that walking to the library was my idea. I had a whole route planned out where we could stop by the bakery to get a baguette then have a coffee at the coffee shop then run by the grocery store.
It's true that my friends and I canceled our morning run because the wind howled through the trees and a cold rain fell. By 10:30 or so, the morning seemed to have cleared up. Let's say the weather resembled this day along the Atlantic.

I remembered to grab the big umbrella from the back of the car and I said to Earl, "How about if we both take umbrellas?"
"Nah," he said. "It's not going to rain."
So we walked to the library in the light breeze avoiding puddles on the sidewalk. We picked up an Italian movie for tonight then we took a turn up a side street to go past the school.
A drop of rain fell on my arm. Then another. Thunder rumbled and a shrill whistle blew at the field. Soccer was canceled due to thunder. The kids ran screaming from the field as Earl opened the umbrella and held it above me.
I understand that holding the umbrella can be a tiring job and I am thankful to him for doing it, but, to be honest, the person not holding the umbrella gets wetter than the person holding the umbrella. He thinks he is keeping me dry, but he is a foot taller than I am, so inevitably the rain begins to soak my shoulder.
We walked fast but the rain became more fierce as the thunder rumbled. In a yard between two tall buildings, the rain came in at an angle blowing my hair across my face.
"Get on my other side," Earl said as he attempted to block the rain with the umbrella. We rounded the corner headed toward Panera and the rain suddenly turned to hail bouncing off the sidewalk in little chunks. The rain came straight at our faces and Earl held his umbrella in front of us and it buckled.
I ran for it. My jeans were soaked. My wet hair curled wildly. My socks were wet inside my shoes.
We decided to get the baguette and the coffee at Panera so we didn't have to go any farther. We shivered in the cool restaurant trying to warm up with the hot coffee. When we finished, the rain had stopped and we walked straight home with the sun trying to peak out.
Now the weather looks like this, kind of mocking us as we hang up our wet jeans and put on dry socks.

Lesson learned? Probably not. Unless I carry two umbrellas, we'll probably have to share again next time.
Do you think it's a marriage problem if I want my own personal umbrella in the rain? Does that mean the romance is gone?

I Love the Library

The first squabble/dispute/fight of 2010 drove me out of the house this morning. I ended up at the big library downtown. Our library is the best! I know that because it has been voted best library in the country year after year.
As I walked in, past the coffee shop, I saw a big railroad crossing sign blinking red from left to right. Then inside the main entrance was a huge train display. Parents and young children clustered around it. Kids darted around trying to see where the train disappeared into the "snow-covered" mountains and then they gasped in amazement to see it come around again.
It reminded me of the devotion I had to the library as a kid, and the thousands of enthralling trips my kids and I made to the library. Since I was little, the library has always been one of my favorite places.
When I was growing up, my mom would take us to the library once a week. One of those imposing buildings for a small town, we would walk up the big marble steps to the front door that opened in the adult section. I would take a left and run down to the children's section that was kept in the basement. Sometimes we'd go for story hours, but mostly I remember hauling home a huge stack of books that I would read that afternoon. I would have to wait for the following week to return the books and get more.
I wanted my kids to love the library as much as I do. I'm not sure if they do, although Grace does love reading. When we moved to Columbus as homeschoolers, the first thing I checked into was the library. To homeschoolers, a first-class library is the equivalent of the best schools. We used the libraries as gathering places, but we spent many hours wandering the stacks, finding books on Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Cherokee language, Vikings, the Crusades, the gold rush... Well, any subject that interested us, we managed to find in books at the library.
Now Ohio is making cuts to its library system and I worry about its future. What would life be without libraries? Just today while I was there I found some French movies that were mentioned in Debra Ollivier's new book What French Women Know. I got a couple of books to read and lucked into finding Eat, Pray, Love on dvd so I can listen to it in the car.
My kids turn to it for "Homework Help" when they are stumped, and thousands of jobless people go there for help with resumes or to search for jobs online.
My friend Tracie is a librarian. This year during Christmas dinner a sister-in-law commented that she didn't see the point of public libraries. People were quick to set her straight while steam poured from Tracie's ears. But I wonder how many people share the feelings of this woman who doesn't see the point... the point of an oasis of books that can take us far away or bring the whole world, past and present, close to us.