Driving through Saulieu brought up a few memories. One was about the bike ride that I wrote earlier about. Another one is about a car trip I took with my mom and dad through the burgundy hills. I must have said this was something I wanted to see; the hills on the way from Dijon to Beaune and southward where grapes turn into gold. That’swhy they call the area the Cote d’Or (the gold coast)of course.
Well, that was not a splendid idea. First of all, I was too old to be travelling with my parents, I was 22/23, but some unexpected events in my life made this vacation trip together seem like a ticket out of heaven, so I went with them. I remember laying on the back seat on the way to Saulieu, reading the hilarious letters of the Dutch poet Jan Hanlo, not paying attention to any of my parent’s traveling discussions, about where to turn left and which exit to take on the roundabout.
In Saulieu a read a little more and biked around,; without ever being forced out of the heaviest third gear my dad’s bike provided. Oh heavenly days of youth. I also remember my uncle Henk who would propose at the deepest of night to watch some ‘bears.’ In Dutch , the big and small dipper are called the “bears” Both are visible in France.
But one day I proposed to go and see the hills of the Cote d’Or, of Beaune and of Nuits St Georges. My mother agreed first and my came along with the idea. Until he found out that those hills were real hills and the travel was slow and the hills endless and, by the way, what was his pretentious son and his crazy burgundy wines trying to accomplish? As he drove, he got more and more irritated by every corner he had to turn – and here were lots of those.
This story reached a climax in a little shop in Beaune. I saw a bar of soap that I wanted to buy, It was made of real olive oil! Throughout this journey, my mother had been mediatigng between me and my dad. It was a difficult role. She wanted to support us both. When confronted with the soap, she told me that it was an extravagance. I thought, “how could a bar of soap – a few guilders at the time – be an extravagance!” But now I understand her better. By suppressing this desire for an exotic (by dutch standards) soap, supported my dad’s position that the whole trip would be a crazy idea and at the same time prevented her son from falling into a tourist trap.
With hindsight I do sympatize with both of them. My goodness, how often in the past few weeks, have I thought about better ways for Claire to spend her time than what she came up with herself. Every time, I’ve had to laugh about the Dad in myself.
And the other part – all the nonsense that marketing guru’s come up with every time – my mother understood that much better than me. I haven’t really learned it and it didn’t prevent me from buying a big circle of cheese from the abbye of Clairvaux today.
“You bought the cheese, I suppose,” Julie asked, as she waited on a bench outside the Abbey store. “True”, I acknowledged. “The whole thing I suppose,” Julie asked. True again. She knows me. I want to proclaim, here and now, that it is value for money. In fact, I’ll go and eat a piece of the cheese right now.
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