Bon soir, mon chérie. Probably already I have made a spelling, gender agreement, or accent mark error. (Mon + cherie - should that be cheri, since you're male? But that doesn't look right. Or is a dear always a female dear, no matter the Jean Doe). I was abysmal at French, despite all the middle-, high-school and even college years that I struggled with it. Generally things come very easily to me - or they don't. Geometry and French - not. And yet I love both. I especially love French culture, and consider myself perhaps French in spirit, more so than Anglophile anyway. That could well be the Polish in me.

I went to the movies this afternoon (Eat Pray Love, starring Julia Roberts) and laughed when the ever-charming Javier Bardem character explains how he gave up on proper names and varied endearments to refer to all his loved ones - lovers, children - simply as "darling."

Rainy all day and now it's pouring out, audible in the aerie, rain streaming down, wind blowing. I'm enjoying the inclement weather - what is oppressive months on end in the long winter makes for a delightful change in summer. But still there are shades of autumn, though I would not go so far as to say, with regard to the last sliver of a peach cake I made a few days ago, which I ate along with my morning cup of delicious Strongtrees coffee, that "each bite [was] a tiny farewell." Okay, Ms. Reichl, now I know you're baiting your Bourdain-crossed alter ego, I should get around to see what he did with that. Ping pong.

Ping pong. Played it a lot as a kid, table set up in the garage. There was a brief scene in the movie today where kids are batting a tiny ball across a green tabled field - India I think, not Italy or Bali. And the12534's into ping pong (or was that me, wishing one Saturday morning for a game to get started? No matter - both of us are for sure.) And - remarkably - the remarkable Mr. Charyn wrote a whole nonfiction book on the subject of Ping Pong. I really must check that out. Very much a confluence, more so for me, these days, than of hummingbirds...

[Went off on a riff about hummingbirds, which I've cut and pasted onto Word, and that I'll work on separately as a separate post.]

Darling - oh, I don't know what to say. It took a bit of piecing clues together to figure out where in Europe you "had" to be, and that was hours after the earlier part of the afternoon when I sat in the movie theatre vicariously (Julia Roberts' character's shadow self) exploring picturesque Roman streets and devouring exquisite pasta dishes, wishing all the while that I was there with you. There was a character in the movie, in the India part, who sort of looks like you, what you might look like now (or perhaps 10 years from now) - well, more like you than James Taylor - now that resemblance, which the doe-like Julia Roberts character exasperatedly says he looks like, I didn't see.

Sleep well, my dearest. I hope you're having a wonderful time - truly - OMG, you're in Paris! Revel in it, especially after what you've been through. But for now - midnight for you - hush, quiet, kisses, darkness, soft sheets, stillness, silence - sweet dreams, darling.