Thanksgiving

Yep, that's a movie poster, but have no fear, you haven't accidentally wandered into our "other" blog, Kentucky Fried Popcorn - Instead, it's a reference to what I want to write about today, which is not pipes but the pipe community and our community of fellow humans in general.  I was thinking about this after spending some time writing a long letter to our French friend Claudie, trying to sum up all the things that have happened to us since we said goodbye in the Nantes train station.  It seems a good topic for a post, but you'll have to pardon me if this is a bit more personal than usual.

Our seven years in France cost us a lot...  We lost a US house to foreclosure, all our savings and a lot of our possessions.  Over the course of that extended struggle we were chipped away bit by bit, losing the expectations that people take for granted in their native cultures, as well as a lot of our optimism.  You don't decide to try moving to another country without plenty of optimism, but by 2008, it was gone.  The world was in recession, sales were down, and that was the time the French government decided it was a good idea to double our monthly taxes (Had we remained, they would have doubled again in 2009).  We sold the house and planned our return to the USA, hoping to at least leave France on a peaceful note, but the buyer broke the contract at the last possible minute, months after we'd closed down our business and let our working visas expire.  We were left with absolutely nothing a mere two weeks before the plane flight was scheduled...  Multiple maxed credit cards, no savings at all, no money to come from the house sale, no way to even afford the train ride to the airport, much less pay to have our workshop equipment and belongings shipped to the US.  Those were genuinely the darkest days of my life.

Now here's where that movie reference comes in... It started with an overseas call from an American pipe collector.  "How can I help?", he asked.  The word went out through the pipe community.  Aid raffles were discussed.  Donations were sent.  Two different people offered us rental houses to stay in, free of charge, until we could get back on our feet.  Checks were mailed.  Bank transfers were made.  I finally had to contact my confused parents in the US to explain why these strangers were sending money to her (as a US postal address).  One fellow shipped me a crate of wood turning tools, buffing wheels, and more.  Another drove down several states to visit and hand me $1000.  Another loaded up a U-Haul trailer with a loaner compressor AND sandblasting cabinet and drove it all the way up here from Alabama.  Someone paid our utility bills for a year.  Fellow pipemakers sent briar.  Others sent furniture, household items, food, you name it.

When we finally turned into the driveway of our new home, it was simply astonishing.  We walked into a furnished house.  Loaners and donated items filled every need... Couch, chairs, someone's extra TV, a kitchen stocked with food, a foldaway bed to get us by, and a workshop spaces stacked high with tools and contributions.  One lady had even provided outdoor furniture for the rear deck!  It's an overwhelming feeling, looking out into a green backyard from safe shelter when only two weeks earlier I was literally facing a homeless life in a foreign country. 

After we'd moved to France, things began going badly in so many different ways, and I spent years wondering what I had done wrong...  Feeling as though some higher power were out there deliberately punishing me by crashing every hope and blocking every attempt to better our situation.  Writing this, it sounds crazy, paranoid, but it's a very real headspace - When nothing goes right for year after year, you really do start to wonder why.  Was it me?  Was I somehow a bad person?  Books and movies tell us that the bad guy always "gets his", but life isn't fiction.  Why did so many terrible things happen to us, year after year?  I don't know.  Why did so many people selflessly give of their time and money and possessions to help us out when we needed it?  I can't answer that, either, because if I was a bad enough person to deserve such punishment, I couldn't be a good enough person to deserve such kindness.  And I'm not a "good person", not really - In fact, I've always considered that to be a particularly off-putting form of arrogance, those folks who smugly nod and smile and think deep inside that they're "the good people". 

I feel like I should wrap this up here with some sort of heartwarming homily that ties it all together in a neat bow...  "Lesson learned.  The End."  Except that there's not any Great Truth out there on the highways of life, no transcendent Zen moment of enlightenment when you understand the universe, no movie magic scene where you become one with the Force...  Instead, what I took from my experience were these lessons:   Listen.  Give.  Help.  Don't be an asshole.  Also, if we're measured by anything in this life, it's not by what we personally accomplish, but by what we do to help others.  That may not be what they write down in the history books, but it's the bond that holds us together between the lines.

I'm thankful for everything that's happened, and I look forward to tomorrow.

Memories of Brittany

Since I've been on a roll with the comic-style posts, here is a little cross-post from our "Life in America" blog, just to show a somewhat different look and feel. I've been trying to find some way to sum up our seven years in Brittany, and here's a start.

It's already like a dream. This is my first attempt to put our experience into a combination of words and images. Click it for the full-size version.

Home again, home again, tickety tock

We are back in NC! In a mad whirlwind, Em and I departed Herbignac with the cats in tow. Stressed out in their carriers, Loki gave us a blast of explosive cat diarrhea which she proceeded to roll in and lie in during the car trip to the Nantes train station, so we were soooo popular on the train... (Em hauled the cat through three TGV train cars searching for a bathroom that had a working sink to wash the cat off in, but never could find one that funtioned properly, and ended up blasting the filthy cat with spurts of random tap water, while I sat in the back of the car with the better-behaved feline, Freya, and reflected on the joys of international travel)

Tip to those traveling under stress - the CDG Sheraton, despite its excessive room prices, more than makes up for its cost by giving you a luxury room at the airport from which you can simply walk to your flight the next day - no exhorbitant taxi fees, no traffic jams, no racing the clock.

The cats both vanished under the hotel bed and refused to come out, until morning came and human bait and treachery prevailed.

Eight hours and fifteen minutes of flying found us back in the states, where my parents met us for another six hours of driving from Washington to North Carolina. For the past week we have been settling gradually into our new home while friends and family phone and visit daily. English overload! It isn't as bad as I had feared - I adapted pretty quickly to once again being able to follow multiple dinner conversations at once - but it does get exhausting, still. I find it takes very little "native socializing" before I'm worn out, tired and ready to go somewhere quiet and read a good book. Of course, I was like this before we moved, so it's hard to say how much is due to France...

I'll be writing more over the weeks and months to come. We have a workshop to build from loaned equipment, and a lot of setup work to do. I don't realistically expect to be making pipes again for two or three months, at a guess. In the meantime, expect some random rambles about re-culturation into the US lifestyle and the shock effect of being a seven year time traveler in one's own country.

(Note - Good Mexican food is as excellent as I remembered, and even Taco Bell is a marvel after having McDo as your only fast food for years)

The cars are enormous. People have pickup trucks to drive three miles to an office job. Our cola bottles are the size of my torso. We have bags of chips that we could carry a cat in. More to come, but in the meanwhile, Em watches birds from the back deck.

About to go offline

Today is our last full day in Brittany. Outside this morning it is grey, overcast, occasionally raining in cold drizzles, and about 50 degrees. Tomorrow at noon we depart by TGV to Paris, where we will stay overnight and then fly back to the US on Friday. I am likely to be out of touch for some few days, however long it takes to get our new internet connection installed and working, though I may try posting from the hotel if they offer wireless access and it works for us.

Zowie, big life-changing events. Thanks to contributions from very generous family and friends, we were able to ship a lifetime's worth of our Ligne Bretagne stock to our new shop. The funny thing is, while I took enough stummels and stems to keep me busy till age 150, I still leave behind probaby twice what I am taking, and the briar cave barely looks as though anything has been removed from it.

This is the one Snowman, signing off for now. I'm west bound and down!

No Friction Required

Just a very quick note on our progress - We are buried in moving prep. Our own meager personal possessions are mostly packed, but the packing and transport of the business stock remains. Movers arrive next Monday, so between now and then we probably will not sleep. Oh joy.

I wanted to post a quick word regarding blame, flames, etc. I knew there would be some degree of anger over our circumstances in some quarters. The first manifestation of this was from some asshole French poster who thought the best response to the wrenching and extremely difficult circumstances of our move was to post a comment along the lines of, "So, you don't like our country? Go back to the US then, we don't want you here - the US is the cause of all the world's problems and caused the depression that's eating the world economy! Etc, etc..." I read this, shook my head over the idiocy of the poster, and yanked the comment because I knew it would only incite flames from our US friends and in the current situation, I have absolutely zero tolerance for having the blog turn into a flame war between offended nationalists.

A lot of American friends and folks in the business have gotten extremely offended at the French in general over what has happened to us. The level of anger expressed in emails and calls has been high, and a friend even opted to cancel a large order of French champagne over this (I posted a personal reply asking that he reconsider, that none of our misfortunes are the fault of an innocent champagne vendor who probably needs every sale he can get in these difficult times). I wanted to post this quick note to stress that there is no need for either side to get angry on the basis of nationalism - Our problems are not with "The French" in general, but with some very specific aspects of the French system. French people are not all evil malcontents - in fact, most are incredibly warm, welcoming, friendly, intelligent, and great fun. The French pipe club has been incredibly nice to us ever since we arrived here.

No, our problems boil down to three areas that most native, salaried French citizens never encounter -

• Accounting. Through bad fortune, we got hooked up initially with a pack of accountants who are the most useless pack of verminous assholes one could never want to meet, and have had our energies and time drained for seven years by having to flog them to get any results at all, all while struggling to understand a foreign tax system with no help from these shits.
• Administration. The French themselves understand this one very well - It's the overall fixation that the government has on paper, regardless of its impact on the lives of its citizens, and the inane difficulty of getting anything done here, on a business level.
• TPB. Yep, "That Préfecture Bitch" has been such a feature of our lives that she even has her own shorthand initials. The level of paperwork and hassle required simply to justify our residence here, year after year, has been beyond imagination, and this is not even counting the fact that the official in question would regularly lie about what papers had been received, never file anything on time, and required constant hounding just to get her to do her damn job. We've done all we can to live here legally, we pay taxes - HER salary - and still every year it's the same... weeks of lost working time chasing down visa papers plus multiple trips in person to Nantes, because of course nothing will get done unless we actually go there in person. Fax? Email? Forget it. Meanwhile all around us, illegal immigrants live and work unhindered by all of this, and while we pay half our income to support the French state, they burn buses, cars, schools, and entire neighborhoods just for kicks.
  

So, in a nutshell, while I have no control over what rancor may erupt among blog readers on either side of the pond, I just wanted to stress that I personally have no problems with the French citizenry at all, and think they're wonderful people. Indeed, I think living under the weight of the bureaucracy they must endure has helped to shape them into kind and understanding folks with a keen insight into the BS level of "the system". We've met some of the best friends we have in the world here.

Falling towards home

Today we had the big meeting at the mairie, and it was quite a gathering - the mayor of Herbignac himself was there, along with the head of town project planning, translators, etc. I made our displeasure known from the start. Naturally, all parties involved denied any responsibility and put the blame wholly on our "depressed" buyer, but of course they would do. The crux of the problem was apparently that we live in a high visibility spot in an area very shortly to be gentrified and upgraded. Our buyer is the president of what amounts to the local Chamber of Commerce and there was some political infighting over his snatching up such a prominent bit of property in a key location for himself, to the extent that he bailed on the deal.

Of course, I care nothing about this, all we want to do is get out of here. To this end, I insisted on a signed attestation direct from the mayor certifying the limits of usage of the property, that it is open to buy for all commercial entities, and so forth, as well as the limits of modification (The original buyer wanted to do some extensive changes, but structural modifications are frozen till the gentrification project is complete next year).

Overall, it was one of the most productive meetings I think I've had during our time in France, and I didn't hit anyone (which frankly, there were odds towards). In some ways it was oh-so-typical, with everyone involved showing great concern about how terrible our situation was and stressing that, of course, it wasn't their personal fault at all. But in other ways, we did obtain some crucial info and some significant concessions.

Bottom line - The deal is still dead. We should receive at least a small payoff as compensation for their breaking of the contract, which can go towards the moving cost. And there will be a move after all - To our everlasting gratitude, a coalition of family members and friends in the states (including some pipe folks, I am told) are gathering together to help cover the cost of getting us back, and many very fine people have come forward with basic items to loan us to help out, given that we'll be arriving minus a lot of furniture and goods to trim the moving expense.

(It's odd to find myself needing things like a lawnmower and curtains again. But then, if I just leave the yard unmowed, the grass may handle the window covering problem...)

Anyone wishing to help out by donating any funds or goods should contact my parents at their work phone - (336) 884-4026, ask for Glenn or Bonnie Talbert. They're coordinating the bail-out on that end, which will include getting hold of some loaner workshop equipment that we'll need (Motors, mainly, since we have to leave everything electric behind - Thankfully our gear is mostly belt-driven). Much appreciation to all! Emily and I have been literally overwhelmed by the flood of good wishes, emails, IMs, and calls that we have received from people in the US pipe community and abroad. There are some very fine folks out there.

We'll be arriving in late April, to find out if Sharkey has chopped down the party tree back home.

The Plot Thickens

A quick update for today - The head of the realty agency has hit the ceiling over this, and we all have a meeting with the Herbignac mayor on Monday. It turns out that the office of the mairie (town hall, essentially) is behind our disaster - Our buyer himself was willing to go through with the purchase, but the mairie pressured him to back out because apparently he owns a great deal of property in this area and there were politics involved. With Herbignac booming and our shop a prime commercial spot, they feared this fellow gaining such a central location and quashed the sale. They may believe it was just any other business deal, a bit of political jockeying for power, and have no idea how much they have hurt us in the process.

Either that, or they knew how much this would hurt us, and purposefully waited until it was likely the house would be lost to foreclosure, so they could snap it up cheaply for the town government to own. I realize a lot of people may believe this too cynical or paranoid, but that's the shape of my experiences with French officialdom.

I guess we will find out something Monday in our face-to-face with the mayor. We get to spend the weekend with our lives hanging in the balance, oh joy, though truly I have absolutely no hope that this will be sorted to our advantage. That simply is not any part of our experience here. We will probably be lucky if we don't leave France in Indiana Jones style, with me clinging to the retracting wheels of our airplane as petty bureaucrats hurled sharpened pencils and attestations at us.

Catastrophe

As of this afternoon, with less than a month until our scheduled departure from France, the major contract that we were counting on to pay for the move (the sale of our French property) has just fallen through.

The news leaves us devastated on multiple levels. We have closed down our business in France, so we can no longer legally work here. Our visas are soon due to expire, and cannot be renewed without secured employment, yet we cannot restart our business in the time we have before the visas expire. All our travel reservations are already made, and of course are nonrefundable. We can leave as scheduled, or remain at most another couple of months and then pay for the travel all over again. This leaves us with nothing to pay the movers with, nothing to live on after our arrival in the US, and a gigantic lead weight of debt to crush any future we might try to build in the states.

We are probably going to fly back on schedule anyway, but this leaves our financial futures and any future for the pipemaking in serious doubt. At the least, we will almost certainly have to abandon the Ligne Bretagne stock due to inability to pay for shipping - a huge loss of both our money and a good little pipe brand. Though I must say, at this point the idea of simply leaving pipemaking for good, for a "normal" job with a paycheck, has a considerable degree of appeal. If I sound a bit disjointed, it's because I am - We are reeling, once again, from another "French disaster". The past seven years often seem like little but one long stream of knotted stomach, cold sweats, paralyzing worry, and fear of what new and worse surprise may be waiting around the next corner.

So... It is likely that we will still return to the US on schedule, but most likely penniless and unable even to pay for the shipment of most of our workshop stock. Obviously any sort of future plans regarding restarting pipemaking or attending US shows is now totally up in the air. I really can't begin to predict where we will be just a month from now.

Oh, and our buyer's reason for breaking his contract at the last minute, after we'd closed down the business and terminated all our French business and legal connections, thereby leaving us without recourse and financially devastated? He is "depressed".

He should be in this household tonight.