Tag: France

The Young Lady of Carcassone

I have a special affection for the ancient walled city of Carcassone in France though I have never been there. There is an apocryphal legend about Lady Carcas (French: Dame Carcas) and the origin of Carcassonne‘s name. What follows below is borrowed from Wikipedia, complete with a picture of the bust representing the great Dame Carcas herself. After you read her tale, I will tell you how that possibly fictional lady embedded herself in my imagination and my affections. And how she may have possibly saved my life.

The legend

“The legend takes place in the 8th century, during the wars between Christians and Muslims in the southwest of Europe. At the time, Carcassonne was under Saracen rule and Charlemagne‘s army was at the gates to reconquer the city for the Franks. A Saracen princess named Carcas ruled the Knights of the City after the death of her husband.

The siege lasted for five years. Early in the sixth year, food and water were running out. Lady Carcas made an inventory of all remaining reserves. The villagers brought her a pig and a sack of wheat. She then had the idea to feed the wheat to the pig and then throw it from the highest tower of the city walls.

Charlemagne lifted the siege, believing that the city had enough food to the point of wasting pigs fed with wheat. The gesture lowered the morale of Charlemagne’s men who were also suffering from the long siege and a shortage of supplies.

Overjoyed by the success of her plan, Lady Carcas decided to sound all the bells in the city. One of Charlemagne’s men then exclaimed: “Carcas sonne!” (which means “Carcas rings”). Hence the name of the city.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcassonnehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcassonne

Me and Lady Carcas

I first made the acquaintance of Lady Carcas as a child. She was featured in a volume of the Childcraft books I practically lived in at the time. Her story was colorfully illustrated.

As I recall the story back then, it involved a cow, not a pig. The cow was let out through the gates of the walled city and not thrown from a tower. The waiting hordes were in flagging spirits themselves. The sight of an actual fatted calf (as it were) robbed the marauding hordes of all lust for battle and they disbanded.

Lady Carcas’ story came back to me as a struggling single parent, navigating a difficult divorce. For reasons the book I am writing will detail, I was intractably estranged and at loggerheads with the maternal side of my family. More to the point, my mother.

So as I surfed the tempestuous waves that beset me in the wake of my failed marriage, a career setback, and a teeny, tiny alcohol addiction, I played the Lady Carcas card.

I was hurting badly in the early years of my babies’ lives, emotionally and financially. But I would never let on for a second how badly to my mother or her side of the family. Sadly, this freezeout eventually included my only two siblings who were firmly planted in Mom’s corner. Me and my sisters had been intermittently close off and on growing up. But the connection after my marriage ended became easily strained and tenuous until it finally snapped.

My survival strategy in those lean and tumultuous years was to act as if I was managing all of my injuries and responsibilities without a single care. I worked. I socialized. I moved about in society as if I hadn’t a trouble in the world.

Those whose eyebrows might raise a little whilst reading about the extremity of adopting such defensive tactics within one’s own family were no doubt raised in nice, normal, supportive families. Those who were not – like I was – will recognize and relate to my experience in a heartbeat.

In a mixture of what sounded like utter frustration and despair, my mother once shrieked at me: “You don’t need anyone!” That only proved my ruse was working. If I had continued to display my pain and vulnerability in front of these flying monkeys, they would have torn me into pieces. More than they already had.

I feel a quiet debt of gratitude to Lady Carcas and her tactics of deception for a good cause. I learned much about protecting my heart and soul in the face of hostility from family rivals and about healing. The goal was to survive my family of origin long enough to emerge and stand in my own truth and certainty. It was like holding my breath underwater for a very, very long time.

When I was finally able to consistently take a full breath, then another, and yet another, it prompted me to utter a silent response of gratitude to a young French noblewoman from many centuries ago who may, or may not even, have existed.

Enough Already

When is enough? I have asked the question before. When do we know we have done enough in aid of what we are trying to achieve in life?

Periodically in life, it is of value to do some stock-taking. An inventory, if you will, of what we have and don’t have. Materially, emotionally, and physically. What we still want and don’t have. What’s good about our life and what has to go.

Life can be marked by patches of plenty and want. The sages out there say that. we increase our chances of getting what we want by being grateful for what we have right now. I have found that this works. Or at the very least, it can relieve the negativity of a situation we’re struggling in.

I believe most of us can live comfortably on quite a bit less than advertisers and social expectations would have us believe. Envy and greed are all too human vulnerabilities that are easily exploited.

If every comfort we seek is outside of us, we have no time to just be alone and luxuriate in our own thoughts. I have found that times of external scarcity were my greatest teachers. I was often terrified as I could not imagine my external circumstances would ever change.

And yet they did. It was true that when one door closed, another opened. It finally became obvious that I was not totally in charge of my ultimate path or destination. We can pursue and wish deeply for what we want in our lives. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

It is what we do with the bare patches in life that shape us the most.

I was a world traveler who sought out the cheapest ways of getting around. I carried only a backpack and valuables in a fanny pack or neck wallet. I was a camping buff as a young adult.

Distilling life down to its barest elements of food, water, warmth, and shelter was clarifying, in a way. It was good to be reminded how little we needed when living like that. We learned – if worse came to worse – we could chuck city trappings and survive on little more than our wits, a canteen of fresh water, and a couple of cans of beans. Or the French equivalent was a baguette, cheese, and a cheap bottle of red wine.

By living poor, I also learned a lot about grace. I once trekked in the Himalayas in Nepal. One afternoon, I went to lie down and set up camp by a small building in a village. A young girl of about 14 years old and some friends came by to watch what I was doing.

When she realized I was planning to sleep there in the open that night, she panicked. “No sleeping, no sleeping,” she said frantically while motioning across her neck with her thumb. “Man come… killing.” That night, I was happy to crawl into my sleeping bag laid out on the dirt floor of her parents’ small village hut.

The next morning I was served the most delicious eggs I ever had that had been cooked in a black bottom pan over an open fire pit in the middle of the hut. That memory has stayed with me. It is a story of how my life may have been saved out of the blue by a caring little girl. The other lesson I came away with was how rich their life seemed to be in one of the poorest places on earth.

I am currently stock-taking. As we prepare to move to a new house, I look around this house to see what needs to go with us to the new one. There is so much that will be left behind. Deliberately.

It feels odd to be at the place where we are ready to offload the possessions we have spent a lifetime accumulating. It does seem that is the way it goes. A less cluttered house – we hope – will allow for more living and creating. Me with my words and my husband at his easel.

I admire and I’m a little envious of those sage souls who know from very early on what they want to be and how they will live their life. It is a special kind of blessing. My life has been more of a trial-and-error experience. It has led me down various side roads and byways. It took many years of experiments to arrive at a place where life works for us.

Perhaps, put differently, we learn to be at peace with what is and accept what we have with gratitude and grace. I don’t waste too much time these days unpacking the hows and whys of the journey I took to get here. I feel profoundly lucky that I did.

Happy 35th Birthday, Katie Mac!

Daughter’s birthday today. Her 35th. A milestone of sorts. The fact she has been on the planet for three-point-five decades seems a significant chunk of life worth celebrating.

Poet Kahlil Gibran wrote: “Your children come through you, but not from you.” My Katie couldn’t be a clearer example. She is very much her own person. For that quality alone, I am delighted by her and having her on the planet. She is a little like me, as genetics inevitably dictate, but mostly she is like herself.

Day by day, Katie discovers with more certainty who she really is. And what she really believes. And what she really wants. Those are not automatic givens for anyone. A lot of people flop around in life without much internal structure and an ill-defined self-image.

Katie was literally a miracle starting from the circumstances of her conception. She outwitted the murderous intentions of an IUD to be born on the planet. As miraculous to me anyway, she was a VBAC birth. That is, she was born vaginally after her brother’s C-section two years earlier. That birth protocol was rare back in the day. And she topped off all of the other improbabilities by being born on her grandmother’s birthday. Talk about a suck-up.

As a toddler, Katie shimmered. In her christening pictures, she looks sweet and angelic in a white floor-length lace and ribbon confection of a dress. I believe that sweet, angelic, and loving spirit she exuded that day is who she is at core.

Me and Katie did not have a particularly normal day-to-day parent-child experience, but we did have some adventures. I flew to Paris with her during a school break to get her to Austria where she would au pair for several weeks as a summer nanny. We rented a car at D’Orly Airport. As I haltingly made my way into Parisian traffic, I remember being hyper-vigilant about driving in Europe for the very first time.

It was Katie who spied a traffic sign directing us toward Versailles Palace. The playground of King Louis XIV and his court should have been on our list of must-sees. With no set itinerary, Katie and I were happy to stop and wander for a few hours through the luxurious palace and its gardens. https://en.chateauversailles.fr/

On another occasion, I flew from Ottawa, Canada and she from Christchurch, New Zealand to meet up in Los Angeles for the last post-Oscars taping of the Oprah show at the Kodak Theater in 2011.

Most memorable, beyond seeing Oprah live, was a major earthquake in Christchurch that occurred the very day Katie was supposed to fly to LA. With communications out of NZ badly damaged, it took hours before I learned she had safely boarded her flight and was on her way to Los Angeles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrBA5ddfMc

One cold winter morning, we headed East in my new-to-me RVR SUV to drive across North America starting in Calgary, Alberta. We headed straight south into Montana and drove across the northern United States until we hit Long Island. Surprisingly, road conditions were summer-like for most of the way until we hit Iowa when a snowstorm hit us right between the headlights.

On another of Katie’s birthdays, we stayed at a dude ranch in BC and rode horses through a thick, tall forest. From the forest’s edge, we watched black bears gamboling at a distance in a large open field.

On one of my special birthdays, we climbed Seongsan Ilchubong Mountain on Jeju Island in South Korea. Had Katie not been there, quietly but firmly pushing me upwards on the treacherously steep trail to that peak, I m not sure I would have made it to the top. Which was so worth seeing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seongsan_Ilchulbong

A few days later, Katie and I flew to Hong Kong so I could visit her workplace. The best description for the place is rustic. Right beside the floor mattress I was directed to sleep on, a baby pit viper was coiled up in a clear Rubbermaid container with a top riddled with breathing holes. That it was really incapable of inflicting serious harm on a human was slight comfort. I put in a rather fitful night.

In the intervening years until she bore down on her academic pursuits, Katie amassed an impressive resume of international travel from New Zealand, to Buenos Aires, Argentina to the Yukon Territory and the Arctic Circle. Always with a job and with a goal in mind.

She graduated from the University of British Columbia two years ago with a degree in geography. She now applies that training to her job in a technology startup doing infrastructure assessment projects for engineering firms. In the past year, she has bought a house, is at work on several entrepreneurial ideas, and manages her household and business affairs well.

I am so damned proud of her. And happy for her though she isn’t always happy herself. She is a learning machine. She is saucy, sharp, fun, super-bright, fashion-forward, and athletic and she never quits when the going gets rough. She is logical and a problem-solver. I’m not sure that she yet fully knows how important those qualities will be to her in the future.

I sure hope she knows how vitally important she is to me. And to a buncha other people. Her older brother, for instance, who is a going concern in his own right.

Happy Birthday, BBH! (Have I finally made up for your screwed-up twelfth birthday? Surely an amnesty is in order what with a special birthday coming up for me, too. Think about it? :-))