In Love with France, At Home In Italy

  Hey, wait a minute! Hadn’t we already heard that back in 1979, given that our son celebrated his 46th birthday yesterday?    Well, during the course of our nearly 55 years of marriage we have had occasion to say “and baby makes three” during the three times we adopted rescue dogs Bandit, Murray, and Tiana. I’m not counting our first dog, Bip(squeak) Snowflake Charney who was languishing yet hopeful in a Durham, North Carolina pet shop and given to me by Jim as a wedding present. That smart little runt-of-the-litter 4-pound teacup toy poodle shaped like a frankfurter with an oversized head was our baby for over 16 years. Jim had told me that I could have any dog who wasn’t white, poodle, or female. But once little Bip jumped all over him with the most joyous of greetings, all of those rules went out the window.                                        ...

    Dear Covid and Rip Van Winkle (that guy who fell asleep in the Catskill Mountains for twenty years and woke up to a changed world),   I note that two years ago I wrote about picking up the thread of this blog to which you  and my mild case of Covid have inspired me to return. Let’s see if this time I can follow through.   BEFORE— http://franceoritaly.blogspot.com/2022/01/on-reaching-three-quarters-of-century.html?m=1  no   AND NOW— My blog rubs its eyes, takes a look around, and says, “NOW WHAT?”   Is this an Ode to Covid’s Magica l Powers? Well, once I realize I’m not dead, and with my quick recovery, several previously avoided writing projects and recordings of my new book are starting to get done. I will never forget the feeling of plenitude I felt after my first more worrisome bout of Covid in 2022. I see that I kept a journal then but never showed it to anyone. I will do that in a separate post.     But for now, back t...

Since in my first new blog piece in quite a while I mentioned that my “To Do” list included guest-editing a piece on Marcel Proust, I’m proud to say that I actually did it and will prove it by putting a version of it here. In emailing a number of friends about this, I used as the subject heading, “Un GRAND merci to Marcel Proust who turned out to be very good company while I was trying to hide in our guest room from Jim’s very mild case of Covid.”     In addition to wishing them well I said, “As you probably know, Proust is a guy who knew how to spend productive time in bed. How proud and delighted am I at the way this piece turned out? MOLTO! It has taken many decades for Marcel and me to see eye-to-eye. But today I am raising my teacup to him and to Kathy Czepiel who invited me to guest-edit her excellent Substack, Better Book Clubs.” In a previous post, Kathy and several of her readers had alluded to trying to come to grips with Proust, an issue that I could well understand...

    It’s my second night as a guest in my own home, and not a creature is stirring unless you count the one in my brain. I find myself thinking about how in French, my other mother tongue, the word  l’hôte  translates as both host and guest. I think that the concept that these roles are interchangeable may derive from the Arabic tradition of hospitality—that everyone is expected to treat a guest as an honored self, the way she herself would wish to be treated.  In my mindfulness group I mentioned my goal to learn to stop beating myself over the head for my shortcomings and to become a better friend to myself. Celtic poet John O’Donohue who is a recent discovery for me said it better: "Be excessively gentle with yourself." So after yesterday’s Halloween trick-or-treat disguise as someone who is a guest in her own guest room, I am now going to inhabit the role of a lapsed blogger who is picking up the thread by returning to her favorite medium. She is referring to...

This feels like a good time for me to apologize to my Blog (yet again) for neglecting her.  😔💐  To encourage myself to follow through with my plan to update her, yesterday I posted a message to that effect on Facebook. Here comes more about my good intentions.    I see that my most recent post is from last summer, so it’s hard to know where to begin. I also understand that readers get impatient if they don’t hear from you on a regular basis, so I am working at turning over a new leaf.    Since my book Letters To Men Of Letters   came out,    https://bookshop.org/p/books/letters-to-men-of-letters-diane-joy-charney/16485616?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email  I was persuaded that it would be important to try to learn how to use social media, and being a complete technodunce, I faced a stiff learning curve. Further, just as soon as I thought I had figured out how to do something on Facebook, there was a change in how the site worked...

Our friend Veronica whom we love dearly and vice versa has always been a city chick. Even though she enjoys the change of pace of staying with us out here in the middle of nowhere, when pressed, I think she’d admit that the life of a Country Mouse is boring. Ditto for Jim’s sister, my lovely, sociable sister-in-law, Nan, who bought her own apartment in town rather than stay out here with us in the sticks.  All that is a prelude to what would’ve been a far more dramatic story if I had had my camera handy at the right time.😕 But these photos will have to do.  Here goes. Last night after I should’ve been in bed, I remembered that my freshly-washed clothes were still in the kitchen. As I was about to head back upstairs, laundry in hand, I noticed a very large creature on the floor that should not have been there. At first it looked like a wounded bird. But, no.  I looked for a workaround and decided to try to cover it with just the right size piece of Tupperware. Succ...