In Love with France, At Home In Italy

Last night when we visited our daughter-in-law's super-nice family for a most delicious dinner, I asked her very cute adolescent brother about the accordion on his bed. He had just started taking lessons four years ago when we were here for the wedding, and he already sounded good then. Ditto for our daughter-in-law, who never had a lesson, but is very talented at most everything, including music. An accordion is an essential element of a popular style of this country's music that's referred to as "beef music." I realized I had goofed when I asked Jan if he liked "cow music," and got a perplexed look. Once I corrected myself, we both agreed that we liked it. It is invariably cheerful and smile producing. Kind of like the tap dancing I still do. Many Slovenes seem to make fun of it, but there is even a tv station that I'm watching right now that plays it 24/7. The singers wear what look like liederhosen, and every once in a while the...

We are getting to know our son's adoptive country, and as helicopter parents with a first grandchild on the way, we expect to be spending increasing amounts of time here. Even though it's a seven-hour drive from our Italian home, this will not be such a sacrifice. This is a beautiful place that feels exotic to us, and about which we still have plenty to learn. For example, just outside our charming B&B, the church bells go bonkers with something like regularity. They seem to go into overdrive at quarter of the hour, and they like to get an early start. A few minutes ago, at 8:45AM, I counted 145 bongs. That must mean that it's 145 o'clock, and all is well. Or could it mean that once the bonging stops, we have only 10 minutes to get to 9AM mass? We are a family of theorists who likes to think there's a method even to things that look like madness. We  have a family saying for when we have no idea what might be behind any given phenomenon:...

 We just arrived in Slovenia, a knockout country whose pitched roofs, while practical for snow, seem designed to give the unsuspecting person who is not a dwarf a loch in kop (that’s Yiddish for “a hole in the head”—something no one needs). On arrival at our cozy B&B, the same one as last year, it took J about five minutes to repeat his feat of bonking himself on the bean. He bent over the bedside table to pick something up, and WHAP!—just like last year.  Our kids have rented an adorable apt that has many similar hazards. It's on the top floor, which means that each of the three rooms has parts that can do serious damage to those who commit the folly of entering the place without a helmet. Somebody put my coat on the bed in the little extra room designed for those under three feet tall. Of course after I bent down to pick it up, the inevitable happened:I womped myself a bit.  Those previous two words are key. To survive here it is important not...