Invited Species
Emissaries of happiness
Despite what you may have heard, I didn’t actually retire. Here’s why:
“Retirement” is like hummus. It’s sold to you in plastic wrapping and is supposedly good for you. But it doesn’t taste like anything on its own, so they market it to you with a dozen flavors to make it appealing. After three nights of snacking, it starts to go bad in the fridge.
It also gives you gas.
Okay, the metaphor doesn’t really work. But stay with me. While in Brooklyn recently we shared our apartment with Jerry. Jerry was a City Mouse who invaded the kitchen and, despite efforts by an exterminator, claimed adverse possession. At our landlord’s urging, I set a mousetrap: on the little metallic pad of death, I spooned a dob of hummus I found in the fridge.
When I got back from the day’s outing, Jerry was there. He wasn’t moving. He had retired, possibly with the taste of roasted red pepper and garlic in his mouth.
That’s not me. Did I grab the pension and run to the South of France? You bet. Did my colleagues throw a nice party for me on my last day and give me a manufactured card that everyone except Alice (who hated me from day one) signed and did my boss make an unwoke speech that made all the he/hims laugh and everyone else squirm?
Well, no. I did, however, get a nice paperweight that I had to order myself, plus a folded American flag encased in plastic that made me briefly wonder if I had been shot down over the Pacific.
Like others before me, however, some days I find myself circling the mousetrap. The bait is tempting when they tell you “you’re retired now” and are supposed to “slow down” and “enjoy life.” You find yourself downing too many pastries and taking two-hour naps (just to shut them up, of course.)
But instead of partaking of the fatal hummus like Jerry, I’ve joined the French Foreign Legion.
To refresh your memory, the Legion is a group of expatriates of a certain age who have taken up tanned arms against invaders. They hold positions in and around stone structures, where they dig trenches and engage in chemical warfare while complaining about the heat.
Our enemies are real. Mine include bamboo, which turns out to be a metastatic cancer for our garden. Defeating it will take years of cutting, digging and uprooting and driving barriers into the ground.
There’s also ailanthus altissima a.k.a. Tree of Heaven, ancient China’s allelopathic botanical precursor to COVID, which grows tall and brings toxic treelets to the yard. You can’t beat it, only poison the big trees, or hammer mushroom pegs into their trunks while stomping on the progeny.
Then there are the ants — five or six streams going up and down the exterior walls, day and night. I’ve used poison that caused many to pile up dead on my office floor. But they keep coming, plodding on by the thousands to die like Russia’s youth on the Ukrainian front.
The other invasive species we Legionnaires battle daily are regrets. Everyone has them, but we in Provence are championing the fight against them on behalf of the rest of humanity. Je vous en prie.
Some of my regrets are the same beasties that scampered across my mother’s kitchen floor throughout my childhood. Now they and their younger relatives have grown into Gregor Samsa lookalikes and staked out every comfortable chair in my 200-year-old French farmhouse.
What are these hostile forces? They’re the regrets over things I did, things I clearly remember doing but didn’t actually do, and things I wished I’d done over half a century. Stupid stuff from 4th, 8th, 9th, and every other grade, not to mention every year of college and every year afterward. They include these classics:
The regrets over the hours spent breadwinning when I really wanted to be making farting noises with the kids.
Regrets over the hours I didn’t spend laughing at off-color jokes with family and friends back in the States.
Regrets over other things I had to forgo in order to be a responsible adult. To picture this pest, imagine an enormous cockroach dressed as George Bailey about to smash the newel cap on its way up the stairs.
Regrets tied to the myths of success. These ones sit at the kitchen table repeating Cosmo’s line from Moonstruck about “a bad, crazy day.”
How does one fight these invaders? You can’t poison or whack them — they just come back bigger. No, la guerre provençale demands a very different approach.
I, for example, start with heirloom tomatoes. With a little salt and pepper these can be a powerful deterrent. Fresh black olive tapenade from the Saturday market is also effective when spread on epeutre au levain from the corner boulangerie.
As for cheese, try the bleu de sassenage. But you can’t go wrong with anything sold at the stand on Rue Pasteur.
With wines, I find that moderate application of Domaine de L’Angèle blanc 2021 — lovingly made at the vineyard owned by our landscaper’s father — complements these other measures nicely if appropriately chilled. They also have an excellent rosé.
After that I recommend the exquisite dark chocolate with nuts and dried fruit made by Joël Vilcoq Chocolatier in Manosque — this is the real thing with no chemical aftertaste like you sometimes get in the States.
Finally, an invigorating bicycle ride past vineyards and lavender fields is better than any regreticide on the market. Supplement it with an occasional dip in the pool, a cuddle with your rescue dog, and a video chat with your far-but-dear, and those regrets revert to normal-sized roaches that you can now gish under your Topsiders.
Don’t expect overnight results: retiring these invaders can take decades of daily practice. To keep them at bay, remember to sow plenty of gratitude and water it daily. Emissaries of happiness — the invited species — greatly magnify the effect; some drive in, but others you can pick up at the local airport:
