No, you don't have to worry about us.
Yet.
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Sue Sue: Tonight we went out for a walk in the dusk about 7:30. We walked up to the Place Magenta and sat in a cafe and Mom suggested I order a Ricard, which I did, the first in many many years. (She stuck with Evian.) The waiter put down small dishes of peanuts, potato chips, olives and saucisson and we sat and watched the people go by and felt incredibly rich to be together on the Cote d'Azur and in good shape in our mid eighties and able to be here and decide at the last minute to take this walk and stop for an aperitif like this. Between the apartment and the cafe we passed places that were big in our lives, first the building where I shared an apartment with the nude dancer and her boyfriend, (they were always out when your mother came in the afternoons) and the hotel where we spent our wedding night, and the building where your mother lived with your grandparents to be. And then walking home along the Rue Massena and the Rue de France passing the shops that used to be Charley's bar with the perfumerie along side it, and next to that the former movie theater where Prince of the City once played with my name on the posters outside (how proud your grandparents would have been if they could have seen it, relieved too, this foreign lout who had walked off with their daughter) and all this time the church where our wedding took place being a block or two down the street. All the tables were out in front of the restaurants as we walked along, the chairs all full of diners, tourists mostly I imagine, all imagining they had found paradise, and we nodded to a waiter we knew from a different restaurant long ago, and to a woman walking by whom we knew from the eye doctor's office. And we talked about all this and wondered how much longer we could continue this life, knowing that if we stayed too long you and/or you sisters would have to come over, once something happened to one or both of us, to close up the apartment and dispose of all that is in it. And we worried about the job this would be for you. We walked on home and sat on the balcony in the night and had dinner, which tonight amounted to devouring an entire runny Camembert, most of a baguette and a glass of two of a Merlot from the Languedoc, a terrific wine we had found for 3 or 4 euros, plus a beet salad, and for dessert a plum tarte your mother had made that afternoon.
No, you don't have to worry about us. Yet.
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December 2019
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