In the morning, he kisses me, and we fool around a bit, but he dashes off to take his daughter to horseback riding lessons before I can get any satisfaction out of him. Then it's off to the parents for yet another fattening, but uncomfortably silent lunch. Before we pick up Chunk we stop at the local supermarche. The Sauvage has been sunning himself by the ocean with absolutely no sun protection. As he was baking in the sun, he occasionally smoked, which made me wonder if he was trying to end up looking like beef jerky by the time he was 50 and/or also trying to get cancer. I mean it's good to have goals, but really.

What I didn't think about was a sun burn.

But that morning he woke to find, surprise, surprise, he was burned. So we stopped at the supermarche. He walked up and down the aisles until we came upon an aisle with sunblock. I had brought my own, but it was something ridiculous like 40 SPF. The front of my sunblock should say something like "The only thing that can give you more protection is a lead barrier" and even so I was already lightly tanned. I figured he wanted less intense coverage like SPF 15. But he looked and looked at the shelves and finally said "Well they don't have what I need." And like a fool I said, "But there is all this sunblock."

"No," he says, "I want sun tan oil." 1

Now the one thing I learned growing up is that you don't argue with crazy. Crazy always wins. Not to mention, that when you don't speak the language well, every time you want to say something you have to go through the "Is what I want to say worth the effort of translation?" And most of the time, the answer is no. In this case, I thought, "It's not MY responsibility to stop him." After all this guy grew up by the ocean and if he didn't realize that he shouldn't put on sun tan oil at this age, well I doubted I could convince him. And since there was no sun tan oil, I figured it wasn't worth mentioning.

Except Jean had some and lent it to the Sauvage. So there he was on the beach, after the usual trek to the farthest possible spot, just to make it fun for me, oiling himself up under the bright afternoon sun.

I lay back in my rhinestone studded shades and pondered how this town, which had Roman ruins, could have inhabitants so utterly devoid of anything vaguely resembling logic.



** French Logic Returns
1 emphasis added