Even the 'Bird of the Week'

From left: Donald, Elizabeth, Joanne, Paul, Peter,
Janet and Tom.

Is 'Vachement Cool'

Paris:- Thursday, 23. November 2000:- Although winter is officially programmed to begin about four weeks from now, you can consider that it has arrived in Paris. If there are any surprise tropical spells between now and then, they will be true surprises.

For this reason I do not scout for any meaningful photos in the Rivoli-Châtalet area. I go straight to the club's café La Corona on temporarily dry sidewalks which are hardly wet at all.

In the café - without taking any useless shots of its empty terrace for a change - a surprise of another sort awaits. Some tour group has fully booked the club's very own entire reserved area.

An alternate spot has been set aside - but nobody has told some large civilians, who suddenly bolt from their cramped booth into today's designated club area, filling a third of it.

Although I am the club's secretary and it is my duty to protest against this illegal manoeuvre, I suspect no club members will be present on account of it being World Turkey Day and if anybody is eating one for lunch, they will continue doing that rather than show up.

But your club is dynamic and growing every week, so I don't even get a chance to write down the meeting number and date before members Joanne Fischer and Paul Smith are overwhelming me with reunion noises.

The Houston, Texas couple signed the members' booklet on Thursday, 23. December of last year, and they have been waiting since then to tell me how they survived Paris Great Storm on 26. December - which almost caused them some difficulty in returning to Texas.

Since they have forgone eating turkey to do this, I declare Houston to be the 'City of the Week.' It is a lucky thing I do this because Janet and Tom Doyle from Lagrange, Illinois are right behind them, with the hopes of getting the coveted award for Chicago.

In fact, I have been warned via email by club member Sally Dilgart that she is sending State Attorney Janet Doyle to the club, in order to 'break up the New Jersey putsch' even if she did become a great friend of Eva Lee from Tranquility, New Jersey - a place no other club member from New Jersey seems to have heard of.

Tom says, "We're probably the only lawyers who aren't in Florida this week," which I'm glad to say is not only the first word on the subject, but also the nearly the last.

Let me back up a bit. Joanne and Paul have told me they have been to Mont Valérien in Suresnes to see the American Military Cemetery there.

Although it is small, it is the only one in France containing the dead of both World Wars, all of them unknown. It is also the only cemetery around with a huge view of all Paris on a fine day.

Across the street from the cemetery there is a restaurant named 'Les Jardins de Camille' and it shares the same view and has good food, they say. The easiest way to get to both the cemetery and the restaurant is to take the métro to Porte d'Auteuil and then take the bus 241 which goes right up there.

After some comments about Halloween still lurking around Paris, we are joined by Peter Malet from Irving near Dallas, Texas, who states that three glasses of wine per day are an existential minimum, but six glasses may wreck your health only slightly more dangerously than not having any wine at all.

As club secretary, I ask him not to use his prescription handwriting to enter himself in the members' booklet, and he cheerfully does not; although slowly. His answer to question four is, "Still thinking about it." Question five he leaves blank.

Joanne says, "We did not have Thanksgiving today." Not yet, because Paul says he intends to have pintade this evening, even though in Texas it is a 'trash bird.' By this he means it sits up in Texas trees are eats bugs.

My research-source to this sort of French bird is in German and contains no mention of Perlhuhn, which is guinea-fowl or 'hn' in English; and they originated in Africa. None of my books say they eat bugs, but in Texas anything is possible there because it's bigger than France.