What with presidential politics and global warming, lately I often feel the need to escape from real life for a while. With few exceptions, televison doesn’t do it for me. I read, and while I am reading I live in different worlds. Not perfect, just different. I have to be careful of what I read, because those worlds make a difference in this world. I always bring something back with me.
Someimes I visit Venice with Vice Comissario Guido Brunetti and his wife Paola. He solves crimes, she teaches English literature, and together they bemoan what Venice, and the world, have become. Because of the Brunettis, my morning coffee is made in a Moka pot instead of the old Aero-Press (too plastic, too American). The multi-course meals Paola serves her family (between her long sessions with Henry James) have inspired many ambitious meals at my house. Venice, stinking and sinking but still glorious, is such a powerful metaphor! The beauty and the rot. The closest I’ve come to it here is New Orleans, another favorite escape.
I’ve spent a few hours in Three Pines with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. In a recent book, in the middle of a tense investigation that involves the whole community, Gamache invites last-minute guests to dinner, knowing there will be enough. He says of his wife Reine-Marie: “She was four courses upset and considering an amuse-bouche.” That resonates. Since I inadvertantly skipped from number one and number two in the series to number eleven, I expect that I’ll return to Three Pines often, a sanctuary that we all need from Donald Trump. Three Pines is fictional, but the promise of Cape Breton is real.
Not that I’ve given up on real life. But sometimes it’s nice to take a break from it. Have to go now, the smell of butter and sugar and blueberries coming from my kitchen is irresistible.