by Bob Thompson
“Couldn’t hurt,” I said.
Periwinkles
The table was on the edge of the world, between land and sea, fall and winter, this life and the next. It was nothing new for Kehrer and me; it’s what we did. We’d been doing it for thirty years as corporate scouts ferreting out new business opportunities and investigating places to later share with our families.
Maps of all majors US cities, interstates, and airport layouts were stored in our temporal lobes, ready for recall. We’d driven, flown, and ridden trains all over Europe multiple times together, but this was different: a transition, a post-retirement story-gathering trip to Europe without our wives. My wife Cathy, still teaching high school English, could not travel extensively after the fall semester began, and that would leave Maud suffering through our ambitious military-history and too-much-left-in-the-air agenda without estrogenic reinforcement. Our wives decided that we could go alone.
With the permission came guilt and the implication that the pain of our selfishness might be softened with (1) a unique and thoughtfully selected gift from a faraway land, and (2) the promise that we would return with them to places pre-scouted for cultural, literary, and shopping attractions.
The moon had been in its last quarter when we landed at London’s Gatwick; now the full moon found us in Normandy, suffering from informational and emotional overload and wanting to go home. Tomorrow in Caen, we would dutifully fulfill our first promise, walking quickly past jewelry store windows before choosing a locally owned but world-famous chocolate shop. We would select rare and delicate confections that would travel well and persuade the chocolatier who produced the handmade gems to pose for pictures. Then we’d drop the rental car off, take a bus back to Ouistreham, catch a Channel ferry to Portsmouth, a train to London, and then home.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight, we were going to relax and enjoy our last night in France. We’d slowly walked the half mile from the small, family-run Hôtel Le Vauban in Merville-Franceville-Plage to the English Channel. The main street of the drowsy beach town was slowly shuttering into the late season. At the intersection of the avenue and the sea, we came to the L’Escapade café within an hour of closing time. The handsome aproned waiter standing outside the glass windbreak of his patio seating area, interrupted his seaward stare to greet us. “Bonjour, messieurs, extérieur ou intérieur?” It appeared we had our choice of any table at the seaside café.
We were practiced and cautious with French waiters, whose moods often teeter on the edge of arrogance for no cause. This was not our first rodeo. In France especially, we knew our status as American-tourist-trash-who-hadn’t-bothered-to-learn-the-language, but we were only mildly shamed by this, and we still expected civility in service.
Weeks ago, just off the ferry in Calais, we encountered an unexpected time difference that meant all the rental car counters at the ferry terminal were closed. But we were nonplussed veteran road warriors—these things happened, and since the advent of cell phones they were much more easily handled. We knew the drill. We arranged to pick the car up in the morning, got a nearby hotel room, cancelled our reservation in Dunkirk, and asked our concierge for a restaurant recommendation.
Surrounded by canals and harbors in the historic old part of Calais, we settled into a street-side table and were confronted by a garden variety thin-mustached “huffy French waiter.” He smirked as we politely said in mangled French, “Bonjour. Le menu du vin, s’il vous plaît.”
Kehrer studied the list and when the waiter came back, pointed to a Cabernet on the “Rouge” list, admittedly butchering the name. We both ordered bowls of mussels, cooked in differently seasoned water.
The waiter, clearly not impressed with Kehrer’s selection, returned with a bottle of white wine for our inspection.
“No, vin rouge. I ordered red wine, Cabernet,” Kehrer said.
Suddenly the waiter completely lost all ability to understand English, which was strange considering his recent fluent conversations with nearby tables of Englishmen. “Non, messieurs,” he insisted, and let loose streams of condescending and haughty French.
Guessing at what he was saying, Kehrer countered, “Yes, we know white wine is recommended with seafood, but we want the Cabernet! It’s an old Kentucky tradition.”
The offended sommelier shoved the label up under Kehrer’s nose and pointed to the label, uttering something we understood to be “Look, you dumb-ass American, you’re in my restaurant and this is what you’re getting.”
Kehrer was on the verge of rising from his seat as his voice rattled the glassware and he growled, “I ordered Cabernet, damn it.” The insolent Frenchman stomped back to the kitchen, never to return. A round of applause sprang up from the nearby Englishmen.
In his place came a very nice young lady who had no trouble understanding what we wanted, as unconventional as it may have been. It turned out to be a lovely evening.
Despite enduring more than one of these experiences, we had developed a deep appreciation for the heart and hospitality of French people in small towns and villages across the country and were always hopeful that smiles and good energy would overcome our linguistic laziness.
Tonight, we responded to the waiter’s greeting at the L’Escapade with our best “Bonjour. Outside, please.” Letting him know all he needed to about us.
Smiling, he gestured to his only beachside table, perched in an isolated spot across the narrow sand-washed Boulevard Wattier. We recognized and appreciated that this meant more steps for him, but we were his last customers of the night, and at the end of the season it likely had not been a busy day. Tonight at least, he was a kindred spirit.
We were grateful for the English menus he brought without prompting and were careful not to ask an excessive amount of ignorant questions. Even English menus can be perplexing in France. We smiled as we saw the now-familiar “rocket salad.” We’d figured that one out in a seaside café on Italy’s eastern coast ten years ago, but here was a new puzzle we had never before encountered in our many travels: periwinkles.
I pointed at the word on the menu and queried in my best Pepé Le Pew accent, “Periwinkle?”
After a few words that didn’t register with us, he patiently walked back across the street to the café and returned with a shallow bowl containing three or four small black snail shells and a tiny two-pronged fondue fork. Demonstrating, he inserted the fork into the shell opening, wiggled it a bit, and pulled out a short wormlike creature, which he deposited on the plate in front of me.
“Oh!” I said, picking it up with my fingers and plopping it in my mouth. The boiled-in-the-shell slug exhibited a slight crunchiness on the seaside end, but overall had a pleasant light, salty sea flavor.
“Très bien, it’s good,” I said. “I’ll have a bowl of those with a carafe of vin blanc,” preempting another argument with a French waiter over wine pairing with seafood. Kehrer, who’d also dug a snail out and sampled it, said, “Deux, por favor.”
The waiter, no doubt stupefied at our dexterity and culinary adventurousness (not to mention our fluency in multiple languages), stood shocked and smiling for a long moment before leaving our table. He returned with the wine, ice bucket, and cheeseboard, gracing us with his best sommelier moves.
Under the full moon, we sipped the wine and discussed places we suspected Maud and Cathy would enjoy: Canterbury, Dover, Calais, Arras, Le Havre, Caen, Bayeux, and even the American cemetery above Omaha Beach.
When the snails arrived we tore into the heaping plate of periwinkles as soon as it was on the table. The waiter, at first seemingly on the edge of speech, watched us in silence with an amused smile before retreating across the street. We figured he’d mistaken us for gay. The evening had an unmistakable poignancy, but whatever it was, it eluded us.
Four years later we came back, this time with Cathy and Maud. The sweet proprietor of the Hôtel Le Vauban rushed from behind the counter and hugged us as we came into the lobby. As we filled out the paperwork, she disappeared
into her living quarters, coming back with a book that Kehrer had left on our last visit. We were home; this was family!
Having for years extolled the virtues of the countryside, the hotel, the café, and the salty-sweet-crunchy virtues of periwinkles, we drove the girls down the main street and parked at the tourist office. Our arrogant confidence was mildly patronizing but well founded—we had done all this before. We guided our wives to L’Escapade. Our small seaside table was gone. Intruding on the beach now was an informative metal placard, a paved parking lot, and a miniature golf course. We guessed that the sign was not a memorial to our meal on that same spot.
There was no hope of re-creating our first visit for Maud and Cathy. They opted for the air-conditioned inside seating instead of the heat of the open-air patio. For Kehrer and me it was a homecoming. Somebody might even remember us! How could they not? It had been such a memorable evening.
It was too much to hope for the same waiter. The new waiter had the same grasp of English as all French restaurant staff, but while our wives struggled with the English menus, we, like the veterans we were, expertly ordered a full carafe of vin blanc and a bowl of periwinkles.
Our rookie wives, asking multiple questions, soon overpowered the waiter’s limited English and drove him away well before they were satisfied. We scoffed and chided them for being “typical Americans.” “He’ll never come back,” I said. “Probably back there now, peeing in our wine,’ added Kehrer. The look we got indicated that our wives were not amused and were bordering on huffy. Maybe it was in the water.
In a very short time, to our surprise and delight, a young and pretty university student brought periwinkles, wine, and much better English to our table. We’d seen this before too. Behind every haughty waiter stands an attractive French lady to salvage the day.
Making amends for our wives’ turgid insistence on details, we set about demonstrating to the young lady that at least some of us were not ignorant of local ways. I expertly extracted the first tasty slug and plopped it into my mouth.
There was an audible gasp as the waitress suddenly turned her attention to me with a shocked look. “Non, non, monsieur!” She looked as if she was about to perform the Heimlich maneuver on me. Not sure what was going on, I spit out the tiny mangled creature into my hand and dumped it back onto the plate. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Merde,” she said, pointing to one end of the little worm. With my knife she flicked the tiny mica-like crunchy part off the end and smiled. “Voilà. Now you may eat it.”
Confused, I asked, “That’s just the crunchy door to their shell, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” she said, “but it’s merde.”
“I don’t know that word,” I said.
“It means—let me think—yes, it’s excrement. Snail shit.”
The table was quiet, and our wives’ faces showed the same amused smiled we’d seen on our waiter, years ago.
The Internet of Things
In Bilbao, Spain, when I got out of bed, my body and the Internet of Things told me it was four hours past midnight on Saturday morning, but my mind tried to convince me that in Kentucky there were still two hours left of Friday night and I’d be home before Saturday was done.
Now, eighteen hours later, desperate for nonvertical sleep and a bathroom that wasn’t a wobbly closet shared with two hundred people, I shuffled like a zombie toward passport control. Passport officers are notoriously deadpan, but at this point I was looking forward to contact with another human being who shared my language and knew where Louisville was. The line moved along until I was finally standing in front of a genuine US passport control … robot.
It looked like a convenience store automatic teller machine on steroids, with a camera sticking out the top surrounded by Dumbo ears. Stupid from sleep deprivation, I stared at the screen in its chest, which was asking what language I’d prefer. I pressed the “English” button. Then it asked to look at the photo page of my passport. I inserted it incorrectly about four times before the robot was finally satisfied. Next it wanted to know what flight I’d been on. It had to be kidding! I could barely remember what airline. After some fumbling, I fished my crumpled boarding pass out of a pocket and entered the number.
Then the screen erupted with questions: “Are you bringing in any fruits, vegetables, animals, insects, Ebola viruses, napalm, or thermonuclear devices?”
“No!”
Another full screen of questions followed. “Have you touched snails or cows? Have you smeared animal dung on yourself or been on a farm or in a pasture?”
“No, no, no! I just want to go home to bed.”
Suddenly the robot started transforming. Its eyes and ears rose on a telescoping neck, scanning me, freaking me out. It knew where my eyes were! Looking straight at me, it wiggled its big ears and asked me to take off my glasses. I went blind as the ears flashed and my biometric facial data shot out to the world’s information database.
Now I was really paranoid. In that moment of white light, I saw computers all over the world searching their databases, my browser history, my phone records, my Facebook page. The robot was already talking to Siri and Alexa.
Facebook! Holy crap! I’ve posted pictures of cows on Facebook! Does it know that? But I haven’t touched a cow! There were always fences, I tell you, fences! I had not been on a farm. I had been on a public footpath leading to a beach, but there were no snails on the beach! No snails!
I tried to calm down. It didn’t matter, anyway; that screen was gone. And it wasn’t like it was asking me to report on any meetings with the Russians.
Finally, the interrogation machine spit out a bad-hair, bloodshot-droopy-eyed photo of some ancient guy I didn’t recognize. It looked like a mug shot of a drunken W. C. Fields or Tiger Woods.
Seven hours later, without luggage (lost by the airline) and still freaked out, I staggered into my house, fully aware that the seven microphones in my virtual personal assistant were listening.
“Alexa, what time is it in Bilbao, Spain?” I asked.
“It’s 5 a.m. Sunday morning in Bilbao, Spain.”
“Alexa, where have I been?” Anxiously, I awaited the answer.
“Humm, I can’t answer that question.”
I didn’t believe her.
She had not said, “I don’t know”; she had said she couldn’t answer the question. She knew. I knew she knew. I could tell by her tone.
My body was too tired to care, even though my mind knew that the Russians were going to blackmail me about the cows and cast my vote in the next election. I found my copy of Orwell’s 1984 and put it beside my bed before I went to sleep, hopelessly entangled in the Internet of Things.
Teetum
I’d heard stories about Teetum all my life. His brother Bunk, a farmer who lived just down the road, was married to Vernona, my mom’s first cousin and my third-grade teacher. In his bus, Bunk drove me to school every day from first grade till I got my driver’s license. He took me squirrel and quail hunting in his woodlot and fields, we went fishing in his boat on Crawford Lake, and I helped him cut tobacco and bail hay. He told me his baby brother had gone off to World War II but hadn’t come back.
From others I heard that Teetum—William Thurman—the youngest of ten, had lost his mother before he was two, and his dad when he was seven. He had been raised by an older sister during the Great Depression. The scattered family had all gathered in 1939 to see him graduate from my high school, Heath; he was the only one of his family to do so. I heard he was among the first off the landing craft on Saipan in 1944, and after a chance encounter while unloading supplies on the beach with Humpy Morehead’s son George, he was never seen or heard from again: no remains no explanation, only a telegram.
Always interested in history, I read all I could find about Saipan. It was seven thousand miles from western Kentucky, a tiny dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On my globe, the dot on the i in Saipan was larger than the actual island. It was in a group of islands cal
led the Northern Marianas, along with Guam and Tinian. Because it was within B-29 bomber range of the Japanese mainland, it had thirty thousand frontline Japanese Imperial troops defending it from well-prepared positions, with no intention or plans for retreat.
On June 15, 1944, fifty-six thousand men in one Marine and two army divisions landed on the island, supported by the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Three weeks of brutal fighting had left the last five thousand Japanese soldiers trapped between the ocean and cliffs, determined to fight till the last man died.
Before dawn on July 6, they drank all the sake they could find, killed all their wounded who couldn’t walk, gathered guns, swords, grenades, bayonets, clubs, and rocks before launching the largest mass suicide attack of World War II. Directly in their path on Tanapag Beach were fewer than eight hundred Americans of the 105th Infantry regiment.
Bodies piled up in front of foxholes till it was impossible to see over or shoot through them. Machine-gun and mortar tubes melted; bullets could not be fired fast enough. Howling “Banzai!” the mad wave washed over and through the Americans. Three Medals of Honor were given that day, all posthumously, and many more were probably earned, but there were no witnesses left to tell the stories. Two days later, the battle for Saipan was over, with only three hundred Japanese left alive on the island. A week later, Prime Minister Tojo and the entire government resigned.
I always wondered how much, if any, of this carnage Teetum had witnessed.
In 2015 Bunk’s son J. T., now in his seventies, got a call from a veterans’ organization. A group of Japanese volunteers searching for war dead had uncovered a Japanese body on Tanapag Beach … and buried beneath the body in the foxhole, along with grenade fragments, were other skeletal remains: a boot on a left foot, a set of US dog tags, and a 1939 Heath High School ring.
Now we know—he saw it all. Sixty-nine years later, Teetum finally came home.