Last night, after dark, trying to spend our last Francs (except for the ones I'm saving for Rena, a Summerbridge student who started a coin collection as a result of my sending her an old coin from a Renaissance Fair as a birthday present), we bought a pear and a peach at a small grocery-type store, then had hot chocolate (me) and red wine (Pop-Pop) at a corner sidewalk cafe while a guitarist sang Italian songs beside us. In Nice the wine is less expensive than the hot chocolate. We talked about social ills of the day, the decay of the family, and poverty. Pop-Pop agreed with me that what allows a relatioship or marriage to last is when each person is what the other one needs; he elaborated on how this is true with he and Bubba. You always have such things to say about these topics.

I think a possible cause of much of what troubles at least America today is the popular relaization that "You can have it all". I see it with how the media views celeberties, and how it chooses them. It runs thick in the women's movement, as I encountered reading Backlash last year. But there is a problem with "You can have it all"--three actually. Most obvious is that the statement is false within Western philosophy: Americans can never get what they want, only what they once wanted. More subtle is the damage done by the "You". Families break up when a member can gain more by leaving that unit; I've seen how troubled families are being replaced by troubled ex-families, who benefit from distance tempering their strife yet suffer from distance destroying any chance of healing. The "You" not only encourages this in practice, but is making this socially preferrable. Similarly other aspects of building and maintaining a community are damaged by the "You".

For people with temperments like Pop-Pop or I the "have" is also problematic. We know that once you give something away it is not yours, and we accept that human mortality means what we own is not truly ours either. So the only things that are truly ours are those we are giving away right now. Similarly, to us a community is a group of people who feel in one another's debt. This type of community and ownership is ignored by the "have".

Arg. Along the motorway between Nice and Florence are over one hundred and fifty tunnels, to further complicate writing on a bouncy bus with finnicky pens. Worst of all is during the tunnels too dimly lit to write in I have a chance to notice my spelling mistakes (my grammar mistakes I don't mind since they reflect how I think.)