A MONTH-LONG BREAK
The ferry arrives in Nice Port from Corsica and Sardinia
I’m not sure anyone has given any notice that I’ve not posted anything for a month, but I haven’t felt particularly inspired to write lately, anyhow. It’s not like I don’t have anything to say, rather I have been more focused on other things, and the time just seems to slip past. We are often told by our elders as we grow up and begin to age that time will begin to speed up even faster. And once retired, time becomes a construct with no real relevance any longer. It is one of the more amazing things that I have experienced in the past year of being retired, let me tell you. Unless there is a ticket with a departure time or a reservation involved that requires us to be some place at some time, time doesn’t really exist. Meaning, it doesn’t really matter anymore. I think for a lot of people who are still working that this must sound either terrifying or great, one or the other. It raises philosophical questions: If time doesn’t matter, or even exist, then do I? The answer lies therein, in your definition of meaning.
I know some people can’t ever retire because their definition of meaning, their purpose, is associated with how they spend their time working. Stripping themselves of the associated mirror that reflects back their prestige, purpose, power, and prosperity is tantamount to a form of suicide. Others, who may not have had a career—defined by one university source, as a combination of roles, experiences, education, and pathways you take to achieve your goals—versus say a “job,” which is just a role, may not suffer this debilitating fear of purposeless. But then again, they just might. Since none of us really know why we’re really here, how we all got here, and where we’re headed—regardless of any system you subscribe to that tells you otherwise—losing a role can be very tough on one’s self-esteem. That mirror gets shattered, and the multifaceted reflection is too difficult to focus on. The meaning no longer whole.
For me, I couldn’t wait to shatter it. Partly because I have suffered from severe adult ADHD for my entire life, I have many, many interests, and like a comet, I have predictably returned to them again and again. For those who know me well, you have seen that manifested as perhaps a lack of focus, an impossibility to stay in one place, or more positively, being really good at lots of things. Design, art direction, photography, painting, cooking, career advice, writing, wine, school, etc. (Yet, one probably wonders why I just don’t stick with something to realize a greater success?) The combination of retiring, and the dismantling of time as a driver, as well as the upheaval of relocating to France, and the effects of hearing another language daily, have all worked to unleash the ADHD in me, guilt free. I am now free to bounce between passions at will. Of all those things that I have said in my youth that I would do once I retired, well, I am doing them, all at once but in no particular order.
This is how a month slips by, but in my world it feels like an hour or two.
Some of you, well, I think a lot of you, know that I have been saving the corks from most of the bottles of wine I have drank since the 1980s. You have been there to drink them with me. It is one of the things in this life that I truly cherish. In Vino Veritas has led to strong bonds with many of the people in my life and the clarity of shared human experience that it brings, which in my book is the only real antidote to the absolute helplessness to understand the purpose of life that we all suffer from.
As Mark Hollis wrote so profoundly:
Baby, life’s what you make it.
Celebrate it.
Anticipate it.
Yesterday’s faded.
Nothing can change it.
Life’s what you make it.
As ridiculous as saving thousands of corks is, and I fully acknowledge the stupidity of it, I have lugged around these corks with me everywhere I have ever lived for the past 40 years. I even sent two full storage totes full of them to France. Why, you ask? It started as one of those things where I thought I would made a cork board. Then I had enough for a bar top under glass. Then enough for maybe a back splash. Then it became overwhelming, and I just never stopped saving them for “something.”
But now I am retired, and more aware of the limited time we each have left. I asked Chien-hui one day a few weeks ago randomly, “How long do you think we’ll stay in this apartment?” and she said, “I don’t know, ten years?” That struck me like a thunderbolt. I’ll be 70 in ten years. I knew it was time to finally put the corks to some kind of use. I needed to forget about the romantic vision of some underground cellar covered in cork-glory.
So, again, it’s only something one can do when time is irrelevant, I have just spent the past two weeks hot-glueing the corks to my office wall. More than 7,000 of them. It was hard work, I could only do so many per day before my neck began to ache, and I have multiple burns on my fingers from the hot glue. Actually it was exhausting, however I think they look great.
Corks from wines from all over the world that I’ve shared with others now grace the wall in my office
One special thing about the way my brain works is that I could reach into a tub and randomly pull a cork out and tell you where, when, and who I drank the bottle with. Not every one of them, of course, but so many of them. The project turned out to be a walk down memory lane and a unique way to remember my life. For example, I pulled the cork from the night I graduated the University of Washington—a 2002 Meursault ( I graduated UW in June 2006 as a 41 year-old). There was the 100-point, 2005 Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, that I bought from Jeff Tweiten’s shop on Bainbridge Island and drank with my aunt and uncle 15 years later. I saw the long cork from a bottle of Reynvaan Family Vineyards Syrah that I drank with John Dey in the early 2010s. We loved our Washington Syrahs. So, so many bottles from California that I drank with Lynn Crocker, my first wife. I even found the corks from Glen Ellen, Hop Kiln, and Gundlach Bundschu that we bought on our drive around Napa and Sonoma that made up what was our “honeymoon” in 1988. We were 22 and we bought 12 bottles, which at the time, I thought was an outrageous number. What would we do with so many bottles! They didn’t last six months.
The oldest cork on the wall is from Ridge, a 1981 Zinfandel from California, and the newest from 2023, a very delicious Vermentino from Sardinia I just had by the vigneron, Cantina Mesa . There were several large handfuls of corks from the many times we sat on Mark and Marie’s back porch in front of the fire ring late at night with friends, talking about life, our perspectives on the past, our frustrations and joys with work, about our families… and more than anything, just laughing. Lots of those were Italian wines, as Mark and I share a love of good Italian wine. Or from France, where we were all just recently traveling together earlier this summer. There are bottles from Atlanta shared with my old friend, Robert, and our girlfriends. Bottles from Tucson, and that time we had a Sweet Sixteen-style blind tasting party with Pinot Noirs from around the world. There are wines drunk from our tiny apartment in Santa Monica where I somehow painted huge canvases with a glass in my hand. I did some of my best work from that apartment. There was that time we had 25 people over to our house on Bainbridge Island for a wine dinner and the long table we set stretched from the living room, through the dining room, and out the back door onto the deck. And many enjoyable bottles from our family trips with my mom’s family when she was still here, to Oregon, Paso Robles, and that Christmas we shared in Arizona before she got sick.
Perhaps all of these corks look excessive, wasteful, or hedonistic. There is a case to be made for all of those, but one man’s definition of excess is another’s definition of memory and meaning.
I don’t know how many exactly, but my closest estimate would be over 7,000 corks
Even behind the door
The other thing I did in the last month is to decorate our apartment. As I mentioned in my last post, our stuff had finally just arrived, including the corks. But there was also artwork, books, and kitchen gear. Deciding where to hang art, collecting being another lifelong passion, was also purely joyful. I tried things in different places before settling on the right locations. I love looking at all of my art monographs on my bookshelves, all of the artists I most admire. And with my kitchen pots, knives, and tools here I have been in the kitchen every day. The routine of going to the outdoor markets, butchers, boulangeries, the Italian market, is set now. Every three days I make the walk with my trolley cart pulled behind. We eat on the terrace most evenings if it isn’t too hot.
I found a terrific framer here in Nice, Maison Franco. Monsieur Franco is a third-generation framer working from an atelier that was begun by his grandfather. I like to think about how many pieces of art, family heirlooms, and other memories are hanging on the walls here in Nice that his family has had their hands on. I had him finish framing a diptych that I painted during Covid that I have always been very proud of, but never got around to framing. Where would I have put it anyhow? It’s huge. But somehow, I’ve got a perfect wall here. I think it looks so good and fits well with many of the other pieces we have in our place.
The framed piece of my painting titled Fissures. Oil on linen, 2022. 83×33 inches
All of the pieces we collected over the years on our journeys, places we lived, our honeymoon, photographs and paintings I have made, they’re all here now.
The only other thing that is noteworthy from the past month is that we went to our scheduled health inspection that is required by the French government as part of the long stay visa process, also known as the VLS-TS. If you emigrate to France and plan to stay for the long-haul, there are a number of steps that you must take before you qualify for your residency card. The first step takes place in US before you ever leave and that is the application process and interview with the consulate, which we did in Seattle back in March 2025. As with everything you do with the French bureaucracy, this involved showing lots of documents, which in turn leads to lots of stamping by the bureaucrats. The French love stamps. Not the postage kind, but the rubber and ink pad kind. You know, thump, thump, squiggled-signature on top, official-like.
So, we hopped on the tram, and went to our local OFII office (Office of Immigration and Integration) to be seen by a doctor to make sure we were who we said we were, that we didn’t have tuberculosis, and to obtain the very integral Certificat de Controle Medical, a very important document that is necessary to progress to the next step of our Residency process.
After waiting in line outside the main OFII campus with people from all over the world, we were welcomed through a security gate and metal detector, our passports checked, and then asked to wait with a group of other people. Once we had a critical mass, a security guard of some kind came and got us, and we followed him like ducklings behind a mother goose. He led us through a door and into another waiting room. After a few minutes he came out of a side door with a clipboard and began calling names. He called ours and came over and checked our passports. After checking everyone, he asked us all to stand and follow him again around a corner to where we saw a series of large dots on the floor, which we all aligned to. After a few minutes the line began moving forward, and we quickly passed through a doorway where another woman seated at a desk checked our passports and after confirming our names on a list, we were directed either right or left depending on what we were there for, I am guessing. Only a few of us went right, while the majority of folks went left. Of those that came with us, there was a very small Vietnamese nun who had the friendliest face, and another well-to-do looking woman of unknown descent. There was also a young-ish looking couple who I gather were North African.
We were led to a small waiting room, more like a hallway, and seated. In front of us were two doors. The door on the right opened and a doctor in a white coat came out and called Chien-hui and me. We went in and sat down. We handed over our passports. He paged through them until he reached our visas, the one that had been glued into our passports back in the US by the French consulate, allowing us to stay in France longer than the 90 days that all US tourists are given automatically. After giving the visas a good once over, he then took out two pieces of paper from his desk drawer and started stamping away. One stamp was his, showing his name, and he over-signed that in ink. Then another stamp for the Territorial Director of OFII but that one had the signature as part of the stamp. Then he took out an old-fashioned date stamp, and a blue ink pad, and stamped the page again. THUMP.
Then he began asking us some health-related questions. Had we ever had any surgeries? Were we on any medications? We have become very skilled at working with the French bureaucracy, so we always come in with a dossier, in an official looking folder with lots of documents, copies of anything we can think of they might ask for. I loosened the corner elastic straps and opened mine and produced a printout of my medical vaccinations and current medications. I could tell that he liked that. I told him about my A-fib, and he asked me if I took a “anticoagulant” (blood thinner), which I acknowledged. He then took out a tiny blood pressure device that wrapped around our wrists. Chien-hui told me later that she hadn’t seen one of those since she did one of her nursing rotations in a public health clinic in skid row in downtown Los Angeles. He took hers first and it was 192/111, which would be alarming if it wasn’t so laughable. Chien-hui’s normal resting heart rate is around 52 bpm, and her normal BP is always under 120/80. She is very chill. The doctor looked rather surprised and mumbled something about maybe she was nervous. He then proceeded to take mine. I figured my numbers would break the machine if hers were that high, but no, my BP was 116/90. Go figure. I was pretty relaxed.
He then told us to follow him, and we were led next door to the other room where an official looking nurse sat. We were told to sit. She checked our passports. She picked up where the doctor had left off asking us questions. What was our height and weight? Nobody actually physically measured these. Did we smoke? No? (Surprise?) She looked at the medications the doctor had written down and asked if everything was well-under control. I said, “oui.” She wrote “bien-contrôleé.” No chest X-ray ever took place, which we thought was the entire point of going there. They apparently ended this practice a short while ago.
She then handed us two copies each of the document that we were there for. She explained that one version was for our records and that we under no circumstances were to ever give anyone the original. The second copy was for our next appointment with OFII proving that we had had this first appointment. In that meeting we will be tested for our French language skills and based on how well or poorly we do, we will be given a certain number of hours of free French language classes. We will also need to go to required French history and culture classes. Thus the “integration” part of the OFII name.
After nine months of living here, which will be this December, we can begin the process of applying for the permanent residency card. This all takes place online or by mail, or both. We have had our birth certificates, marriage certificate, passports, etc., translated into French by an official government-approved translator. We will add these new health documents to our packets and send them in and wait. They will be approved eventually, and we will receive a photo ID residency card that is good for two years. This will allow us to travel anywhere in Europe for as long as we like. We can renew them again for another two years. After the fifth year we are eligible to become French citizens or apply for a ten-year residency card.
In an entirely different process, we are also now able to apply for a government health card, called the Carte Vital, or more commonly the green card, which is not the same as a green card in the US. That is the Residency Card. Follow? Health care is a right in France and anyone who is here longer than three months is eligible. Isn’t that remarkable? We will no longer need private health insurance, nor will we ever need to fear medical bankruptcy ever again. There is no employer-based health insurance in France, so nobody is ever worried about losing their job and thus their health insurance. As people who have retired early, we consider this to be the greatest gift we could ever receive and we will be forever indebted to the French government for it.
The medical exam this week was obviously less about being examined and more about how many people had jobs due to our visit, I think. By my count, there was the door security, the guy who walked us from place to place, the woman who checked our passport for the third time, the doctor, and the nurse. And let’s not forget the entire rubber stamp industry being kept afloat in this age of AI.
And you know what? I am perfectly satisfied with it all. I can’t believe they are letting us live in this beautiful country and giving us free (very excellent) health care to boot. They are also rightly concerned with how French we are or will become. There is no equivalent to the hyphenated race title such as African-American here. There are no French-Americans, or Mexican-French. Only French. They don’t care where you come from, if you live here you’re French now. You know, it is illegal here to keep any kind of ethnicity records? You will never be asked to check a box to determine if if you are white, black, some kind of Latin, or a mix, like in the US. You are French first and only. This is why the French culture is so strong. That, and they legally require everyone to take a full hour for lunch, and kids eat with silverware here, and can tell you what 250 different kinds of cheeses are. They have their priorities straight and they have a very high opinion of their own culture, and it is easy to see why.