Why I Hate J. K. Rowling & Other Tragedies of This Cruising Life

One of our dock neighbors is a kindly French woman who puts up with my extremely bad French and likes our dog.  When we are out on the dock, she will stop by to pet Yogi and try to have a conversation with me despite my garbled French sentences.  So far, I’ve come to understand that she is from Bordeaux but lives in Madagascar during the winter and she’s come to understand that I have few language skills and am not very bright.

For over a week, I stared at the name of her boat, ‘Gryffindor‘, looking it up in both my French/English dictionary and my plain old English dictionary.  I began to think that it was an ancient, obscure French word with perhaps a double meaning.  Duh!

I literally slapped myself upside the head when I realized why my grandchildren have been nagging at me to read the Harry Potter books.  Those stories are so much a part of the world now we’d (I’d) better get used to them, no matter how old, cranky or backwards we (I) may be.

Gryffindor - one of the four houses at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry which, in particular, epitomizes courage and chivalry.

Almost every evening our marina capitain, Jean-Pierre, serenades us boaters by appearing on his second story deck with his alpenhorn and belting out a few tunes.  He usually blows melodies I am not familiar with but last night we heard Amazing Grace and the Marseilles coming from the end of his long horn.  How nice to hear live music; we look forward to his twilight concerts and are disappointed when he misses one.

The marina up a creek

 Even though Corre is the tiniest, sleepiest of towns it boasts two marinas.  Our marina is up a creek (literally not figuratively) but the town marina sits right on the Canal De Vosges.  As Yogi and I took our evening walk through both marinas, we were approached by a local man who, with his granddaughter, was walking from boat to boat peddling fresh fruits and vegetables from his garden.  I said sorry but I had no money with me.  No matter, he said, reaching into his basket for 2 tiny peaches which he presented to me with a flourish.  Juicy, sweet and gone in a gulp - merci beaucoup, monsieur.

The town marina alongside the Canal de Vosges

Our local grand-pere isn’t the only enterprising spirit along this canal.  On our way to Corre, just as we had pushed the lever to begin a locking process, a grandmother with fresh haricot vert, a picture perfect head of lettuce and newly dug potatoes perched in her motor scooter’s carrier roared up to lock side.  We were too busy line handling to dig out any money so she revved up her motor and peeled out to find boaters with looser pockets.  Bon chance, madam (although with her kind of get-up-and-scoot attitude, her chance is already bon).

Then we ran across that damn selfish dog.  A group of men stood talking together alongside a lock and, as our boat entered, I noticed a wire-haired Fox terrier beside them sniffing the ground, digging a bit, then eating what he found.  I pointed the dog out to Dwight, wondering out loud what that puppy was chewing. His owner looked up and said “truffles”.  Truffles, those little black gems worth hundreds of dollars a pound and that dog was not sharing, nor was his owner ripping the food out of its mouth to sell on the open market.  At last we’ve met a dog even more indulged than our Yogi-dog.

The canals aren’t all ancient scenery or scary times in the locks.  Sometimes they are cornucopias yielding freshly picked vegetables, sweet golden honey or just laid eggs with orange yolks that stand at attention in your frying pan…..but not truffles.