The scandal of the lone blogger

It has occurred to me, while checking out other folks' blogs and seeing the number of comments they generate that I am in this community much as I have been throughout my life, and in any community, a bit of an odd one out.

At primary school, I would walk around the perimeter fence of our playground lost in thoughts, or singing the latest hits (many of these, being in France , and in the fifties, have since become great classics by the way...and not just in France...cf "je ne regrette rien", to name but one). When I wasn't singing known songs, I was composing symphonies in my head and singing them out loud. I don't remember how they went, with any degree of precision..otherwise, I would be a composer, see?...but I do know that I had an extraordinary amount of trouble ending my symphonies...I always found another crescendo, then descendo, then crescendo again...until the school mistress clapped her hands and we were lining up again, ready to go back to class in an orderly fashion.

It's not that I wasn't "popular"...just that I was mainly popular with the boys, since I preferred their playground activities to the girls'. The boys at my primary school were Supreme Thespians: during each play time they enacted some famous saga or other; from Blue beard, to Joan of Arc, from Tom Thumb to The Three Musketeers. I, as their Lady, was always given a good part by all those budding stars. I have it on good authority, having met up fairly recently with a couple of them, that those boys fought for the honour of carrying my satchel to school! This fact is all the more surprising that, as a child, I was given steroids on a permanent basis, as a result of which my appearance was less than good because of the bloating caused by the life-saving medicine ...(The girls called me all kinds of names...aaawwwH!Silly moos!...)But I was, and still am...to some extent, and please forgive this rather narcissistic outburst, plucky, funny, up for anything fun or slightly out of bounds, and the boys loved me. I loved braving the snow with them, ploughing and sliding, up to our necks in deep trenches, along the dodgy path overhanging the "waterfall", instead of walking the long way round to school; I loved scaling the walls at the back of the priest's house, instead of going to catechism, and exploring the secret gardens of the rich estate those walls were meant to protect...I loved adventure, a bit more than your average girl did! I was not a garçon manqué (Tom boy), oh no sirree! but I was one of the boys all the same.

Thus I was somewhat excluded from the various girly cliques and slightly bullied...I didn't care much, because I was always top of the form, and that shut them up, once a month when the rankings were announced: I can still hear Madame Vigier announcing softly: "Première de la classe, avec une moyenne de 9/10 (...or such like...again forgive the poetic license), Jocelyne Douvre!" That was a good sound: it meant I wasn't going to get beaten when I got home. All my dad would probably say, is "Can't you ever manage a 10, you idiot!"...aaaawwww! ( But then he also beat me when I could not stop shaking because of having contracted St Vitus dance -chorea is the proper medical term I think...more aaawwww?... Ha! No need to aaaawwwww on my behalf: everything is just as it is meant to be!)

Actually, since those faraway days, my dad and I have done such a lot of concilliatory and reconciliation work that we are now quite close, and the relationship is harmonious. He has just sent me a wonderful present: 365 Buddhist thoughts illustrated with 365 photographs of Tibet and Tibetans. It's calles "Offrandes" and is by Danielle and Olivier Follmi .It is stunning. By this I mean a: the book is stunning (awesome for Americans...?) and b: the fact that he should be able to judge so accurately the kind of thing that makes my heart sing is also stunning!

So, I have now reached a stage where I am quite gratified that so few people venture on my personal journal as to render the concept of www redundant , as it continues this life time tradition of being slightly out of synch with the norm, of not quite gelling with the rest of my community...whatever it is...of making a contribution which has the same relevance as those early performances in the playground at the Ecole communale de Flacé-les-Macon ( a village which no longer exists!). Yet writing here pleases me immensely... and the "boys" I meet in my Webb-sharing world are sweet, intelligent, polite, respectful, interesting. They'll know who they are!

The photo on my profile was taken by the Number One Boy, Paul, and put on the site by his friend Dave: my thanks to both of them!

Out of my window, all I see is a faint crescent of moon in a deep blue sky, and I feel blessed.



Love,
Jocelyne