View Larger Donald Duck lobbing a tomato at der Fuehrer’s caricatured schnoz provided one solitary scrap of frivolity in the appropriately recondite Memorial de la Shoah.
Beans, Baguettes, & Boulogne
View Larger 
If you place the fork and knife on the wrong side, prepare to be censured by the bumptious grandfather. If you eat something different than the flesh-of-the-day, prepare to be pecked with queries by the ever-brazen Aliénor. If you are Voltaire the lab, curl up on your mangy rug and watch the ritual awkwardness unfold three times daily.
Although my modus operandi when visiting museums is to mosey adagio, no such luxury when your hand is yanked every which way by an ever-eager youngster at La Rochelle Aquarium.
View Larger I must concede that little Heloïse is a photogenic darling.
However—before you make the all-too-common mental jump—she is not an angel. Angels do not scream when taking showers in view of a harmless resident spider. Nay, I severely doubt angels continually vociferate “IT’S HAS A SPIDER” in varying pitches of headache.
(My babysitter facade as a “kid person” is becoming ever more slimsy by the word.)
The girls—Heloïse, Aliénor, Diane—and I unintentionally mimic wind-swept model hair at La Rochelle port.
View Larger The three children I dressed, soaped, and otherwise coddled—loopy Heloïse (6), earnest Aliénor (9), and diva Diane (8)—during my two weeks at Ile de Ré.
Photo Credit: Claudine Marie
View Larger This Ars-en-Ré fowl plods—without haste, without sloth—through a mosaic of stones beaming blues and greens through the colorless, rippling current.
View Larger I could have saved myself a jangle of centimes by printing out this gay, atypical Ile de Ré set-up instead of succumbing to any of the virtual facsimiles flapping invitingly from corner shop loggias.
I was struck reticent as the wind alternated between stillness and spiral in the shadow-crossed ruins of the medieval Ile de Ré Abbey.
View Larger An angled mass of cumulus cast a penumbra upon the verdant countryside, feeding in me that metaphysical void only such arresting wonders can nourish.
(Note the bridge in the background connecting Ile de Ré to La Rochelle on the mainland.)
