Well I for one am holding thumbs that you will GO! I think some of the people attending will be delighted to see YOU. My husband is not at all comfortable in swarms of people but since taking up photography again, walks around like he is part of the hired photographers (especially at weddings!) and just enjoys himself snapping away.
I too hope you go Kerouac! I enjoy your photo essays and selfishly I would also like to see pictures from the Lorraine as we will not be able to visit there in September. I would show them to my mother-in-law, it would be ironic if she knew some of the people! She has many memories of the difficulties that her family dealt with due to being occupied during WW2.
She also remembers when they were sent down to Paris how some people called them names because of where they were from, but she prefers to talk about how many kind people there were that helped her mother, brother and herself.
I hope you go and take many many pictures for us and tell us how the family has evolved over the years.
I was talking to a village friend on the phone yesterday. She informs me of all of the recent and upcoming deaths: "Remember Mr. Blinette, the old bachelor who lived downstairs from Mme. Hoffmann? Well, he died a few weeks ago. Nobody came to his funeral; I was the only person at the cemetery. And Jeanette, your grandmother's next door neighbor. Well, she's got lung cancer and she's in the last phase. She has a morphine drip punched through her throat, but she just keeps smoking as much as ever..."
Frankly I am amazed that I still remember these people, but they were all 'village characters' one way or another and talking about village people or peering at them through the curtains was always the main pastime there anyway.
I still have a vivid memory of my grandmother sitting on my parents' sofa and using their binoculars to spy on Jeanette while giving a running commentary. "There goes the old lady with her bucket of peelings for the pig. [The 'old lday' was about 35 years younger than my grandmother.] Is she going to stop and pull the weeds in the tomato patch at last? No, she's just lighting another cigarette. She could at least take the laundry off the line -- it's been there for a week."
My parents were good friends of her husband, but he died of throat cancer back in 1980 or thereabouts. The four children seemed to raise themselves because their mother did not seem to ever take notice of them. The youngest little boy would have been an apt candidate for the role of 'Pigpen' in the Peanuts comic strip. It would be worth it to go to Jeanette's funeral just to see what the kids look like more than 30 years later.
Ah, idle speculation about things that are none of my business...
It sounds like you might have inherited much of your grandmother's curiosity about people (and I only mean this in a very positive sense of being curious about the world around you).
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