Saturday, December 31, 2011

France




Next question: what does a trucker do when she's disgruntled with her 60-hour work week and her void of a social or intellectual life? Answer: she quits her job and moves next door to a monastery in France to spend a year studying philosophy, of course. Occasionally the village maintenance guy parks his rotten old tractor outside my bedroom window and lets it sputter there for half an hour while he gets ready for his work day (I live next door to the "town garage", if you can call it that), but otherwise the absence of perpetually-running diesel engines is a beautiful silence to my ears.

Did you happen to spot the monks in my vacation post? They're the two in the center of the lunch-break group, looking like hard-asses and wearing pretty gray skirts. (Yes, they hiked 4 days in the Alaskan wilderness in their habits. These are some hardcore monks.) Well, a week after I got home from Alaska I got a phone call from one of them. It went something like this: "You're thinking about doing something besides truck driving?" "Yes." "Do you want to study at my monastery in France? Classes start in 6 weeks." "Perfect. Thanks. I'll be there." Okay, it wasn't quite that smooth. After the invitation, it went more like, "What?! Are you crazy?! The last time some monk had some crazy idea about what I could do next I ended up trucking for the next 3 years!" If I would just stop talking to monks, my life would be so much simpler. And not half as interesting.

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