I’m on an airplane at the moment, headed to Southern California where I’m due to speak at a Friend’s luncheon for the Newport Beach Library. I’ve been invited to do so three years in a row. Twice the event was canceled by Covid. This time I’m definitely going.
This week, my hostess, Pam Crook, heard from a member who will be unable to attend the luncheon because she’s currently traveling out of the country. Last week she was in Paris. Having just read the book, The Paris Library, she decided to pay the place a visit. While there, on a whim, she went to see if they carried any of my books. As you can see from the accompanying photo, the answer was a definitive YES.
I thanked her, of course, but, as so often happens, that set of email exchanges sent me on a trip down memory lane and gave me a topic for this week’s blog.
In 1997, Bill and I booked two back-to-back tours of France with Rick Steves’s Europe Through the Back Door. They are guided tours with buses where travelers’ accommodations are in second or third-tier hotels. Guests are allowed to bring a single bag and a small back pack, and the hotels involved generally don’t include air conditioning. If you’re traveling in Europe in the summer, as we were, that’s a big deal. So included in Bill’s and my individual bags were small, battery-powered fans.
We flew in by way of Copenhagen. When we stepped off the plane, we were blasted by 33 Celsius heat which translated to a very humid 91 degrees Fahrenheit. At our also-second-tier hotel with no AC, the fans stirred enough air to allow us to go to sleep, but they ran out of power long before morning. When we arrived in Paris a day later, it was the hottest temperature on record in 200 years. Naturally, that hotel, too, was without air-conditioning.
Our first stop after leaving Paris was in a town called Albi. There we ditched the walking tour in the destination part of town and went where tourists seldom venture. There, in the town’s only hardware store, we located an electric fan with a France-based plug, but buying it wasn’t easy. The store couldn’t use our credit cards and wouldn’t cash our Traveler’s checks. The owner of the hardware store finally had to take us to his bank in order to facilitate the transaction.
For the remainder of the tour, I dragged my roll-aboard luggage into one hotel after the other with that fan strapped to the handle. There were people from our tour who offered us money to let them sleep in our rooms.
One of the first items of business on the tour was introducing ourselves to our fellow travelers. When I said I wrote mysteries, no one had ever heard of me. Big surprise there.
We quickly made friends with Jean and Truby Jones, a couple probably twenty years our senior. Like Bill, Truby was a retired EE—an Electronics Engineer—who had ended his career as an executive for Florida Power and Light. He was also a Shriner and delighted in dressing up to drive clown cars to raise money for the Shriner’s Hospital. A raconteur par excellence, he filled our evening hours with tall tales while Jean, a southern lady to the core, looked on smiling from the sidelines.
Once we purchased our electric fan, we passed our battery-powered ones along to Jean and Truby. In exchange they shared their airline-tax-free Scotch with us. Jean didn’t partake, but her Rick Steves bag contained its very own bottle of single malt Scotch for the rest of us. Bill and Truby took theirs neat. I’m a rocks girl, and rocks are hard to come by in France in the summer. At least they were back then. Three cubes was generally the per-person limit, so Bill and Truby ordered rocks, too, and then gave me theirs, thus allowing me nine rocks per glass.
When we returned to Paris for the last day of the tour, Bill and I went to the English section of a famous Parisian bookstore where we found a single copy of Until Proven Guilty. When I signed it for Jean and Truby, I said, “So long and thanks for all the Scotch.”
Naturally, within weeks of our arrival home, Jean sent me a gracious thank you note telling me that she had enjoyed reading the book and was now looking for more “at every garage sale I see.”
We corresponded for a while after that, and they even came to visit us once. Then Jean was diagnosed with lung cancer. The tumor was removed by way of a 21-inch incision in the middle of her back. Within days, however, the incision was attacked by necrotizing fasciitis forcing her to spend weeks in the hospital in both a hyperbaric chamber and the ICU.
While she was still in the hospital, Truby sent me the following note:
Dear Judy,
I have just finished reading all of your wonderful books. I don’t know how I would have gotten through all these weeks in hospital waiting rooms without your stories.
Sincerely,
Truby Jones
It’s by far best fan letter I’ve ever received, and the only one I can quote verbatim. By the way, Jean recovered completely, and they were able to take two more Rick Steves trips together before we lost them—Jean first and Truby several years later. But that’s what the photo of those books in the Paris Library did for me—they brought back all those wonderful memories.
And now I’ve been able to share them with you.
As that old song says, memories are made of this.
Can’t tell you how much this memory of yours meant to me! Thank you so much for sharing.
Great memory! However, the last line of your blog has now caused an earworm…thank you very much!
The song that is going through my mind is Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were,” which begins “Memories…light the corners of my mind….” So for you it’s the photograph in a Paris library; for me it’s a song. In June of last year, the leader of the band I was in died of pancreatic cancer. This morning the drummer and I were reminiscing by email about Gary and the good times we had in the band, and what a hole his passing has left in our lives. But for me, when the radio plays a country song that I learned in that band, or I use one of the songs in my music teaching, it triggers a memory of Midnite Special and it’s lightning-fingered leader. And while tears are coming to my eyes while I write this, I experience gratitude for the years in the band, and for the repertoire of music I now know because of Gary and the band, and I cherish the memories.
Celebrating our 60th wedding anniversary today.
“As that old song says, memories are made of this.”
Thank you for sharing your memories with us.
This lovely blog reminds me of so many friends I have met through my life, under strange circumstances. Sometimes they turned out to be the very ones I could lean on or open up to in my times of need. Sometimes I let them use my shoulder to cry on. Thanks for another gem of a blog.
Thank you again for being timely with your ‘ weekly ramblings’ much anticipated and seemly relevant to my life . In anticipation of travel back to Aloha land. Have tried to contact friends there ( masonic .rotary and people I did AI ‘artificial insemination of dairy and beef cattle + horses for 10 years of my life’s. And found 9 of 14 contacts were deceased.but still have those memories.Chuck from Tacoma .maholo and Aloha. You have helped me vicariously thru a tough portion of my life.
We did a similar frantic search for fans on a visit to Montreal 20+ years ago – we were staying in grad student housing at McGill University (great deal on a 2 bedroom apartment with kitchen/bath but of course no AC….and usually no reason to set up cross ventilation etc, since it is not normally in the mid 90s there). Fans were not a thing in hardware stores we visited and our crumby French made asking around for where one could find a fan almost impossible. Finally asked a lady sitting on her stoop with a window fan blowing on her and found a source; we left our fans in the apartment when we left the city and I bet they were popular in the next heat wave!
Ceci
We passed our fan on to our tour bus driver.
What a lovely blog with some great memories…similar to our experiences in Montreal when we visited Expo 67. Always wondered if those Rick Steves adventures were worthwhile. Living in Tucson, we could bear the heat but not the humidity!
Our first trip to your Europe was in 1972. I Globus Tour starting with Los Angeles to Paris, then a 21 day bus trip to 12 countries. We had decent hotels with moderate AC, breakfasts and dinners, major attractions and some entertainment; all for $799.
The one thing missing was ICE. No ice water, no crispy salads, no ice cube in mixed drinks. Everything was served at room temperature. Even the beer was warm.
A great story and tribute!
You will probably be deluged with notes like this, but I’m that way about your books, too.
Wonderful story.
We too are Rick Steves fans. Never took his tour, but his books are Bibles. Once ran into a tourist carrying his books in the Cinque Terre, Italy (an amazing place!) Bob Glass
Lovely story, as usual.
Great story!
Thanks for sharing it with us.
Jessica
My wife and I have most of your books, purchased at 2nd hand stores, on line and occasionally new at stores. I’ve enjoyed all the ones I have read and looking forward to reading the few unread ones. Being a Northwest native I have really enjoyed the Beaumont series. Hope you keep writing for a long time
I was late coming aboard, but I do love your weekly posts. I got hooked on Joanna from book 1, then discovered Beau and then along came Ali.
I also read a lot of independent/new writers (99c or free on Amazon)… cause you never knew when yoy’ll get hooked. Sometimes I finish (or don’t) and I’m sure glad I didn’t pay big dollars for it! Anyhow, last week I was reading one of those books which was OK but I won’t look for the next book! The book was “Dogs Don’t Lie” and in the book the main character has police surveillance staying at her home. She comments that Det. Carter, arrived with her coffee and her J.A. Jance book about Sheriff Joanna Brady. She comments that the Det. & she wwill get along just fine. The author gets a star from me for mentioning you!! Still doesn’t mean that I will read her next book! Just had to share that you show up where least expected!!
Great story.
Love this story! A wonderful reminder of how travel brings unlikely friends together and enriches our lives. And completely understandable to me: that your books kept her going at a critical, difficult moment in Jean’s life.