bike trip: 3

In the morning we packed up quickly and rode off to look for a church. We had mentioned the day before that it would be fun to find a Sunday morning mass in French in a charming rural town. In a half hour or so, we found the next town and we found their church--an old structure of brown stone walls, displaying thin crosses atop various peaks vaulting over entranceways, and half-surrounded by graves that dated from as far back to 1880 to as recent as two months ago as far as my eyes perceived while I rounded the building to find a door that might be open or a schedule that might tell us when mass might be held. An old woman toed between the gravestones slowly, like she had all the time in the world. I asked if there would be a mass at this church this morning. Yes, she told me, at eleven.
I reported this information to Paris and Garth. It was almost ten o'clock. We weren't sure if we should hang around for this mass. In the meantime, we stopped into the supermarket store right next to us to restock our food supply. I still had a dry sausage donated to me by my friend the monk, Friar David. He managed to smuggle a bagful of sausages, cheeses, and canned vegetables for me from the monastery's store of charitable food donations on his last visit. The sausage served as the main item on the menu for my first few days but there was not much left any more.
"Look, guys," said Paris, "I still have my cucumber. Oh my God, I'm so hungry. I'm gonna take a bite out of my cucumber."
Paris and I went in first while Garth looked over the bikes. I searched the supermarket with one ratio in mind, the ratio described by one New York comedian as "the greatest volume of food for the least amount of money." Foods adhering to this ratio include cans of ratatouille, store-brand cereal, store-brand ravioli, bread, and then a number of things that cannot be prepared on the road: pasta, couscous, rice. Paris operated on a different equation. As far as I could tell, the equation could be described thus: "The foods I feel like having right now plus bonus points if they're really crazy." The nice side effect of this equation is that Paris almost always bought more food than he could eat. The store had very little that scored well in my ratio. I bought one banana.
So it came Garth's turn to go in. I accompanied her. My appetite came back and this time I bought a can of ratatouille, bread for us to share, and cheese. Garth does not eat animals or animal products, so she bought some fruit and a can of cashews.
When we were all assembled in front of the store, Paris remarked, "This is so ghetto."
I didn't know what he was referring to and I didn't care.
"Listen," I said, "I don't know if we can make it to this service today. I'd like to, but it's 10:30 now, we've only gone three kilometers so far and now we'd have to do nothing but wait half an hour... and then if it starts late... and then sit around for an hour at a mass just for a laugh, just to say we went and saw it and then we're in the heat of the day and we've only gone three kilometers."
"But what's the point of our trip," said Paris, and Garth agreed, "if we're always going forward and never enjoy anything along the way?"
"I agree with you totally," I said, "but I don't think there's a lot to be gained by going to a church service, something we've all seen before, when all we're doing it for is the humor value. So that afterwards we can say, Can you believe we even went to Sunday mass in Littletown, France? It's not gonna be a real hoot and a holler. We know what it's gonna be--au nom du père, du fils, du saint-esprit... stand up, sit down... body of Christ, body of Christ... peace be with you. Everyone else will take it quite seriously but we'll try to force comic value out of the experience afterwards. Let's not and say we did. I don't know why it's necessary to lose two hours just for that. Two hours to set ourselves up for a punchline we already know and that's not that funny. We alrady lost time with the flat tires yesterday. I don't think it's worth it to stay for the mass."
We all would have liked to stay for the mass but could not dispute that two hours was a lot of time to spend for one punchline.

After a few hours of biking in the sun, we found a town where to spend the hottest hours of the afternoon. The days were very long and we could bike until 10pm with plenty of sunshine. The hours of two to five in the afernoon were the most brutal, so it was during these hours we liked to spare ourselves from the sun and the effort of biking and relax with a book, with our food, with some restful hours in the shade. Signs in the town indicated an étang, which I knew translated as pond, but I chose to translate as lake.
I called behind me to Garth and Paris, "Let's unload by the lake." And so we did.
Paris took a look around. To the left, dozens of recreational vehicles huddled in a lot, voices buzzing in and out of them. In front of us, a couple of children walked languidly in front of the pond, which stretched forty feet to the opposite shore. We settled ourselves around a wooden bench. It was not the lake I had promised. It was indeed a municipal pond, but Paris looked around to the trees twinkling in the July sky and perhaps the patches of cool, green grass in the shade and ruled, "It's gorge." He continued, "I'm gonna take a shower." And he disappeared into the restroom facility for half an hour.
On the bench, I held Garth in my arms. We'd had almost no time together except at night. "Look at your neck, it's so red," I said. "Do you have some more sun lotion? I need some, too, look at my forearms." I had been wearing a thin long-sleeve shirt to block the summer sun as much as possible, but the sleeves only came three-quarters of the way down my arms, so the entire backs of my hands and distal forearm were red like a tomato. This is as far as I can go without true sunburn, I thought. I better watch out and keep the sunlotion on at all times.
When Paris came out again, he looked refreshed. His blonde hair was spiked up and wet, his skinny torso wrapped in a black shirt tucked into tight jeans that fell a long straight way down to his shiny urban boots.
We shared the afternoon in different ways. I slept while Paris read the Bible outloud to Garth in a southern accent. Garth and I read the second chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to each other while Paris slept. I read the Bible intently and discovered that many of the chapters are in fact letters that Jesus's disciples wrote to the first Christian communities. I had always heard that the Bible was written by God. But I found this new development concerning its authorship to be far more interesting. God could write fact or fiction and you'd never know the difference. But if these are the writings of men, perhaps we can use our hearts and minds to read and understand their words and wonder what makes them write what they do. For we are men, too, and capable of understanding other men. From the various mysterious things I hear told about God, I can gather only that he must live in a cloud of unknowing because people say a lot of things about God that make no sense at all.