A Farewell to Arms

This afternoon, while sitting outside reading a book, the upstairs neighbor poked his head out the window and invited me to come up for a drink.  Felipe and I had chatted a little here and there a few times, and though his invitation was a little out of my comfort zone, I put my book down and went up.

Felipe is a war vet in his late forties who walks with a cane.  When I got upstairs, he was sitting at the table with a friend, who exclaimed, "Ah, the little American girl!"  Everyone, and I do mean everyone, calls me "the little American girl," which I find strange, because I'm no shorter than the average French woman, but whatever.  I pulled up a chair, and Felipe poured me a whiskey.

We spent the next hour and a half chatting through a haze of cigarette smoke.  They told me where the army had taken them, and then we discussed jazz music and John Wayne movies.  Somewhere between taking note of Felipe's graying stubble and uneven teeth and watching Luc spin an old pocket knife on the table top, I wondered if perhaps I'd died and been sent to live in a Hemingway novel.  In my imagination, the scene looked a lot like this:

Eventually Felipe's ex-wife showed up to collect their shy little son, who had been happily playing with cars under the table for the whole conversation, and I said it was time for me to leave and get back to my writing.
Overall, it was a fairly surreal experience.