A Sweet Life

I've made a mistake.  It's a good one.  Les Petites Ecolieres, my home away from home, is in fact, Les Petits Ecoliers.  What's the difference?  One is the name of the French porn that I mentioned before.  And the other simply means "The Schoolboys".  As pleased as I was to have become a regular at the porn cafe, I'm more pleased to have become a regular at the cafe for the schoolboys.  I'm happy to have been welcomed (although some of the drunks don't really like me) and surprisingly enough, I seem to be learning a little bit from these boys.

A few days ago, the discussion was about happiness.  What does it mean to be happy?  One conclusion was that you have to be either really stupid or really smart to be happy.  If you're really stupid, you don't know any better and you just float through life being happy. ( Is that a bad thing?)  And if you're really smart, maybe you've figured it all out.  I'm not sure there are many of those.  That left the rest of us in the middle.  Are we happy?

According to one important member of the group, he's pleased to have one little bit of happiness a day.  It's enough.  And it really doesn't have to be much.  If he collects all of those little moments along the way, he looks back and feels happy.  It's quite a nice idea, really.  Don't worry about when the next happy moment will come and  don't dwell on the unhappy things that have come and gone.  Just keep collecting the little bits of joy and in the end, you'll have happiness.

These little schoolboys are kind of smart, no?

It gets better.  I spent nearly two hours in the cafe that morning and talked about two hours worth of other nonsense (that I probably didn't understand because it was all in French).  Loads of customers came and went and I stayed planted on my stool for the next lesson.  Olivier worked around me clearing tables and washing dishes.  On one of his trips back to the bar he had a little tube of sugar tightly wound to indicate that only half had been used and it was still fresh and reusable.  It struck me as odd.  In the first place, who can use only half a tube of sugar?  I can only hope that this was the leftover from the consumption of a tube and a half.  Also, how much can half of a 3 inch tube of sugar be worth?  Then came the lesson.  He keeps a jar of sugar behind the bar.  He took the lid off, unwound the nicely wound little tube and poured it in.  It was far less sugar than could fill a one minute timer for BOGGLE, but he poured it in and said, "It's like happiness.  If I keep getting a little bit everyday,  in the end I'll have enough to make a cake."