Pre-Production

We're going on a trip to France this fall. We'll start in Paris, travel to Bordeaux, then head up to Brussels.

We'll take off from the airport in less than a month, and already the mental countdown has begun to shave minutes off of my productive workday in the form of vacant-eyed daydreaming of cafe creme at Les Halles in Paris, golden twilight in Normandy and the 13 delightful regional variations of Bordeaux.

Not to mention the fromage. As a rule of thumb, the moldier and uglier the outside, the more heavenly on the inside. For the cheese, that is.

It's been two years since we were last there, also in the early fall.

To keep myself in a good state of mind, I'll visit websites like www.chocolateandzucchini.com

I enjoy French cooking. A great deal is made of French gastronomy. Jacques Pepin, in his engaging memoir, "The Apprentice", has inspired me with his straightforward descriptions of the hard work, discipline of repetition, consistency and resourcefulness in technique. It's all so simple. At least that's how the experts make it look.

I also read books by authors, mostly correspondents and writerly types, who have published accounts of their exploits and derring-do in the City of Light. My favorite, and a wonderful literary Grand Central Station for anyone interested, is "Americans in Paris, A Literary Anthology", edited by Adam Gopnik. Adam Gopnik lived in Paris for five years as a correspondent to the New Yorker magazine.

In this book, he has collected and excerpted real gems that expose some truly rich personal memoirs by writers ranging from Benjamin Franklin to James Baldwin to Henry James to A.J. Liebling. My copy, which cost $50 new, is battered and well thumbed from many pleasurable evenings of reading.

The thought that will continue to plague me as we prepare to board the plane is that I should have purchased that set of Rosetta Stone French language courses to better my Francais. The one consoling thought is that the French will, in fact, make an effort to understand you. You just have to try to meet them halfway.