Words in My Wake

This morning as I opened the slider in my office loft, the oil tanker Lacanau was apparently finished with it business here in Channelside. I watched her steam off toward the sea, thinking: ���It���s a long way to Marseille.��� The famous French city notwithstanding, the word ���Marseille��� still makes me shutter after more than fifty years. And it���s not even the French word that embarrassed me as a boy. It just reminds me of it.

At the age of eight or ten, at the house of family friends I loved, I