And what of the glove that is left behind—abandoned by its counterpart. The remaining glove is resigned to a life of limbo, forever waiting for its mate to return so that it might see the sun again. Or perhaps it becomes a dust rag or, on very rare occasions, it too gets lost or thrown away, where (in the spirit of The Shawshank Redemption) the two might meet up again on the outside through some rock that has no Earthly business in a Maine hayfield.
It’s long been a goal of mine to visit a city and to fall in love with it. I want to revisit it—spending a weekend here and there—on my way to other countries; I want to discover special nooks that only the locals know and come to call them my haunts; I want my desire for this city to parallel my desire to explore territory uncharted or my desire to return home after a long and wonderfully exhausting trip; I want a home away from home.
There were already countries to which I yearned to return again (Ireland and Iceland being chief among them), but I hadn’t yet found that city in which I yearned to own property.
Enter Paris. It’s gorgeous and reminds me a great deal of NYC, but older. Each cafe has people sitting outside, sipping wine, breaking bread. Every other person is clad in leather—in spite of rain and summertime temperatures—as if it weren’t a coat but a second layer of skin.
The people are aware of their surroundings. They speak on their telephones with a consistency that I thought had disappeared; juxtapose these people with the tourists—their heads facing downward at their phones or completely occluded by iPads as they use the ungainly device to take pictures of that which is in front of them, without ever actually seeing it themselves.
A side note on selfie sticks: I loathe them. I would gladly go out of my way to step in the background of any picture (the foreground is obviously off limits since I can’t stand atop the stick, between phone and hand) in order to occlude the memory that the picture taker (I will not say photographer) is trying to capture, their heads crooked upwards, contrived smiles shape-shifting until they’re happy with what they see. Just have someone take your photo. Yes, there is the chance of taking a bad photo, but that is the risk you take (a risk, I might add, made more prominent by the increased amount of selfie sticks and the decreased amount of people actually giving a crap about the photos they take). Make a brief connection with another human being; don’t just work your forearms in some self-indulging, mastabatory effort in the corner somewhere.
Also, I’ll provide an obvious answer to the obvious question: yes, the bread and wine here are better than in the states. It's the kind of thing that people throw around so often that you start to wonder whether or not it is actually true. That is the problem with our use of words now a days. We use the important, meaningful words to describe the dreck and the dry and then, when we need them for the truly exceptional, they're used up and discarded in the corner.
Nevertheless, I will say that the wine is unbelievable. All of the wine. All I've done is to order the house wine in most restaurants and it's better than nearly all the wine that I've had in the states. There were some exceptions, of course. There will always be exceptions, but good wine is the rule.
As I write this, I am nestled in a corner with a bottle of wine, a baguette and a wedge of brie and I’m not sure I’ve ever had a finer lunch. Tomorrow I head to Versailles, where I hope to make good my escape with some gaudy piece of gold ornamenting one of the excessive bedrooms.
Cheers,
Dicky
P.S. "Don't Be the Bunny"
In my travels, I've utilized quite a few public transit systems. From Seoul to Dubai, I've traveled my share of the parallel rails. Many of the metro systems in other countries have a set of glass doors that keep people on the platform until the train arrives. I imagine, if these were installed in New York, we would feel like patrons at a zoo as we watched the rats from behind glass as they scurried beneath the subway tracks.
The trains arrive, their doors stopping at the same points each time, and both sets of doors open. I've never had trouble with any of the subways that I've used, but on this trip to Paris—as the doors were about to close and I was the last member of my party not yet on the train, just as the bells were ringing to announce that the doors were closing, I rushed through the partition between train and platform, only to the doors sealing shut around me.
I've seen this happen in the states. The doors close around someone and then instantly open again to allow that person to get his or her whole self on the train. This is not the case in Paris. The doors did not open. Instead, I had to force myself through the opening that my body had created and then pull my camera through the opening before it closed shut behind me and my camera—much like the bags in the movies that I've seen—would have been made to drop to the ground outside the platform and lost to me forever.
Incase your narrator has not painted enough of a picture, there is a sign outside the glass doors that might be worth one thousand of my words. It is a picture of a bunny caught in the exact same way as I was. Below the bunny, read the words—both in English and French—"When you hear the door closing sound, do not board!".
Obviously, after a lifetime of seeing such signs and ignoring them, I did not heed the bunny's warning and so, this is basically what happened: