Paris

July 3, 2017, SeaTac Airport.

    Maisie and I have been roaming the SeaTac airport, me with my head bowed to a phone call with Aunt Donna, who, thirty years ahead of me and Stephanie, is celebrating her fiftieth wedding anniversary. Maisie patiently walks beside me while my neck is starting to strain because of some weird imbalance with the tiny phone at my ear and the backpack I’m bringing on the plane, which, though it’s light, is stuffed with two strangely large neck pillows Stephanie and I bought the day before with the hope that this will be the thing that allows us to sleep on an overnight flight. Maisie is patient. Maisie is texting unknown friends and also playing some game on her iPhone.

    We are about to take a couple planes to Paris, where the two of us will spend three unplanned nights and two full days exploring one of the most romantic cities of the world, and our hearts and minds are open to it. Are we going to learn what it means to eat in Paris? A little bit. Are we going to walk narrow streets and wind up in beautiful boulevards with flowers overhanging the windows? Are we going to see the Seine in art and cross it on gorgeous old bridges? Maybe yes.

    I always thought I’d experience this city with Stephanie, who learned French, won French prizes, had a yearning to return to a place she hadn’t been since before all that. But Stephanie has a new job that is called two-weeks-of-vacation job, and those two weeks start in one week. After Paris.

    Sophie and Amelia are in Europe already. Traveling with their orchestra, they have returned to the homes of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, have celebrated the 500th year anniversary of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses at the very church where he posted them, and most of all, Sophie and Amelia are out there adventuring like full citizens of the earth.

    The five of us will meet up at the end of the orchestra trip, in Mozart’s Salzburg, and from there we will a) return to Hungary and Hungarian friends after seven years and b) return to the grounds of our honeymoon in Northern Italy, twenty years later.

    It’s time to March back to Barcs.

July 4, 2017. Paris.

    Maisie and I arrived in Paris after following the sun over the northern polar ice caps, eating only the dried fruit and nuts we brought and staying awake on airplane movies and straining backs. Because we arrived in Paris at two or three in the morning Seattle time, we weren’t hungry exactly, though we hadn’t eaten, and the three hot crowded trains to which we transferred in airless, perfumed subterranean heat finally made Maisie swoon with fatigue and nausea. I watched with increasing dread the crease of her brow deepen.

    But finally we found our apartment, a second floor walk up, and Maisie got horizontal, and soon I was able to feed her half a salad before we got her back to the bed. It’s currently 6:34 pm. I should probably wake her.

    I’m not going to be the best guide. I know this because of the weird place we ended up patronizing when she was so hungry, which is probably a great place to get a beer or cappuccino or Coca Cola but not the best French cuisine, our tub of meat and lettuce; and as we sat there not saying much because Maisie still looked green, I also wondered what kind of guide I might be to a city I was totally willing to discover by accident.

    I left her in the bed and walked north, climbing stairs parallel to the funicular leading to the Basilique du Sacre Coeur, and then I caught the stream of tourists visiting inside its naves and domes; and on the outside once again, I followed the lawns and winding stairs down past the Indian men selling cold water and cold beer, past the carousels and then into the tourist-only street with vendors selling berets Eiffel Tower scarves for 3 Euros apiece. And this led to a boulevard bound on one side by a gravel pedestrian path and on the other by a high fenced ball court, a typical 7-story apartment with its cornices and flowered windows beside it -- and then gardens, and two playgrounds, and little girls and boys kicking identical balls in every direction (including mine: look out). And then the bicycles and the people slowly drinking sodas and wine and coffee at all the cafes and the pedestrians promenading and talking: I was grinning with the energy of it all, and all of the things that people said about this city, because here it was: less hurried, more animated, much better indulged, at least as far as I could tell on a walk by myself on no sleep for a day and a half.

July 5, 2017. Paris.

    Maisie was supremely patient with me today, four times. This was after a five a.m. run I could do while she slept, a run that gave me Paris all to myself all the way to the Eiffel Tower, and gave me to a candle of golden light off the glass and metal statues and buildings as the sun came up over the Seine. I returned and showered and fell asleep finally, Maisie half awake herself.

    The first and second time Maisie was patient with me was when I got lost after she had a pain au chocolat and I tried something called drops, which I thought was filled with poppy seeds or fig but was, happily, also chocolate. I wanted to go to churches and museums today, so Maisie patiently demurred when I asked her to trade her short jean shorts for a dress, and she was patient again when I got us lost for fifteen minutes.

    On our way towards the Seine, we visited the first church I wanted to see -- the L’église Saint-Eustache, a stunning cathedral near the Louvre. Why was I so happy in there? It was the second cathedral I’ve visited in as many days. That smell of cold columns and the Delacroix murals in two of the transepts were part of it, but also the unexpected magnificence of every angle and of sheer enormity in a church I’d never heard or thought of but was on the way to somewhere else. I told Maisie I was very happy. And that was before we double-taked on a video screen in the center of a much larger, surely quite old mahogany wooden mantel in one of the central transepts: and on the video, an electric red beating heart. Make it work, Catholics!

    Right beside this church is a library and mall and train entrance in a swooping giant shell of a roof.

    We crossed the bridge to the Notre Dame Cathedral, and Maisie did not have to be patient that time because she was not in any way tempted by the lines that went around and around in front of the grand entrance, and I acceded. We were given the reward of ten minutes of noontime pealing, which is my biggest association with the church anyway -- well, after flying buttresses and gargoyles, I suppose: bell ringers who also might be tragic love-addled hunchbacks.

    Lunch in the Latin Quarter near the surprisingly compact Sorbonne was a desperation lunch again, where Maisie said, Sure, to my multiple meaningless and frustrating questions (Do you want to try this place? Do you want to try this place across the street? Do you want to sit inside? Do you want to sit outside?). I used my three words of French to quickly unlock our host’s English (which earlier led Maisie to ask a question that baffled me -- when did I learn all that French -- because beyond those three words to get in the door, I do understand a lot of what I read around me, and maybe that’s what surprised her; I explained about Romance languages, and being a reader, and visiting Rachel in Montreal a few different times). Maisie had penne with chicken. I had roasted chicken, green beans and potatoes. But it was so good -- presented with care and simple sauces.

    The third time Maisie was patient with me was a block away at Shakespeare & Company bookstore, where I roamed every room (didn’t look at every book), and Maisie showed absolutely no interest in any of it; so I made sure not to be jealous of the readers lounging in the quirky nooks provided all around the store, nor of the many better books in English than the small tradeback classics I’d brought for disposability and space. I didn’t make her wait long. This was more window-shopping than browsing.

    In the Luxembourg Gardens, not only did we see more of the gendarmes with holstered pistols and automatic rifles (guarding flowers? -- maybe this is related to Aunt Donna’s shocked nervousness that I was taking Maisie to a hotbed of anti-Semitic terrorism?) and not only did we see also a row of vines carefully turned and drooping beside a row of long cultivated trees on either side of a shaded fountain and reflecting pool, but we saw an interactive art exhibit inside one of the buildings -- a great industrial space in whites with a pink-pebbled floor, covered sparingly with artwork and wooden pinwheels and wood puzzles and many signs saying in French, Please Touch. This was going to be Maisie’s best experience with art for the day. Not for me. I was about to go nuts with joy while Maisie tagged along.

    On our way to the Musée d'Orsay, we ran into the Church of Saint Sulpice, used badly by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, where he inserted pagan history and violence. Seattle’s churches don’t have pagan history, but they also don’t have half a millennium history either, which means when we have something with vaulted ceilings, however close to the ground, we get a little excited. How strange to turn a corner and see another hundreds-plus years-built church-testimonial of devotion to God to cathedral-humble humanity and then to just walk by it!

    The Musée d'Orsay was crowded with Impressionist super star paintings -- ones I’d studied, three I have up on my classroom wall, others I knew from books, puzzles, and movies. There was the Van Gogh self-portrait I have in my classroom, and also his skewed yellow and red bed painting -- I have that one too, and some stars and hay. There’s Manet’s crazy men picnicking with naked lady picture, and all those dough-eyed Renoirs, and forty to sixty seasonally-pastelled fields, ponds and city-scapes by Monet. There’s Latrec’s strangely squatting women and leering men. And here’s a whole exhibit devoted to Cezanne’s portraits, room after room after room, and some fruit too. Here are Degas’s dancers and his photograph-mimicking subjects off-frame. No Cassatt? And here is Degas’s little dancer, aged fourteen. I read an entire trashy book based on this very sculpture -- The Painted Girls, by Cathy Marie Buchanan. (Look at that smug little girl! That's because her mother was terrible and selfish and they were so poor. Absinthe, whoring, ballet, laundry.) And there’s Whistler’s Mother, whom I know best because Amelia freaked out when Mr. Bean sneezed on her and got snot on the face and tried to wipe it off but wiped her head off instead and replaced it with something like that nun did to some medieval painting of Mary a few decades ago.

    Maisie was patient through all of it, following closely behind me, looking, but not investing. I tried explaining a couple things but realized I didn’t have enough good material in my head to articulate -- plus there were four more floors to get to. I said she might get more from the paintings by reading the histories and criticism provided in English, and she said she doubted they would make it better. But the whole thing, my whole excitement, came from the one Art History class I took in college, focusing on French 19th century art. If I didn’t learn it, I don’t see it; but I learned a little about how to look, what to see.

    And when I look at Maisie, what I see is someone ready to go back to our apartment and rest.

July 6, 2017. Paris. Waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower.

     We are standing in line, waiting to get into the Eiffel Tower. Maisie says this is one line she's willing to face. But its mysterious and slow queuing says, Go ahead. Work on your blog. You write it on your phone anyway.

      Maisie was feeling a bit queasy again this morning, and again it was on the hot crowded subway smelling of perfume and urine and, Maisie says, cigarettes. We stood a few seconds in the rain to behold the Arc de Triomphe, got beneath it and rejected paying to get to the top, and instead took another subway to Eiffel’s Tower but stopped at a hotel for their obsequious help settling Maisie (we sat at nice couches, got water).

      Now she's doing okay, but this mysterious line is only now beginning to move.

      I tried going out last night, and succeeded, to the extent that I went out. For a few hours. I investigated dancing in Paris, or music scenes, and was directed to a neighborhood where I didn't find it. I did find a very lively student night life, but they were very busy drinking wine and coffee in cafés. Eventually, I got on a subway to get a good view of the Eiffel Tower at night, which I heard was absolutely magical. It was a beautiful clear night under a nearly full moon, and with the glittering facade and the swiveling spotlight hitting that moon every couple minutes, and a woman bent over her phone under the lights of the bridge over the Seine, I preserved a little magic in a photo.

      We are now on our third security line, third time emptying our pockets and presenting our bags and walking through metal detectors. That's the mystery, I suppose, related to the police with assault weapons. Score another one for Aunt Donna. I've not once felt any sense of risk. But I have now three times sensed some aggravation. It's just an elevator, people!

       Fortunately, Maisie seems to be feeling better.

July 6, continued. Paris.

    We’re back at our apartment finally. Now as the day’s events have closed, I can take stock of this, our second and last full day here in Paris: We had only two things we wanted to do for sure, and because we knew there’d be more interest and crowds involved, we weren’t counting on anything else in particular: 1) Eiffel Tower. 2) The Catacombs -- a macabre gift to quietly twisted Maisie for being so patient yesterday. Of those two things, we accomplished one.

    The Eiffel Tower provided stunning views of a limitless city. People spent a great deal of their time and a chunk of change to get far away from the familiar world on the ground and then spend a little more to view that far away world from close-up (actually, people mostly ignored the telescopes). I tied my hat to my belt because I knew it would blow off at such heights, but in fact, the air was muggy and close there, too. While I was squirming a bit in the jostling crowds on the observation deck (And is it helplessness that made me so mad coming down the stairs of the tower behind the French woman slowly eating a granola bar? She was slow, and she was eating so slowly, but she wasn’t descending any more slowly than her friend in front of her; yet that slow eating while I was stuck behind her was making me crazy), while I was squirming a bit, Maisie was loving the views, asking questions about what we were seeing, finding a new vantage point and enjoying it again. Much improved from the green-faced girl of the subway.

    I anticipated long lines at The Catacombs, too. The line was shorter. Maybe 400 people. But it never moved at all, and the American in front of us went and asked the front office and was told the wait was four plus hours. He and his family shrugged and settled in. I wanted this experience for Maisie, because I knew it would appeal to her and I knew it would be long memorable and a good story. But neither of us was ready for four hours.

    Instead of quantity of dead bodies and bones, we could go down the street for quality of dead body and bones: The Pantheon was open for business, with some of the best dead bodies in France.

    At first, the only thing I was ready to be excited about in The Pantheon was Foucault’s Pendulum. To explain what was so cool about it, I first had to explain that no one has yet built a perpetual motion machine, and then the history of this particular pendulum (though a replica), and then, best of all, the science of it, moving to the spinning of our planet rather than against any force acted upon it.

    So did we just get these broad, representational sculptures to represent the famous people I read were buried below the building? Were all those people in line to see a pendulum? But then we found the stairs to the crypts. And I got my body next to the dried bodies of some incredibly important thinkers and heroes. The best one for me -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose book, Emile, was one of the first I’d read on theories of education and childhood, and whose ideas and words on the Social Contract I teach in my philosophy and monsters class (is evil more free than goodness or what do we mean by freedom, and can we really just do what we want, and is one free when a neighbor gets to do whatever she wants too, like take your cabbage, and are you going to be paranoid now and start building fences around your cabbage, and will that make you more free, and what do we learn about Rousseau’s social contract from Dr. Jekyll and his invention of Mr. Hyde, and is that really Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s body in that box ?). But here were others, like Dumas, Hugo, Madame Curie, Braille, Voltaire. Oh, so many outstanding dead bodies! You could feel the cold wash up with the cool of their crypts, and here they were, shelved in rooms for storage and our delight!

    Maisie was not delighted but was feeling jet-lagged and smell-sensitive again.

    Wish I could throw her a bone.

July 7, 2017. Paris train to Strasbourg.

    We’re on our way to Strasbourg, on the top deck of a comfortable train. Because we never met our host, and he didn’t answer my last text, we piled up sheets and left our key under a mat and said no goodbyes but left, me hauling a grotesquely large duffel suitcase down three flights of stairs and down narrow sidewalks to a subway, a couple of mystery fruit loaves we bought with morning pastures in my pack.

    Last night I tried going dancing again, this time more certain of my success, because I was chasing a specific event that I’d researched and followed on Facebook, and it had unlikely but very promising early hours.

    The bus I caught was many minutes late, and when it arrived and I watched it at work for a while, I understood why: the bus was so jammed with bodies that the bus had to wait several minutes at each stop in order to allow a disembarking person to squeeze out amidst the four or five who would also temporarily step onto the sidewalk to allow passage. I was feeling hot and faint and the air seemed to thicken. First I contemplated whether I should just abort and get off. Then I thought I had no choice but to do so. I was just a joy rider. And my fellow passengers were not so fortunate. I twisted out and jumped onto a full but not suffocating subway and made my way to Belleville.

    The club midway up the hill was a charming and thoughtful construction of beach decorations and creative social arrangements, including four bars, high counter-tables and shorter, more intimate ones, private astroturfed grottos bounded by potted trees, a ping pong table and shuffleboard, and the stage for the hip hop artists. It looked like a terrific venue to be with friends. But the music was not loud and there was no dance floor yet. I missed it again! Either I am arriving way too early and don’t know how to access what I’m looking for, or dancing means something different in Paris.

    On the way back, my arms and legs were shaking as I contorted on the subway to hang onto a rail with a finger while twisting hips and swiveling feet to avoid intimacy and in revolt against one unavoidable protuberant bottom.

    Maisie and I went out for one last dessert when I returned, and I regret now I didn't photograph the beautiful waitress who served us with such warmth for a second night. Maisie wanted the same thing she had last time, and our waitress remembered the creme brûlée we adored on the first night. I ate a slice of fig pie.

    I ran early this morning, mopping up some of the places I missed but hoped to see if not visit: the Louvre, Hôtel de Ville, Place des Vosges, and the site of the Bastille (now the site of a shopping mall, I think). My terminus was Promenade Plantée, an elevated track that’s been converted into a tree-lined walking path. Unfortunately, its steps and entrance were gated and locked because it was only six in the morning. But that was my only loss.

    Outside, the French countryside flies by in vivid yellows and greens.