Pieces of Paris

You've asked me what you should do to see Paris.  It's your first visit, you have an extra day and you want to know what to see, where to go, with that "conquer-the-mountain" enthusiasm and confidence that you can do anything if you set your mind to it.  I don't know what to tell you- it's been a long time, and what I remember is a mosaic- bits of memory studding the city, traces of my life there embedded in everything of me.

The task is a little daunting, and a little too personal; but I guess I can take off my armor and direct you towards a few highlights.

Go on the cusp of twenty years of age.  Study French language, literature and philosophy  for 8 years, and then forget everything you know.  Almost miss your chance. Hurl away your pride, and beg, threaten and cajole to get there.

Go with a grand total of forty dollars to spend, month to month, in the most expensive city in Europe. Go the year your parents separate. Forge your own identity, and learn to walk away.  Have a wonderful time.

Walk across Paris, at least twice- once because there's a transportation strike and you have a thesis to type; once in the middle of the night because you miss the last train. Get gassed in a metro north of the city at Passover; get mugged and get lucky because there is nothing in your pockets to steal.

Get lost. Get fed by a muslim woman selling crepes who takes seriously the Koran's commandment to be kind to travellers.  Find things you'd never imagined, closer than you thought possible- bird markets, grocery stores that smell like your mother's kitchen cabinets, mongoose.

Feel bad because you are an American in Paris. Feel large, graceless, linguistically hopeless.  Get used to being embarrassed, start looking for opportunities to help American tourists, enjoy arguing, learning new words, new and vicious ways of dealing with random molestation on the metro. Have a bad day and flash your "Art History" student card at the entry of the Louvre, the Musee Dorsay, Musee Marmatton, just to watch stone cold distaste melt to deference at your approach.  Not rail-thin in a city full of x-rays? Throw your generous proportions around the north of the city, the left bank, sections of the city where your embonpoint will represent a sort of oasis of feminity in a desert of cigarette-thin Parisiennes.  Buy your friends dinner on the basis of the fascination you command in the son of the maitre de of the Greek place in the Latin Quarter.

Sit at a cafe and do nothing.  Write on the metro.  Notice everything beautiful, and everything cruel, while attempting to be kind.  Pass through like smoke from a cigarette, suffuse the city the same way the city suffuses you. 

Visit the dead. Realize that someday, someone else will have to artfully deal with the annoying question of what to do with your bones, your sewage, and that someday someone may need to drive through the layer of earth that was once your home. 

Celebrate the living.  Climb the dirty hill below the white domes of Sacre-Coeur, surrounded by markets and turbans and burkas and roasting chestnuts, the bright colors of a harsher, more vibrant world, rats and rags and smoke ascending to the incorruptable.  Descend again.

Look so hard in the museums that you fall down.  Fall down, fall over, fall into a lot of things.  Fall down the morning your favorite view of the Eiffel Tower, the one from your window, disappears. Watch, open mouthed, as the fog dissapates, and she emerges, slowly disrobing from the haze.  Watch her stride across the park, wearing a crown of lightning.

Get engaged in a tiny pensione in the Bastille. Hold your first dinner party. Be a guest at someone else's. Sleep in a bedroom full of recipes. Sleep in a bedroom full of friends. Study hard and ditch class, attend exams, have patience and figure out how to get a book from a library, and how to send a postcard.  No matter how many times it takes.  Find something your friends hunger for- girl scout cookies, or bagels- and surprise them.  Be surprised.

Sob until a stranger gives you a handkerchief.  Laugh at yourself until a bus full of Parisians laughs with you. Learn to drink wine, and coffee, and how to serve a seven-course meal. Make someone fall in love with you. Be ridiculous. Come back with one good story, and a pan from the restaurant supply store near the stock exchange. Use them both for the rest of your life. 

That's all.  Bon voyage, say hello to me when you get there,  I miss me, and I'd like the two of you to meet.

9:31:19 PM