May 2006

Monet’s garden (yes, that one) and “The Bronze Age” in the Rodin Museum.

(Literature will be making a comeback soon, I promise.)

Because you can’t have any pond scum clogging up your Louis XIV fountains. I wonder who has to wheel the palm trees in for the winter.

The Friday before Memorial Day. It’s supposed to be 88 degrees. Quit reading this (expecting Paris pictures? I’ll get some more) and go outside.

HA! (That was for you, Dad.)

These were all taken in the Pere Lachaise cemetary. The middle photo is of the statue that’s on Oscar Wilde’s tomb; the top is, well, Rossini’s grave (imagine that); and the bottom is photographic evidence of a Focus among all the mossy tombs and marble monuments. Because you have to be able to get around.

This is me, and that’s the Eiffel Tower. Yes, that Eiffel Tower.

This is in the Luxembourg Gardens, on the only day the sun shone for more than an hour at a time. We sat in green chairs, just like these Parisians. It was very nice. As I quoted Willa saying two weeks ago, “Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly…”

Literally.

We walked and walked, stopped for wine and food, walked again, stopped for beauty products, walked some more…I got back on Saturday toned and smelling of French cosmetics.

It was great. (Pictures forthcoming this week, I promise.)

Courtesy of our buddy Hemingway, here’s another Paris quote. (I know I’m always promising and not delivering, but this comes as part of a longer passage at the end of A Moveable Feast which I will indeed quote here someday. If I come back.)

There is never any end to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other

(The image is of the hotel where Papa Hemingway would write, when he lived in Paris. He would walk over from his flat in the mornings. The French sign says something along the lines of, ‘Paul Verlaine died in this building January 8, 1896. Born March 30, 1844.’ Vive the internet!)

Sadly, it just isn’t about literature. (Hey, someone has been deciding what to wear to France. And learning how to work her camera. And trying to say, “No, you can’t buy my mother a drink” in French. It’s been busy.)

But it is about birds. (I forgot the book I wanted to use today, so bear with me. They could be Parisian birds.) I just found this. Good old Emily Dickinson.

A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass—

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad—
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought—
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home—

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.