this time of year...

always makes me want a big old east coast house with white columns and a chair on the porch and two ears of corn tied to the outside light on a wide wide street with trees and trees and red and yellow trees where a little car could drive up and let my family out. they could climb the two stairs to the front yard and the three stairs to the front door. i could take their coats and put them in the guest bedroom. bustle bustle bustle...wine and juice and jazz and "did you get your hair cut?" and "would you like a cracker to tide you over? the turkey is going to be another twenty minutes at least (i know how you get when you're hungry)" and "how is school?" and "do you like your new job, apartment, assignment...", "how was the trip?", "do not eat all of the pickles", and "what are you reading, making, listening to?"

and in this sweet house people listen to the answers...

it makes me want a big long table and old dishes to serve things in, and an oven for roasting and windows for fogging and a fireplace for poking and a rug to play jenga on, chairs to tell jokes on and guitars in the corner for anyone who wants to play. floppy place cards and just the right silverware and kids mixed in with grownups. and if you looked under the table you could see feet moving and restless at different speeds, to different degrees, some swinging and some swaying and some still, and their hands, the same...

gold and green and burgundy and mustard yellow. tweeds and tartans and wool. stockings and corduroys and brown leather, warm rosy-cheeked conversation. laughter and the scraping of knives and forks on china...a long walk after dinner and a nice chat on the porch for everyone else...

maybe not next year, but some year.

and this morning i stalked through the wet leaves and thought of these things and was just thankful for the trees and the river and brown leather and corduroy.

o garance!

well garance,

now you've done it. thank you very much. i keep toggling between this extremely long and boring court document that i am supposed to be translating and your blog:

which i didn't know about.

which i should have known about a long time ago.

and now, instead of sitting contentedly at my desk on the second floor of my office building watching the steady drizzle of november paris rain, i am considering charging down the street to colette or up the street to chanel, or around the corner to maria luisa just to slobber on the windows...i even have half a mind to take my phone to the tuileries across the street and take pictures of the passers-by and make witty comments about the way they are dressed.

not so long ago i was photographed in the street, sylvie and i were leaving a fifties brocante near bastille. i had just purchased a pair of beautiful christian dior glasses, bottle green with blue trim, no lenses, i was wearing them and i felt like a fashion star for a day (though i do still regret having finished my hot dog before she photographed me, i think it would have added a lot to the image...less precious).

anyway, every once in a while i am reminded that my life is just ever-so-slightly less glamorous than i would like it to be. when i try to block out the sound of the electric drill across the street, when i drink my senseo from my pink moomin mug every morning, when i accidently answer my cell phone: "cabinet d'avocats bonjour" or when the postman asks me if i'm "feeling sick today mademoiselle...?" these are the times when i wonder what i am doing with my life.

and then i remember that last weekend, after we finished our concert and danced until 5:30am i stayed in my little bed all day and when i awoke and threw my vintage raw silk balmain jacket with the poet collar over my pajamas to buy bread it had just stopped raining and i crossed the bridge from île st louis to île de a cité and the little man who sits at the end of the bridge was playing his accordion, calderon de la barca would have been in agreement, so would the 'row, row row your boat' guy and lewis carroll for that matter:

"life is (but) a dream",

i thought in that moment;

and it is.

I still don't quite understand how,
the door shuts.

Perhaps the human heart has only so much room for things.

Perhaps it has a breaking point, boundaries and moats and limits.

This heart might have many walls and no windows.

It may have towers and turrets and forests to hide in, walk through.

The doors to this heart may not be clean and straight.

They may be craggy and weathered, keyless and dark.

But there may be curtains too, in this heart.

Curtains that let some light pass, curtains that can be ruffled with a breeze,
a breath.

Velvet curtains with cords for raising and for lowering,
made for marking the beginnings and endings of stories
told there on the heart's stage.

There may be slides and rafts and great plains and endless expanses where
the forgotten things roam;
where the forgotten ones go.

And the heart may receive visitors every so often.

Visitors who sit and are still and who are warm and familiar and who belong.

Visitors who roam and stalk the stage and the plains, who dare adventure there,
and who go to places that you had not dared to go
visit;
inside your own heart.

Some must be shown the exit,

the door,

the curtain.

But perhaps these visitors cannot leave once they enter.
Perhaps new divides are made to hem them in,
to keep them safe;

to keep us safe from them.

Perhaps they huddle there close together in the great seabreeze that blows through this
heart's ocean, on tiny boats or on this heart's ferry which travels between the many places a
heart holds.

Like the great white ferry we took.
To come here.
To find you.
To find out what was in your heart all of these years.

looking in

we were sitting in the window of a top floor apartment in the 10th

we were watching the people, people must have been watching us

and then, from across the courtyard and three or four floors below...i saw something

something oddly timed and perfectly lit

just the light from the television at the end of the bed, a white and blue filmy light, like a Hopper painting

and then a woman, arms dangling at her sides, grey hair dangling on either side of her face.

she was dressed simply and timelessly:

a long grey skirt and a long navy cardigan over a white blouse and grey slippers

she shuffled from the doorway to the bed where she knelt and leaned forward like a teenager watching her favorite program

then, two minutes later, she rose again and left the room.

she must have done this ten times, all in a perfect and unnatural rhythmn.

and then we noticed that light was on in the next door window

a man sat naked on a bed, leaning slowly forward and backward, touching his toes

and then he began to dress, very very slowly, a perfect counterpoint to his neighbor and the two of them were playing together in harmony and totally unaware of one another

once his pajama bottoms were on, he pulled a sock from a drawer beneath the window

he stretched it carefully over his right foot and stood up and sat back down

the woman entered and exited the room again and again, back and forth

and the man pulled another sock from the drawer and put it on and stood and sat

and then he opened and shut the window three times, we were suddenly afraid he would look up

but he didn't

he twisted from side to side and touched the window lightly and sat back down to put on his night shirt

i wonder what my neighbors see...

she's really something else.

this morning she was wearing grey and black.

suddenly i couldn't see her anymore. i like to think that she got stopped by the cops after grilling those three stoplights on rivoli.

also saw an enormous man on a little green dutch bike. his butt was spilling out over the sides of the seat. i chuckled to myself.

one of these mornings i am going to witness a death...

i just know it.

she is probably 32, but she looks old for her age (from the neck up). her body is fantastic; long slender legs and shapely arms with just enough muscle and a teeny tiny waist. she dresses to accentuate this figure too, euh i guess you could say that... this morning it was an electric blue poor-man's hervé leger bandage dress with a bright red vinyl (poor-man's marni balloon) bag and black wedges from (and this is just a guess) bata.

her lipstick matched the bag and she even wore a matching red...wait for it...headband...

she might be crazy, at first i thought she was just a plucky, sporty frenchwoman eager to arrive at work on time, then last week she spit a mile as we sat at the stoplight and lately she's been laughing like a maniac and "revving up" (as much as one can "rev" a bicycle) at all of the lights. she jumps over lane dividers and swears at busses and taxis, she clangs her bell at everything in her path, pigeons, pedestrians, pieces of paper... i keep a safe distance between my bike and hers.

thankfully i stop just before the place de la concorde because i would really hate to see her work that circle...a place so dangerous that french car insurance won't even cover an accident there, where last year alone there were 41 accidents. she's gonna get squished...plucky, sporty, frenchwoman sandwich. i'll have to make a witness statement, be forty minutes late to work and probably have nightmares for the rest of my life and be forced to take the metro.

this morning i did something stupid. i knew it as soon as it happened...i glanced in her direction and (i couldn't help it) i giggled, like, out loud. and she blurted out some obscenity that i couldn't really hear because stevie wonder was too loud and she revved her bike and took off (and spit about a hundred meters later) now she wanted to compete with me. crap. suddenly a row of handsome bikers in matching grey suits fanned out next to me making a perfectly staged diagonal, more perfectly even than four actors could have made after a week of rehearsals. they laughed too, but she didn't hear them.

her wrath is now focused squarely on me. and i am either going to have to wear lower heels and bike faster or take another street to work in the morning...

to be continued...

clothes

well, why not?

everyone else is doing it...why can't i?

perhaps i am ignorant, new to this blogging business but i just discovered that there are four million anglophone blogs about paris. paris fashion, paris travel, paris literature, paris pets, food, music, movies...everything...seems like everyone else got to it before i did.

perhaps i should have begun blogging years ago about being an au pair or a waitress at a diner...or a student at a physical theatre school...but those days are all over and now i am a secretary and one-half of a folk/pop duo so i guess things could get interesting...

i will not, however, write about the french "look"

(i will not remark on the ballerina flats, sailor shirts, trench coats, inherited hermès bags, messy hair, just-right vintage flair, velib-riding, cafe-sitting, chain smoking, dog-walking,

scarf-tying, pouty face-making qualities of these people. i'll leave that to the others).

on uniforms:

the pierre hermé man has to wear a very dressy black chef's uniform as he unloads the macarons at the store on rue cambon, i feel sorry for the poor guy, less sorry now than i would have if i had noticed him last week in the sweltering heat, but sorry nonetheless.

the butcher who delivers the hamburger meat to the diner every morning always wears a spotless white overcoat and carrries a clipboard.

the café richard delivery man has it easy, a few light boxes of coffee pods and the occasional filter, i believe his overcoat is blue...he is a happy little fellow.

the postman is jolly and i know he's coming because i can hear him whistling in the courtyard, he has enormous dreadlocks and an earring and a great lisp and he is very organized, i like him.

there is a hierarchy at the jean-louis david training center, the trainees have to wear white and the supervisors wear black. it is easy for the supervisors to look thin and chic, but try making ill-fitting white cotton trousers look chic...very few succeed and those who do generally give better haircuts.

the chanel girls all wear different variations of the same ugly suit, with a little cc lapel pin. i often see them at mcdonald's looking hungry.

the laduree girls wear the same polka dotted neck tie. i think it's cute, but if i had to wear it everyday, i would not think it was cute.

and on and on, i often study the people coming out of the metro and try to guess where they work. in retail we call this profiling, in life i call it observation.

i wonder where they think i work. sometimes i dress like molly ringwald and sometimes dorothy parker, sometimes interplanet janet or doris day and sometimes there is even a janis or patti nod in the mix. i wear what i please...thank you.

up there

i live in an oven on the sixth floor.

i pay a lot of money to live in an oven on the sixth floor with sloped ceilings.

you could have cooked an egg on my windowsill yesterday.

and my neighbor doesn't like it when i climb on the roof.

well, screw him... he has a balcony. and a bigger apartment.

(okay, so he doesn't like it when me and twenty of my closest friends climb on the roof...)

okay, i get it. but i can't just climb up there alone, can i? somebody has to stand on the pink chair and hold the window up enough so that the other person can climb up the ladder that i found in the street one night in front of the hotel de ville. it's a bit dangerous but that's part of the charm. and then once you're up there it's just...wow.

from here you can see most of paris. it looks like you could almost touch the back of notre dame though she's a moody cathedral. her mood really depends on the time of day and on the season, the weather, my mood, whether or not it's a holiday, what kind of beverage i'm sipping, who the company is, what we're talking about, if i remembered to bring a sweater/sunglasses/teaspoon/put the right music on in the background...

the tower is a little less variable, but moody just the same. if you're lucky to be up there when she sparkles it's really a treat.

if you tiptoe to the other end and turn your head to left and incline just a tiny bit, you can see the pantheon. it's my favorite thing to look at from up there. the pantheon is not at all moody (insert gender joke here).

he retains the same balance of light and shadow, mystery, poise, seriousness... all year long, at any time of day on the top of his big hill. i imagine men in long robes speaking latin and wearing sandals, flowing from in and out of his big columns. they're kind of ghosty but if i focus they become more real.

from either diagonal you can see the big clocks at the gare de lyon and the gare d'austerlitz. i love those clocks. (though i half expected them to melt yesterday). here i imagine ladies and gentlemen in forties suits and shiny shoes boarding trains and kissing goodbye and sipping coffee and carrying suitcases without wheels and hatboxes too...all looking at the enormous clocks. when the sun sets behind them you can even hear trains whistling.

once i met an adventurous neighbor from three roofs over. he heard us and decided to come and say hello. we gave him a goblet of wine from a box and sent him on his way. i think his name was bruno.

there is an apartment full of american students across the street (i think it's across the street though i find the whole thing very disorienting). the side of the apartment opens up (i swear) and if they don't pay attention and drink too much i just know one of them will fall out one of these days. they talk very loudly. i wonder if they would figure out that i saw the whole thing and ask me to be a witness. i don't like courts so i'm pretty sure i'd say no.

the best best best part of all of this though is when the saxophone player sits on the bridge between the two islands. the sound floats right up between the buildings and matches the boat shadows and it's then that i wonder if baudelaire and his mistress jeanne ever hung out up here. he kept a little apartment for her in my building and i am partial to the idea that it was mine...

so i think that's where i will be this evening. if i can find someone to help me with the window...

After a time he began to wander about, going lippity-lippity, and not very fast.

i spent a very pleasant monday morning in the children's book section of shakespeare and company...the windows were all open and i sat on a tiny chair and read. the world melted away as i remembered countless hours on countless armchairs and couches and beds listenting to my mother and grandmother read to me, and later reading to them, and even later reading to myself in the hollow of my favorite tree or in the green room at the theatre or at my father's dining room table.

below is a list of some of my favorite books. it's so funny how instrumental they have been in the life i have created for myself...from madeline in the streets of paris to the bowls of blueberries and milk in the boxcar children to harriet-the-spy-like the careful observation of people i see on streets and in trains...images from all of these stories creep into my life constantly. i feel so blessed to have spent a childhood in the company of these wonderful characters and to notice when parts of them seep into my adult life.

The Day Jimmy's Boa ate the wash
Ramona Quimby, Age 8
Tuck Everlasting
Madeline's Rescue
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
A Porcupine Named Fluffy
The Boxcar Children
Caddie Woodlawn
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Ghost Cat
Harriet the Spy
Matilda
more to come...

the way i walked

away from his crooked floors and tall windows and curling plants and...
down that tiny street, at the end of which lay the seine...
down the quai and past the boats where i imagine the ghosts of pirates still live...
across a bridge that knows only feet, where a man in black sat playing the clarinet, which matched the sky and my insides...
and then my heel got stuck between wooden slats, and i had to look down, and then...because i was standing there, still, already, i looked up...
and there was an archway and the entrance to what was once a palace
crossed a busy street and joni started singing about a baby, born with the moon in cancer
and i stepped on each cobblestone, one at a time while she sang about crocuses and california...
another arch and the gardens with fountains where someone i loved once told me to rent a tiny sailboat...and i imagined his peter pan ghost there in black and white.
and the narrow path with trees curving up and over the length of green fence
and old men with small dogs and jogging firemen and women scowling and smoking
and in a hurry
and the grate over the bookstore windows is still down and the books stare out like little paper prisoners
maybe monday i will walk this way again.