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.

the lion's mouth

Stuck my finger in the socket

Wondered why it burned

I stuck my arm right down the drain

You'd think I would have learned…

 

But the scars from burns and metal

Are the ones that heal so slow

And the ones that stay the longest

Are the hardest to let go

 

So I'm glad I stuck my finger

In the socket on the wall

And now I'm off to see

If there's a lion in the hall

 

I plan to walk right up to him

And this is what I'll do

I'll put my head right in his mouth

And dare him to chew

 

Don't ever try to think about

The things you might have done

Just do them hard and do them fast

And try to have some fun…

cowboy boots

i will search for them when i go home

for no more than thirty dollars at value village

i will eat sour patch kids and fruit leather

i will park my battered little green car in the wide wide parking lot of glendale mall and marsh grocery store and

i will buy things i know i do not need

i will eat a hearty breakfast most days,

with bacon and syrup

i will wrap presents and sing carols

i will show julien the pretty houses on meridian street where

i will never live and the big schools that look so unfriendly from the outside

i will watch videos of forgotten recital routines, full of tongue biting and bad pirouettes

i will eat perfectly salted popcorn at the movies on christmas day

i will chase the ducks on the canal in broad ripple and

i will drink hot chocolate with my mother and cocktails with my father after church

i will show him where my grandparents used to live and the places where i fell in love and

i will do all of these things that remind me of home

and then

i will go home again

the hangover that didn't happen

and am very grateful for that. (thank you aspirin).  

birthday dinner went off without a hitch (a long climb up rue de belleville but it made us hungry so that ended up being a bonus). the food was delicious, the wine was amazing, the boy was happy. all good things. drinks with friends at the express bar and a short ride home before 1am. all good things.

nespresso in the morning, a lovely chat with a smiley parisian woman at a stoplight who liked my rabbit fur jacket ("marché aux puces ou le marais?" "ben, le maris..." i admitted, guiltily. "but i didn't buy it, it was a gift"). singing and dancing alone in the office this morning, only to be caught by the gardien who was standing in the doorway with the mail...laughing. why is she so tan? two white chocolate cookies for breakfast. watching an old movie tonight at one of the tiny theatres on rue des écoles. all good things.

now...one very bad thing. i just read an article in the herald tribune (since my boss finished his paper during the hour and a half that he was stuck in the train because it ran over someone, okay- two bad things):

sarah palin is really starting to scare me...i have always had nightmares but they were improbable before (faking death in a helicopter crash so that the nazi soldiers wouldn't find me and i could escape into the jungle, strangling a baby, setting a haunted house on fire, sitting before a panel of french doctors and then having to pay sixty-nine euros because i didn't have health insurance, taking flight on my bicycle, chatting with monkeys in a café...just things that probably won't happen); but the pitbull hockey mom with a barely used passport and a degree in journalism who wasn't even popular in high school and who probably wants to make my kids pray in school who could be headed to the white house, that is beyond nightmarish. so i already mailed my ballot.  get those scary people out!!! it's almost halloween. i have enough scary things in my imagination, i don't need them in real life.

so tonight i will try to find a pumpkin to carve. another good thing...keep 'em comin' please.