À bientôt, Paris!

I never had a perfect moment during my many motorcycle road trips. It just wasn’t very important for me to have one of them. Maybe because one would have told me that it was time to go home . . . Plus it was so much effort to plan and map out such a movie screenplay-like thing.

Consequently, I didn’t have some grand vision of myself as a kind of wandering two wheeled chronicler, motoring all up and down the west coast’s beaches and its mountainous sideways highways, eating magical food, drinking unbelievable spirits along the way as I went until I reached some west facing ocean promontory to evaporate in a state of ecstasy in a summer sunset-explosion.

But I never fully told myself that. I was hoping that others couldn’t see as many years had passed that my body and will, or what was left of them, were beginning to vacillate.

These two absolute essentials for motorcycling riding had paused their decline, when we found our way to a December 2018 winter holiday in Paris. W and I arrived in the City of Light, seven days before Christmas and it was exquisite, you know, like a perfect exhilarating fountain of youth tonic.

Parisian pop-up, sidewalk Noel boutiques

Unlike America’s great cities, where money rules and possesses everything . . . beaches, yachts, mansions, power, and, yes, even desire, Europe’s grand cities are one endless ever shifting calendar art photo.

They are lovely places that a visitor plays in. But never plays with. Not once. If you tried, they could be ruthless. You’d be lucky to return from their gentle caresses. Even luckier to be alive, if you toyed with some of their wiles.

In Paris we slept like young kids sleeping over again at Grandma’s. Each and every day, we’d get up with the little kid raging inside, and the adult was there too, saying “almost time to go home.” The little kid was going, “More, more. Get more where that came from. Stay, stay, stay.” And the adult was going, “Time to return. The house, the cat, your life. The future.” Either we were hard of hearing or more likely were indifferent to answering how would we’d get out of this dilemma. Paris essentially is a place for being indecisive and open. The real world across the Atlantic was for the decisive person parts of us. In Paris we didn’t need to be one, so we didn’t act like one.

We had a blast.

If we had had all of Wall Street’s wealth in our pockets, we would certainly have put it in the great cathedral’s charity boxes to stay there; but, we had only VISA cards in our wallets; and besides, much of America’s beauty remains to be discovered. Yet, Paris is overfilled with the greatest products of architecture. They are not just the works of individuals but of their societies. Such an enormous collection of a nation’s efforts over a millennia is the inspired flash of a culture of genius.

Porthole window view from the Picasso Museum

As beautiful as modern Paris is, our Ile St Louis warren allowed our imaginations to see Paris of the Renaissance. We could daily look at the winter sunlight through a host of steeples, towers, and belfries as its warmth poured over an immense city of arched river bridges. The sun’s midday glint made the currents of the Seine momentarily appear at times like the brown and greenish skin of a serpent. We slowly detected the Gothic bones of the place through the city’s fog of innumerable chimneys and infinite labyrinths of buildings. We traced the spirit of Paris’s prior ages and the features of its people even in small things like the hinges of its church doors, the crusts of its baguettes and the slackers in its cafes.

We climbed the ~400 steps to the top of Notre Dame’s southern tower. Paris, viewed from the cathedral’s tower in the cool winter sun of a Christmas holiday season afternoon was a delectable and a magnificent sight. The Paris of the Gothic period must have been eminently equal.

Each night as we walked back to our fourth floor walk up apartment from some distant subterranean jazz cave on the left or right bank dozens of feet below the street’s surface, we could spot the church’s outline and the huge heads of its towers as they stood forth as our navigational beacons jutting up into the moonlit night sky. Its saints of marble were our friends, who blessed out passage, while its carved gargoyle monsters were shipmates who stood watch over us. In our minds the towers would revert to those long ago dark monoliths when all of Paris’s streets and building exteriors were unlit. Only now with modern public lighting and its shadows do the countless thousands of angles of the city’s spires and gables stand out as if the jagged teeth of a shark’s jaw, backlit by a reddish neon hued sky of the night.

Each day during our fortnight stay we lent our ears to this city’s bell tower voices, diffuse over the buzz of over two million human beings and the Seine’s murmuring, softened down into something more rich, pleasurable, and dazzling than just a mere tumult of bells. At times it was a blast furnace of music that transformed the city into an orchestra playing a jazz symphony.

During each Parisian sojourn I try to put into print what I sensed, felt, and thought to make these memories imperishable. Yet each new day’s experiences made the previous day’s sensations volatile and intangible. By this trip’s end, they all mingled with the air like a flock of birds, scattering to the four winds and filling all air and space.

Time is greedy. Paris made us greedier.

So, when we were on the way to the airport to return home, we did not despair that we were heading to the gallows. We couldn’t do that. We felt, mainly, elated to have done what we did. We’d been there for many days. We were sure by God that we would once again visit more of the little magic places we saw on this visit. As Charles de Gaulle airport loomed on the horizon, we fell into a silent zone of quiet best wishes for all that we had had and would miss.

À bientôt, Paris!

Postscript: As in the past, even after more than a month has gone by since this last Paris visit, I am unable to rid myself of it. I still hear its songs and music humming in my head. I am beset by its architecture dancing away in front of my eyes. I feel even at night, in my dreams, its forms in contact with my own. I desire to see it again, to touch it, to know who it was and is Hoping these latest impressions would efface the earlier, as if the first would fade, is unpardonable. W and I shall seek it again. When one has seen it twice, one wants to see it a thousand times and always. Should we try to detach ourselves from these memories, we shall disappear into dust.

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