Letters From Paris
The City of Clouds
The first letter in a series from TMN co-editor-in-chief ROSECRANS BALDWIN after moving with his wife to the French capital, where colds are defeated by eating the local pollen and stoves are repaired with cream.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Ways We're Saving Money (Of Recent Note)
- When It Sizzles (Letters From Paris)
- 2008 Editors' Awards for Online Excellence (Awards)
Also by Rosecrans Baldwin
» SEE MORE
- When It Sizzles (June 19, 2008)
- Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down (March 19, 2008)
- Bonne Année (January 10, 2008)
Also in Letters From Paris
» SEE MORE
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The magazine editor was 20 minutes late. I ordered a glass of wine and struggled with the Thursday crossword, one of those really tricky ones. Keens, a petrified always-midnight sort of steakhouse on 36th Street, was once a hub for newspapermen and book publishers and it is an ideal watering hole for when you close an issue, or a writer wants to celebrate roping an engagement ring around another one, or a magazine closes and the young fashionable market girls are weeping as a chorus. We had eaten at Keens many times, me and the editor. In celebration and in tragedy, it was our place. And he’d never been late before. I emailed him from my BlackBerry, but he didn’t reply, then suddenly he was being escorted down the steps by the hostess, saying he’d been waiting in the bar and his BlackBerry had run out of juice, and would I forgive him? Gradually, over more wine, I forgave him. We talked about work and gossiped. We talked about my move to Paris, a week away. Was I packed, was I really going? He was stupefied. What had been a theory a month before had been proven out—I was leaving New York. We ate portions the size of bricks, there was more wine, we left cordially, trying not to make a big deal about it. Afterwards, I had an errand to run: I wanted to buy my wife a massage to alleviate some of the moving stress. My father had recommended the spa at an Equinox gym, so I walked over to the east side on 33rd street, a little drunk, quickly skimming over the hot sidewalk. It was a sunny spring afternoon and I hit that almost sublime New York pace when it’s possible to navigate a dozen blocks without pausing, you just have to play the lights right, you weave quickly and duck the delivery men with push carts, the lunch gangs, the tourists who pause without notice. You never stop moving—as though New York’s underground secret masters who press the buttons have you in mind and for this wonderfully long, extended moment you are not only in the city but of it, the city’s yours alone—which is what I was thinking about when me and some dude stepped off the sidewalk into the path of a speeding truck.
I’d lived in New York for eight years, in four apartments. Never once was I mugged. No apartment of mine was ever broken into. I arrived at 22, romanticizing the city all out of proportion, during the safest period in its history for civilians, feeling I could go anywhere at any time of night. The worst that ever happened was a homeless person striking me with a banana. It was a winter morning on Atlantic Avenue. I remember thinking: He has enough bananas to throw one?
Over lunch at a small café on the Ile de la Cité, the agent asked me to describe what it had been like to be in New York on September 11th.But on Park Avenue on the sunny afternoon, I was below what I still think of as the Pan Am building, where a submerged tunnel for cars breaks out into daylight in the middle of the street. When we crossed, me and the guy, we didn’t have the walk signal, but there wasn’t any traffic. I stepped out. The other guy followed my lead, then overtook me as we crossed in front of the tunnel. The SUV appeared out of the darkness and time started to slow down; a black Escalade was coming out of the tunnel’s mouth, speeding directly at us with its headlights on. I remember thinking how strange it was that he had his headlights on since it was the middle of the day, then in a millisecond my mind pieced together that he was driving out of a tunnel at 60 miles an hour, that there was a tunnel in the middle of the street and we were about to be run over. The guy and I stopped in place. I said, calmly, like I was shouting a secret under my breath, watch out.
The man glanced back at me and leapt backwards on his heels. I took a step back. Though now honking and slowing down, the truck flew past us close enough so that I could have touched it if I raised my knee. All eyes were on us. Someone on the sidewalk said some admonishment I didn’t hear—it was just me and the guy for all I knew, and if he’d asked me to go grab a drink right then I would have said yes instantly. He shook his head, said “wow, thanks,” and then joined the crowd crossing the street.
For the rest of the day I was shaken to my guts. Why had been I so coolly detached? Who was I, this seen-it-all New Yorker who thinks he’s safe from traffic? A man almost died in front of me and all I did was suggest he take note of it.
* * *
We’d wanted to move abroad for several years but never found the right opportunity. A job offer then showed up in March; two weeks later I was interviewing in Paris; two weeks after that I was jetlagged, overwhelmed, being driven around the city by a relocation agent to look at apartments for 11 hours. The whole day the conversations were in French, which I’m not bad at, but also not great. Ooh c’est tres sympa, the agent would coo about one apartment, as though she were going to rent it for her daughter. C’est tres charmant, ça, she said, gesturing at the cracked boards in a stairwell stained with wet, black mold. We saw 10 apartments. One had red leopard-print furniture and a bedroom with mirrored walls. “Less chairs of the animals, please,” I said in French. An extremely small apartment, overlooking Notre Dame, was agreed to be wrong for a married couple, but perfect, the agent said, should I want to have an affair. “It is not necessary,” I said. One apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens, done entirely in different shades of green even down to the kitchen appliances, had on the bedroom wall a very convincingly painted trompe l’oeil of lingerie hanging from coat hooks. “I like character,” I said, “but maybe less?”
Over lunch at a small café on the Ile de la Cité, the agent asked me to describe what it had been like to be in New York on September 11th. I struggled to put the sentences together in my head. I said, “It was like all of the other days. The morning, it was beautiful. Then it was sad. It was very, very sad.” Which is true. With a small French vocabulary, I’m forced into bald precision. I wished as I wish now that I knew more words, but both tragedy and what one desires in real estate can be expressed in simple terms, and not understood any worse for it.
A man comes to repair our stove, takes one look at it, and tells me to go to the hardware store and buy the proper cream. Cream? “You know, the ointment for the stove,” he says, as though I’ve just asked him how far we are from Paris.In New York we inched toward moving. Then suddenly everything began to fly into high speed—rushing at us, threatening to knock us over. Planning to say farewell to the city, somehow I never did. Going out for cocktails or dinner every night with friends for three weeks, we kept prolonging our goodbyes, telling our friends we’d at least see them one final night for drinks that, in the end, we never organized. I had my final celebrity sightings: a friend who’s a Pilates instructor gave me two free sessions for my birthday, and on the way to her studio I saw an angry James Gandolfini buying a pile of aerobic tops at Paragon Sports; in the subway station I passed Lukas Haas; during my Pilates session, in an otherwise empty studio, the front door opened and in walked Rip Torn, who wandered around the waiting room wearing a tank top, then walked out. My wife and I packed up our apartment, filled 40 boxes with books, and trucked our furniture to storage. We ran two to three miles every day to burn off stress. In Connecticut, at my parents’ house, we repacked for France and filled 10 large suitcases and duffel bags, totaling approximately 450 pounds, plus two maximum-sized carry-ons, and with heart palpitations we unloaded them at JFK and paid almost the equivalent of a third ticket to check our bags onto the plane. “It was like I had stage fright,” my wife said later when we were waiting for our flight, describing the racing of her heart while the American Airlines representative weighed our luggage. I agreed; I felt like I’d had stage fright regularly for a month. In Paris, we arrived two hours late, meaning we missed the bank appointment I’d scheduled, and stage fright kicked in again. We commandeered three luggage trolleys and with two in my hands and one in my wife’s we slowly pushed our 12 bags out through customs to brave the taxi rank. “You need a car to Paris,” a man told me in French, appearing out of nowhere. “Do you have a big car?” I asked. “A car that is like a truck?” He was already out the door, pushing one of our luggage carts.
On our way into the city, we saw posters for low-cost airlines, for Ocean's Thirteen and Die Hard 4. When the driver wasn’t talking on his cell phone and I wasn’t trying to contact the bank or our real-estate agent, I tried to make elaborate conversation in French. Where was he from? Did he own his own business, how many employees did he have, would he recommend his cell phone service? “Bequeil,” he said at one point, turning to me while speeding down a highway. “Comment?” I asked, not recognizing the word, hoping he’d look at the road again soon. “Queil,” he repeated, “bequeil!” “Monsieur,” I said quickly, “I am sorry, I wish my French was better, I do not know—” He touched my arm. “Man,” he said, “be cool.”
Later, not knowing how much to tip, I gave him 20 Euros—a bit too much. I now have his card in my wallet, having had it pressed into my hand as he made me promise to call him at any time, for anything.
* * *
Paris is not the city of light. That’s a fallacy, at least in early June. Let Rome or Cape Town or Santa Fe be the city of light; Paris is the city of clouds. Clouds you’d think were only an arm’s length above the buildings; tall, layered almond cakes of clouds; overturned wheelbarrows of clouds; clouds as temporary monuments. The weather has been beautiful almost every day since we’ve arrived, but always changing and mainly cloudy. Parisians have a long history of enduring, they’re pragmatists, and though they dress for sun, they’re prepared for when the sky clouds over: a scarf, a sweater peeping out of a bag. “Finally,” my wife says one afternoon, being from the South, “I live in a place where people understand what it’s like to feel cold.”
We live in the north of the third arrondisement near Place de la République, a traffic rectangle of beautiful classic architecture, a Holiday Inn, and an enormous monument in the center depicting the Republic as a majestic giantess wearing a robe. Often, walking home, I’ll see her from a few blocks away. She dominates the view, reminding us of the virtues France has stood by through its seizures of government and revolt. The panorama of sky behind her will be full of shifting clouds, and I will be reminded of the title screen from a Columbia Pictures movie, with the torch lady, and wonder perhaps about a new one: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité: Part Cinq.
By day my wife and I explore, shop, assemble a home. At night, exhausted, we load a disc from the PBS documentary New York into my laptop and watch it at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t until the second or third night of doing this that we realized the irony of watching the history of our former home unfold from across the ocean. During a segment about the Draft Riots, I fantasized about République outside. The square is a traditional gathering place for protesters, and has played this role from Napoleon to Sarkozy. The next time George W. Bush does something stupid, might a mob gather and head door to door looking for Americans, and by then would my French be fluent enough to encourage their torches down the street, toward those girls I saw in the Duke sweatshirts?
There are daily miracles and amusements, trials and exhaustion. A man comes to repair our stove, takes one look at it, and tells me to go to the hardware store and buy the proper cream. Cream? “You know, the ointment for the stove,” he says, as though I’ve just asked him how far we are from Paris. There are two levels of membership at a nearby gym. For the more expensive plan you get two things: accident insurance, in case you are attacked by a bench press, and a towel. For the cheaper plan, you’re on your own and towel-less.
Going to the bank is something to be both pursued and endured, knowing that, ultimately, someone will serve cheese.We both caught colds as soon as we arrived, and were told by ex-pat friends to eat honey from the farmers’ market to introduce the local pollen to our systems. We’ve decided we should probably apply the same theory to Brie de Meaux, to raspberry and blueberry tarts, to blocks of foie gras the size of steaks. Food is a wonder: The groceries are significantly cheaper and more delicious, and even lemons taste better, more lemon-y. We do our shopping store to store—wine, cheese, fish, meat, produce—within a two-block span on a street near our apartment, and then there’s the giant farmers’ market across the road. We’ve tried cheap and fancy restaurants, nearby spots and ones we walk a whole 20 minutes to. We found a sushi restaurant that delivers and it’s only made us more anxious, trying to figure out how we’ll buzz in the delivery guy since the building doesn’t have a buzzer, and we have neither cell phones, a telephone, nor an apartment number.
Even entering a bank is intimidating up front but yields strange rewards. You press a buzzer outside the branch and wait. The door clicks and you’re allowed into a holding pen large enough to fit half a cow. After the first door closes, you press a second buzzer to open a second door, then you wait and smile for the security camera. But when you’re finally inside, there’s no bulletproof glass. No frantic, nervous lines like in New York, only a person sitting behind a desk smiling at you. And there are no forms to fill out if you want to deposit money, you just say, hello, I would like to deposit some of the money, and they say, OK, then you give them some of the money and they print out a receipt from a laser printer on the other side of the room near a potted orange tree.
Because my job doesn’t begin for another two weeks, we’re out all day, stumbling around in French. Though my wife and I both know Paris reasonably well, we’re lost one afternoon trying to find the park Buttes-Chaumont near the St. Martin canal. Then we spot a Parisian friend’s cousin who should be studying for his exams but is out skateboarding instead. He’s sweaty, his T-shirt sticking to him in dark spots. We kiss on both cheeks. He very politely gives us directions. We wish him luck on the BAC and say goodbye, and then he goes back to skateboarding with a determined look that I’ve seen on other Parisians, as though skateboarding, or riding the Metro at lunch hour, or going to the bank is something to be both pursued and endured, knowing that, ultimately, someone will serve cheese. Our refrigerator now contains five different types of cheese.
We’ve been to museums and galleries, bistros and brasseries. We drink five-euro wine from the supermarket that’s better than 15-dollar bottles at home. We are easily satisfied, and my writing, particularly in fiction, is coming more easily, with more emotion than I’ve previously allowed myself. The cliché of being hardened by New York has roots in fact, and now I am fact-checking what we had and what our life was like. Seeing paths endowed in the sidewalk for my steps, I’d lost the feeling of earning them. Things were too easily made fun of or cast aside; lots of things were never good enough. I had little faith in much at all.
One afternoon, my wife is home in bed because her cold has gotten worse. Apparently the honey isn’t working. I go out to run errands. I see the monument in République and salute the majestic woman from the sidewalk; I promise her I will stay determined, I will eat the pollen, I’ll be cool. In the center of the square is a merry-go-round and an ice-cream stand. I buy my wife a strawberry and vanilla cone. I have to run to reach our apartment before the ice cream melts and slides off. We eat it in our bedroom overlooking the building’s courtyard. Everything’s quiet outside except for bird calls.
I’d lived in New York for eight years, in four apartments. Never once was I mugged. No apartment of mine was ever broken into. I arrived at 22, romanticizing the city all out of proportion, during the safest period in its history for civilians, feeling I could go anywhere at any time of night. The worst that ever happened was a homeless person striking me with a banana. It was a winter morning on Atlantic Avenue. I remember thinking: He has enough bananas to throw one?
Over lunch at a small café on the Ile de la Cité, the agent asked me to describe what it had been like to be in New York on September 11th.But on Park Avenue on the sunny afternoon, I was below what I still think of as the Pan Am building, where a submerged tunnel for cars breaks out into daylight in the middle of the street. When we crossed, me and the guy, we didn’t have the walk signal, but there wasn’t any traffic. I stepped out. The other guy followed my lead, then overtook me as we crossed in front of the tunnel. The SUV appeared out of the darkness and time started to slow down; a black Escalade was coming out of the tunnel’s mouth, speeding directly at us with its headlights on. I remember thinking how strange it was that he had his headlights on since it was the middle of the day, then in a millisecond my mind pieced together that he was driving out of a tunnel at 60 miles an hour, that there was a tunnel in the middle of the street and we were about to be run over. The guy and I stopped in place. I said, calmly, like I was shouting a secret under my breath, watch out.
The man glanced back at me and leapt backwards on his heels. I took a step back. Though now honking and slowing down, the truck flew past us close enough so that I could have touched it if I raised my knee. All eyes were on us. Someone on the sidewalk said some admonishment I didn’t hear—it was just me and the guy for all I knew, and if he’d asked me to go grab a drink right then I would have said yes instantly. He shook his head, said “wow, thanks,” and then joined the crowd crossing the street.
For the rest of the day I was shaken to my guts. Why had been I so coolly detached? Who was I, this seen-it-all New Yorker who thinks he’s safe from traffic? A man almost died in front of me and all I did was suggest he take note of it.
We’d wanted to move abroad for several years but never found the right opportunity. A job offer then showed up in March; two weeks later I was interviewing in Paris; two weeks after that I was jetlagged, overwhelmed, being driven around the city by a relocation agent to look at apartments for 11 hours. The whole day the conversations were in French, which I’m not bad at, but also not great. Ooh c’est tres sympa, the agent would coo about one apartment, as though she were going to rent it for her daughter. C’est tres charmant, ça, she said, gesturing at the cracked boards in a stairwell stained with wet, black mold. We saw 10 apartments. One had red leopard-print furniture and a bedroom with mirrored walls. “Less chairs of the animals, please,” I said in French. An extremely small apartment, overlooking Notre Dame, was agreed to be wrong for a married couple, but perfect, the agent said, should I want to have an affair. “It is not necessary,” I said. One apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens, done entirely in different shades of green even down to the kitchen appliances, had on the bedroom wall a very convincingly painted trompe l’oeil of lingerie hanging from coat hooks. “I like character,” I said, “but maybe less?”
Over lunch at a small café on the Ile de la Cité, the agent asked me to describe what it had been like to be in New York on September 11th. I struggled to put the sentences together in my head. I said, “It was like all of the other days. The morning, it was beautiful. Then it was sad. It was very, very sad.” Which is true. With a small French vocabulary, I’m forced into bald precision. I wished as I wish now that I knew more words, but both tragedy and what one desires in real estate can be expressed in simple terms, and not understood any worse for it.
A man comes to repair our stove, takes one look at it, and tells me to go to the hardware store and buy the proper cream. Cream? “You know, the ointment for the stove,” he says, as though I’ve just asked him how far we are from Paris.In New York we inched toward moving. Then suddenly everything began to fly into high speed—rushing at us, threatening to knock us over. Planning to say farewell to the city, somehow I never did. Going out for cocktails or dinner every night with friends for three weeks, we kept prolonging our goodbyes, telling our friends we’d at least see them one final night for drinks that, in the end, we never organized. I had my final celebrity sightings: a friend who’s a Pilates instructor gave me two free sessions for my birthday, and on the way to her studio I saw an angry James Gandolfini buying a pile of aerobic tops at Paragon Sports; in the subway station I passed Lukas Haas; during my Pilates session, in an otherwise empty studio, the front door opened and in walked Rip Torn, who wandered around the waiting room wearing a tank top, then walked out. My wife and I packed up our apartment, filled 40 boxes with books, and trucked our furniture to storage. We ran two to three miles every day to burn off stress. In Connecticut, at my parents’ house, we repacked for France and filled 10 large suitcases and duffel bags, totaling approximately 450 pounds, plus two maximum-sized carry-ons, and with heart palpitations we unloaded them at JFK and paid almost the equivalent of a third ticket to check our bags onto the plane. “It was like I had stage fright,” my wife said later when we were waiting for our flight, describing the racing of her heart while the American Airlines representative weighed our luggage. I agreed; I felt like I’d had stage fright regularly for a month. In Paris, we arrived two hours late, meaning we missed the bank appointment I’d scheduled, and stage fright kicked in again. We commandeered three luggage trolleys and with two in my hands and one in my wife’s we slowly pushed our 12 bags out through customs to brave the taxi rank. “You need a car to Paris,” a man told me in French, appearing out of nowhere. “Do you have a big car?” I asked. “A car that is like a truck?” He was already out the door, pushing one of our luggage carts.
On our way into the city, we saw posters for low-cost airlines, for Ocean's Thirteen and Die Hard 4. When the driver wasn’t talking on his cell phone and I wasn’t trying to contact the bank or our real-estate agent, I tried to make elaborate conversation in French. Where was he from? Did he own his own business, how many employees did he have, would he recommend his cell phone service? “Bequeil,” he said at one point, turning to me while speeding down a highway. “Comment?” I asked, not recognizing the word, hoping he’d look at the road again soon. “Queil,” he repeated, “bequeil!” “Monsieur,” I said quickly, “I am sorry, I wish my French was better, I do not know—” He touched my arm. “Man,” he said, “be cool.”
Later, not knowing how much to tip, I gave him 20 Euros—a bit too much. I now have his card in my wallet, having had it pressed into my hand as he made me promise to call him at any time, for anything.
Paris is not the city of light. That’s a fallacy, at least in early June. Let Rome or Cape Town or Santa Fe be the city of light; Paris is the city of clouds. Clouds you’d think were only an arm’s length above the buildings; tall, layered almond cakes of clouds; overturned wheelbarrows of clouds; clouds as temporary monuments. The weather has been beautiful almost every day since we’ve arrived, but always changing and mainly cloudy. Parisians have a long history of enduring, they’re pragmatists, and though they dress for sun, they’re prepared for when the sky clouds over: a scarf, a sweater peeping out of a bag. “Finally,” my wife says one afternoon, being from the South, “I live in a place where people understand what it’s like to feel cold.”
We live in the north of the third arrondisement near Place de la République, a traffic rectangle of beautiful classic architecture, a Holiday Inn, and an enormous monument in the center depicting the Republic as a majestic giantess wearing a robe. Often, walking home, I’ll see her from a few blocks away. She dominates the view, reminding us of the virtues France has stood by through its seizures of government and revolt. The panorama of sky behind her will be full of shifting clouds, and I will be reminded of the title screen from a Columbia Pictures movie, with the torch lady, and wonder perhaps about a new one: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité: Part Cinq.
By day my wife and I explore, shop, assemble a home. At night, exhausted, we load a disc from the PBS documentary New York into my laptop and watch it at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t until the second or third night of doing this that we realized the irony of watching the history of our former home unfold from across the ocean. During a segment about the Draft Riots, I fantasized about République outside. The square is a traditional gathering place for protesters, and has played this role from Napoleon to Sarkozy. The next time George W. Bush does something stupid, might a mob gather and head door to door looking for Americans, and by then would my French be fluent enough to encourage their torches down the street, toward those girls I saw in the Duke sweatshirts?
There are daily miracles and amusements, trials and exhaustion. A man comes to repair our stove, takes one look at it, and tells me to go to the hardware store and buy the proper cream. Cream? “You know, the ointment for the stove,” he says, as though I’ve just asked him how far we are from Paris. There are two levels of membership at a nearby gym. For the more expensive plan you get two things: accident insurance, in case you are attacked by a bench press, and a towel. For the cheaper plan, you’re on your own and towel-less.
Going to the bank is something to be both pursued and endured, knowing that, ultimately, someone will serve cheese.We both caught colds as soon as we arrived, and were told by ex-pat friends to eat honey from the farmers’ market to introduce the local pollen to our systems. We’ve decided we should probably apply the same theory to Brie de Meaux, to raspberry and blueberry tarts, to blocks of foie gras the size of steaks. Food is a wonder: The groceries are significantly cheaper and more delicious, and even lemons taste better, more lemon-y. We do our shopping store to store—wine, cheese, fish, meat, produce—within a two-block span on a street near our apartment, and then there’s the giant farmers’ market across the road. We’ve tried cheap and fancy restaurants, nearby spots and ones we walk a whole 20 minutes to. We found a sushi restaurant that delivers and it’s only made us more anxious, trying to figure out how we’ll buzz in the delivery guy since the building doesn’t have a buzzer, and we have neither cell phones, a telephone, nor an apartment number.
Even entering a bank is intimidating up front but yields strange rewards. You press a buzzer outside the branch and wait. The door clicks and you’re allowed into a holding pen large enough to fit half a cow. After the first door closes, you press a second buzzer to open a second door, then you wait and smile for the security camera. But when you’re finally inside, there’s no bulletproof glass. No frantic, nervous lines like in New York, only a person sitting behind a desk smiling at you. And there are no forms to fill out if you want to deposit money, you just say, hello, I would like to deposit some of the money, and they say, OK, then you give them some of the money and they print out a receipt from a laser printer on the other side of the room near a potted orange tree.
Because my job doesn’t begin for another two weeks, we’re out all day, stumbling around in French. Though my wife and I both know Paris reasonably well, we’re lost one afternoon trying to find the park Buttes-Chaumont near the St. Martin canal. Then we spot a Parisian friend’s cousin who should be studying for his exams but is out skateboarding instead. He’s sweaty, his T-shirt sticking to him in dark spots. We kiss on both cheeks. He very politely gives us directions. We wish him luck on the BAC and say goodbye, and then he goes back to skateboarding with a determined look that I’ve seen on other Parisians, as though skateboarding, or riding the Metro at lunch hour, or going to the bank is something to be both pursued and endured, knowing that, ultimately, someone will serve cheese. Our refrigerator now contains five different types of cheese.
We’ve been to museums and galleries, bistros and brasseries. We drink five-euro wine from the supermarket that’s better than 15-dollar bottles at home. We are easily satisfied, and my writing, particularly in fiction, is coming more easily, with more emotion than I’ve previously allowed myself. The cliché of being hardened by New York has roots in fact, and now I am fact-checking what we had and what our life was like. Seeing paths endowed in the sidewalk for my steps, I’d lost the feeling of earning them. Things were too easily made fun of or cast aside; lots of things were never good enough. I had little faith in much at all.
One afternoon, my wife is home in bed because her cold has gotten worse. Apparently the honey isn’t working. I go out to run errands. I see the monument in République and salute the majestic woman from the sidewalk; I promise her I will stay determined, I will eat the pollen, I’ll be cool. In the center of the square is a merry-go-round and an ice-cream stand. I buy my wife a strawberry and vanilla cone. I have to run to reach our apartment before the ice cream melts and slides off. We eat it in our bedroom overlooking the building’s courtyard. Everything’s quiet outside except for bird calls.
—Published June 15, 2007
