Catching Up With Cecilia

Winter Update, 2007

2007-01-09T13:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Ones,

Hope your new year is off to a happy and fruitful start. After a month on the road in the midwest and southeast, I'm back in L.A. for the spring semester at USC. My classes this fall went beautifully -- I realized how much I love being in the classroom, and how good for my soul it is for me to be with young people -- so I'm looking forward to the new term. I'll have a somewhat lighter teaching load, both at USC and in the low-residency MFA program at Western Connecticut State, so I hope to be able to focus as much of my time and energy as possible on my own work, though of course there's never quite enough time ...

I'm still working on the prose project about my travels in Poland and my family history, and also trying to put the finishing touches on a new book-length manuscript of poems. My chapbook, Narcissus, will be out from Tupelo Press in the fall of '07, and there's some work to be done on that, too.

While I'm continuing to limit the amount of time I devote to private teaching and other workshops, my schedule will allow me to take on one or two new private students in February -- get in touch if you want to talk about that, and keep in mind that I require a three-month commitment in advance.

There's also a plan in the works for a bi-monthly private workshop in L.A. starting in February and running through the end of April. I'll let everyone know those details as they emerge, but it's likely the workshop will be held on Saturday or Sunday, will focus on close critique, and will be limited to 10 or 12 poets who've studied with me before and are prepared to work at an "advanced" level, in terms of craft. If you want to be considered for the workshop, let me know which of the above-mentioned times might work best for you.

Because I'm limiting the number of workshops I lead and the number of participants in each, I've made the decision to reserve those spots for writers who've previously worked with me and are already on my workshops list, and to those referred by someone on that list. Anyone who hasn't been in a workshop with me before will be asked to submit a sample of their work and a brief bio, by way of application. It's not my aim to be exclusive, but to foster a certain intensity, intimacy and chemistry in the workshops.

Happily, my academic schedule will allow me to travel in March, and again when the semester ends in late April, so I'll be offering several workshops "abroad." Registration is now open for my Creative Writing Workshop at Centro Pokkoli in Vitorchiano, Italy (to be held in early March), and registration for the Paris Poetry Workshop (in May) will open in late February. While the workshop in Italy is open to writers working in all genres, and offers a somewhat secluded creative environment, the Paris workshop is focused on poetry and takes place within the lively English-speaking Paris poetry community -- two very different experiences. My intention with these international workshops is to introduce friends and fellow writers to one another, to connect people and places I love, to build bridges between creative communities so that we can all keep expanding our horizons. Additional notices about both workshops will be coming soon ...

I'll also be traveling in Poland, Ukraine and Turkey this year, and hope to offer a workshop in Istanbul in fall 2007. Announcement of that workshop should be out by early summer 2007.

In July, I'll be in Idyllwild, as usual. This year's "distinguished" guests at Summer Poetry in Idyllwild will be esteemed poets Marilyn Nelson and David Lehman; the marvelous Terrance Hayes will be back with us as a teaching poet, along with Eloise Klein-Healy, Richard Garcia, Natasha Trethewey, myself, and David St. John, who'll be leading a special week-long workshop on the chapbook manuscript. Watch for a new electronic newsletter on Summer Poetry in Idyllwild, coming this winter, and check the Idyllwild Arts website (www.idyllwildarts.org) for registration and other information. The workshops -- especially David's workshop on the chapbook -- are bound to fill very early this year.

Finally, I'm looking for an assistant to work with me one day a week (minimum of five hours, preferably on Saturday) in Los Angeles. The ideal person would have great organizational and administrative skills, familiarity with Macintosh computers, plus lots of initiative and creativity. The job involves helping with the administrative tasks involved in running workshops, setting up systems for keeping track of registrations and expenses, updating my website and mailing list, assisting with author questionnaires and other publication-related tasks, and generally holding down the fort in Los Angeles while I'm on the road. Someone with good research skills would also be a blessing, as I could use assistance on the Poland/family history project in that regard. I'm willing to pay well and/or offer free workshop tuition to whomever fills the bill. If you think this might be you, or you know someone who might be a good candidate, please let me know.

As ever, I hope your creative work is going beautifully, and that this new year brings peace and plenty and happiness to us all.

All best,
Cecilia

Summer Update

2006-08-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Ones,

For those of you who haven't already heard, I'll be returning to Los Angeles more-or-less full-time, more-or-less "permanently," this fall. (Though an old friend wrote to me recently, "You're not abandoning your gypsy life, you're just fooling everybody for a little while--a totally Tsigan thing to do.") I'll be settling back into my apartment on Whitworth Drive in a couple of weeks, and will start teaching in the undergraduate creative writing program at USC almost immediately. I'm wildly grateful for this opportunity, and for the schedule, and for the structure I hope it will afford me for getting more of my own work done...

Some other wonderful news is that the chapbook manuscript I put together while I was at the castle-on-the-sea this winter has been chosen winner of Tupelo Press's Snowbound Competition, and will be published by Tupelo. So now I have the "core" around which to begin assembling a new book-length collection. I also hope to be able to get back to work in a serious way on the long prose project.

All of which is to say that I'm not sure, at this point, how much additional teaching/workshop-facilitating I'll be taking on. In addition to my classes at USC, I'll be continuing to teach in the Western Connecticut State low-residency MFA program, as well as directing the Idyllwild program. And I'm still working with a few people privately, as well. So I'll decide, once I've settled into some kind of routine in L.A. -- probably by late September -- whether or not that will leave me time to offer a private workshop Chez Whitworth. If I did, it would be a twice-monthly evening or Saturday group, dedicated to close-critque and limited to ten participants whom I'd ask to make a minimum two-month commitment. If that's something you might be interested in, please let me know. I should also know by late September if I'll be able to take on any more private students, but anticipate that would be two or three, at most, and have already begun a waiting list.

As to workshops abroad, the academic schedule at USC will allow me to continue to offer several overseas workshops a year, and I'm currently considering a number of options, and would love to have feedback from you as to which you might find appealing and might consider attending. Your input would help me decide which are most feasible, since I can't (can I?) do them all. Here are the options, as they stand now:

The Paris Poetry Workshop -- This is a "definite," as the workshop has had a very successful four-year run already, and is always so much fun. It will most likely be held in mid- to late-May in 2007. The cost is approximately $800, exclusive of travel and lodging and meals, for a week of workshops, seminars and readings that includes the anglophone Paris literary community.

Poetry Workshop at Chateau de la Napoule, France -- This is my "castle-on-the-sea" in the south of France, about 15 minutes from Cannes. The administration there is very excited about the possibility of my bringing a group of 10-12 poets for a week-long workshop. We would be housed in the villa -- a beautiful old mansion next to the castle and also facing the sea -- which also has two big rooms for meetings and readings, a kitchen, laundry facilities etc... A fee of approximately $1,500 would cover workshop fees, room and board. The train station is right across the street, which makes getting to the beautiful nearby towns and villages a snap. I would hold this workshop sometime in June 2007, if there's sufficient interest.

Creative Writing Workshop at Centro Pokkoli, Vittorchiano, Italy -- We had a fabulous time in Vittorchiano this past March, so I'd be happy to hold a workshop here again. This would be a mixed-genre group, limited to 10-12, staying in The Hotel Piccolo Opera, which is "basic" but sparklingly clean and offers rooms with private baths and full board -- delicious home-cooked, multi-course Italian meals. The workshop meets in the "centro" in a charming medieval village just a few minutes away by hotel van. We'd have time for excursions to nearby hill towns in the region, which is called the "Tuschia" -- catacombed with ancient Etruscan tombs -- and is about an hour and a half from Rome by train or shuttle. I would try to hold this workshop again in late March, during the academic spring break, and the fee would be approximately $1,500, including workshops, lodging, meals and at least one excursion. This past year, we also had opportunities to get together with ex-pat writers living in the area.

Poetry Workshop in Istanbul (or in a Turkish Holiday Village) -- I have a Turkish friend who's been researching possibilities and options for offering a workshop in Istanbul, which is asolutely thrilling to me. My friend has also offered to help me make contacts with writers living in Istanbul, and she would serve as our local facilitator. A week-long workshop in Istanbul would cost approximately $900, exclusive of travel and meals and lodging, though my friend and I would make arrangements for a group discount at a reputable hotel. (Istanbul prices for meals and lodging are comparable to Paris.) Istanbul seems to me cosmopolitan, ancient, gorgeous, and I'm very excited about it ...

However, my friend has also discovered another option: meeting at a seaside holiday resort on the Aegean near Izmir, Turkey. This latter option would allow us to have a more "secluded," retreat-like experience. It would also likely be less expensive, overall: a fee of approximately $1,600 would cover fees, lodging and meals. The resort also offers activities such as tennis, volleyball, horseback riding, a disco in the evening, opportunities for excursions to places like the ancient city of Epheseus.

If we can pull it together for this year, and if there's sufficient interest, I could probably offer a workshop in Turkey in late June 2007. If not, perhaps the following year ...

Creative Writing Workshop in Sydney (or the Blue Mountains), Australia -- An Australian friend who's recently moved back to Sydney has offered to help put together a workshop there, or in a beautiful, pristine resort area called The Blue Mountains. This would be a mixed-genre group, again limited to 10-12, and meeting for a week. If held in Sydney, the fee would be approximately $800, exclusive of lodging and meals. If held in The Blue Mountains, we should be able to work out a package deal that would include lodging and meals for approximately $1,500. My friend, Sarah Potter, who's a writer and scientist, would help faciliate contacts with the local literati, too. The best time for a workshop in Australia would be early December. If there's sufficient interest, this could happen in late 2006, or in 2007.

So, that's the lowdown. Please let me know if you have any thoughts about any of these workshops. I hope your writing is going well, and life, and that our paths cross again soon.

All the best,
XO
Cecilia

Itinerary Update

2006-04-08T19:48:00.000-07:00

Apr. 6 - 10 -- London

April 10 -- fly from London to Louisville, KY via Atlanta

Apr. 10-17 -- Kentucky, with family

April 17 -- fly from Louisville to Los Angeles, via Atlanta

April 17 - 24 -- Los Angeles

Apr. 20 -21 -- La Jolla

April 21 -- reading in LaJolla w/David St. John

April 24 -- fly from Los Angeles to London, via Atlanta

April 25 -- Arrive London; train to Totnes (southwest England)

April 26 - 29 -- lead workshops at Dartington in Totnes

April 29 - May 1 -- London

May 1 -- return to Paris

May 1 - June 1 -- Paris

May 14 - 19 -- Paris Poetry Workshop

May 22- 26 -- Writers' Journal workshop, WICE, Paris

And that's what I know for now ...

Paris Poetry Workshop, 2006

2006-02-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Ones,

It's a pleasure to invite you to join me in my favorite city in the world for the fifth Paris Poetry Workshop, May 14- 19, 2006.

Over the past several years, the workshop has become a tradition in the English-speaking Paris poetry community, offering poets from the U.S., Canada and Europe the opportunity to come together for a week of intensive workshops, lectures and readings. If you've been to Paris, you already know about the inspiration and stimulation of the senses it offers; this is a chance to see and experience, to absorb and be absorbed by, a side of Paris not readily accessible to the average tourist -- an opportunity to spend time in Paris as a poet among poets. Participants generate new work, hone their craft, share and support one another's creative endeavors, make new friends and expand their literary horizons. I invite you to become part of this exciting and vibrant community.

Here are the plans as they've come together thus far ...

This 5th Paris Poetry Workshop will begin with a welcoming reception and dinner at the private home of Adrian Leeds, situated in a 17th-century building in the historical Marais district, on Sunday evening, May 14th. This informal gathering will give you all a chance to meet one another and to mingle with the local literati -- English-speaking poets who make their homes and their poems in Paris. Long time resident Adrian Leeds will give an orientation to the city, including tips on how to get around and how to get along happily with the French. I'll distribute copies of the full schedule for the week's activities.

I'll personally lead the daily workshop sessions from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. The workshop will meet in a private apartment in the lively and very Parisian neighborhood of the 3rd arrondissment. Participants will be guided through a series of writing exercises designed to generate new work specifically related to the sights and sounds of Paris and each poet's experience there. The group will provide feedback on the new work, and we'll also conduct close-critique of works-in-progress participants will bring along with them for that purpose.

We'll break for lunch at 1 p.m., so that everyone can explore the neighborhood and enjoy a mid-day meal at one of the many cafes and restaurants in the area, or you can simply pick up a baguette sandwich at a boulangerie and head to the park.

In the late afternoon, we'll gather again at the beautiful Rose The tea room for a series of craft talks led by Paris-based poets and writers such as poet and Paris Editor of Tin House Heather Hartley, poet/novelist Jennifer Dick, poet/essayist Ellen Hinsey, and others who'll share their work and their personal and creative relationships to Paris. You'll also have a chance to sample some of the best desserts you've ever tasted, so bring an appetite.

Mid-week, on Wednesday, we'll break from the regular workshop schedule so that participants can relax and enjoy a free day in Paris. Canadian poet/journalist and long-time Paris resident Lisa Pasold will offer an optional walking tour of literary Paris for those who would like to see the haunts and homes of such literary luminaries as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin and Collette.

In the evenings, there will be readings at venues throughout the city, including the famous and historical left bank bookstore, Shakespeare & Company. Readings will feature Paris Poetry Workshop faculty, poets from the Paris poetry community, and the poets of the Paris Poetry Workshop -- i.e. you! All readings are open to the public, and the audiences in recent years have been increasingly large and diverse and appreciative.

The workshop limited to 12 participants and is open to poets at all levels of development. I'm personally extending this invitation to poets who have worked with me previously; however the workshop is open to all interested poets on a first-come, first-served basis. Those who haven't participated in my workshops are requested to submit three sample poems prior to registration via e-mail to CeciWo@AOL.com.

The cost: $835/person (cash or check). Includes all workshop fees, afternoon and evening lectures and activities, welcoming cocktail and dinner. It does NOT include other meals, local transportation, air fare or lodging. Participants in afternoon sessions at Rose The will be expected to purchase their own coffee or tea, as well as dessert, if so desired.

Early Registration Discount: $735/person. If you choose to register and pay in full by March 1, 2006, you'll receive a $100 discount, making the total fee for the workshop $735.

Please bear in mind that keeping the workshop this affordable for participants means that I'm not able to get involved with making travel arrangements or serving as a tour guide. I will, however, do all I can to help you have a great time in the city I love best ...I strongly suggest that you plan to arrive in Paris on the Saturday prior to the workshop, so that you have time to rest and relax and overcome jet-lag before the activities begin, and that you plan to stay through the Saturday after the workshop ends, so that you'll have another full day to enjoy Paris before flying home on Sunday.

Recommendations of inexpensive hotels, short-term rental apartments and restaurants will be provided, as well as information on getting from the airport (Charles de Gaulle, airport code "CDG") into the city. Reservations for accommodations can be requested for a fee of $25/person.

Registration/Deposit:The workshop will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. A $200 deposit will hold your place in the workshop, and full payment will be due by March 15, 2006.

Cancellation Policy:Cancellations received on or before April 1, 2006, will receive a full refund, less a $100 processing fee. From April 1 through 15, 2006, a refund of 50% per person will be given. After April 15, 2006, the workshop fee is non refundable. If you cancel due to medical reasons that are covered by your purchased travel-insurance policy, we will advise the insurance company that your travel and conference or seminar fees are non refundable. Any refunds issued by the insurance company will negate any credit due.

To register, or for further information, please write to me at CeciWo@AOL.com with "Paris Poetry Workshop" in the subject line. For further information and regular updates, please go to http://www.parlerparis.com/poetry/parismay2006.html

Looking forward to seeing you in Paris!

Cecilia's Itinerary

2005-12-22T05:47:00.000-08:00

December 18 - 31, 2005 -- Kentucky (with family)

January 1 - 7, 2006 -- Danbury, Connecticut (Western Connecticut State University, MFA Program in Writing winter residency)

January 7, 2006 -- depart NYC to Paris, France

January 8, 2006 -- Paris

January 9 - Feb. 17, 2006 -- Southern France (residency at La Napoule International Retreat for Artists)

February 3 - 6, 2006 -- Geneva, Switzerland (Geneva International Writers Conference Feb. 4 - 5)

I'll remain in Europe through late June 2006, though I hope to make one visit back to the eastern U.S. in early spring.

Tentative plans for Europe:

late Febraury '06 -- Paris and/or Switzerland (Basel and/or Zurich)

March 2006 -- Warsaw, Poland

March 26 - April 1, 2006 -- Creative Writing Workshop at Centro Pokkoli, Vitorchiano, Italy

April 2006 -- London and southern England

April & May, 2006 -- Paris, France (The Paris Poetry Workshop will be May 14 - 19, 2006)

June 2006 -- The Carpathians (Poland) I'll return to the west coast of the US in early July, in time for the summer program in Idyllwild , California.

That's what I know so far ...

Back in Paris

2005-09-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

16 Sept. 2005
Paris

The past few weeks, since my mother's death, seem mostly a blur, though a few moments stand out vividly:

Carine and I lifting the dead bouquets and wreaths from the mound of my mother's grave, and piling them into the back of my truck. The two of us getting Chloe off for her first day of first grade at Roby. I sat Chloe on top of the vanity in the bathroom, brushed her hair until she was awake. Meanwhile, Carine was making breakfast. We smelled something burning and found her in the kitchen, holding a smoking PopTart aloft. "You made it. You burned it. You eat it," Chloe said. Between the two of us, we managed to get her dressed and fed, then I walked her up the street to school.

Leaving Shepherdsville for Atlanta, stopping at Mary's beauty shop in the late afternoon, when everyone always stops in. Rachel with Kylie Pearl; the local cop who's Mary's good friend; assorted mothers and their daughters still in their school uniforms. Chloe didn't want me to go, and then she said she wanted to go with me. She locked herself in the cab of my truck and Mary's friend Heather had to lure her out with an offer to take her to the store. But Chloe had hidden my gearshift knob, and by the time I found it, stashed in the console with my cd's, they were back from Bullitt County Supermarket. Chloe stood on tiptoe and kissed me goodbye through the window of my truck, and I finally drove away. Her fingerprints still on the window.

Stopping in Nashville to spend the night with Sandy in a fancy hotel. We went out to a songwriter's showcase (at the bar of a Best Western Motel) and then came back and ordered room service at midnight, talked until 2 a.m. The next day we had lunch with her manager, Miles, and by the time I got on the road, it had started to rain. Katrina was on the way ... It got so bad that I had to pull off the highway and spend an hour at a Waffle House; drenched by the time I got to the door, the waitress waiting inside with a towel. A couple of motorcyclists were waiting out the weather, too, and we all sat around with the waiters and waitresses in a couple of corner booths, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

A few days later, sitting in the belvedere at the top of Eve's house on the Chattahoochee, watching the storm with Chante. She'd driven down from North Carolina to spend a weekend in Atlanta, visiting friends, and it wasn't hard to talk her into spending the night with us at Eve's. We made a bed up for her in the belvedere -- her "tree house" -- so that she could listen to the frogs and crickets and wind all night. She said she was too excited to sleep. Told me she wakes up every day and tells herself, "This is the day the Lord has made." Her doctors still can't find the source of the cancer, haven't changed their prognosis, don't expect her to live to see Christmas. But I refuse to accept it and she says that's fine with her. She looks luminous, with or without her wig. Every time I reach for my mother and start to keel over, I think of Chante, her arms around me, and try to stand up straight.

Someone said, "No more heartache, please." The devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the death of New Orleans. The obscenity of the Bush administration's ineptitude and corruption. The sense that my whole country, the whole world, seems to be falling apart. The sense that, with my mother gone, there's no solid ground under me anymore.

Leaving Atlanta again for a quick trip back to Shepherdsville, the bed of my pick-up loaded with boxes from my storage space. A couple of southern gentlemen had insisting on loading it up for me, and then I hadn't bothered to tie anything down. So I was driving north on I-75 and looked in my rearview mirror to see the downtown skyline growing distant and a box full of lingerie from my last marriage tumbling out of the bed behind me -- silk nightgowns and lacy bras sailing out over four lanes of traffic. I laughed and said a little prayer that no one would be so flummoxed by lingerie flying across his windshield as to cause an accident. But it was quite a metaphor ...

On the flight from Atlanta to Paris, the young Frenchman sitting beside me smiling when his dinner tray was set down in front of him. He picked up the wedge of cheese and cradled it in both palms and brought it up to his lips and kissed it. Then he turned to me and said, "I've been three months in Guatemala." "No cheese in Guatamala?" I asked. "Not like this," he said. Ah, the French.

So I've settled into my little studio on rue des Filles du Calvaire and Paris is gray and windy and it's good to be anywhere.

The October Paris Poetry Workshop

2005-08-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Fellow Poets,

It's with real pleasure that I invite you to join me in my favorite city on earth for the 4th Paris Poetry Workshop, October 2 - October 6 2005. Anyone who's been to Paris already knows about the inspiration and stimulation of the senses the city affords; and this is a chance to see and experience, to absorb and be absorbed by, a side of Paris not readily accessible to the average tourist -- an opportunity to spend five days in Paris as a poet among poets.

Over the past several years, the success of each Paris Poetry Workshop has contributed to the creation of an expanding international community of poets writing in English, who come together from all parts of the world to generate new work, hone their craft, share and support one another's creative endeavors. I invite you to become part of this exciting and vibrant community.

Here are the plans as they've come together thus far ...

This 4th Edition of the Paris Poetry Workshop will begin with a welcoming reception at the private home of Adrian Leeds, situated in a 17th-century building in the historical Marais district, on Sunday evening, October 2nd. This informal gathering will give you all a chance to meet one another and to meet many of my Paris-based writer-friends and mingle with the local literati -- English-speaking poets who make their homes and their poems in Paris.

Long time resident Adrian Leeds will give an orientation to the city, including tips on how to get around and how to get along happily with the French. I'll distribute copies of our workshop notebook, which will include a full schedule for the week's activities.

I will be leading workshop sessions from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. I'll take participants through a series of writing exercises designed to generate new work specifically related to the sights and sounds of Paris and each poet's experience here. The group will provide feedback on the new work, and we'll also conduct close-critique of the works-in-progress participants will bring along with them for that purpose.

A light lunch will provided and, in the afternoon, we'll gather for a series of talks and discussions about poetry and the creative process led by a number of Europe-based poets and writers, including poet/memoirist Jeffrey Greene, poet and Paris Editor of TIN HOUSE, Heather Hartley, poet and translator Sarah Luczaj, poet/novelist Kathleen Spivack, and others who'll share their work and their personal and creative relationships to Paris.

Mid-week, on Wednesday, we'll break from the regular workshop schedule to spend a day with Paris poet and teacher Jennifer Dick. Jen will lead a workshop on ekphrastic poetry that will include a visit to one of Paris' many art museums. This outing is optional.

In the evenings, there will be readings featuring Paris Poetry Workshop faculty at the famous and historical bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, poets from the Paris poetry community, and the poets of the Paris Poetry Workshop (i.e. you!) another evening. Last spring's reading by workshop participants at a Paris pub proved to be one of the highlights of the literary season.

To register for the workshop and a complete schedule, visit the Parler Paris website. Looking forward to having you there with us in Paris for this exciting event!

A Beautiful Life

2005-08-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

My mother -- and the mother of my sisters Mary, Rebecca. Suzanne and Roberta, and of my brothers John and Charles -- died peacefully just after 8 p.m. on Tuesday, August 2. She was in a deep sleep at the time, simply took one breath and then didn't take the next. It was a quick and graceful exit -- exactly, I think, as she wished it to be, and much like she did everything: quickly and gracefully and on her own terms. Of course, it seems very sudden to all those who loved her, and we are legion. Friends and family were calling us at the hospital all through the days and nights. I'm grateful for that, and I know my brothers and sisters are, too.

My mother had been diagnosed with a brain tumor last Wednesday and was admitted to the hospital for tests that same afternoon. On Friday morning, her doctors informed us that they thought the tumor was operable, and she was scheduled for surgery on Saturday morning, I was in Idyllwild then, and made plans to drive back to L.A. and catch a flight east. I spoke to my mom on the phone Friday morning and, although she told me she didn't want me to come, I told her I'd see her soon. Her last words to me were, "I love you, honey." On Friday afternoon, as I was leaving Idyllwild, my sister Suzy called to tell me that while Mom was undergoing a pre-op stress test, she'd gone into cardiac arrest, had "coded." The medical team had spent thirty or forty minutes reviving her. The doctors wanted to know if we wanted to sign a "do not resuscitate order." We were all in a state of panic. I was hysterical as I drove down the mountain, and stopped at the fire station just outside of Idyllwild. The firemen took me inside to use their phone to call my sister again. Suzy told me that Mom was stable. I continued driving to L.A., calling the airlines en route, and managed to get myself on an early morning flight to Louisville. Once I was in L.A., Sarah did her best to keep me calm and help me pack. Elizabeth drove me to the airport at five a.m. When the Delta agent at LAX told me that my flight had been cancelled, I burst into tears. Within two minutes he'd booked me a first class seat on another flight leaving within the hour. Kindness upon kindness accompanied me every step of the journey. I arrived at my mother's bedside on Saturday afternoon. I'm grateful I was able to be there in time for her to recognize me and squeeze my hand. I'm grateful for all the others who loved her and stood around her bed.

Mom was in ICU, and the hospital staff had designated a private waiting room just down the hall for our use. The sign on the door said "The Woloch Family," and a dozen extra chairs had been brought in -- there was still not quite enough seating for all of us. My brothers and sisters and I took turns sitting by Mom's bedside, waiting for her to fully awaken. I slept in a chair next to her bed for the next few nights -- just dozing mostly, and listening to the monitors hum and beep, and watching her breathe, and thinking about how many nights she must have sat at my bedside, watching me breathe, grateful just to watch me breathe. But she didn't wake up.

The most difficult day for us was Monday, when the neurosurgeon told us that there was nothing more that could be done for her. ("I just didn't want it to end this way," my sister Suzy sobbed in my brother Chuck's arms. "No, you just didn't want it to end," Chuck said.) And Mom most likely couldn't have withstood surgery to remove the tumor at any point in the tumor's growth. I think she knew that, and chose her moment; chose not to have revealed what she most likely already knew until the last possible moment.

By Tuesday she wasn't responding at all. Another of her doctors met with all of us, and we agreed that the ventilator should be removed so that she could be made as comfortable as possible for as much time as she had left. At that point, a red-haired angel-nurse named Julie took charge of Mom's care. She wept with us and told us what a beautiful family we were. She started Mom on a morphine drip and removed the ventilator herself. We stood vigil by her bedside in two's and three's for the next several hours, talking to her and singing a little and kissing her good-bye again and again. A chaplain named Kathy said a lovely prayer. Mom looked beautiful and calm. There was a holy, motherly radiance around her, and I thought of the world she'd made from that body. In those moments, it was clear to me that there truly is a spirit, a human spirit, and that it continues beyond the body, beyond death. Mom was already far away.

In the early evening, Julie performed a small miracle and got Mom transferred to a large private room where we could all be together with her. At seven p.m., my older sister and her family left, one of my brothers decided to take his wife and kids to get something to eat, and I decided to run home to take a quick shower, change out of the clothes I'd slept in the night before. That left my three younger sisters -- Bekki, and Suzy and Bobbi -- and one of my brothers, John, and his daughter, Kayleigh, and my pregnant niece, Rachel, in the room. We've all agreed that Mom probably figured that was the smallest audience she was going to get, and chose that moment to slip away. I was able to get back to the hospital while her body was still warm, but it was clear to me she no longer inhabited that body.

I wish we'd had her here for another ten or twenty years, but I'm grateful for what we've had. As I told my nephew, Jimmy, we all have to die, but we don't all have beautiful lives. I believe my mother had a beautiful life, as I also believe my father did. They got much of what they wanted from this world. Most of all, they wanted to make a family, and they made a family --big and messy and real. I'm grateful that they gave me so many brothers and sisters. I'm grateful that they loved us beyond all reason and taught us to love one another, too. Taught us to love, period. I think my mother invented her own kind of motherhood -- all wild joyfulness. She sang to us and danced us around when we were still too little to walk. Then she taught us to stand on our own, but she never stopped taking care of us. She took an even deeper, wilder joy -- if that's possible -- in her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who in turn loved her wildly, joyfully. "My grandmother is the funniest woman on the planet," my nephew Jesse once told his friends.

She had so much fun with children. I kept telling my brothers and sisters, "We made her so happy." She might have kept right on having babies; she and Daddy were so gaga for babies, new life, the wild energy of children.

My grandniece Chloe Balou was born a few months after my father's death, and brought a whole new spirit into our lives -- and an old soul, too. When she was an infant, Mom used to bathe her in the kitchen sink and call her "my joy in the morning." Mom would say, "Life is too short to spend too much time grieving." Now Chloe Balou is six. When she walked into the waiting room on Tuesday night, we could see that she could see immediately what was gone from the world, who was gone. But when her grandmother, my sister Bobbi, told her that great grandma was "gone," she said, "No she's not. Only a part of her is gone. That part is an angel now."

And Chloe will have a new baby sister soon. Rachel's and Gary's daughter will be delivered by c-section on Monday, two days after Mom's burial. On Tuesday evening I held Rachel in my arms; she cried and I felt her big belly heaving against my ribs. I told her that her timing was perfect, again.

It's strange now to be alone in my mother's little house, where I spent so much time with her, and where she seems to be everywhere. Taking bed sheets out of the closet in the hall, I hear her again saying, "Honey, take the ones on the top shelf." Honey-this, honey-that. No one will ever call you honey the way your mom called you honey, I think.

She was our matriarch, as my cousin Lori said, and the life of the family revolved around her. The screen doors at the front and the back of her house were always banging open and closed. She was so much a part of my daily life that I know I haven't even begun to begin missing her. On Tuesday night, I drove home from the hospital, parked in the driveway, got out of my truck, and saw a little bat swooping around in the streetlight. "Mom, is that you?" I laughed. A little flutter of dark wings. She would still be awake at 2 a.m., maybe sweeping the kitchen floor in her nightgown, or fluttering down the hall to her bedroom with her bible under her arm and a small bowl of potato chips in her hand.

She relished the breaking of rules and conventions. Her faith was a deep and personal faith. She was fearless and passionate about expressing her opinions. She was vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq, where other mothers' children were being killed, and she boldly wore, for several years, a t-shirt my sister Bekki had made her that said, "Bush is not my president." She drove too fast. She flirted and teased and laughed. She taught me that it was possible to be both formidable and adorable, to be nobody's doormat and somebody's girl. She told me once, "If you don't do anything for people to gossip about, they'll just make something up, so don't pay any attention to gossip." A pal of mine dubbed her "the rebel Mom." She delighted in the friends from all over the world I brought home to Kentucky to meet her. She, herself, was one of my best friends. We talked about everything -- politics, history, memory, love, even sex. I wouldn't have made it through the nightmare of my recent divorce without her constant support. She gave great and practical advice. She loved to talk; she loved meeting new people. Last night my friend Robert called from Atlanta and said he felt cheated that he'd never had a chance to meet her in person, having heard so much about her.

I feel as if I've been through all the stages of grief a half dozen times in the past few days. I'll probably go through them all again and again. But maybe not the anger phase. I was angry when I first got to the hospital on Saturday and saw my mother lying in that bed with the tubes in her mouth and her throat. I told the chaplain I was furious about the injustice of it all -- why is it that the best people ("She was the best woman in the whole world," my nephew Jimmy sobbed) are struck down too soon, while the worst seem to go on and on? I've been reading a lot, in recent months, about evil and about narcissism, about the kind of evil and narcissism I've experienced in my personal life in the past three years, and the kind of evil and narcissism that have so transformed politics and culture in the U.S. that my whole family has felt betrayed. Why is it the bullies and their henchmen and their cronies always seem to go on having their way; where is the justice in that?

The chaplain didn't have an answer for me, but Mom did. And the answer is love. That's what the bullies and narcissists will never have. Because it's impossible to truly love a narcissist. Because, underneath the layers of seduction and deception, the layers of blaming and rage, there's really nothing at all to love. No self. No soul at all. I think it's possible that an evil person, ultimately, bit by bit, has relinquished his soul so completely that he dies and leaves only a corpse. And though, during his lifetime, some might pay obeisance to the bully or flatter the narcissist, he won't ever be truly loved. And without love, there is no redemption, simply, ultimately.

When my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and I stood around my mother's bed and actually saw the radiance of her spirit, the light of that love around her body, I thought: that's what the evil people of this world will never have. That's the only justice there is, and it's enough. Unloving people don't get to die with and into that light. So my mother's last lesson to me -- if it's indeed to be her last -- is that love trumps all. That's what I'll try to remember. That's what I'll try to hold onto in the days and weeks and months and years to come.

In America

2005-07-04T19:05:00.000-07:00

July 4, 2005 (Los Angeles)

I haven’t posted anything since I got back to the US a few weeks ago, mostly because I had been thinking of the blog as a way to keep a kind of travel diary and also keep friends and family and whoever might be interested posted as to my whereabouts and daily doings. But I guess I’m still sur la route, in my fashion, some fashion — although it feels as if I’ve suddenly come to a halt, which is much more disorienting to me than being in motion — and some have asked me to post, and friends and family on the other side of the pond want to know where I am now, so I’ll try to catch up a bit here …

A few thoughts about “blogging” first: I’m still not sure what I want this to be, what it should be, still finding my way, and always thinking about things like intimacy and privacy, too — because it is a public forum, after all, much as I might feel as if I’m just writing to a few close friends and family — so I’m still struggling to find a balance. Of course there are things that I leave out — some of the juiciest details, perhaps — and then there are things on which I’d welcome comments, things I’d like to discuss with whomever is reading, but I haven’t figured out yet how to respond to comments posted on the blog on the blog itself. So forgive me if you’ve posted a comment to which I haven’t responded, and feel free to e-mail me if there’s something you’d like to talk about more. But another thing I’m always struggling with is time, how to find enough time to keep up with everything. And America — or maybe it’s just L.A.? — seems so much more rushed to me than any place in Europe.

On my last day in Paris, I gave in at last and bought the princess skirt — really, Jenny made me do it. And then we took the train to Alfortville and had dinner with the Poilloux family in the magic house. Played a rousing game of duck-duck-goose around the table after we’d all eaten our fill. “Would you like a coffee, Cecilia?” Isa asked. And then “Would you like a whisky, Lila?” (Lila hadn’t stopped dancing since we arrived.) “No, Mama, je n’aime pas le whiskey.” It was a lovely way to spend my last evening in France, and I left a shopping bag full of books and things so that, as Isa said, I’d have to come back. And soon.

And the next day I flew from Charles de Gaulle to the Cincinnati International Airport, where I experienced what my sister Rebecca calls “Home Depot Security.” So much of it is absurd, and does so little to make anyone feel any safer. But my brother John collected me in his big red pick-up truck and we drove to Mom’s, where almost the whole family was waiting. “You’d better be hungry,” my mother said. I’d lost track of what day it was by then, and how many meals I’d already had. Chloe screamed “Aunt Cel-ee-ya!” when she saw me, and took a flying leap into my arms. Post-pork-chops-and-all-the-fixings, I sat on the porch and smoked with my sisters and watched the kids playing in the yard. And that pretty much set the rhythm and tone for my time in Kentucky.

I retrieved my own pick-up truck a few days later — not without some trauma involving the ex-friend who’d borrowed it while I was away — and then, over the next weekend, my mom and I made a road trip to Pittsburgh. We got lost — or I got lost, since I was the one doing the driving — twice before we ever got out of Louisville. We got as far as Columbus, Ohio, then stopped for the night to visit mom’s brother Richard and his wife and their kids and their grandkids.

The next day we arrived in Pittsburgh in the late afternoon and went straight to Mercy Hospital to see my godfather, my great-uncle Paul. He’s 83 now, the last surviving family member of my grandmother’s generation, and though he’s not in good shape, physically, his mind is amazingly sharp, and his memory. As soon as I went to his bedside and took his hand, he looked me in the eyes and said, “Oh honey, it’s seven years and two weeks since Harry’s been gone.” It was June 17. I counted back in my mind. Yes, seven years and two weeks, to the day, since my father had died. My dad’s cousin Mildred was in the room, too, and she said, “Now make him tell you everything. Even the things he doesn’t want to tell.”

So over the course of the next few days, Uncle Paul told me family stories, most of them terrible and dark — “Oh honey, the trouble this family has seen.” How his father had owned so much land in Poland, and then had lost everything — “Some people lose everything,” he said — and how he’d sent him into the streets in Pittsburgh’s wealthy neighborhoods, as a little boy, to beg. How his father, my great-grandfather, this “Guido,” was so dark that people whispered “nigger” when he walked the streets of the southside. How all the children fled — “Here comes Guido!” — when they saw him coming. (“A little man, “ my father used to tell me, “who always carried a long blade.”) How his mother, my great-grandmother Justyna, survived by taking in laundry and making whiskey when Guido disappeared for long stretches— months, sometimes years at a time. (“Where did he go? Why?” “New York. I don’t know. That’s just the kind of person he was.”) How they all lived crammed into a few tiny rooms, in an apartment down by the warehouses that had to be entered via some kind of tunnel; how one had to turn sideways just to pass between the rooms. Or was it Mildred who told me that story? Mildred told me stories, too. How Aunt Sue’s five-year-old daughter, Anna, died of a concussion suffered when she tried to stop her father from going out drinking, got caught between the doors and he slammed the door without knowing she was there. How there wasn’t money to bury her. How the father never came back. How Aunt Sue was determined to do anything – anything – to keep her two surviving daughters with her, and not put them in an orphanage. How my grandmother Mary’s little boy – was it Earl or was it Junior? – was scalded to death when he fell into the cauldron of hot coffee Justyna kept behind the stove. A story I’d heard before, though I’d never before really imagined the horror of it. Mary trying to comfort the screaming child; his flesh coming off on the towel in her hands.

On the last afternoon before we left Pittsburgh, Uncle Paul even talked about Mary’s death – a death he’d once told me had been caused by a heart attack, dismissing then the rumors I’d heard that she’d committed suicide or been murdered. This time the story was different. He told me how he and Aunt Sue had been away when the news came of Mary’s death. How Uncle Andy – big Uncle Boog – had cried like a baby. How young she’d been – only 48 or 49 – and how beautiful, still. How she “looked good” when they laid her body out in Detroit. How nobody knows where she was buried. How her last husband, the Russian, had taken charge of the funeral. “He took charge of everything.” Then Uncle Paul looked at me and said very firmly, “And he killed her. And there was politics involved.”

Was this what I’d come here to hear, to find out, to have confirmed? It was enough, at least for now. There are so many pieces of such a big puzzle to be put together, and some larger mystery, and some mysteries that may never be solved. I blew kisses to my uncle as we left the hospital, saying I’d see him again before long, praying that there’s still time. “God bless you,” he said as we left. God bless us all.

So it was a bittersweet visit, to say the least. I think it must have been hard for my mother. So many of those we loved there are gone now that Pittsburgh seems like a kind of ghost city to me. Though there are chic shops and expensive restaurants on the riverfront in the southside where the steel mill used to be. The warehouses are being turned into lofts. One church has been converted into an upscale coffee house. The sidewalks are packed with a young, hip crowd; but every so once in a while I’d see an old woman in a headscarf, a shopping bag weighing her down on either side, standing on the curb and looking around as if she’d just landed in a strange foreign country, looking disoriented, looking lost.

Which isn’t to say that we didn’t have some laughs, too. Like when I was standing by my uncle’s hospital bed telling him all about the man I’d met in Paris, how he managed to get every detail of the story out of me. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this,” I laughed. And my mother and Mildred across the room called out, “We love the details. Keep going.” And then my uncle took my hand and said, “Honey, I don’t want you to be alone. When are you going to marry him?” “Just as soon as he asks me, uncle,” I promised. Mom and I also spent some time with my old friends Betty and Don, who’d driven in from Philadelphia to meet us and to see a little of Pittsburgh – the first time for them, though they’ve been everywhere else in the world. Don zips down the sidewalk in his electric wheelchair ahead of everyone, taking in the scenery. He flirts more outrageously with waitresses than I’ve ever seen any man flirt, but manages to do so with the utmost gallantry. Betty rolls her eyes and smiles. Mom and I also stopped to visit her sister Eleanor and her brother-in-law Kenny on the hill, on Mission Street. Aunt Eleanor made us coffee and she made us giggle. There’s still an amazing view of the downtown skyline and the river from their front porch – even more amazing now that the mills are gone, and all the smoke. It’s beautiful, but something seems missing, too.

We made the long drive back to Kentucky without stopping for anything but gas and junk food. And then I had a few more days to spend with my family there, and to play with Chloe Balou, who never wants me to leave. She’ll start first grade in the fall but she’s already reading whole books, reads out loud to me with great glee, especially my favorite, “But not the Hippomapotamus.” I also spent an evening with Jim and Mary Ann and Rebecca in Sadieville, and an afternoon with my sister Bekki and my nephew Jesse in Lexington. And had a little picnic with my sister Mary on the porch of her beauty shop. And went swimming with the kids in my brother Chuck’s pool. That was midsummer’s night.

And then I flew back to Los Angeles. It was kind of strange to be here, at first, but I’m settling in. The traffic is worse than it was six months ago, and the divide between “have” and “have not” Los Angeles seems to be growing by leaps and bounds, as that divide seems to be growing all over the country. According to OECD statistics, the U.S. (as of 2000) has the highest poverty rate in the developed world, with 13.7% of the population having disposable income below half the median disposable income, and public (non health) social spending at 2.3% of the GNP. In France, only 6% of the population lives below this line, and public social spending — excluding health care, which in France seems nothing short of miraculous to an American accustomed to paying hundreds of dollars for prescription medicines that cost a few euros in a Parisian pharmacy, and I don’t even have French health insurance — is 9.1% of the GNP. Even Poland only has 8.6% of its population living in poverty, and spends 7% — more than three times the percentage the US spends -- on social programs.

In the June 11-12 edition of the International Herald Tribune, columnist Paul Krugman cites a New York Times series on class in America that presents compelling evidence that the middle-class society — once sustained by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation — has been lost since the 1970’s. Since 1980 in particular (the Reagan years), U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families — and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich, especially those who derive most of their income from inherited wealth, to bankruptcy ‘reform’ that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate the march back to the robber baron era. Krugman writes: “It’s not a pretty picture — which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public what’s going on ... To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in ‘the politics of envy.’ But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970s have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren’t sharing in the economy’s growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there’s good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society -- and more likely to be a functioning democracy — than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.” Or as a friend of mine in Paris said, “How can the U.S. export democracy when it doesn’t even have democracy?”

But I’m heartened by the evidence that popular support for W. is declining, and many here in L.A. are heartened by the election of Villaraigosa, L.A.’s first Latino mayor. On my second night back in town, I went with Andrew to a screening in Echo Park of my old pal Ed Landler’s long-awaited documentary about the Watts Towers, “I Build the Tower.” It took Ed almost 20 years to make it, but the results are wonderful. It’s a subtle and complex film, and deeply moving. The interviews with Mike Davis and with Buckminster Fuller are especially illuminating — the phrase I used earlier, about “have and have not L.A.” is Davis’s — and the portrait of Simon Rodia — the Italian immigrant laborer who single-handedly built those crazy, beautiful towers in the heart of Watts — is, ultimately, a portrait of the kind of flawed and heroic American whose story might have been lost if it weren’t for the vision and determination of someone like Ed. Those towers are L.A.’s Eiffel Tower, I think, and more a symbol of the city’s crazy, beautiful spirit than that sterile palace on the hill built with Getty’s millions or the monstrously inhuman architecture of Disney Hall.

It’s Independence Day as I finish typing this, sunny and breezy and blessedly quiet, for a change, on Whitworth Drive. I’ll be giving some readings in the coming week, and then my brother John will arrive from Kentucky with his girls, and we’ll take a beach day before heading up the mountain to Idyllwild. It will be good to see old friends again there, too. As Stanley Kunitz wrote in “The Layers,” “Oh I have made myself a tribe/out of my true affections,/ and my tribe is scattered!” Bisous …

Leaving Paris

2005-06-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

June 10, 2005 (Paris)

“Even the shuttle driver doesn’t want you to leave!” Jenny laughed. True, he’d kept me on the phone for at least twenty minutes, making jokes about training for the 2012 Olympics (in the “telephone” event) and telling me he would give me some Lotto numbers to play, I’d become “beelionaire” and could stay in Paris as long as I wanted, then saying he’d pick me up himself on Sunday morning (for the trip to deGaulle, alas) but the price would be very expensive -- I’d have to go to a restaurant with him. He also said that my accent in French was very pretty; Mlle Riordon, back at Bullitt Central High School, would be proud, I think.

So how am I supposed to leave Paris in 36 hours? With Adrian telling me, “Oh no, you’re going to miss the fete de la musique!” And Jenny and Michelle pleading at one a.m. in the rue de Bretagne, “Don’t go. We need you here!” And Michele Q. saying, “Just come and live with me.” And M. Saying he’ll miss me. O la, how to kiss goodbye in the middle of a sunstruck street when you don’t, really really don’t want to go? How to leave Paris at the height of spring, when “everywhere you look is luck?” And beauty. Yesterday a beautiful young black man stepping off the metro at Bastille beside me very politely asked my permission to tell me that I was “belle.” As if I might say non? No, please don’t tell me that! I must be crazy to be leaving now ...

Maybe Paris has this affect on everyone, but it just feels like home to me.

I tried to explain to my mother what it is about being here that makes daily life feel so much richer than it does in the U.S. Say, for example, I told her, I decide one day to go out for milk and bread. I leave the apartment -- let’s say Adrian’s place on the rue de Saintonge -- take a few steps down the sidewalk -- passing a boulangerie, and a Russian bookshop, and the shoe repair where Mr. Cordonnerie sits at his counter watching the street, calling out “Bonjour, ma fille” -- and turn onto the rue de Bretagne. Say it’s early summer, and people are sitting at sidewalk tables in front of all the little cafes, and many of these people are neighbors, people one sees almost every day. The shop windows are full of
beautiful displays -- even the fromagerie, even the butcher shop (even to a vegetabletarian) offer something pleasing to the eye. Even the pork chops are beautifully arranged. And then there are the patisseries, the boulangeries, the flower shops, the fruit and vegetable markets. There are smells of bread baking and chicken roasting and yes, sometimes dog poop, too. I can step into a little shop -- two or three steps to the dairy section in back -- and buy my milk in about a minute. I can decide to go an extra few steps around the corner to the boulangerie that has the little pain complet with nuts and raisins and apples that I’m craving today. Madame bids me a warm bonjour. A young woman in a flowing skirt zips past on a scooter. By the time I get back upstairs to the apartment, I feel as if I’ve come a little more alive, and I’ve also had a little fresh air and exercise.

In Shepherdsville, Kentucky, I would have had to get into a car, even though it’s just a few blocks to the Pic-Pac -- because there aren’t sidewalks in the subdivision and anyway it’s dangerous to cross highway 41 on foot these days -- and then driven past a lot of empty-looking houses -- no one on the porches or in the yards -- then parked and walked across a big parking lot into a big climate-controlled store and searched among 47 different kinds of milk to find what I was looking for. It seems to me that, in America, we spend an awful lot of time just walking across parking lots. Which are ugly and boring. No sensory pleasures, no contact with neighbors, no sense of moving through the world as part of a moving, living world.

So I’m already trying to figure out how to return to Paris as soon as possible. Jenny H. Has dubbed it “Operation: Back by September.” I can console myself with that idea, because it’s not so far off and the weather will still be lovely then. But there is no place in the world like Paris in the spring and early summer -- trees in bloom in all the parks and people kissing in the streets and every sidewalk table full and everyone sipping at jewel-colored beverages and so intoxicated by everything that the flirting and laughing and talking and raising of glasses seem to never stop --simply no better or more beautiful place to be.

Except that in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, my mother and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephew will all be waiting, and there’s nothing like that, either. So the trick is to figure out how to be in several places at once, or everywhere at once, or just to keep moving. Et voila.

Post Poland Shuffle

2005-06-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

June 6, 2005 (Paris)

I left Warsaw a week ago Friday -- ten days ago now -- and flew back to Paris. Wizzair to Beauvais. Had to cry to get a cab at Porte Maillot, in Friday rush hour, but sometimes crying works. Sometimes it's the only thing to do. So I was on time for my appointment with Dr. Julia, who gave me prescriptions for the rash and told me to go home and wash every stitch of clothing in my suitcase, rinsing twice.

Adrian helped me load all my laundry and then gave me a sundress to wear. A balmy night, so we walked to the Place des Voges. Got the last table facing the place. Got a little tipsy on the rose wine. Made a detour for ice cream on the way home, half of Paris lined up out the door and around the block of the gelati shop on the corner of rue Vielle du Temple and rue "St. Cross of the Buttonery."

Spent Saturday working, catching up, and then hung out in the evening with Jenny H. Campari and soda at Le Progres on the rue de Bretagne and then dinner on the terrace of le Rocher du Concal on rue Montorgueil. We were going to go to a party later but when Jenny called Carolyn, Carolyn said that the party was already breaking up. Not even midnight! "Trixie, where's your moxie?" Jenny gasped. But I was happy to walk back to the rue de Saintonge alone in the warm dark.

Sunday was gray, cooler, a good day to sit at the desk. But I got myself out of the apartment in late afternoon, ran down the rue de Saintonge to the little Armenian church in time to catch the free Schubert concert. Wonderful to close my eyes and just listen, let the music carry me away. In the evening I met Christine H. at les Philosophes for intense conversation -- maybe it's the place? -- about poetry, abusiveness, love. Later, Adrian made dinner here for the two of us.

Monday, I woke early, finished revising an essay, printed it out, sent it off, met M. for coffee on the rue de Bretagne. Caught the TGV to Zurich in the late afternoon in a swoon. The train ride was dream-like, as train rides can be. And a little surreal. In Dijon, the train stopped for a long time, and many announcements were made. Finally, it became clear that everyone in the rear of the train who was going to Zurich was to disembark and get back on at the front of the train. All the passengers in the car I was in looked at one another and shrugged. My gentlemanly seatmate insisted on carrying my bag. There was a flurry of confused people rushing back and forth on the quai. We found a car with the same number as ours at the front of the train and got on. Took our seats. Looked around. It was the exact same people in the exact same seats as before. Everyone laughed.

Cathy and Tom had waited up for me in Zurich. Cathy prepared a lavish "snack" for me and opened a good bottle of red wine. We talked until one or two a.m., and then I went downstairs to the guest apartment and settled in for the night. Spent the next day writing and recovering from the wine. In the evening, Tom and Cathy and I went to the lovely "little chicken" restaurant just over the hill and had a lovely meal and then talked again, until late.

On Wednesday, I walked into the hills, into the forest a bit, and then got ready to catch the train to Basel. Tom had left for New York in the morning. Cathy was packing to leave for Washington at the end of the week. Dagmar met me at the station in Basel, looking illuminated and very blonde in the hazy sunlight. We caught up for a couple of hours -- photos from her trip to L.A. of Neal and the new baby, Liam -- and then in the evening Uschicame to take me to dinner at Kranz. We dined in the garden, under a white umbrella -- a feast of fresh asparagus for me, good white wine from the region, dessert of peppered strawberries and ice cream.

I spent most of Thursday with Wilfried, running around Rheinfelden. We had lunch at the place on the Swiss-German border, on the patio overlooking the river. We talked about magic and travel and the way we want to live. Wevisited Marga's grave. We stopped to visit Bernard, sat in his garden drinking sweet mint tea and eating melon. He told us about his travels in the Sahara and about the Bedouins. He and Wilfried argued a little about the EU constitution, about whether the "no" votes are a positive or negative thing. They agreed to disagree. Bernard gave me a rock from the Sahara to keep. I'd like to go there, too, some day.

In the evening, Dagmar made dinner at home -- more asparagus -- and we talked on the terrace until the garden below us went dark. Until even the birds were quiet. We both turned in early, got up at 6 a.m. the next morning, and she went with me to the station, and she was on her way to Zurich and I was on my way back to Paris on the 8 a.m. train.

Friday evening in Paris. The world became strangely transparent ...

On Saturday I went to Alfortville to visit la famille Poilloux. Pierre's mother died about a week ago. He was her baby, the youngest of her nine children. He kept saying to me, "You know, it's hard to lose a parent." I know. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just after Pierre and Isa and the kids had left for Indonesia. They couldn't be reached on their island in Borneo, and didn't know what was happening, She was only supposed to last a few weeks. But she waited until they'd returned, so Pierre had a chance to say goodbye. He wrote something absolutely beautiful that he read at her funeral, surprising himself and everyone. We spent a long time after dinner looking at photographs of the sea in Indonesia, their family paradise. I want to go there, too.

Sunday I met Jen D for brunch, then we took a long walk along the Seine, talking about poetry most of the way. In the evening, I met Jenny H in the rueau Maire. Punk music was pouring out of the Baghdad Cafe when we passed, and we couldn't resist going in, cramming ourselves against the bar, admiring all those boys with skinny arms. The drummer was shirtless and his head was shaved and he played really LOUD and I wished it were even louder. It was Jenny's early adolescence in Pittsburgh; it was my wasted youth in L.A.; it was great. It was also Paris, so an older gentleman (even older than I, and I'd thought I might be the oldest person in the place) came out of the dining room in back to inquire, hopefully, if the band were going to take a little break? Out in the street, people were standing around smoking in the rain. Not really rain -- just a fine drizzle. Jenny and I went around the corner to the same Chinese place where I'd eaten with M. a few nights before and had a big, delicious, cheap meal.

So I have less than a week left in Paris, and that's already breaking my heart, but I'll be really happy to see my family again, and friends in the States. I'll fly to Cincinnati on 12 June, visit with my family in Kentucky until the 22nd or so, then fly to the west coast. I may check in here again, but I'm sure all that I'm going to be doing in the next few days is visiting with friends and swooning.

Lost & Found

2005-05-31T14:35:00.000-07:00

May 18, 2005 (Rzepnik)

The weather is mud. The less said about that, the better. But I feel like complaining. The weather is mud. A constant gray downpour and everything sliding out of itself.

We finally set out for Wislok Wielki, though, Sarah and Nasim and I, at mid-day today. We had chocolate to fortify us, and Irish music to go with the rain. En route, we passed through the village called "Lower Will," and passed the turn off to "Higher Will." We passed several old collective farms, or "PGR's." It's strange to be driving through the countryside and suddenly come upon the kind of gray concrete apartment blocks -- housing for the farm workers -- one sees in the cities. Some of these are still inhabited, as the people living there have nowhere else to go, even if there's no longer work for them here. The farm buildings themselves -- also gray concrete monoliths, with rusting metal window frames and broken windows -- stand abandoned, usually on the opposite side of the road. Lukasz tells me that the communists didn't try to turn all the farmland in Poland into collectives, as they did in other "satellite" countries, because attachment to the land here was too fierce. It was only in those villages, like Wislok Wielki, that were "purged" of all their inhabitants, that collective farms were established. And Lukasz tells me they were doomed to fail. People were brought into these villages, to work the collective farms, from other parts of Poland. He says these were people who'd never owned land of their own, who were "the dregs of society," layabouts and thieves and drunks. I love the stories and histories Lukasz tells me, but Sarah says I should talk to other people, too, because Lukasz's versions are Lukasz's versions.

Wislok Wielki is situated on the river Wislok, near Poland's border with the Slovak republic, in the Beskid Niski, the lower Carpathian mountains, on the northeast edge of Jasliski Park Krajobrazowy, the Jasliski "landscape" park. It's about an hour's drive from Rzepnik, and I was surprised at how quickly we seemed to arrive. Maybe because it doesn't seem so far away to me as it once did. Only a few years ago -- six years ago now -- I could hardly believe it existed. Before that, I had been convinced it was a vanished place, no longer on any map -- if it had ever been on any map, if it had ever really existed at all. And arriving in Wislok Wielki still feels to me like arriving in another world.

There's this beautiful kind of emptiness -- at least, I find it beautiful. Sarah says that knowing so many people once lived here and were forcibly "removed," most of their houses long gone and the fields gone back to meadow, would make it too difficult for her to live here. Haunted and sad, yes. But I find it peaceful, beautiful, even in the rain. Mist hung along the hillsides and in the valleys, like shreds of veil; the pine trees growing so thick and so dark they looked almost black; bright yellow flowers -- marsh marigolds --blooming along the riverbanks; the river flowing swiftly, glassy green-brown. The village where my father's mother was born.

We drove over the bridge, past the old collective farm buildings -- firewood cut and stacked along the wall of one of the enormous concrete barns, so someone must still be using these facilities -- and past the green Wislok Wielki sign. We stopped first at the priest's house, next to the old wooden church, but there was no answer when we rang.

So we drove straight into town to the town's one shop, where we used the restroom and bought Nasim an ice cream. The shop is always dim inside -- I suppose they're saving electricity, even on rainy days like this -- and there were a few men drinking beer at a little table when we walked in, as usual. The last time we were here, a kind of cafe bar was being added onto the building, but that side of the building was closed, and looks as if it's only opened for special occasions. Sarah asked the proprietors some questions, and they told her there was to be a mass at 6 p.m., so the priest would be at home later ...

Then we drove toward Anna's house, just across the road from the village's one bus stop. Sarah and I met Anna Opryszko the first time we ever came to Wislok Wielki, and she seemed already ancient then. Last year when we were here, we figured Anna must have died when we saw the for sale sign on her house. But today there was a tiny female figure standing out on the second floor balcony. She was wearing slacks and a headscarf and her face, from that distance, could have been the face of a young or middle-aged woman -- dark skin, sharp blue eyes. "Is that Anna?" Sarah asked. "In slacks?" I asked in reply. So we got out of the car and Sarah called, "Pani Anna?" And the man who'd been cutting the grass in the yard stopped swinging his scythe as we approached, set it carefully aside when he saw Nasim. And Anna came down and, yes, she remembered Sarah -- she's adored Sarah from the first time she met her, six years ago now, when Sarah was breast-feeding Nasim in the car while Lukasz and the priest and I talked to the oldest woman in Wislok Wielki, Anna having been, then, I suppose, the second oldest woman -- but no, she shook her head when she looked at me, she didn't remember me at all. Of course, Sarah can speak Polish to her, and I can't; and Sarah says Anna is terribly lonely, just needs someone to talk to, and Sarah gives her lots and lots of attention.

Which is at least partly why, from the first time we met her, I've wondered if Anna's claims to remember my grandmother's family and where they lived are, in fact, true. Or if she's only humoring us so that we'll stick around a little longer ... ? Nasim, knowing I don't understand Polish and maybe sensing my frustration at not being able to catch what was being said, whispered in my ear, "She keeps saying the same thing." Maybe just an addled, lonely old woman. She asked if we wanted to see the Bakisae family lands; she directed us first down an unfamiliar side road, pointing out plots of land and even one old wooden house, still standing, places we'd never seen before, saying that one family member lived here, and another there, and oh they owned a lot of land, my grandmother's father was a kind of "chief" of the village. I was getting skeptical, then, until she led us back to that same field we've visited a half-dozen times, the first place she told us was my grandmother's family's land, a big open meadow next to the river, where we've had our ritual picnic each of my three previous visits to Wislok. Maybe I'm just choosing to believe it's" our land," because I'm already in love with it; but maybe it's true. Standing there in the road, I had the strongest sense that my grandmother had been there, in that meadow, that it had been her meadow, and she wanted it back. And no sooner had that last thought crossed my mind, than Anna turned to me, gestured toward the meadow, said something that Sarah translated as, "She says you should buy the land." It's not privately owned now, which means it's owned by the government, which means one could try to reclaim it, if one could figure out how that's done. But all I could do, at that moment, was turn again to face the meadow and the hillside that rises behind it -- "That's your hill, too," Anna said -- and hope that no one saw that I was crying, though no one would have minded, I know.

Then we drove Anna, as always, to the church, climbed up to the cemetery so she could kneel at her husband's grave and sob. He's been dead since 1995, which seems not that long ago to me, but Sarah says it must seem like an eternity to Anna, who seems so alone. Her husband was taken away during the war, she's told us, and forced to work in Germany; when he came back after the year, he was "removed" with other Lemks, and imprisoned for five years. Anna's keening reminded me of the way my godfather, my great-uncle Paul, keens sometimes, saying, "Oh honey, life is hard, life is hard." Sarah held her for a few minutes. Nasim and I walked on; Nasim was marveling at all the snails on the path; I was noticing how many small graves, children's graves, were in the cemetery. Thinking that we've lost count, again and again, of how many children my grandmother buried. I also noticed that Anna had a key on a cord worn around her neck, and remembered my father telling me that his grandmother, Justyna, wore such a key, and never took it off. He suspected it opened the trunk where she hid her "hootch." I asked him once if his stepfather had been an alcoholic, and he looked at me and shook his head and said, "Oh honey, it was the only way they could get through a day."

After we dropped Anna off, we went back to the priest's house and tried again. This time, the priest -- sporting a two-day beard, a cardigan and rubber slippers -- came around from the side of the house said, Dzproszem, and motioned for us to follow him. Not into the house, as it turned out, but up the hill, in the rain, to the church. He remembered who we were; he's been in touch with Lukasz's father, saying he had some picture he wanted me to see -- a poster that Michal would give me later, of a painting of the Madonna and Child from the Wislok church, with a bullet hole in the center. So we hurried to keep up with him.

Poor Sarah, trying to translate while the priest talked non-stop and I wanted to know every word he said. And Nasim, though she surely must have been bored by then, just kept reading the book she'd found in the backseat of the car. The priest was showing us the church, how he'd recently had the original wooden facade restored, so it would look like it had looked fifty years ago, before the wood had been removed and replaced by some kind of aluminum siding. (To "modernize" or erase the past, or both?) The interior walls, also wood, have been painted and repainted, I'd guess, over the 150 years the church has stood on this small, steep hill. The wooden domes are orthodox, eastern; the white bell tower in front of the church seems more catholic, and more recent. The whole effect is somewhat confused ... eastern and western icons, etc.. -- and even the priest is confused. White ribbons hung like streamers from one point in the ceiling -- a point at the top bar of a set of bars on a window in a painting of the Virgin Mother surrounded by the apostles, Mary with one hand on the head of a bizarre-looking statue with a man's face, woman's breasts, a dog's body -- and attached to different points on the walls, giving a May Pole (i.e. distinctly pagan) effect. The only explanation the priest offered was that the local schoolchildren had made the ribbons ...

A woman came into the church at that point, needing the priest for something, so he left us alone there for a while. When he came back, again talking almost non-stop, he led Sarah and I up a ladder into a loft, which he's made into a kind of museum. On one wall hung traditional garments brought back by some Lemks -- my grandmother's tribe --who'd gone to Ukraine during the purges. On the other side of the loft, there were the few documents of village business he'd been able to preserve -- things he'd found in the attic. He told us that when the communists had come into power after the war, they'd burned almost all the local records. One document he'd preserved was a reprimand of a local Jewish man, Fisela Wrobla, who'd been selling alcohol illegally. A word that looked like a Polish equivalent of "prohibition" was written at the bottom of the document. The priest laughed and said "Al Capone!"

I was surprised to hear there had been Jewish families in Wislok. The priest shrugged -- "Here as everywhere in Poland." So Gypsies, Jews, Lemks and Ukrainians had lived together in Wislok, along with a few -- "not many" -- ethnic Poles, who followed the pope, then as now, the Roman Catholic church. As best I could understand, since there was only one church in this village, everyone worshipped here together, thus the mix of iconography. The priest told us that, between the two world wars, the Lemki -- who were the majority here, I think -- were shifting from Greek Catholic ("Orthodox") to Ukrainian Orthodox, changing faith. I assume this coincided with the Ukrainian separatist movement Lukasz has told me about, when Ukrainian fighters in the mountains recruited Lemks, who spoke a Ukrainian dialect, to their cause. It was after that rebellion was put down that the purges began.

There were 4,500 people living here before WWII and "Operation Wisla" in 1945 -- the forced removals -- mostly Lemks and Gypsies and Jews and Ukrainians, and the few "ethnic" Poles; and now there are 250, including five of the "old families" who returned after Stalin's death. The whole history of the place seems complicated and dark; there's much that's simply not known, and may never be known. It seems to me the whole village was "disappeared," much like my disappearing grandmother. Disappearances inside of disappearances inside of vanishings ...

The priest wants to put me in touch with some other Americans who've been to Wislok recently, searching for their "roots." I get the distinct sense that he thinks, together, we might be able to reconstruct some of the history of this village. There's also a priest in a Slovakian village who might know more, and there's a Lemk community in the nearby town of Comancze, which wasn't purged, and an old woman in the next village ...

But this was enough for one afternoon. My feet, in my thin, wet boots, were numb from the cold, and I could tell that Sarah was exhausted, and Nasim, bless her, was finally getting a little restless. It was twilight by the time we left the church, and Wislok Wielki, and started the long drive back to Rzepnik.

May 19-20, 2005 1:15 a.m. (Rzepnik)

Maybe a story of disappearances, what's disappeared, and who, and do I have a right to call anyone back, to try to call anything into existence again? My grandmother disappearing, disappearing all her life, then her life disappearing, too. This whole country disappearing behind the iron curtain before I was born. The whole village of Wislok Wielki "disappeared" just after the war, Operation Wisla. Even the priest doesn't know where they went, the thousands of houses that stood there, gone. And how people seem to look at me here, now I've come, as if I've appeared from some future or some past and maybe they're glad I have, maybe I have work to do. But it may be written on water, too, the story I'm trying to tell. May disappear as it's being told, as it's being written, seems to go on and on like a river, and a river never turns back. Now I can hear all the streams moving swiftly, some night bird calling, invisible.

Sarah and I took part in a crazy reading in Krosno this evening, in the new "salon artysteka" of the public library. A beautiful room full of beautiful sculptures, reached by passing through the usual dismal passageways, always a surprise, these interiors, which I think of as metaphors for the inner life, how the inner life has been protected here. But the discussion after the reading degenerated into some kind of battle about local arts-politics, and it went on and on until I thought my head was going to explode. It terrifies me now when I hear people talk about "patriotism," about "national identity." Don't they remember the Nazis? I thought there was something on the brink of real madness, real insanity, in that room. What was that gorgeous 94-year-old woman trying to say about going to heaven? What was Michal trying to say about toilet brushes? What was anyone? And why didn't Wacek or Jan put a stop to it? Afterwards a bunch of us went to a cafe on the main square, sat downstairs in the cellar, eating and drinking and smoking and talking, laughing about it all, until the rooms around that room where we sat went dark, and we knew it was time to go.

May 20-21, 2005 12:30 a.m. (Rzepnik)

Last night, after what had seemed like an eternity of rain and mud, the sky cleared and the temperature dropped.

Sarah lit a fire in the big room, so it was warm when we all fell asleep.

This morning, I woke to hear Sarah and Lukasz talking, Lukasz packaging seeds somewhere in the vicinity of my bed. I rolled over and went back to sleep. He was gone when I finally got up, and Sarah was having a much-needed, much-deserved lie-in. So I made my coffee quietly.

After she got up, we had a whole morning and afternoon to ourselves here in Rzepnik, blessedly peaceful. Sarah made us the most delicious slow-cooked porridge for breakfast. There was time to talk and listen to music and time for me to take a nice vigorous invigorating walk up the hill. The sun even peeked out from time to time, so we ate our lunch on the bench outside, in front of the house.

Later, we went to see The House -- the house Sarah and Lukasz are building on a hillside just down the road, in a spot overlooking forest and valley, facing a big dip of a meadow, like a bow full of wildflowers. How to describe this? How to describe anything? It's A House. Sarah and I climbed the gravel road up the hill and there it was. Lukasz salvaged the wood from an old Jewish Inn; thick rough beams he's caulking by hand with moss and a mixture of mud and sawdust. The local carpenter they've hired -- "You're born to do something," he says, "You have to do what you love, then you'll do it well" -- was putting in the wooden frames around windows. He proudly showed us the beautiful front door he'd made, embedded with brass studs, a magical door. A magical house with a peaked red roof, like a Chinese pagoda. Everything will be made by hand, and with love.

Early evening, after Sarah and I returned from a trip to Krosno, we picked Lukasz up at The House to bring him home for dinner. We agreed he looked incredibly handsome. And when we came home, and were unloading the groceries and getting the front door open, we told him so. And he told us we both looked incredibly beautiful, too. None of us knew why this was true. I said maybe it was because we were all so happy that it wasn't raining. And then Lukasz turned, with a Lukasz look in his eyes, and said, "The world is strangely transparent!" And Sarah and I cracked up.

But he was right. I went into the house and decided to immediately take the wet laundry out to the clothesline in the meadow. And when I opened the door, I called to Sarah, "Come and look at this light!" It was suddenly golden, transparent, every tree lit up; the church on the other side of the meadow gleaming behind the scaffolding. I ran up toward the high end of the meadow with the laundry in my arms, saying, "Look, look!" Sarah was laughing behind me, "Yes the laundry line is the place to be right now." It hangs between some trees at the edge of a little ridge, a stream running just below. And this strange, transparent golden light was filtering through everything. I could almost hear it, it sounded like chimes. I hung up my pyjamas and my pyjamas glowed. I hung up Lukasz's socks and Sarah's underwear, too, and thought all our garments were becoming magical. In the morning everything will smell like sunlight and fresh air and the green meadow. And then we'll get to put that light, the whole meadow, onto our bodies. How will we not be even more beautiful then?

I was so happy that I took a big hot bubble bath, burning a stick of incense and reading Sappho while I soaked. Then I was so happy that I did some of the washing up at the kitchen sink, while Sarah prepared some beautiful salads. We cleared everything off of the table but the flowers and the food, opened the good bottle of wine we'd picked up in Krosno, and celebrated being here, on this strange earth, at this kitchen table, together. I love knowing that I will know these people for the rest of my life. I love knowing that, in a few minutes, I'm going to tiptoe in to my bed in the big room, next to my friends' bed, next to the fire. Lukasz said he's going to dream about cutting the grass. Sarah and I may both dream of the horses we'll be riding tomorrow, across our beloved Carpathian meadows.

May 21, 2005 1:30 p.m. (Pole Surowniczna -- "a sacred place" for Sarah)

Yesterday, the sun came out long enough for me to take a walk up the hill in Rzepnik. I looked down one muddy lane, curving into the woods, wildflowers blooming in the grass, and I thought of my father; I suddenly felt his presence there. He comes back to me sometimes like this; I can feel the weight of his voice in the air; I feel I can feel -- more than hear -- him speaking to me. This was the first time in more than a year.

This morning Sarah and I drove to Lipowiec, to the stables owned by Lukasz's friend, Pan Kusnierz. Sarah chose a short-legged, stout, sturdy looking horse called "Professor," because she hadn't ridden in 20 years, but I wanted a view, so I insisted on the long-legged Fanaberia. Too late when I realized that, of course, "Western" saddles aren't used in Poland, even on trail rides, so we would be riding "English." Too late to confess I'd never been in an English saddle in my life, until I'd mounted the horse. And Fanaberia -- whose name means something like "flighty" -- keeps wanting to dip her head for water, grass, a passing low branch. And the first time we all broke into a trot, I thought I'd fly right off of her back. Sarah called out instructions about holding on with my knees, rising in the saddle in rhythm with the horse's gait. And what should have taken days or weeks or months to learn suddenly felt as natural to me as walking with my own feet on the earth, as flying, if I happened to be a bird. Or a little bit of both.

Between heaven and earth. All morning we've ridden across high meadows full of wildflowers, over the mountains, through Jaslisko, Posada Jasliska, to Polany Surowiczne, laughing Magda on her long-legged horse in the lead, the drunken Polish guy -- who was already one-eyed, red-faced drunk when we arrived at the stables before 10 a.m. -- bringing up the rear of our little entourage, though he keeps wanting to gallop his horse. "It's a horse, not a machine," Magda tells him, and shakes her head.

So at mid-day we've come to Pole Surowniczna, gathered around the bonfire; the bottle of vodka and a single shot glass are being passed around; kielbasa is roasting over the flames. Across the pasture, we can see the wooden lodge where Sarah and Lukasz were stranded by a rainstorm for several days on their very first "date." Our horses are rolling around in the mud, cooling off. The "last cowboy in Poland" has tuned his guitar and is singing a song about whisky and beer. I've said "no thanks" to "drippings" on bread, but yes to a shot of vodka, so as not to be "unsocial," as Pan Kusnierz said, and I've stuck two pieces of Kielbasa on the end of my skewer and am waiting for them to get crisp.

I've been thinking again how impossible this is, how magical, that I'm here at all. I've been thinking about Pawel, the Bulgarian man I met in Basel ten years ago, the first person I ever talked to who'd ever actually been to the Carpathians. And he'd only passed through, on a train in the middle of a thunderstorm late at night. He told me he didn't believe in ghosts, but that the landscape seemed truly haunted to him. And maybe it is. Full of ghosts and absences. On the road to the stables this morning, little chapels where Lemk houses once stood.

Everything disappears. Nothing disappears.

May 21-22, 2005; 1:30 a.m. (Rzepnik)

Riding back in magic light, at a high trot across the high meadows, gold beneath us -- the golden fields -- and gold above. The whole gold-green world.

Thinking this: did she ever exist? There is no record of my grandmother's birth or baptism, or of any of her marriages. No record of immigration. No record of her death or where she was buried, or what name she was buried with. Did she ever even exist? How completely a woman, her whole story, her whole history was erased.

And thinking this: how I had to come back here, to the Carpathians, to catch up with my own soul. How I felt it fly back into my body here, after a season of grief, last spring. How I'd been terrified of losing some love I'd never really had. How I'd mistaken that terror for love, brutality for strength. How close I came myself to allowing myself to be erased.

Today, I peed in a patch of marsh marigolds and then washed my hands in the river, so clear and cold it stung.

And after we'd led the horses, bareback, back into their stalls, Pan Kusnierz -- we could be related, the name is like "Kushner" when said out loud -- stared at me hard and nodded his head, saying, yes, we should go to the Kermesz in Olchowiec. Saying the mass would be sung in Ukrainian; saying, "Your grandmother prayed this way."

This is the way my grandmother prayed.

I stood in the back of the old wooden church, next to Justyna and Marya. Squares of gold and green and red and blue light shone through the stained glass windows, fell across the Madonna and Child. A simple painting; perfect squares. From the front of the little church, near the altar, deep sweet voices rose. Singly, in chorus, then singly again, and the voice of the priest from behind the altar which makes him invisible also rose. Dark notes; the human voice. Not "angelic" but full of earth. Sarah says the sound is "horizontal," the notes coming straight at your body. More solemn than holy. More holy than sacrosanct. The priest shaking the rope of golden bells.

I stepped outside and climbed the hillside, green, of graves to the very top. The child's grave in the topmost corner there; no stone, just a plain wooden cross. And paper narcissus everywhere; white paper narcissus on long, slender stems growing in bunches, wild, like clouds.

Down in the meadow, around the bonfire, sparks flying up against the full moon, I stood among friends, a conversation going on in four languages -- English, Polish, German, French -- and only four of us standing there.

And then in the room where the dancing finally began, the Lemks from L'vov with their gold and their silver teeth were singing and clapping and stomping their feet. Gabriel said to me, "You see, it's the old people who know how to have a good time."

Sarah danced in a crowd of the young and I sat on a bench against the wall with the gypsy mother, just to be near her, just because I was glad she was there. This year, she was wearing a sheer yellow scarf on her head, a glittering emerald green vest, a black skirt with gold threads woven in, a white apron embroidered with flowers, even gold socks. She's as astoundingly beautiful as ever; her face is brown; her eyes are blue. She muttered to me -- in what language? -- I nodded my head and said "tak" and she shrugged, then laughed and lit a cigarette. I gave her the little ashtray that Andrew gave me, that I've carried for years in my purse, because I wanted to give her something and she loved how it clicked when it opened and closed.

We drove back to Rzepnik at midnight, moonlight on everything, silver milk. How the world shines and shines in its mystery. How I'll never be lost again.

May 22, 2005 (Sunday, Rzepnik)

Mud is the price we pay for these flowers.

In spite of the warm bath with salts I took before going to bed, in spite of the fact that I somehow miraculously wasn't sore after all day on horseback and my baptism-by-fire of learning to ride English (or would that be "Polish?") in the first fifteen minutes on Fanaberia (and why did I choose a horse whose name means "Flighty" anyway?), and the shots of vodka at the mid-day bonfire and the beer I spilt half of at the Kermesz, I wasn't able to sleep much and woke almost as soon as the sunlight came streaming into the seed room this morning, a Sunday morning in the Carpathians so beautiful that it was breaking my heart to be leaving even before I had my coffee.

So I had my coffee outside on the bench while Sarah and Lukasz came to -- which involved Lemki music played loud enough that I could hear it, too, which added to the heartache. And then everyone was arriving for mass at the church across the meadow, the tone-deaf bells were clanging and Sarah was saying, "Stay one more day," and I was packing and feeling like singing and crying at the same time.

And there was Kaszyk in his Sunday best at the end of the driveway, waving hello. "Dobre," I said, and got into the car. And then we were flying to Krosno.

And at the bus station, Lukasz ran to buy my ticket and Sarah and I ran to the shop for a roll. And standing in line at the till, I grabbed Sarah and said, "I love you," but what I meant was, "Thank you," but what I meant was, "I love you." And an old lady cut in front of us to buy some vegetables. And then we were chasing my bus to Krakow across the parking lot. And then standing there kissing, the three of us, and then waving and blowing kisses as the bus pulled out of the parking lot.

It was a long, hot, lurching ride to Krakow, then I panicked a little, finding the train to J-S, a train I'd never taken before, to the station nearest Maczki, where Jozef would be picking me up. And the train was packed, but I found a seat in a compartment with a lot of young people -- better that one than the compartment occupied only by one man sprawled out across half the seats, who looked -- and smelled -- as if he'd been sleeping there for days -- and two of my seatmates, who spoke some English, assured me that I was on the right train. And when we stopped at Jaworzno Szcakowa -- I was crying over my book -- they let me know this was the place and helped me get my suitcase down from the rack.

But the quai at Jaworzno Szcakowa was mostly deserted, no sign of Jozef, and it turned out to be one of those stations that doesn't look like the end of the world, but like 20 years after the end of the world. Grim and deserted and where was Jozef and was this the right place, after all, and where was a telephone, at least? Finally, after dragging my bags downstairs into a tunnel and back up again into the street, I found a man who spoke no English but was able to point me toward the "kasa" -- a dark room where a middle-aged woman sat behind a ticket window and two men with bruised and battered faces -- one had a black eye so black and blue it was swollen shut -- were staggering around, finally settling on one of the benches. Lukasz told me that the unemployment rate in Poland is "officially" at least 20%, and actually much higher, as anyone with a garden is considered a "farmer" and not counted among the unemployed, so what a lot of these guys seem to do is drink and fight and drink some more and while I'm sympathetic I wasn't relishing spending the night there with them on the bench. And my phone card didn't work in the pay phone and my cell phone battery was dead and the woman at the ticket window couldn't understand a word I said. So I did what any Woloch woman would do: I got Dramatic. I wept. And the woman at the counter relented and let me slip my cell phone adaptor through the ticket window and plugged it in so I could make a call. Which didn't go through. But a few minutes later a young woman walked into the station and the pani at the counter asked her to please speak to me in English and this woman called Jozef's cell phone from her cell phone and found out he was stuck at a railroad crossing waiting for a very long train to pass and he would be here any minute. And then he was.

So I spent a lovely evening in the garden of the house at Mazcki, with Cecylia and Jozef and Karolina's grandmother and two of Cecylia and Jozef's friends, their friend Ewa doing all the translating, and eating and drinking and admiring the flowers.

In the morning, Jozef will put me on a train in Sosnowiecz and I should be in Warsaw by noon, which is going to seem restful, I think, after all the excitement of the past week.

May 23-25, 2005 (Warsaw)

Last days in Warsaw, at least for a while.

Monday evening, I took bus #117 to visit Irena. We were moving down ulica Madeleinskiego when the bus lurched to a stop. Blue lights flashing, police. A body in the street covered with a black plastic sheet. No one else even flinched, it seemed to me. Sixty years ago, there were makeshift graves on the sidewalks, in public gardens, in alleyways. The horror of what we get used to, I guess. The bus lurched forward again.

Irena made dinner -- a salad and spinach with eggs from a chicken she "knows very well." We talked and talked and talked and drank white wine and I missed the bus back. So she put me into a taxi, telling the sullen driver to take good care of her friend.

On Tuesday, I wrote in "my" cafe --"Do you have enough light?" "Is the music too loud?" I ran into Zofia in the hallway, coming out of the elevator, and she gasped. Later, she brought me another pair of earrings before she went out.

I stood in the kitchen talking to Krzstyof, who told me more about Operation Wisla, the secret assassinations, who would have wanted my grandmother dead? He suggests I find someone to help me do research and Richard agrees and I think I have. We talked about psychological torture, the kinds of tactics the Soviets used -- moving mountain people to the plains, and those from the plains to the mountains, in order to break their bonds with the land, in order to invert the ancient hierarchies, making the weakest among them the "chiefs," setting people against one another so they'd never rise up together against their oppressors. Die in misery. And many have.

On Wednesday evening, Irena took me to Aurora -- a club owned by some of her friends who also publish philosophy books. Really, it's a compound of clubs and cafes, all in industrial-type temporary buildings in an open courtyard that will be a subway station some day, as soon as the road authority gets around to building it. ("But that's at least 10 years away," Anna shrugged.) It reminded me of downtown L.A. We ate in "the garden," which means at a long wooden table outside, in the open space. Then Irena and I had a drink in another of the clubs, where flamenco was being played. She carries her little dog Mishka everywhere she goes, sets her down, lifts her up with one hand. Everyone thinks the dog is adorable, wants to pet her, but Mishka growls.

May 26, 2005 (Warsaw)

Who would have wanted her dead, and why?

Evil exists and it often prevails. The bullies, the tyrants, the murderers win. That's what I've been learning all this past year that I didn't want to know.

Thursday: Corpus Christi. A quiet, quiet day because it's a holy day all over Poland. "Body of Christ." The few people out in the streets carry bouquets of flowers and are dressed in their Sunday best. All the shops and cafes and businesses are closed. The streets are empty and hushed. I notice a shrine has been erected on the sidewalk on ulica Poznanska. I'm on my way to Sergio for a final massage, "something special" involving honey that will take two hours. Later, walking home, I'll hear the priest's voice chanting, echoing; see the procession moving away down a side street. I think I was in Krakow last year on this holiday; I remember watching such a procession from the window of my hotel room there.

"Do you feel like a queen yet?" Sergio asked. "Do you feel like Cleopatra?" And I had to laugh and say that I did. He was lifting the honey from my skin with the palms of his cupped hands -- "to bring up the blood, get the toxins out." And it left my skin feeling like silk. Quite a feat, given the Carpathian rash that's been plaguing me for a week.

Krzyszytof arrived while I was sitting on the stoop outside of Richard's building, trying to write down some of the things that the three of us had been talking about a few days before. He brought me a cd of Polish music. We went upstairs and opened the white wine and sat on stools in the kitchen and talked, Richard perched on the edge of the counter. An intense conversation that continued over dinner at the Mexican place -- one of the few places open; American-owned, of course. We talked about politics and history and justice and love and power. I was feeling a little tipsy. I've been feeling a little overwhelmed.

There are times when I understand completely -- or almost completely, because there's so much I haven't been told, so much that I don't know -- why my mother always says that her father never wanted to go back to Poland, kissed the earth of America. And not because the restaurants never close. But because the sense of its terrible history is so close to the surface here. I keep thinking about that body in the street I saw from the bus. And what I read in one of Richard's books, about the makeshift graves for soldiers all over the sidewalks of Warsaw during the war.

After dinner, we walked through the warm spring night to the park near the American embassy, to see the exhibition displayed on the fence. Posters of heroes and heroines of the Polish resistance, the underground, imprisoned or murdered after the war. But why, why, why I kept asking Krzys and Richard; these were people who'd fought the Nazis, the Germans, and the Nazi's had lost? Because new tyrants came into power. Because these were people who loved freedom, who were dangerous and brave. Knew how to hide in the woods, how to make bombs, were willing to fight for what they believed. Some were killed in prison. Some were released after Stalin's death, "showing signs of mental illness." Some were assassinated in America by agents of the KGB. I said I thought these posters should be on billboards, looking down at us in the streets.

In 1949, in Detroit, who might have wanted my grandmother dead? Or why might she have wanted to kill herself? I've always thought it was just her hard life, the children lost, her poor choice of husbands -- the last "the Russian," all we know of him -- but now I'm not so sure.

We walked back to ulica Piekna. I kissed Krzysztof goodbye. I wouldn't want any life but this life. And I want her story told.

To the Carpathians...

2005-05-25T23:24:00.000-07:00

May 15, 2005 (Sunday)

Last night -- my last evening in Warsaw before heading south and east for a while -- I sat on the floor in Richard's flat, in a circle of students and teachers and friends who'd come to hear me read some poems, and to eat and drink and talk. And I tired to explain what I'm doing here, why I've come back to Poland again and again.

I keep thinking about what might have been different if this city hadn't been bombed into rubble, if it hadn't been rebuilt under communism to look more like a prison than a place where people gathered to live; if you could do some kind of time-lapse projection, how it looked then and how it might have evolved had those disasters never occurred, how might Warsaw look now?

This morning the classical station woke me very gently: music and light; Richard stepping quietly from the room. And I washed, had my coffee, and packed. Then we walked to the station; I got on the train.

In Krakow, Sarah appeared on the quai, as she always appears, wearing something bright, striding toward me, looking a little surprised, as if she's found someone she thought was lost. We drank coffee, we shopped and talked, we flew through the streets -- filled with tourists now, bright umbrellas over the tables of sidewalk cafes, little girls in communion dresses slipping down the narrow streets off the market square. We ate at the first place I ever ate in Krakow, the cafeteria called "Chimera;" had big plates of salads and spinach tort and aubergine and thick slices of bread.

In the evening, we had a wild mini-bus ride from Krakow to Krosno, the two of us dozing side by side because keeping our eyes open would have made the trip too terrifying. When I opened my eyes again, it was dusk. Sarah said she'd thought she'd heard me saying, "Oh, god," in my sleep, but I think it was her. Mist rising up from the fields, from the road.

Lukaz and Nasim met us with the car at the Krosno bus station, full of stories of their Sunday. Lukasz had had to spend the whole day judging a local beauty pageant for 14-year olds, interviewing them about ecology, listening to what they had to say about recycling. "It was HORRIBLE," he proclaimed, "It was so ABSURD." We laughed and Nasim joined in, because she likes being in on the jokes, whether she understands them or not.

Stopped at a garage for coffee and chocolate, then drove the dark, muddy roads to Rzepnik. There are some tulips blooming in front of the house and some night bird has just called from the blackness. No stars.

So I've had my wine, I'll have my bath. My bed's been made and Nasim's gone to sleep, her rabbit back in its cage in her room. So here I am again, whatever this means: the Carpathians.

May 16, 2005 (Monday)

"What you've just eaten," Lukasz announced -- after I'd salted the thin brown broth, broken the clump of noodles with my spoon until they were soft; after I'd eaten it all and dipped my bread -- "was soup made from an organic rabbit."

"No," I said, "I don't eat rabbits!" (Nasim's pet bunny was right in the next room.)

Sarah laughed and corrected me: "No, you don't LIKE to eat rabbits. But you already have." She was standing over the woodstove, cooking up something else for herself: vegetables and noodles and 'chips.' "Something spicy and strange," she said, "You can write about it in your blog." I tried some of that, too.

"I didn't tell you before," Lukasz said, "because I didn't want to alarm you." He knew I wouldn't have eaten it. I'd seen the raw joint in the pot all day but thought I was safe with broth. He brought the meat to the table later, sat there gnawing the rabbit's haunch. What the hell, I had lemon cake, too, which Nasim had insisted be baked for me. And a glass of our "Rzepnik blend:" Lukas's homemade wine mixed with the wine from Bulgaria; the one too sweet, the other too sour. From the only three glasses, we drank.

May 17, 2005 (Tuesday)

The first time I stirred this morning, I could have sworn the sun was shining. I closed my eyes again and rolled over. An hour later, I really woke, finally.

My bed is in "the big room" of the Rzepnik house, but I still think of it as "the seed room," because that's what it was a few springs ago, when Lukasz used the space to dry and sort wildflower seeds, and my bed was in the far corner, away from the door. This year the room is full of the wooden frames of the windows for the new house that's being built, on a hillside a few minutes away; and my bed and Sarah's and Lukasz's bed are side by side, separated by a low table that holds the candles by which I read at night, after they're asleep -- after I've sat in a kitchen chair in the doorway at the front of the house, under the eaves, just out of the rain, writing in my journal and having my last cigarette of the day.

Their bed was already empty, of course, when I woke. And the house was quiet. And it was pouring outside.

Nasim had gone to school, Lukasz had gone off on errands, and Sarah was in the kitchen, at the table, a scarf wrapped around her neck, grading the English compositions of her Polish students. I could tell by the warmth that the woodstove was going, and I waved to Sarah on my way to the bathroom, knowing she'd have coffee on the stove by the time I emerged again. Maybe it's the wood fire, maybe it's the little espresso pot, but coffee made in this kitchen tastes better to me than coffee anywhere else on earth. I took my mug and headed back toward the seed room. But Sarah burst into peals of laughter just then, and she knows I can't resist. I had to go back and find out what it was about. Something to do with badgers that I can't really explain here, something about the king of the badgers ...

I opened the curtain over Sarah's desk in the seed room. It hasn't stopped raining in forever -- so says Sarah, so says Lukasz -- and outside everything looked green green green and drenched drenched drenched. I remembered once, from this same window, watching birds play on the tin roof of the bus stop shelter, which is just at the end of the Luczaj's driveway. It looked to me as if the birds were using the roof as a water slide, sliding down the little gullies to the edge of the roof and then, whoop, lifting off into flight. This morning I think it was too wet even for the birds.

I was on my second cup of coffee when Lukasz came home, dripping, loudly bemoaning "this Carpathian rain." "The potatoes are all going to rot because of this rain," he said. "Potatoes HATE this rain!"

But some time around mid-morning, the rain stopped. I stepped out the door and the air smelled freshly-washed, felt soft, so I decided to go for a walk before the rain started again. A nice misty walk, I thought. But it turned out to be a sparkly walk, instead. By the time I was five minutes up the road, walking uphill, the sun had come out and everything was glittering: a breeze blowing drops of rain from the trees overhead in little crystal showers into the puddles, almost invisible drops of shine plink-plinking and splashing back up again; streams running glassy and brown and so hard that they made a sound like waterfalls; dandelions and buttercups poking out of the high grass at the side of the road. I walked all the way up to the next bus stop, where the road levels out, and then beyond, where the road becomes a dirt road again. From the top of the hill, I could look out over the fields and the woods, see smoke rising from the chimneys of the farmhouses in the valley. A bird -- what is that bird with the broad blue stripe mid-wing? -- flew right past my head. That made me so stupidly happy that I did a little dance, right there in the middle of the road. Then I raced all the way back down the hill.

Sarah practiced her violin while I stretched, then she got lunch going -- curry and cous-cous and salad, no rabbits. Nasim got off the bus in front of the house at 12:30, though we hadn't expected her until 2 p.m., as she usually stays after school for a special "dancing class" on Tuesdays. But she "just didn't feel like it" today. I asked her about the teacher, and the dances, and whether she got to wear a tutu when they performed. She looked at me as if Id lost my mind, but she's always very patient with adults. "No," she said, "we just wear something that suits. Like, when we did the dance about the cows, we just wore black trousers and white shirts. And all the girls -- well, there's only one boy -- put their hair up like this" -- and she pulled her pigtails into two small loops at the back of her head -- "so they look like cow's ears. Well, not really like cow's ears." I told her I understood, and asked her if she'd do the dance for me, but she explained that, "You need a lot of children for that. Ten children is best." And I wished my grandnieces and grandnephew and nieces and nephews were here to dance.

Sarah and I left for Sanoc right after lunch; she was seeing clients at her office there in the afternoon, and I was going to find a nice cafe to sit in and write. The sun continued to shine, so everyone was out in the streets in town, eating ice cream --us, too. And I found a sweet little place to write for a while, a sidewalk table at a cafe attached to a "decor" boutique. And when it clouded over and got too cold to be outside, I went back to the place where Sarah and I had planned to meet, and discovered a lovely back room there, furnished with antiques, and that's where I was when Sarah found me. "You look happy," she said.

We drove from Sanoc to Krosno in the early eveing and went to see Wacek in his apartment above the pizzeria that's run by his son-in-law. Pizza was brought upstairs to us, and drinks, and we spent a couple of hours hanging out and talking -- exhausting for Sarah, who has to translate everything -- mostly about poetry.

Then we drove home to Rzepnik, and now I'm back in my chair by the front door, listening to the streams running and the frogs singing, loud and green tonight. And Lukasz is inside cooking a worm, but says I can't write about it unless I try some.

In Warsaw

2005-05-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

10 MAY 2005 (Tuesday)

The blind accordion player -- a rather dashing figure, in his black beret and dark glasses -- has packed up for the day. I've just seen him crossing the street in front of Hortex, the old ice cream cafe around the corner from Richard's flat, where I've taken a window table and ordered a cappuccino. It's a breezy, sunny day outside, cool for May, but bright. A half hour ago, I heard the accordionist playing softly -- something slow and melancholy and lovely -- as I walked past the spot where he'd set up, in front of a massive gray-brown building, the ground floor taken up with various shops. I stopped at a kind of take-out window to buy some fruit; the woman behind the glass partition, in a faded flowered apron like the aprons my teta's used to wear, joined me in a pantomime of gestures. I pointed to the bananas, the pears, held up a finger for "just one," and the woman held up one finger in imitation, and repeated the English word "one," and gave me a gap-toothed smile. In the ten years I've been coming here, Warsaw has changed in some surprising ways -- I couldn't, for instance, have gotten a cappuccino for love nor money in this neighborhood ten years ago -- but it still seems full of ghosts.

Sometimes an old woman walks past this window, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. Is it only the wind, or soot in her eyes, or is she crying? This seems to me somehow like the kind of city in which one could cry openly, at any moment.

I arrived yesterday on a Wizzair flight from Paris/Beauvais. It struck me when the plane landed: Warsaw is almost as gray as I've ever seen it, even in May, as if it's made all of ash and poured concrete, but there are splashes of color now. The plane that brought me here was painted fuschia; the shuttle buses on the runway were a bright lime-green. There were even some signs in English. So different from the first time I came here, arrived in Warszawa Centralna and literally didn't know which way to turn to leave the station.

On the shuttle from the plane to the gate, an overly-talkative Asian woman -- she'd been smiling at everyone all day, chatting with whoever would speak English with her -- was having her photograph taken with a little Polish boy. She was wearing pink suede boots. This woman who'd been on my nerves all day -- she'd even smiled at me, as if recognizing someone she knew, as if surprised and pleased -- suddenly seemed a kind of emblem of how Warsaw is now.

And I realized that one of the reasons Poland fascinated and mystified me as a child was that it really had, in some way, ceased to exist. The "old country" my older relations spoke of in whispers had, in fact, been erased -- or at least sealed off, made into a kind of prison for the Poles who lived within its borders. That's why it seems like a miracle to be here now. And maybe why some kind of drabness clings to it still, a kind of shadow of all those years.

Krzysztof Krzysztof (yes, his real name) met me at the gate and we took a cab to Richard's flat. He's Richard's new best friend; a 25-year-old sculptor and the son of a sculptor. He delivered me to Richard and Richard sent him off to catch his train to the country, which was leaving at 8 p.m., with a sandwich he'd packed for him. I took a good, long hot bath, read the note taped to the bathroom mirror about kindness and happiness. This is Richard's world: people take care of one another without fanfare, without hovering, without any ulterior motives about control. The kind of world in which I prefer to live.

Richard had made an appointment for me, as usual, to have a massage with Sergio, the Russian sailor. So I walked the few blocks down Poznanska, climbed the stairs to the flat Sergio shares with his mother, got on the table in the back room. His antique swords were hanging on the walls; 1950's American rock-n-roll playing on the radio while Sergio kneaded my back, cracked my spine, positioned and re-positioned me on the table until I could barely move on my own.

Later in the evening, Zofia came downstairs from the flat she shares with her mother above Richard's flat, as glamorous as ever in her bangles and spangles, that Cleopatra eyeliner only she could pull off, her hair pulled back severely so that all the angles of her face -- tragic, beautiful, ruined and not ruined -- are shown off to most effect. I'm hoping to age like that, though Zofia's glamour is an old world glamour that's probably taken a life time to achieve. No, I thought, looking at her: not old-world glamour but the glamour of a lost world. She's insisted on lending me a warmer coat than the one I brought with me from Paris, but it hangs on me like a grown woman's coat on a little girl, as if I don't have the stature or the posture to wear it properly.

Zofia and Richard and I walked down ulica Piekna to a little cafe. No tango, alas, but there will be other opportunities; there are opportunities for tango in Warsaw almost every night of the week. So I had a salad, a glass of wine, and Richard and Zofia had coffee. Zofia doesn't speak English and I don't speak Polish and so our common language is French, and so my French gets more of a workout here than it does in Paris. But Zofia's French is spoken with the dark, trilling r's of an eastern European accent. And sometimes I don't understand and sometimes I get confused about where I am, which language I should be speaking. I tried speaking French with the waitress and she stared at me blankly and, for a minute, I couldn't understand why she couldn't understand.

And now my cappucino's come and I know I can sit here for hours, if I want, staring out at the gray streetscape framed by the white lace curtains of Hortex, the pretty blonde waitress discretely guarding my privacy and my solitude, because she can see that I'm writing, or trying to write.

I never know what I'm doing here, exactly, but here I am.

11 MAY (Wednesday)

Yesterday, in the early evening, Richard sat across from me in the Czech restaurant just off Constitution Place -- "Which constitution," I asked, "when?" -- telling me about food shortages during the 1980's, during martial law, created by the Soviets to punish the Poles for their rebellion. "Everyone looked so white in the winter," he said, "Everyone's face was so pale, because of lack of vitamins." People were living on potatoes and cabbage, then, and what they grew in their little summer gardens and could preserve for the cold months. And then one day, he told me, he went home and looked in the mirror and saw his own face and saw that he looked just like the people he saw everywhere. And is it my imagination or do I see that pallor, still, on so many of the faces I see? Then, "Look!" Richard said. A group of young musicians in bright costumes was passing in front of the window; the girls in bright embroidered blouses and skirts; the boys in long cream-colored coats. "Beautiful," I agreed. And then our salads came, overflowing their bowls.

I'd spent the day writing in a cafe, taking a break in the late afternoon to go to see an exhibition of "kitsch" with Richard -- some of the art clearly made with ironic intent; some of it simply assemblages of the kinds of stuff my teta's used to decorate their houses with.
The middle-aged Polish "guardians" of the gallery -- what do they think of this stuff, of the giant posters of sex kittens and the socialist-realist portraits of Stalin and Reagan? -- asked us to write something about the exhibition in the book before we left, and we gladly obliged.

Last night, we went to tango night at the Artists' Club, Zofia's gold high heels in the bag Richard carried as we ran for the tram. A dim, smoky room on an upper floor, where couples danced around a sculpture of a nude woman kneeling on a kitchen chair ("So kitsch," Zofia despaired) and an old artist -- this is their club, after all -- obviously drunk, stumbled in and tried to chat up the young girls. Two men were dancing together, too, in the most dignified way, one teaching the other the steps. And Zofia filled me in on the local gossip as we watched, and we laughed and misunderstood one another's French.

Today, again, I spent the day writing in a cafe, then met Irena in the evening at Bacio for wine and a light supper. She had the magical chihuahua with her, as always -- her furry little Mishka, who sat quietly on her own chair next to her mistress while we talked. Irena's French is much better than her English, and much better than my French, so we spoke in a combination of languages, confusing the pregnant waitress, who addressed us sometimes in Polish and sometimes in English. It surprises me, how many people in Poland speak English now (suddenly?), and it surprised Irena that we could hear so many different languages being spoken around us in the restaurant -- Polish, English, German (which, I'm sorry, startles and frightens me, given the history of this place).

Irena told me about the writing project that will take her to Crimea next year -- a new book about where those people go when they get off the bus in the middle of nowhere and disappear into the countryside. And she offered me the use of her Warsaw apartment while she's away, because she wants me to write the book I want to write, and believes I need to write it in Poland. "But really, Cecilia," she whispered across the table, "I think your real place is in the Carpathians." And then she told me that maybe it sounded crazy, but she thought I should try to buy land there. And I told her, in fact, I'd already been thinking of that, but how? And then the "why" of it suddenly occurred to me: that maybe I want to own that land in Wislok Wielke because it was taken away from my grandmother? All the hair on my arms stood up. And I told Irena that I felt my grandmother had been lost, and had been calling to me all these years. But how to find her, how to tell her story, reconstruct from what I know and don't know the life of a woman who died before I was born? I don't know if I can do it. "But you can, Cecilia," Irena said, "You've already begun."

I walked with her down Marzalkowska to her tram stop, Mishka tucked under her arm. As she turned to cross the street, as we were kissing each other goodbye, she asked me if I knew the way home? And I laughed and said, Yes, but did SHE know the way home? After all, she'd told me she still needed a map to find her way around Warsaw. And she laughed and said, "Yes!" And then, suddenly serious, she stopped and said, "But the question is, really, do we know where 'home' really is?" She was standing there in the darkness, touching her hand to her chest, my friend.

14 MAY (Saturday)

I've found a new cafe around the corner from Richard's flat -- actually it's in the front section of the same huge building that contains Richard's and Zofia's flats. It's run by a dark-eyed, pixie-ish Italian woman, who speaks excellent English, as does her young Polish staff. There's a beautiful, quiet backroom that I've had all to myself every afternoon since Thursday, when I discovered it; a big leather sofa and a table on which to spread out my stuff. They bring me lattes and ask me if they need to turn the music down. The mirror on the opposite wall reflects the big window behind me, which is shaded by a big chestnut tree. Yesterday I came early and wanted something like breakfast. My latte was accompanied by a family-size bowl of sliced fresh fruit, and a "croissant' that turned out to be filled with raisins and cream.

Thursday afternoon I took a break for a few hours and went with Richard to the Tadeusz Kantor exhibition. In the evening we went to a tango "milonga" in a lovely circular salon inside the Palac Kultury. The Palac Kutury is the truly hideous structure that's come to define Warsaw's skyline. It was a "gift" (the Poles laugh) from Stalin after the war, completed in 1955. It kind of looks like a huge, overwrought, absurd wedding cake,surrounded by those frightening and immense "socialist-realist" statues, and I think it was considered an eyesore and an abomination for many years. Maybe it still is. But the Poles have made it their own. Now there are cinemas within its walls, a gymnasium, these tango nights in the circular salon. I met the lovely Luiza there, who's one of Richard's young English students and a tango instructor. She has this idea for combining a poetry reading with a tango milonga, and of course I'm game.

The Palac Kuultury was the first thing I saw, the first time I came to Warsaw and emerged from Centralna Station, ten years ago. I keep thinking about how much has changed here in those ten years, and how much is still the same. I noticed that the old woman selling flowers under the archway that leads from Ulica Piekna ("Pretty Street") to the Marzalkowski -- the big avenue that runs into Constitution Place --was wearing bright orange lipstick the other day, and smiling. She looked quite the coquette, in her babushka, smoking a cigarette, all those tulips in buckets at her feet. Warsaw definitely seems less grim these days, and less dangerous than it did just a few years ago, when I was robbed on the bus from the airport to the train station by one of those "Russian mafia" gangs. Richard tells me there's now a police officer on that bus, and the police on foot in the streets have also made a big difference in lowering the rate of petty crime. Still, everyone has three or four locks on their doors; and most of the facades are a sooty gray.

Ten years ago, when I first met Richard -- he was standing on the platform at Centralna when my train from Berlin pulled in: a tall, thin, striking man with a dancer's erect and graceful posture, a shaved head, a bouquet of flowers in his hands -- he was living in a two-room flat on ulica Chlodna, the street that had run through the old Warsaw ghetto. That spring -- my second time in Poland -- I was with a poet friend from the U.S., Dorraine. Dorraine had arranged for an old friend of hers, Christopher, to show us around Warsaw. Christopher was an actor who'd been a television star in Poland as a child, had then spent several decades in California pursuing an acting career -- that's where he and Dorraine met -- and then returned to Warsaw after the fall of communism. Richard was Christopher's friend, an American artist who'd slipped into Poland at the beginning of martial law and never left. When I asked him why, he told me it was because he thought that Poland, in the early 1980's, was where the most exciting art in the world was being made. So he'd stayed through the food shortages, the demonstrations, the curfews, the whole revolution -- although at first he knew no one, spoke no Polish.

Funny, that I've since lost touch with Dorraine, and Richard has lost touch with Christopher, but our friendship, our connection, has held fast. For a number of years, when I returned to Warsaw, I stayed in Richard's flat on ulica Chlodna. And I always felt comfortable there, and at home, in spite of the fact that the flat was in one of those monstrous soviet "blocs," frightening even to enter -- I'd feel like I felt entering the prison where I once led poetry workshops, each door slamming and re-locking behind me as I made my way inside the labyrinth. The flat was two, small narrow rooms, and the room I slept in had a window that looked out on a deserted square. It was desolate out there, bleak and probably dangerous, but Richard's flat was a haven -- as, I've found, the interiors of so many Polish apartments are, as if the inner life is secret, sacred, protected, but also there to be shared, and very generously shared. Richard's generosity always makes me want to be a better person myself. During the food shortages, he gave away his ration coupons. Since the first time we met, I've always had an open invitation to stay with him in Warsaw. When I arrive, he's always put in a store of coffee, purchased my weekly tram ticket in advance, laid out a map and directions to all the places I need to go, organized a poetry reading for me and invited his many artist and dancer friends.

A few years ago, Richard moved into the flat in Zofia's building on ulica Piekna. It's huge, high-ceilinged, old-world, light-filled, and the big front room is "mine" while I'm there. The wood parquet floors are worn and there's almost no furniture, and that suits my aesthetic just fine. Richard goes about his business -- he tutors privately and also teaches English to Polish business executives --- and I go about mine, though always with the sense that I'm being looked after from a little distance. As if I have a guardian angel. And I suppose I do.

On Friday evening, Richard and Zofia and I went to a milango on the "plac" near ulica Chlodna, his old neighborhood. I was amazed at how the place had been transformed -- it's a big, gleaming plaza now, surrounded by office towers, restaurants and cafes. I remembered the first time I crossed ulica Chlodna with Richard, and he told me that the tram tracks I was stepping over were the same tracks that ran through the Warsaw ghetto and that, during the war, the trams had their windows painted black so no one could see out, no one could see in, as the trams passed through the ghetto.

I'd spent most of the day Friday, again, working at this cafe, then had taken a walk in the early evening to the park at the end of ulica Piekna. The flowerbeds were full of creamy pink tulips; the play area was full of children; couples strolled hand in hand along the paths and over the little footbridge, or sat together in the shade on the benches. I noticed that more of these couples were middle-aged or elderly than young. One old man, alone, simply stood in the middle of one of the wide paths, looking around and smiling. He had big leather mittens on his hands, in spite of the warmth. I wondered why. I wondered if he was old enough to remember this city being bombed into rubble by the Germans. Probably so. But that generation is dying out slowly, as generations do, and I wonder if the rest of us forget too easily. I've been reading Bruno Bettleheim's essays about evil and thuggery, about the degradation of the soul, the self, that leads to an acceptance of evil, about the necessity of fighting to hold a moral center.

This is the weekend of the "Juvenalia" in Poland -- a celebration of and for and by the young, and so university students are everywhere in the streets, in a festive mood, and the weather is cooperating -- the sun is shining, it's breezy and bright. Richard and I were walking back from the train station earlier this afternoon when a parade came rolling down Marzalkowska, young people standing on makeshift floats, waving their arms in the air and singing, "Let the sun shine, let the sunshine in." I was crying by the time we walked into the Bulgarian wine shop. But no one seemed to be at all surprised or bothered by that, and I couldn't have explained why I was crying, anyway.

Where Was I?

2005-05-08T13:12:00.000-07:00

May 7, 2005

Someone has suggested that maybe I add an "itinerary" link to my blog so that those who need to know will know where I can be found. Now why didn't I think of that myself?

Last time I blogged, I think, was just before I relinquished the laptop once again to the service center, packed my things and left the apartment on rue des Guillemites and took the EuroStar to London for a long weekend. Spring had just come on like gangbusters -- every cafe terrace in Paris packed with people drinking and flirting and smiling, and I'd gotten my hair done and gotten the surprise kiss worth a thousand beauty treatments and, well, no wonder I've been in a blur, a fog of blossoms ...

The weather stayed gorgeous most of the weekend in London, too, and Jill and I took long walks across the heath, hung out in her latest (her last, she swears) "dream house" in Hampstead, went to an amazing exhibit of photos by Lee Miller at the National Portrait Gallery, then had lunch in the rooftop restaurant, then walked out into Trafalgar Square and the middle of a big May Day anti-fascism rally ... Also had a long, delicious Indian dinner with Bob at the Bombay Bicycle Cafe, a lively political discussion, lots of laughing, catching up with what's happened in one another's lives in the past year ... And I also had a chance to see Milica before I left, at a pub near her office in Camden Town, and to hear about the work she's doing in eastern Europe and the Caucasus, working with "vulnerable populations" -- especially gypsies -- to help them learn to use the media to counter racism and hate crime. I told her about the book I've been reading called Stalking the Soul: Emotional Abuse and the Erosion of Identity, and she told me about a website called BlueEyed that addresses the same core issue: what do we do about the bully mentality of those who seek, and too often gain, domination over others? More about "the dark book" soon ... But read it now, if that title strikes the kind of chord with you that it struck with me.

London looks prettier and more prosperous than I've ever seen it, but even a short trip in the underground leaves one sooty and ready for "the disgusting hour," as Michele Q. so famously called it, or at least a good long soak in the bathtub ...

Back in Paris on Tuesday evening, I settled in for a few days chez Adrian in the third arrondissment, a slightly different rhythm from the Marais but a lively, wonderful neighborhood. Once I finally retrieved the laptop, I was determined to tackle the backlog of work. But after a frustrating and not-all-that-productive morning and afternoon on Saturday, I decided to at least get out of the apartment to do some errands. And I walked out of Adrian's door, turned onto the rue de Bretagne and found myself in the midst of the weekend market ... Within five minutes I was feeling light as a feather, struck dumb with that pure happiness about being in Paris that comes over me when I'm here. I bought cheese for Poland at the fromagerie, and wine, and some DVD's of French films (with subtitles, so that I can keep up with my language "studies") from a sidewalk vendor who advised me to go "little by little," and come back every weekend for some new films.

Then I walked down rue Vielle du Temple to the Marais, all the way down to rue de Rivoli -- I sometimes feel as if I need turn signals to negotiate the sidewalks here, but a simple "pardon, pardon" always works just fine. I got to the cell phone store just before it closed, got my mobile phone set up for Poland, breezed past Franck Provost and waved to Michael, strolled to the tabac at Chatelet and bought their last three packs of American Spirits, the same drunk clochard always out in front, begging for change from passersby. And walking back down Rivoli, I saw those pink shoes again -- the pair I've stared at a hundred times in the past few months. When I'd passed by that shop with Christine last week, she'd asked why I hadn't bought them yet. And my horoscope that morning had asked the same thing: Why haven't you bought those shoes? So I went in, only to find they no longer had my size. The sales girl looked at me askance and said, "You don't have to think so much." She called their other store a few blocks away and sent me flying in that direction. Yes, they had my size. Yes, I adore them, yes, I'll take them, I said. Little pink satin strappy things that will be perfect for dancing this summer, I think.

Later, I met Sonia and Shakil and Christine for dinner at the Grizzli -- great wine and food and a rowdy tri-lingual conversation, then hand-made ice cream. Walking home at midnight, I thought again of how lucky I am to be here, to be living this life, still feeling ridiculously happy, the streets and cafes still bustling ...

It's been said before and there's probably no way to say it better or more emphatically, but the sense of a shared life here, the sense of vitality and community one feels just walking in the streets, is what makes Paris so different from any city in America. This is what Jenny H. (she looks gorgeous in cyberspace!) was trying to tell me on Wednesday night -- really Thursday morning at about 2 a.m. -- while we sat at a little table in L'Etoile Manquante sipping vin chaud, facing the sidewalk still full of pedestrians, a couple of friends waving to us as they passed. This is what we lack in America, where we've given up sidewalks and one another's company for cars and stripmalls, where we've made ourselves lonely and politically impotent because we have no sense of how we're all in this together. Of course I agreed with Jenny whole-heartedly, though I keep wishing it were different, that I could see some light at the end of the tunnel ...

We'd had dinner earlier with her parents, who were in Paris as part of their first trip outside the U.S. So I finally got to meet Jenny's mom, who's an old high school friend of my old friend Betty, which is how I met Jenny in the first place, almost ten years ago now. I think her parents have been flabbergasted for years about their daughter's adventuresome spirit, her desire to live abroad and make photographs and poems. But seeing her here, in her element, speaking perfect French and flirting with the waiter, patiently translating the entire menu for her dad, sparkling in the way only Jenny can sparkle ... Well, her mom grinned across the table and said, "Can you believe that's my kid?" She's come a long way from the Pennsylvania suburb she called, at thirteen, "a stagnant pool of desperation." I think they understand her better, now and I think they'll be back to visit her here. They even encouraged her to visit Poland with me. Jenny said, "Only Cecilia could get my parents to TELL me to go to Poland."

So tomorrow, Monday, I'll fly to Warsaw. Richard has written me that someone named Viktor will meet me at the airport; that Sergio will give me a massage; that another friend will bake the Camembert with raspberries; that we'll have a poetry salon in his flat one evening. And he's set up some school visits for me there, and I hope there'll be some tango, too -- yes, the pink shoes will do perfectly.

Gypsy

2005-04-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

April 26, 2005

I walked into the boulangerie Garcia this morning, on my way up rue Vielle du Temple to Adrian's, and found myself in a line of people extending out the door of the tiny bakery, most picking up their baguettes for lunch, though I was there for my usual breakfast pain complet with nuts and raisins and apricots. Got a big smile and "Bonjour, Madame!" from the proprietress, which added to my already growing sense of reluctance to leave Paris ... It's just so good to be here every day, it just feels so unfailingly good to be here, where I can walk alone at night, unafraid, see the moon shining over Notre Dame, the lights glittering on the Seine ... Where I can strike up intelligent conversations with strangers, run into friends on the street also out on errands, or sitting in cafes ... W here I can get pretty much anywhere I want to go on foot or by public transportation -- and I've just heard that gas in the U.S. is up to $3 a gallon, while people continue to drive SUV's and Bush kisses the cheeks (ass cheeks?) of Saudi princes ... Where I can even smoke a cigarette, if I want to, and where the streets are regularly packed with demonstrators for one "manifestation" or another, and not herded into "free speech" cages, as they are in "the land of the free, home of the brave." As someone said the other day, "How can America EXPORT democracy when it doesn't HAVE democracy anymore?" Oh la la.

So I've been soaking up as much of the city as I can, knowing that I'll be sur la route again in another week. Yesterday afternoon, I got an ice cream cone from the place on the corner and sat in the little park at the end of rue des Guillemites, watching a well-dressed French grandmother playing ping pong with her grandson, and some pigeons diving into the trash bin for pieces of a discarded sandwich. I'd been to see my doctor in the 17th, and it's always a pleasure to see her. One gets a half hour or hour of the doctor's attention during medical visits here, and since I'd only needed some prescriptions refilled, I got to spend a little time chatting with Julia about the adorable shoes she was wearing. Then I picked up three months worth of prescriptions -- which would have cost a few hundred dollars in the U.S., and for which I paid a total of 11 euros (about $15). I stopped in at the neighborhood travel agency and booked a ticket on the EuroStar for London, pleased that I was able to accomplish the whole transaction in French. In the evening, Adrian came by and we walked the rest of the way together from the Marais to Shakespeare & Co. bookshop, where we joined a crouching-room-only crowd for a presentation by Leonard Pitt, author of Paris Disparu. The beautiful Sylvia, who runs the place now, was flitting around with that puppy in her arms, the almost-comparably beautiful golden lab that she swears she's not going to keep. But she kept kissing the puppy's head as she greeted clients and rang up sales, and the puppy kept licking Sylvia's cheek, her perfect, translucent English Rose face. Wherever Sylvia goes in Paris, people stop her to kiss her hello; everyone seems thrilled and delighted just that she exists. And she's brought so much new energy and vitality to Shakespeare & Co., running the bookstore and numerous weekly events and taking care of her father, too. George is in his 90's now, but still a presence, with his lanky frame and long white hair. As Adrian and Kim and I were leaving the bookstore at dusk, George was standing in the doorway that leads from the square in front of Shakespeare & Co. down into the basement, surrounded by a group of young people lighting birthday candles. For a minute, we thought it might be a birthday celebration, and we stopped so that we could help sing the birthday song. But no, it was just the beginning of an expedition into the bookstore's bowels, to see what treasures might be down there still ...

Kim and Adrian and I walked up the hill toward the Pantheon and went into one of Adrian's favorite restaurants, Les Fetes Galantes, for dinner -- a cozy little candlelit room with pink tablecloths and an entire wall tastefully decorated with lacy lingerie, especially brassieres in various sizes. Naturally, there was a couple seated at another table who knew Adrian. Naturally, the owner's son brought a complementary kir for each of us almost the moment we sat down. Naturally, the food was elegant, simple, delicious, and not expensive. There was even a vegetarian dish for Kim. And then there were profiterolles for dessert. At the end of our meal, the proprietor/chef, the handsome "Bibi," came out of the kitchen to see how we'd enjoyed ourselves, to try to offer us champagne -- we had no more room, so he poured it instead for some other women at a nearby table --and to flirt and philosophize. He kept saying that it's such a small time in each of our lives that we're really happy, and I kept insisting, no, my happiness is very, very big these days ...

It's like I was saying to Adrian this afternoon ... In a few weeks, I'll be in the Carpathians, sleeping in what I still think of as "the seed room" of Sarah and Lukasz's place in Rzepnik, then hanging out in the meadow with Nasim, while Lukasz walks around in his underwear with his coffee cup in hand, greeting the wildflowers he so adores, while Sarah cooks lunch on the woodstove ... And then I'll be on a train again ... And then I'll be sipping brandy with Tom and Cathy -- whom I've known since Tom was my professor at Transy 30 years ago -- on their elegant garden terrace overlooking Zurich. I love these extremes. I love my life, I told Adrian. And she said, "You really ARE a gypsy, you know."

We'll always have Paris...

2005-04-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

April 25, 2005

The workshop poets gave a final reading on Friday evening at Polly Magoo's, upstairs and next to the backgammon room. Everyone read beautifully and the audience, by all reports, was "blown away" by the quality of the poems. Even the French barmaid was listening attentively, and asked if she could buy me a drink afterwards. Jenny H. brought a bouquet of lilacs and Jen D. brought books. Even Sarah's old flame, Christophe, came. I was surprised, though I shouldn't have been, by his handsomeness. Similar to Lukasz's handsomeness. That man-standing-out-in- a-meadow-in-his-underwear kind of good looks. Christophe, for his part, was surprised by Sarah's performance -- "comme les autres!" he said. Later, a big group of us went to Zenyama for sushi and beer and etcetera. Then some of us walked back to the right bank across the Ile St. Louis. A warm spring night. So I treated Eve and myself to a midnight ice cream cone from Bertillon. When we strolled up rue Vielle du Temple, we saw Jen D. and Steven sitting at a sidewalk table in front of l'Etoile Manquette. Stopped to chat with them for a while. Then I turned the corner into rue "Saint Cross of the Buttonerie" and headed home to bed.

On Saturday, everyone -- but everyone -- who'd been involved with the workshop all week slept until noon. (Don't ask how I know.) A gorgeous, breezy, sunny afternoon. I got all my laundry done and hung it to dry (bad me!) on the balcony. In the evening, Jen D. and Steven and Elizabeth and I dined on the terrace of the Grizzli cafe. Amazing duck (!) spring rolls and salad with toasted camembert and a tartin of monkfish and aubergines and dried tomatoes that was to die for -- French food again, at last, after lots of meals at places where American vegetarians could also dine ... Then Jen and Steven and I metro'd to the 18th for the big soiree at chez Carolyn. Carolyn was dressed as a nurse (not a bunny!) and her apartment was packed with cute French boys, as promised. I borrowed one of her feather boas -- the electric blue one -- and invented a new dance with Jenny H involving jelly-lizard castagnets and predatory moth-like motions. Home in a taxi at 2 a.m.

Sunday was rainy, and Steven and Nancy and I met Lisa at her lovely home on the villa des Tulipes -- a sweet little cobblestone alley strewn with wisteria -- for tea. Then we all opened our parapluies and headed for the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt. We ooh'ed and aah'ed and drooled over lots of lovely antquities, but ultimately my only purchase was a bright red t-shirt emblazoned with the golden arches and the word "McShit," though I tried on a lot of little silk dresses, too. For Steven and Nancy's last Paris meal, we went to le Coude Fou.

I'll miss being surrounded by all these poet friends here. It seems we're all dispersing now for the summer. The workshop participants have almost all returned to the US by now; Lisa is heading off for a few months in Canada; I'm getting ready to head to London for a long weekend, then off to Poland and etc ... But we'll always have Paris, as the saying goes. More soon ...

Crazy, busy & exhilarating

2005-04-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

April 22, 2005 1 a.m.

Just back from a rowdy evening at Cafe les Philosophes with Sarah Luczaj and Christine, Herzer, who asked me please to start blogging again, if only for their sake, so I promised I would start immediately ...

I'm back in the Marais, having left chez Poilloux in Aflortville mid-April, and taken up residence again at rue des Guillemites. Les Philosophes is right around the corner and serves late every night and has wonderful food and adorable waiters. We managed to decide all at once what we wanted to eat, though we'd started by wanting almost everything on the menu ... three salades des Utopistes and a plate of haricots verts and a plate of pommes sautee to share. Absolutely perfect. On our plates was everything our hearts desired, including beets and chevre chaud. I insisted that Sarah and Christine go downstairs to check out the existentialist toilettes. Both chose the mirror inscribed, "J'ai conscience," instead of the mirror that reads, "Je doute." That's the kind of mood we were in. And when a sweet little mouse -- definitely not a rat -- came scurrying out of the kitchen, running around the cafe, poking in and out of its hiding places, snitching crumbs off the floor, the whole place was laughing, enchanted. Our waiter looked at us giggling and announced, "Me, I'm afraid!" Then he got a broom and dustpan and started sweeping up the crumbs. Out on the sidewalk at midnight, I was kissing my friends goodnight when I felt something squishy under my boot. Uh-oh. But when I looked down, it wasn't dog poop but whipped cream. Only in Paris ...

It's been a crazy, busy, exhilarating week here, with the third Paris Poetry workshop in full swing. I think most of the participants are averaging three or four new poems a day -- amazing poems. And our afternoons at Rose The ("tay," as in tea) with the local literati have been stimulating and productive, too (and the tarte citronelle and berry crumbles --"croomble" in French -- too delicious to resist.) When it turned out that Jim Hall couldn't make it to Paris for the workshop this year, I asked my poet pals here to pitch in and they rallied in fabulous fashion, helping me to organize the afternoon sessions and evening readings. They've brought tremendous energy to the week of activities, and it seems we've become one big, happy, semi-functional poetry family.

Those of us who didn't spend the day shopping -- I name no names, you know who you are -- spent our "off day" Wednesday listening to Heather Hartley talk about Appollinaire. We trekked out to Pere Lachaise cemetery in the afternoon and gathered around his grave. His tombstone is inscribed with a "concrete" poem: "My heart is a flame turned upside down." Heather read to us, in both English and French, from Appollinaire's work, and then we sat on the graves and ate baguette sandwiches and chocolate. But this offended a guard who came along later and said we should "show some respect." We supposed he meant something more like Catholic solemnity. We left then, even though we vehemently did not agree. (He seemed spoiling for a fight.) Eve told us about building a snowman next to her husband's grave on the 10th anniversary of his death. And I told my friends I WANT them to read poems and eat chocolate on my grave when I'm gone.

There was a reading at WICE on Tuesday evening, hosted by Barbara Beck, and a fabulous reading by Paris poets last night, downstairs in the jazz cellar -- formerly a dungeon -- of le Caveau des Oubliettes. Beautiful, afterwards, to be walking across the Seine at twilight with a happily windblown if slightly chilled group of chattering poets. Tomorrow evening will be the big closing reading by workshop participants at Polly Magoo's. Then we'll all say so long until next year, and I'll have another week in Paris before I'm sur la route again. But now I'd better get some sleep ...

Beaucoup de catching up...

2005-04-11T17:42:00.000-07:00

April 11, 2005
Alfortville, France

Beaucoup de catching up to do, and maybe a little explaining ...

The last week that I spent in Paris before going back to the US for my Easter visit, I was staying in the 15th arrondissment -- a charming place in a charming neighborhood, but alas no land line and no local cyber cafe, so I fell way behind on all things related to cyberspace. It was actually kind of nice, in some ways, to have a vacation from the computer. And I may have another break like that coming up again soon, as the laptop continues to be temperamental and I think she needs to go back to Guillaime for a check-up. But I do want to write about the visit I made to the Shoah memorial as soon as I get caught up here ...

So I got up at the crack of dawn on March 21 and made my way to DeGaulle airport to catch my flight to Cincinnati, only to be told by the Air France agents that I was booked for a flight on the 22nd, and no, there wasn't any space for me on that day's flight. So I called Adrian and she hooted and invited me to come back to Paris and spend the night on her couch. About the umpteenth time she's saved my life in this lifetime. The silver lining was that I had the chance to attend the opening night of Sophie Honeyman's performance on a paniche on the canal St. Martin that evening, "The Dream of the Red Pavilion." Sophie (Ian's wife) is a dancer who practices a (now) rare style of traditional Chinese dance. There was singing, too, and poetry recitation, and lute-playing and all kinds of intricate percussion, and gorgeous costumes and masks. I have this strange kind of luck, after all, because the paniche was packed and Ian was only able to get me a ticket because someone had cancelled at the last minute. And the late night walk back along the canal was lovely, too.

Thus I was able to get a good night's sleep on the couch at Chez Leeds, and made it back to the airport the next morning in plenty of time, in spite of the "greve" that meant most trains weren't running and so the streets were completely snarled, the traffic a mess. But I had a book to read in the shuttle and a pain aux raisins in my coat pocket. And there was still time enough at the airport for one last cafe creme, one last cigarette, before boarding my flight. And then it was smooth sailing all the way.

My brother John picked me up in Cincinnati in his big red truck and drove me out to Bullitt County -- a whole 'nother reality from Paris, but I like moving between these extremes. We picked up John's girls -- Kayleigh and Hannah, ages 11 and 7, respectively -- at their mother's house; they crowded into the cab of the truck between us and we all had a snack of M&M's straight from Hannah's purse. John and I stopped talking politics, at that point, because we were both just getting too depressed. I hadn't realized until I got back to the States what a relief it is not to be confronted with the idiocy and criminality of the Bush administration on a daily basis, to have at least some sense of psychic distance from the sad state of US politics ... Not to mention not having to look at those red, white and blue "W" bumperstickers on the highway.

Then it was on to Mom's, where some of the rest of the clan was waiting -- my brother-in-law David making a sandwich in the kitchen (the bumpersticker on his pick-up says, "George W. Bush is a punk-ass chump"); my niece Rachel and grandniece Chloe curled up on the couch together, taking a nap. Mom was at work until 10 p.m., so we all had a good time sliding around on the new kitchen floor in our stocking feet -- the Woloch version of synchronized swimming, invented one Christmas by my ex-brother-in-law, Jerome (once a Woloch, always a Woloch). I had to give Chloe a bath before I could get in the tub myself, then I sat up talking to Mom for a while after she got home from the Senseless Bureau, and finally passed out about 1 a.m.

I spent most of the week, when I wasn't catching up on paperwork, doing things like playing "Bad Barbies" ("Les Barbies du Mal," as Brendan Constantine says) with Chloe Balou, who is the most brilliant and beautiful 6-year-old in America. She's only in kindergarten, but she reads and writes and uses the internet and counts to a hundred in English and Spanish and puts pepper on her mac-and-cheese. She's also ticked off that she wasn't allowed to vote.

My other grandniece, Paige, had had a terrible accident on her bike the Sunday before I arrived, breaking her wrist and scratching up her face, and we were all terrified that she'd be scarred. But she was already healing beautifully when I saw her. She's a brave little thing, if a bit reckless. She told me, "Oh, I was going way too fast."

On Saturday, I drove to Lexington, because it just so happened that my visit in Kentucky coincided with the annual Kentucky Women Writers Conference. I was a presenter at the conference last year, and it was one of the best times I've ever had, so I knew it would be worth the trip. Besides, Christina Lovin, one of my former students at New England College — irony of ironies — was being presented with an award for a sonnet crown about coal mining she wrote when we worked together. So I got to hear Christina read, and Louise Gluck — who was amazing — and to see a lot of friends, like Jim and Mary Ann Hall, and Rebecca Howell, who puts the whole conference together. And I ran into Beth Ann Fennelly there — a surprise — and my old college pal, Terri Isaacs, who's now the mayor of Lexington and still a hoot. A bunch of us went to Natasha's later to hear The Bats. At first, we were told they didn't have a table, then someone saw T.I. and said, "Oh, but since you're with the MAYOR ..." The Bats are a rock 'n roll version of the L.A. HAGS and they threw pop tarts into the audience and sang about menopause.

Then I got to spend Easter Sunday with my family but, since it was raining, we had to cancel the Easter egg hunt. So I put on a pair of Chloe's bunny ears and hopped around handing out treats. And we all ate way too much chocolate and my nephew Jesse danced like a maniac in front of the t.v. ("Well, at least he's doing something PHYSICAL," Aunt Bobbi said.)

On Thursday, John took me back to Cincinnati and I caught my flight to Paris. Arrived in DeGaulle on a sunny Friday morning, took the RER to Alfortville, unloaded some of my luggage and showered and took the RER back to the Gare de Lyon to catch the TGV to Geneva. Jan picked me up at the station there and whisked me right to Off The Shelf bookstore, where a crowd was already drinking wine and waiting for the reading to start. I wasn't sure I'd be able to speak coherently, at that point, but the reading went well and there was a lively Q&A afterwards and the books sold like hotcakes. Then Jan and her husband John took me to dinner at a brasserie with a couple of their colleagues. Fascinating folks. It seems as if everyone in Geneva is associated with the UN or and NGO or the World Health Organization. So the political discussions are deep and wide and well informed. And everyone, but everyone, is completely bewildered by the rise of the American right wing and the popular support in the US for the Bush administration. What can I tell them?

I stayed with Jan and John that weekend, in their lovely apartment in Nyon — about fifteen minutes outside of Geneva — overlooking the castle and the lake. I led a workshop around their dining room table all day Saturday and most of the day on Sunday. I'd inadvertently left the power cord to my laptop in Alfortville, so when I wasn't teaching I relaxed, walked around the lake with Jan and John, looked at the Roman ruins being excavated, had lovely meals and stimulating conversations. There was a dinner party at their house on Sunday evening, and a lot of talk about the death of the pope and his legacy. The consensus seemed to be that, while he did wonderful things to promote peace, it was a tragedy that his position on contraception did nothing to slow the spread of HIV in Africa.

On Monday morning, I caught the TGV back to Paris, and returned to chez Poilloux in Alfortville. I'm staying here at Pierre's and Isabelle's, temporarily — they're off in Borneo with the children until late May — and it's been a nice little respite this past week. They left clean sheets on the bed for me, and lots of coffee, and sweet notes welcoming me to their home and telling me how everything works. I'm a ten minute RER ride — 20 minutes on the metro — from the center of Paris, and have lots of space to spread out and work, and lots of peace and quiet. I use their third floor apartment mostly for sleeping, and work in the big ground floor room, where the windows look out on the garden and the cherry tree that's in bloom, white blossoms falling on the patio like snow. The tulips are blooming, too. Simon is out there now, kicking around a soccer ball; his dad, Mario, is upstairs in their apartment on the second floor.

I've been going back and forth to Paris most days, for readings and brunches and dinners with friends. Getting some writing done, but also busily making final plans for the third Paris poetry workshop, which begins on Sunday night. Jim Hall's health problems prevented him from coming to Paris this spring for the workshop, but the whole poetry community here has rallied to help me keep the ball rolling. Jennifer Dick and Lisa Pasold and Ellen H. will be leading afternoon sessions, and Sarah Luczaj, who arrives from Poland on Friday afternoon. I'll be moving back into the photojournalist's apartment in the Marais this weekend, and spending two more weeks in Paris before hitting the road to London, Basel, and then on to the Carpathians.

Keeping The Rhythm

2005-03-27T19:35:00.000-08:00

March 22, 2005

Last week I moved from the Marais to the 15th arrondissment, an area around Convention, and settled in temporarily at my friend Louise Thunin's sweet little pied-a-terre. A much more residential neighborhood than the Marais, quieter in some ways, and with a different rhythm -- a more quotidien rhythm, I would say.

One "guards" -- or "keeps" the "rhythm" here. On the metro quai at Concorde there are colorful signs on the pavement reminiscent of those 1950's-style dance-step guides -- footprints showing how to step. They provide instructions -- or is that encouragement? -- on how to let others descend from the train before boarding, how to board, how to disembark, and all the while "keep the rhythm" -- keep moving in the flow of pedestrian traffic. I've gotten better at this, myself, at moving in pace with the crowd, with patience and also with energy.

It's a kind of collaboration, riding the metro. If one is walking through the corridor and hears a train that might be one's train, and if those in front of one begin to run, one also runs -- though sometimes it's a false alarm, wrong train, and the person in front of you turns to apologize for having made the mistake of running, and causing you to also run.

I ran for a train in the metro the other day and when I got to the quai, the train was standing there with the doors just about to close. So I leapt -- literally leapt onto the train -- just as the doors closed behind me. Someone said "brava," and someone whistled under his breath, and we all smiled.

I remember last spring, catching the SNCF train to Colombes with Andrew -- and those trains only run every fifteen minutes, so we were making a last minute dash. I squeezed into the car with Andrew just behind me, but the doors started closing as he tried to get in. The other passengers pushed the doors aside and literally pulled him on board.

I don't know if the idiom exists in French that "we're all in the same boat," but we're all in the same boat here. And I enjoy the company, enjoy being a person among persons, and keeping the rhythm.

It's a ten-minute walk -- much of it uphill -- from the metro at Convention to Louise's pied-a-terre on rue Vaugelas. Along the way, one walks up rue Olivier de Serres. From the first day I took that route, I noticed a beautiful little bar each time I passed, Le Petit Bar. I could see through the big front windows that it was all polished wood and mirrors inside and, at night, all warm light. And somehow it looked so friendly, so welcoming, and the people gathered at the bar so "genial," that I kept wanting to stop in for a drink, though I'm not usually comfortable going into bars alone.

So on Friday night, coming home around midnight, I stopped. I could see from the sidewalk that there was a crowd inside, but when I tried the door, it was locked. A man reached over from his bar stool, cracked the door, and told me "c'est ferme'." But then the bartender, a big platinum blonde waving a cigarette in one hand while she poured drinks with the other, said something to him in a gravelly voice and waved me inside. I stepped into a tiny space -- not any bigger, really, than my kitchen in L.A., and the man who had told me the place was closed immediately moved aside and offered me his barstool.

I felt as if maybe I'd walked into a private party. The bartender asked me what I wanted to drink , asked me my name, poured me a glass of red wine and started introducing me to everyone. The man who'd given me his bar stool told me the bartender, Veronique, was his wife. Then another woman walked up and took the stool beside me, and he introduced her, Katya, as his second wife. Before long, he was introducing me as his third wife. And Veronique was yelling that there were thirsty women at the bar, ordering the men to buy us drinks, opening a bottle of champagne and declaring it la fete des super femmes. She was also demonstrating techniques for applying blue eyeliner and lending her makeup bag to the women -- there were only a few of us -- at the bar. Katya told me that, no, it wasn't a private party, just a Friday night at a place where a lot of friends came to gather. "C'est genial, n'est-ce pas?" she smiled. And I counted myself lucky to be included.

This is the kind of neighborhood where the woman at the boulangerie recognizes you the second morning you come in, knows that you're just getting your breakfast bread at 11 a.m., remembers that you love the warm wheat rolls with raisins and nuts.

I've been reading Jennifer Dick's gorgeous first book of poems, Flourescence, as I've been moving through Paris these past few days. And I've been asking myself what it is about these poems that makes them so perfect for reading on the metro, in line at the post office, sitting in a cafe waiting for a friend. Somehow, though the poems are in English, the book seems to me deeply Parisian. And I've decided it may be their jagged rhythms, their luminescent fragmentedness, mirroring the rhythms and fragmentedness of life in Paris. One is always moving in and out of other lives here, in and out of conversations, celebrations, daily dramas. It's not that one's never alone -- Parisians seem to respect the privacy of the individual more than it's respected elsewhere -- but that one seldom feels isolated from the flow of life.

In the metro, a young man with a large musical instrument case is dashing through the underground corridor, and everyone steps aside to let him pass. Where two corridors converge, a group of Ukrainian musicians has set up to play. People stop to listen, to smile and applaud, maybe even to dance. A woman pushing a baby stroller stops at the top of a flight of stairs, and a passing man reaches over to take hold of the front of the stroller and help her lift it down the steps. And the rhythm is kept.

For The Children

2005-03-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

March 12, 2005

Just a thought: if they're going to make these skirts like the one I saw today in a shop window walking up rue Vielle du Temple toward the rue deBretagne -- a pale pink swirl of a thing, fairytale pink, fitted at the waist and hips and flaring out at the hem, with a sprinkling of beads down the front as if someone had tossed a small handful of tiny stars and they'd stuck there -- well, then, one should really be able to be 25 again, so she could wear it, at least for one week in spring time. Twenty-five, with a credit card this time, and the joie de vivre to wear it with aplomb. And preferably in love.

I'm more than a week behind here, so I'm going to try to do some quick catching up ...

Last Thursday I spent a rainy afternoon lunching with Jeff chez lui. He made us warm carrot soup and a salad with crevettes. His new book proposal has been accepted, so he's off to the US for April and May (alas!) to do research on an environmental ranch in Texas. We talked about our struggles with our work, as we always do, while the two Maltese watched us from their positions on the couch, sprawled out -- as only fluffy 3-pound dogs can sprawl -- and wearing expressions of amused concern. Jeff joked that they were his muses, and I told him he should re-name them "Poetry" and "Prose."

Then, on Friday evening, Jenny Huxta (WHO LOOKS GOOD IN CYBERSPACE!) and I trekked out to Alfortville for dinner chez Poilloux. Isabelle made some wonderful Asian dishes, redolent with cardamom, and Pierre dragged out some old photos of all of us from a decade ago. How young and beautiful we looked in the wind on the cote sauvage! No wonder we fell in love ... And Jenny brought along some of her photos, too -- beautiful images of Paris -- and also took some snaps of the children, especially of Princess Lila, who is not the least bit camera-shy. Isa told us Lila had been waiting for us all day. We played "mirrors" and showed each other dance moves. Lila was amazed -- and so wasPierre -- that I can still do splits. And I was impressed with Lila's natural turn-out, and even more so with Pierre's!

On Saturday, Dagmar and Uschi arrived by train from Basel. We picked up baguettes and had lunch in the apartment, then spent all afternoon walking around. Strolled past the department store La Samaritaine and stopped for a few minutes on the sidewalk to listen to a wacky band playing music that sounded psueudo-gypsy-ish to me. The lead singer/guitarist was wearing a Santa Claus suit and looked to be about 13 years old. Farther down the sidewalk, just at the corner, a clochard was reclining on a ragged blanket, spreading Camembert on a baguette. We walked over the Pont Neuf and finally stopped in a cafe where we got a corner table that gave us a post-card view of Notre Dame. Had big cups of cafe creme while dusk fell and the candles on the tables were lit, happy to be among the people inside, behind the windows, as the wind kicked up and rain started to fall and the people in the streets opened their umbrellas and looked longingly in at us. Later we met Adrian for a drink in the Marais -- she was on her way to a birthday party -- and then went to dinner at La Petite Chaumiere. That night, while I was brushing my teeth, I could hear Dagmar and Uschi giggling and whispering to each other. They were stretched out in their sleeping bags, side by side on the bed -- I made my bed on the couch for the weekend-- and it felt like we were all at sleep-away camp. Especially when they started reciting poems together, and singing songs they remembered from childhood.

Sunday was a day of more strolling and eating and talking -- and a little shopping, too -- and then a late afternoon visit with Brett and Aileen and their little girls at their apartment off the rue Montorgueil. Brett joined Uschi and Dagmar and me for dinner at le Gamin, which was delicious, though we could barely see our food and the place was noisy and crowded and filled with smoke, as always.

On Monday afternoon, I put my friends back on the train at the gare de l'Est, and then the apartment was little too quiet for a while. There's always a little bit of melancholy when houseguests leave, and always a lot of catching up to be done. Just the deluge of e-mail is enough to keep my head spinning, and then there's planning for the Paris Poetry Workshop, and trying to master the subjunctive tense in French, and several essays and poems in-progress, and always someone I'm trying to meet for coffee, if only a mutually convenient time can be found,

Monday evening I held my little weekly workshop, then made my now-perfected omelette fromage and turned in early because I knew that Tuesday would be a late night, an evening of feasting and drinking and probably dancing and singing, too, and telling stories and laughing, and I'd have to do it all in French, subjunctive or no subjunctive. Tuesday evening I took the train from the gare St. Lazare to Colombes -- about a 15-minute trip across the river, outside of the peripherique, and into the banlieue. The train was packed with rush hour commuters, so I stood on the steps leading up to the second level (also packed) and did some people-watching. Maybe it's the bad yellow light in the trains that makes everyone look less attractive than they do in the light of Paris; maybe it's the fact that the less prosperous and glamorous people do tend to live in the banlieue. It's the mirror opposite of the situation in the US, where we talk about "the problems of the inner-city." Here, it's "le probleme des banlieues," because that's where the people who can't afford to live in Paris -- though they may work in Paris -- live. And where crime rates are higher and the streets more bleak and deserted, especially at night. But Colombes is actually rather charming, and Jimi Hendrix played in a bar here once, before anyone had heard of him. And I have another French family, of sorts, in Colombes, glamorous and genial, to my mind, and I was on my way to them ...

I walked from the station to the rue de Progres, and could see the lights of Michele's atelier -- the glass walls and skylights emitting a warm glow into the night sky -- as I walked through the gate at number 30. Michele stood in the garden at the end of the walk, smiling and waving to me, looking, as ever, like some gorgeously-aging French film star -- but which one? I remember when she used to live across the street from me in L.A., when she was just that mysterious, beautiful French woman who lived with my neighbor Dale, and I'd watch her coming and going and wonder how one learned to carry herself like that, as if the whole world were watching but she didn't care, and didn't much mind being watched, either, was perfectly at ease being beautiful, and perfectly self-contained. We didn't really become friends until she moved back to France and I started coming to Paris for long visits in the mid-1990's.

Inside, Michele's equally beautiful sister -- think Isabelle Hubert, but slightly darker, slightly less fragile -- was waiting for me. I'm crazy about this Isabelle, too, who calls me "ma beaute" and sits close enough to me on the couch so that we can smell one another's perfume and hold hands, if we feel like it. Isabelle's little boy, Ian, was hiding behind the couch, ready to jump out and surprise me. I think he was just a bit disappointed that I didn't have Andrew with me this time. He was fascinated with Andrew when we came here for dinner last year, because Andrew spoke English and looked like an American Indian, and maybe also because of the way he danced the funky chicken with me after dinner. That was a ridiculous, wonderful, magical night, as my nights in Colombes always are. Much of the extended family was there, and we were "a table," eating whichever course we'd eaten our way to, and drinking whichever wine was the perfect accompaniment, and laughing and all talking at once. Isabelle was seated next to Andrew, since her English is very good, and Andrewwas telling her a story about the beret he wore as a teenager, and Isabelle was leaning across the table, translating the whole thing into French for me, and this went on for some time before I suddenly said, "Wait a minute! I speak English! I know what he's saying!" And Isabelle said, "Oh, cherie, but we don't want you to lose your French!"

So on Tuesday evening, much of the same crowd was gathered. When I arrived, Alain was in the kitchen doing what Alain does in the kitchen -- magic -- and Alain's daughter Valerie was there with her partner Didier, who's maybe the funniest man I've ever met, though the other Didier gives him a run for hismoney -- this second Didier being the husband of Alain's ex-wife Chantal, who was also there, along with Alain and Chantal's daughter, Claire, who's an extraordinary 19-year-old (and a wonderful poet) just back from three months teaching children in Vietnam. And Valerie's and Didier's new baby, Julian, was asleep in a basket in the bedroom -- we went in to peek and coo at him -- and there was Ian, of course, who wears little blue spectacles now, which make him look very "distingue" for a seven-year-old, and who gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "eating like a child." "J'adore l'urchin," he said, so I tried some, too; and "J'adore le foie gras," so I thought, What the heck, this is France. "J'adore les escargots," when they appeared from the kitchen on a huge platter with the fish, but Michele knows me well and smiled and brought me a plate sans snails. We were eating as they do in Marseilles, Alain told us, with copious amounts of the same delicious white wine we'd had on Wednesday at LeCoude Fou, and some wonderful earthy vin rouge with the cheese course -- a cheese from every region of France -- and then champagne with Michele's home-made tarte aux pommes.

After the meal, there was music, as usual -- Delta blues and gypsy music and even some "musique du Rap," for Claire -- and we danced. When everyone else had left and Alain had gone upstairs to bed, Michele and Isabele and Ian and I danced for another hour or so. I decided to try to do every move Ian did. I think we were spinning on our heads at 2 a.m. Then we cleared the table, swept up the shards of the one broken wine glass, and I went to sleep in the garden room that's always reserved for me when I come to Colombes. In the morning, I woke to birdsong and made coffee before anyone else came downstairs. Michele and Isabelle and I shared a cigarette in the garden, and Ian kept asking me to stay so that we could have some petite dejeuner together, but it was already noon and I needed to catch a train back to Paris.

In the afternoon, I met Lisa Pasold for tea in a charming place at the far end (from me) of rue des Rosiers, then had my French lesson with Corine at Le Boucheron, then came back to the apartment and collapsed.

Thursday was a day for buckling down and catching up on work. In the evening, I met Susannah -- an undergraduate writing student from USC, here for her semester abroad -- at le Boucheron for a glass of wine and salad.

Friday was another work day, all day, then in the evening there was a concert by my friend Ian Honeyman -- a tenor who would be singing Schumann and accompanying himself on pianoforte at the Anglican Church in the 8th arrondissment -- to benefit an organization in the UK that buys motorized wheelchairs for disabled kids. I wanted to make sure there was a good audience, so I sent the invitation out to my list and invited some friends to meet me here for an aperitif beforehand. There were seven women gathered in my living room drinking kir and eating olives -- Isabelle (of Pierre and Isabelle), Louise Thunin (up from LeMans), Adrian, Lisa, Eva, and Jenny Huxta (WHO LOOKS REALLY GOOD IN CYBERSPACE). And we managed to be only a few minutes late for the concert. Afterwards, we all went to a brasserie near the Madeleine for wine and a late, light supper.

Which brings me back to today, which is Saturday, and that lovely pink skirt in the shop window on rue Vielle du Temple. I was on my way to an appointment in rue Picardie and was about to take my usual shortcut to the rue de Bretagne by turning left onto the tiny rue Debelleyme. But there was a big crowd gathered in the middle of rue Debelleyme, and police on motorcycles at either end of the street, and -- thinking it was maybe an accident and not wanting to get too close -- I took the long way around instead. But on my way home again, an hour later, my curiosity got the best of me. I looked down rue Debelleyme from rue de Bretagne and saw that the street was deserted now. I also saw a huge bouquet of flowers on the sidewalk where the crowd had been. So I walked down the rue Debelleyme and found myself in front of a school, reading a bronze plaque on the facade -- the sconces beside the plaque held more fresh flowers -- dedicating the building to the 11,000 children of Paris who were deported by the Nazis, with the collaboration of the Vichy government, and sent to their deaths in the camps. The plaque said, "We must remember." I stood there and tried to imagine it. Tried to imagine the kind of men who could send thousands of children -- just like the four-year-olds I see holding hands, following their teachers into the Ecole Maternelle on the rue des Archives, or like Lila and Antoine, like Ian, like my own nieces and nephews, like children anywhere, everywhere -- to their deaths. I couldn't imagine it, or I didn't want to, butI have to, we all have to. Especially those of us who can't actively remember have to imagine. We have to imagine so that we can be horrified so that we can keep our own compassion alive. Because so many of our leaders so lack imagination, so many of those in power, who have the power to perpetrate these kinds of horrors. And if, as a society, we can't, or won't, protect the children of this world from the mass murderers of this world, I'm not sure we have any right to call ourselves civilized. I'm not even sure we have any right to call ourselves human.

Late this afternoon -- at last -- I met my good friend the poet Ellen Hinsey for tea. We recounted some of our personal horrors of the past few years, and tallied our shattered illusions and wondered how to keep faith in the face of that shattering. Ellen summed it up for both of us very succinctly; she said we somehow have to hold two things in mind simultaneously in order to do our work as poets: we have to be able to look at the horrors of this world and accept the presence of evil and those who perpetrate evil and, at the same time, see the beauty of the world, and bring both that horror and that beauty to our work. So there was that fairytale skirt in the shop window, with its promise of beauty and happiness, and -- just around the corner -- flowers left on the sidewalk by a crowd of Parisians in memory of the children who should have been saved.

Public vs. Private

2005-03-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

March 3, 2005

I've been thinking more and more about this whole notion of a common life, of a "public life" in Paris. Well, to be truthful, I've been thinking about this for years, wondering why more people in the US aren't making the connection between a lack of public space -- a lack of public life -- and the decline of participatory democracy. This first came home to me the first time I was in Prague, in the early 1990's, not long after the "Velvet Revolution" there. I stood in Wenceslaus Square, which had been the site, which had been the site of so many demonstrations, and of the triumph of the people over their totalitarian communist dictators. The day I was there, elderly people were in the square feeding pigeons, young people were listening to boomboxes and smoking and talking, kids were playing, business people on their lunch breaks were eating sandwiches. I thought, of course a revolution started here! Everyone was here, already, out in public, together.

Does the shopping mall in America provide the same kind of space for collective action? Or are people too consumed with consuming to notice what's going on around them? In any case, a shopping mall is PRIVATE space, privately owned by the merchants. When people have tried to stage demonstrations in malls in America, they've been told they don't have the right to demonstrate there because it's "private property." And "private property" in America is so sacrosanct that there's almost no public property left. And where public space still exists, there's no sense of it actually belonging to the public. (Think of the Bush administration's give-aways to mining companies and timber companies in our national parks and forests.) If we were to stage a revolution, where would we stage it? At the Super Walmart? (Where workers are locked in at night to prevent them from avoiding working overtime?)

There's not even any sense that our streets and parks still belong to us. Last year, when I was living in Atlanta near the King memorial, George W. came to town for a fundraising dinner. He wanted to hold a "photo op" at the tomb of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which is part of a NATIONAL PARK in the heart of Black Atlanta. Well, what W told the press was that he wanted to lay a wreath on King's tomb. A sacrilege if I've ever heard of one. But Coretta Scott King didn't see fit to bar W -- in spite of the fact that his administration's policies have gone, and continue to go, against everything that her husband fought and died for. One can't really argue with her open-heartedness and her diplomacy. But the real obscenity was that MARTA (public!) buses were used to create a blockade around the King Center, so that the protestors -- and there were plenty of protestors -- wouldn't be visible to W or to the news cameras. They were "disappeared" behind the very symbol of the beginning of the civil rights movement in America. Karl Rove must have been pissing his pants in glee.

This has proven to be a very effective tactic for the Bush machine: if there's a public protest, the protestors are herded into an area "designated" for demonstrations, well out of the line of sight of television cameras and "public" (let's use the term loosely) officials. It's working, people.

I can't count the number of times over the years that I've found myself in the midst of a massive "manifestation" in the streets of Paris -- or stuck in traffic because the streets had been closed for a demonstration. Oh it can be an inconvenience, but no one seems to mind too much. People have a right to demonstrate, after all, seems to be the attitude; after all, the streets belong to the people. (What a radical concept!) It's just part of life in the city. When there's a "greve," here, a strike by workers that slows down or shuts down public transport, no one bitches about the workers not having a right to strike. Of course they have the right! And the inconvenience caused by the strike seems to serve to remind people how essential those workers are. Et voila. I remember reading in the English-language press, during the big public transport strike of 1996, how astounded American reporters were that the people weren't incensed, even though the country had practically ground to a halt, but instead SUPPORTED the striking workers.

And thus "the people" actually have a voice in how "the system" is run. They have a stake. And there's common ground. But there has to be a shared life, a life in common, and common space in order for that kind of democracy -- the kind we're supposed to have in America, a country founded by revolutionaries -- to work. And I don't think it's working anymore in America.

The other day, a little promotional magazine called "Centre Ville," with news of the 4th arrondissment -- which includes the Marais -- arrived in the mail. It opens with a brief editorial by the "maire" (mayor) of the 4th, a woman named Dominique Bertinotti. In her editorial, she congratulates local residents for having come together to oppose the "museumification" of their neighborhood. She says that, if one wants to live in a living city, dynamic and vibrant, it's necessary that young and old, rich and poor, are able to continue to live there -- try that philosophy out in the vast suburban mausoleums of America -- and for there to be public space, schools, hospitals, etc..., in close proximity and accessible to all.

Even the cafes in Paris, which are privately owned, are regarded as public spaces. You buy a cup of coffee and that table belongs to you for as long as you care to sit there. Last Tuesday evening Heather Hartley and I sat in the cafe des Philosophes until our eyes stung from the smoke. While we talked -- for 2-1/2 hours -- we consumed one beverage each. Of course we were never asked to pay and leave until we were ready to go, and signaled the waiter, and it was only then that I noticed that every other table in the place had filled up with diners.

I sometimes wonder if it has to do with spaces being smaller, here, and tighter; if the necessity of sharing makes for a less selfish populace.

Last Wednesday evening, my dear friends Michele Quence and Alain Doignon came to Paris from Colombes to have dinner with me at le Coude Fou. We had an aperitif here in the apartment and, once we'd caught up on personal news -- Michele will have the first Paris exhibition of her paintings on silk and her pastels beginning March 14 -- the talk turned to politics. Alain doesn't speak any English -- though I suspect he understands more than a little --so he's very indulgent about my French. And normally I find it easier to talk about politics in French than about almost anything else. But when the subject of Bush's "re-election" came up, and the war in Iraq, I literally found myself at a loss for words in any language, and suddenly all conversation stopped. I looked at my friends and said simply, "Je suis desolee." I'm sorry. I'm sorry for my country. "But it's not your fault," Alain said. Then Michele added, "And the whole world is sorry."

Then we shared a beautiful meal, and a truly spectacular bottle of white wine that Alain was delighted to find on the menu. I had a crottin de chevre that I'm still dreaming about; it was like eating warm velvet. Afterwards, we made plans for a "family" dinner in Colombes on Tuesday then kissed each other goodnight in the street.

Talking About America

2005-03-02T16:46:00.000-08:00

Feb. 28, 2005

Qu'est-ce que c'est la difference?

The last day of February, and one might think, hopefully, the last day of wintry weather. But it's still bitterly cold outside at night. One sees a few clochards making camp in the metro with their bottles and bags, sometimes engaging in animated conversation with better-dressed passersby. Others slumped over in the rows of orange plastic seats. But I suspect most of the homeless in Paris are in shelters these cold nights, because, well, the French seem to take care of their own better than we do in America.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes Parisians different from Americans, and why I like Parisians so much, and feel so comfortable among them. This evening I've come to the conclusion that it's at least partly because people aren't in competition with one another here -- for money, for space on the metro, for attention. As a woman here -- even a woman of a certain age, mon dieu -- one gets plenty of flattering attention from waiters and shopkeepers and even from other women. I'm thinking of the old cordonnier who calls me "ma fille" whenever I come into his shoe repair shop. And of the young woman who sold me my little red hat, telling me it would help cure my "grippe" to feel pretty and warm, especially if I added some red lipstick.

This evening, for another example, I went with Adrian and her old friend Debbie Baldwin to a little restaurant in the 11th for dinner. (Adrian and I had planned to have a quiet dinner at her place, but Deb showed up a day early for her date with Adrian, so we decided we'd all go out together.) The restaurant was called La Vache Acrobate, "The Acrobatic Cow." A typically crowded little joint with almost no space between the tiny tables. But when we needed a little more seating room on the bench along the window, the women already occupying the adjacent table cheerfully slid over and moved their coats and bags, laughing and joking and welcoming us. It's the same in the metro: people move aside and make room for one another and also keep their own hands and feet close to their bodies, so as not to trip or grope anyone, or take up more than their share of available space.

Whereas last night Jenny Huxta and I went to Jim Haynes' weekly soiree. I hadn't been in at least five years and Jenny had managed to live in Paris all this time without ever participating in this Sunday evening rite. See, a lot of ex-pats living in Paris get lonely on Sundays, because Sunday is a big family day among the French, a day most people spend at home surrounded by family. And even the French get lonely, if they don't have family nearby. So Jim has been throwing these dinner parties for 20 or 30 years. Good food, bad wine, way too many people -- usually 80 or so -- crowded into his atelier. But jostling and being jostled and balancing a plate on your knee -- that is, if you're lucky enough to find a place to sit -- is half the fun. Jenny and I struck up a three-way bilingual conversation with a Frenchman named Marc, who kept spilling his wine all over himself, but was otherwise really charming. We were happily scrunched into a corner of a kind of built-in couch that runs along two walls, and Jenny and I started making a game of seeing if we could pick out the Americans in the crowd by how much space they were taking up. One woman was sprawled -- actually reclining -- on the other end of the couch, on which she had also set down her plate. This in a room where most others barely had room to stand. When she finished eating and got up, a man took her place and sat with his knees spread wide, hand on his hip and one elbow jutting out so that no one could sit too close, I thought. I thought he seemed a little hostile, a little aggressive in his insistence on his space. Later, I noticed him walking out with a cane and felt like a complete ass for the judgment I'd made -- maybe a disability made it too uncomfortable for him to sit any other way than the way he'd been sitting. At moments like these, I wish I could be a little less "American," myself, a little less quick to judge. And if I were more "French," I might also be a little quicker to forgive myself.

I think there's really just a different attitude toward life here. There's more public space, and people live more in public -- on the streets, in the cafes -- so there seems to be more of a common life, a shared life. At the same time, there's more respect for individuality, and more individuality, period. Maybe it's because the conglometerization and corporatization of France hasn't happened yet. I hope it never does. Deb and Adrian and I were talking tonight about New York City. Adrian said she's never had any particular "feeling" for New York, although she lived there for several years. I agreed that I love my friends there, but don't feel any attraction to the city, itself, don't feel that the city has any particular personality. Then we all started wondering out loud if there was any American city that still had any personality. All the coffee shops and restaurants and stores seem the same, look the same. And the window displays, if there are any window displays, look pretty generic to me.

Here, "window-licking" -- and one does sometimes want to walk right up and lick -- provides a feast for the eyes. One can be almost as satisfied by looking as by posessing the things in the windows. Just the desire they inspire feels delicious. Here in the Marais, the window displays seem to change every few days. I find myself walking past a few favorite shops when I'm out on errands, just to see the new displays. Window-dressing is an art here, as is the making of bread and patisserie. The other afternoon on the rue vielle du Temple, a young woman was standing on the sidewalk in front of a shop, carefully scrutinizing her handiwork -- that flowering branch placed just so between the hand-sewn journals and hand-made paper, between the shiny pens and the brightly-colored pencils, did it provide just the right texture, just the right balance, or could it be even more beautiful? I wanted to stop and thank her. Lucky me, I go about my business and I'm surrounded by beauty, and so often beauty that's been created by individual human hands. It's different, it really is, and it's lovely to live on a human scale, instead of on the scale of the "big box" store.

This also has something to do, I think, with why people look more beautiful to me here -- or at least more interesting. Even the very old. Even the men on the garbage trucks, which look like Tonka toys to me. And it's not that people look "exotic" or foreign to my eyes, but that each one looks exactly like him- or herself, like an individual, and not as if they're trying to look like everyone else, or like the people they see on t.v. Some of this has to do with dress, because it's true that Parisians dress better than we do, and not because they have more disposable income. They just don't all buy their clothes from the same racks in the same big department or discount stores. So a French person may not have the same quantity of clothes that an American has in his or her closet, but the French put them together and wear them with certain panache. How many times this winter have I smiled at a young man in a dark winter coat, a bright lime-green scarf looped around his throat with that certain savoir-faire? And then there's the matter of quality, too.

This morning I walked down the rue de Rivoli in sharp sunlight to meet Corine at le Boucheron. She sat across from me in the smoky cafe in a multi-colored sweater, ribbons of color woven into the dark wool. I had to ask her if I could touch the fabric, to finger the edge of her sleeve. "It's so beautiful," I said. "Yes," she agreed, and named the famous designer and told me the story of how she acquired it: she'd fallen in love with it, but it was "trop cher;" then her sister saw it on sale in London and bought it for her. I told her that, in America, women like me -- and Corine and I are approximately the same age and of approximately the same socio-economic class -- seldom buy designer things. But a Frenchwoman wants le qualite; she may have only two sweaters in her closet, but they're beautiful sweaters.

I thought of the summer day some years ago when I returned to the U.S. from France, and was watching the crowds in the Detroit airport, trying to figure out why these people looked so different from the French. Then I realized they were all wearing their "vacation" clothes, which looked brand-new but cheap, ill-fitting. Corine told me that in France, it used to be that there were only clothing shops for children and for adults. Now there are these chain boutiques that cater to adolescent girls, who crave having a lot of different trendy clothes, and the clothes are cheap. "Ah," I said, "So Americans are like adolescents?" In this, as in so many things. It's been said before, of course: America is a young country, still in the throes of puberty, culturally and historically. And there's a clumsy sweetness in that, and a kind of vitality, but won't it be a relief to leave adolescence behind, if we ever leave it behind?

I met Corine at a dinner party at Brett's and Aileen's a few weeks ago. She had been Aileen's French tutor when my Aussie pals first moved to Paris, and has recently found herself unexpectedly unemployed. So I've hired her to help me with my French, and she's developed an intensive course of study that she believes will "poosh" me from an intermediate to an advanced level pretty quickly. I'm meeting her at Le Boucheron every day, working hard at this but having fun, feeling more connected, naturally, to the people around me, the more I understand and can speak this beautiful language. Corine explains different sentence constructions to me, and always urges me to use "le plus elegante." So I may end up speaking a broken and elegant French, which seems perfect to me.

I love this sense of the elegant in even the smallest things. This evening, on my way up the rue vielle du Temple to Adrian's, I passed a display of little flowerpots on a sidewalk table, so adorable, with a perfect baby rose in the center of each, and only 7 euros. So I chose one for Adrian and went into the shop to pay. The two men working there laughed when they greeted me, and I asked if the shop were already closed? Non, non, they smiled, though there was already an open bottle of wine on the counter, and two half-filled glasses. And one of the men took the time to wrap my gift carefully in tissue paper and twine ribbon. Such attention to detail, which is beauty, is everywhere. And am I the only American to have ever found the French not only unfailingly polite, but unfailingly kind and warm?

Of course, the French can be very critical, too, which may also account for my feeling so at home among them. They're "picky" about how things are done -- or, as my nephew Jesse has said about me, "Well, my Aunt Celia is very particular." So be prepared to wait for a cup of coffee, if you want a perfectly-prepared cup of delicious coffee. And to wait while your purchase, however small, is elegantly wrapped. And to be chastised, sotto voce, for putting your feet up on a chair. (This is Paris -- think of what might be on the soles of your shoes!) And to have your opinions and attitudes challenged with intellectual fervor. And to challenge right back.

Last Friday, Adrian and I met our friends Pamela and Solange at le Coude Fou ("The Crazy Elbow") for dinner. Pamela is, in many ways, quintessentially American -- a professional poker player and dealer who spends part of each year in Las Vegas and also takes photographs and writes. Solange, her partner, is in some ways quintessentially French -- she's lived in Paris all her life and recently retired from her work in the French film industry. Each is also rather eccentric. And their relationship -- they met almost ten years ago, when I convinced Pamela to visit Paris, so I take a tiny bit of credit -- is a pleasure to behold, and sometimes a comedy of cultural errors. Solange will correct Pamela about everything from how she pours wine to how she cuts the lettuce (don't!) to how she offers mints from her purse. Pamela will respond with her big hearty laugh. That they love one another and are committed to their life together seems never in doubt.

So, we were talking about movies, and I happened to mention that my family in Kentucky sees the big Hollywood movies at home on DVD before they even reach the cinemas, because one of my brothers downloads them from the internet. Solange was outraged, "It's 'orrible! I worked in this business for many years and ..." But Adrian, bless her big, open heart, butted right in. "No, you don't understand," she said, "Every artist wants his or her work to be seen as widely as possible, it doesn't hurt the artists. It creates a bigger buzz and a bigger audience." And I butted back in and told Solange that if any entity was hurt by bootlegging, it was the big film companies and record companies, who take advantage of the artists, anyway, not to mention how obscenely they profit from the consumer. I told her, proudly, that my younger sisters bootlegged the music of "alternative" artists and passed it around in our family -- music that doesn't get the kind of airplay that the music of pop princesses like Britney Spears gets, because these artists aren't part of the whole corrupt payola system that the industry propagates and the government allows.

I wish I'd thought to mention, too, that my eldest sister, who runs a hair and tanning salon in a little house on Highway 61 between Shepherdsville and Lebanon Junction, made numerous copies of "Farenheit 911" and gave them to her customers -- most of whom are, or were, apolitical at best, and probably getting whatever news they got from the Fox network. But they came back into her shop furious after having watched the film, saying, "I never knew all this stuff." And when they tried to give the DVD's back to her, my sister told them to keep them and pass them around. I feel absolutely certain that Michael Moore would approve of this method of distribution for his film. I know some of these local folks got out to the polls and voted against W last election day, too, for all the good that's done our country ...

I told my friends at le Coude Fou that I come from a long line of people who've often operated outside of the law -- sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of pure rebellion. One of my grandmothers ran a numbers book during the great Depression, and the other made boot-leg gin. My mother started bootlegging copies of movies as soon as she could afford a second VCR. My father did hard time in prison as a young man for a crime he didn't commit. His half-brother, my favorite uncle, spent a good part of his life running from the law. This uncle took my first boyfriend quietly aside when he came to our house to ask my father for "my hand," when I was 18. "If you ever hurt her," my uncle whispered, "I'll have a contract out on you so fast you won't ever know what happened." I think he had a sixth sense about how bullying and controlling this guy could be. I've had reason, in recent years, to wish that uncle were still alive.

And I've learned some hard lessons in recent years about "justice" in America. Should it have really been any surprise to discover that the "system," and even the law, often protects bullies? And that's what I was trying to impress on Solange: that my family, and people like us, have often operated outside the law because the law -- in America, at least -- only protects the big and the rich. In other words, those who don't need protection, but who have the power to construct --or corrupt -- a system so that it works in their favor.
And so I explained to Solange that in certain quarters in America there's a certain respect for the outlaw, for those who don't follow the rules; that we even romanticize the outlaw a bit. And that, it seemed, was something she could understand, something I think any French person could wrap her brain and her heart around. "Ah!" Solange said, and smiled. Solange has the smile of an impish angel. "It's wonderful!" And then we were on to the chocolat ...

And so maybe March 1st will be the first day of the end of winter in Paris. I won't miss the biting wind, but I will miss the sugary snowfalls of some of these recent nights. I've marveled, lately, that I haven't seen any slush in Paris. Maybe those guys on motos who used to be deployed around the city to vacuum up dog poop now suck up the snow before it gets unsightly? Because it seems there's much less dog poop to be swept up these days. Okay, so there WAS a big steaming pile right at the big red doors of #7 rue des Guillemites on Saturday night when Joe walked me home after the movies -- what do these tiny French dogs EAT that makes them poop in such big steaming piles? -- but it was gone by Monday morning. Paris has a gay mayor, one Monsieur Delanoe, who it seems is widely adored for all the changes he's instituted -- even those one might predict would be unpopular, like urging people to pick up after their pets. "Love your dog, love your neighborhood," say the signs. It seems to be working. Hooray for the mayor, I say, so long as he doesn't try to stop people from kissing in doorways or smoking in cafes ...

Meeting Margaret Atwood

2005-02-24T16:59:00.000-08:00

Feb. 24, 2005

The sky was doing something between raining and snowing when I turned the corner onto rue de Parcheminerre -- it felt something like cold spit coming down -- and I could see far enough down the dark little street to be able to tell that there was already a line at the door of the Abbey Bookshop. There was also a little table set up with a crock of warm spiced apple cider and cups just beneath the Canadian flag that flies from the entrance. So it wasn't as if proprietor Brian Spence and his staff weren't trying to be hospitable. It's just that the last-minute appearance by Margaret Atwood had attracted a huge crowd.

I had to slip sideways into the bookshop, which is only wide enough at its widest point for two people to stand side-by-side, or sidle past one another. And there, about half-way down the center aisle, was Margaret Atwood sitting cross-legged on top of a table, signing books. A small, bright-eyed woman who looks right into your eyes when she speaks to you and was warm and friendly when I told her that I wanted a volume of her poems, although she was signing copies of her latest novel for the people in line. She looked around the packed bookshop and noticed, on the packed shelves behind her, the one copy of her selected poems. I recruited, via his petite female companion, a tall guy who was standing near the shelves to reach up and get it down for me-- everybody pitches in, in situations like this. I'm a big fan of Margaret Atwood's work, but not as big a fan as my pal Collin Kelley, for whom I'd made the pilgrimage, so I had her sign the book to him.

Then I had to make my way out again, and across the square to the church where Ms. Atwood was going to give her talk. Plenty of space there, and warm wine and warm chocolate chip cookies, too. Brian Spence asked the audience, on Ms. Atwood's behalf, to move as close as possible to the edge of the stage, so we pulled our chairs right up to the edge. I don't think he or Ms. Atwood noticed that they were standing directly underneath a huge crucifix bearing a likeness of Christ's bloody and beaten body. But it seemed ironic to me, given that Ms. Atwood was cheerfully, quietly and very seriously talking about her latest novel, Le Dernier Homme (the title of the just-published French version of Oryx and Crake), as a "joke-filled account of the end of the human race."

What followed was a fascinating and polite discussion of science, ethics and genetic engineering. "Science is a tool," Atwood said, "that we use to fulfill our desires. What we should be questioning are our desires." She also said that the book has gotten a good response from scientists; and that her scientist brother commended her for getting the stuff about sex right, although he wasn't sure about the purring business. Atwood told us that a cat's purr has a frequency similar to ultrasound and, therefore, has healing properties -- which is why your cat will come and lie down and purr on whatever part of your body is ailing you, and also why a cat who senses a non-cat-lover has entered the room will go directly to that person and rub up against them and purr, in order to try to"heal" that person of his malady. "It's about the only unselfish things cats do," according to Atwood. In her novel, the re-engineered humans form purring circles to heal one another. I think it would work for me, if anyone wants to try the next time I'm sick ...

After the talk, I walked back to the metro with David Turner, an Aussie architect who's been living in Paris forever, and whom I hadn't seen in the past four or five years. I stopped at a Chinese place on rue Rambuteau for some soup to bring home with me, since I'd had a long day already -- wandering through the Marais and over to the Canal St. Martin with my beloved Ms. Genevieve Altamirano, who's been here in Paris for the past week with her pal, Beata, and Beata's family. The two fifteen-year-olds made great strolling and shopping companions for me, since they don't mind walking fast or stopping abruptly to look at a window full of beautiful shoes or ducking into a boutique that has every sweater on sale. We stopped at the antique musical instrument shop on rue de pas du Mule, just in time to hear the proprietor play a tune on some instrument we couldn't identify -- maybe a cross between a standup bass and an accordion? -- and found a wonderful little shop off the rue de Turennes called"le the (w/an accent) des ecrivains" ("writer's tea"), which turned out to be not a cafe, but a stationary store full of exquisite notebooks of handmade paper and other trinkets any writer would love. Gen and I bought glittery, transparent bags that say "lire" ("to read") on one side and "ecrire" ("to write") on the other. And by the time we got to the Canal St. Martin, the locks were operating -- a stroke of luck -- while a boat full of garbage waited to passdown the canal. Genevieve wanted to see the place where her favorite scene from the film "Amelie" had been shot, and Beata proved to be an all-around good sport, willing to go wherever everyone else wanted to go.

Genevieve -- ever her father's daughter -- had to stop and use one of those coin-operated street "toilettes," which I've never dared use myself. She said it was sparkling clean, and even had a mirror! Then we walked back across the place de la Republique and stopped for crepes fromage, delicious and warm in our hands as we carried them away, the snow just beginning to fall. I delivered the girls to Beata's mother in the Marais, and tried to convince herto extend their stay so that I could spend more time with Genevieve. But alas, their flight departs for L.A. in the a.m. ... Bon voyage, chere Genevieve!

Et bon nuit et beaux reves ...

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow...

2005-02-22T18:40:00.000-08:00

Tuesday Night, Feb. 22

It's snowing in Paris! It's really really cold but it's really really pretty! It's that I'm-walking-around-inside-a-snow-globe kind of snow! In the afternoon, it's all swirling down in soft little flakes that somehow don't seemto be all that wet, and there's a line of four-year-olds following their teacher across the street to L'Ecole Maternelle, looking like, well, little rosy-cheeked French babies! And at midnight, you're walking under the archway along the place de Voges, your toes are frozen inside your high-heeled boots but you feel happy as Christmas! Maybe you've been spending too much time with Carolyn Heinze because you're talking about yourself in second person and using lots of exclamation points and feeling all bubbly about being in Paris! And hey, you don't have the flu anymore, finally! Now Michele has it, poor thing! And she's flying to Korea on Friday! Okay, enough already!

So ... the red hat and lipstick and the dancing on Friday night did the trick, and by Saturday evening I felt well enough to go to Carolyn Bazzini's birthday dinner at Marie et Edith. Which was lovely, even though Carolyn didn't let me wear the tiara or wave the magic wand. We ate like queens and we giggled like, well, Americans.

On Sunday I felt even better, and met Ian and Sophie at the Musee Carnavalet in the afternoon for a harp and voice concert, then drinks at Cafe Boucheron afterwards. On Monday, I led my petite poetry workshop, then met Jenny Huxta and Carolyn Heinze at a cafe in Beauborg for warm spiced wine.

This evening, I met Louise Thunin at her pied-a-terre in the 15th, then we took the metro (a very long metro ride) together to the Bastille for the Paris launch party for Lisa Pasold's book, Weave. Everyone was there! (Oops!) It turns out that Ian knows Lisa and her husband Bremner through the music scene, and Anne Pawle knows Ian through the Welsh community, and oh, I've known Jenny Huxta since she was 19 and landed on my doorstep in L.A. at the end of a solo cross-country drive! Everyone knows everyone somehow! And Lisa read beautifully and we all drank wine and ate gingerbread and Ian and I pretended to speak Polish and then Louise and Anne and I went to a little cafe and I ate a really BIG salad!

And Genevieve Altamirano is in Paris! I'm going to see her tomorrow and we're going to visit the tomb of ... St. Genevieve! And then we might do some shopping together! And today was the 30th birthday of my nephew Jimmy's wife, Mandy! Happy Birthday Mandy! And soon, in America, tomorrow -- though it's already tomorrow in America here -- it will be the birthday of Brendan Constantine! Happy Birthday, Brendan Constantine! I love you!

And speaking of friends ... I got the very sad news earlier this week that my friend Ron Hendricks had passed away in Atlanta. I hadn't even known he wasn't well. He was a good friend to me, especially at a time when I needed a good friend, and I'll miss him and I wish I'd been a better friend to him. I wish we'd managed to put together the city-wide poetry reading by kids that we always talked about putting together. I'm glad he left us his poems, which are fine and funny and big-hearted and sweet as Ron was. I'm glad I knew him.

Sweet dreams et mille bisous ...

Cure For The Flu: New Hat & Red Lipstick

2005-02-20T07:13:00.000-08:00

Friday, Feb. 18

I've been sick all week and I'm really really sick of being sick. I woke up on Monday morning feeling as if I'd been hit by a truck. Actually, I barely woke up. I stayed awake just long enough to determine how awful I felt and rolled over and slept for most of the day. So I spent Valentine's Day in bed, which might not have been so bad if I'd had some BON-BONS.

On Tuesday I thought I was better, so Louise Thunin came by in the late afternoon, according to plan, and we had tea and then went to the BritishCouncil together for the Pharos publication party and reading. I made it through the reading, which was good, and even most of the way through the dinner afterwards, though all I could eat was a cup of soup. Then I made my way back to the Marais and went back to bed. My only consolation has been that I'm reading Everthing Is Illuminated, which is surreal and hilarious and suddenly heart-breaking.

I'd promised Jenny Huxta that we'd celebrate her 28th birthday with a hen party here on Thursday evening, and by Thursday evening I was ready for some company and some diversion from my misery. So all the girls came with snacks and wine and we ate and drank and talked until 1 a.m.

Today I felt no better, physically, and my crabbiness had reached epidemic proportions. Joe called to see if I was going to Sonia's big surprise birthday party in the evening and I whined to him and let him talk me into going. He agreed to come around and collect me at 8. I figured I might get him to carry me if I couldn't walk.

Then I ventured out to pick up my computer -- finally repaired -- and a gift for Sonia. And I stopped at a little shop on rue Vielle du Temple that had some adorable hats in the window. I told the saleswoman I was sick but determined to go out this evening, and needed a hat. Of course, nothing looked adorable on me. But she fixed me up with a little red number and told me to try some red lipstick, too. Voila, a French cure for the flu -- a chic new hat and red lipstick. Now why hadn't I thought of that?

I was determined to fix myself up and look presentable for the party, even if it meant trimming my bangs with a breadknife. I trimmed my bangs with a breadknife. Don't laugh till you've tried it. And the red lipstick DID help. And Joe didn't carry me to the metro, much as I whined.

We were among the first to arrive at the Indian-Latino (yes) restaurant off rue St. Anne. Joe asked the bartender to fix me up with a "grog." It took a couple of tries, and I think what I finally got was a hot mojito, but it started to work some kind of magic. When the bar filled up, we all went downstairs to the "cave" and waited for Shakil to bring Sonia. She was very, very surprised and very, very pleased to see 50 or so of her closest friends crammed into the cave drinking cocktails. If she doesn't marry Shakil, I will, even though I keep swearing I'm not going to get married again. He's gorgeous and sweet and he really knows how to do the twist. But I'm getting ahead of myself ...

So we were served tapas and then buriyana -- all of which took a very long time, and though I was happier after I ate, I was STILL crabby. The cute dj in the next room was playing bangra music way too loud. Then he started playing classic American rock 'n roll. And I decided, well, to DANCE. I did the jitterbug with Adrian and the twist with a sexy blonde Frenchwoman and a lot of French guys did the twist together and smoked cigars at the same time. They are SO talented. Then I introduced them to the concept of the "soul train." Well, some of them got the concept and some of them didn't, but everyone was having fun. Actually, this is the third or fourth time I've attempted to introduce the soul train into French culture. I'm sure they'll catch on eventually.

I made it all the way to the cake and champagne and feel no worse for it. In fact, I feel better than I have all week. Maybe it was the hat and lipstick? Maybe the cure is red hat, lipstick, soul train, cake, champagne, in that order? We'll see how I feel tomorrow. Sweet dreams.

Finding Falafel

2005-02-20T07:06:00.000-08:00

Feb. 9-13, 2005

There are a lot of red shoes in Paris this year. And the windows of all the chocolate shops are full of red hearts for St. Valentine's Day.

And all of a sudden it's bitterly col, or at least it feels bitter to me, after how mild it's been for the past few weeks. Someone said it was snowing here this morning, but I didn't see it. When I woke up the sun was shining and I opened the doors to the balcony. But by the time people arrived for the workshop at 10 a.m. teeth were chattering and I had to turn the heat back on.

This weekend I taught an intensive poetry workshop for WICE. On Saturday we met at WICE headquarters on blvd. Montparnasse; but since the group was small, I invited everyone to meet me in the Marais today. (I resisted, however, the temptation to teach in my p.j.'s.) Kathryn Clutz brought madeleines. David Nutt (yep, the name suits him, a retired British businessman who's now the scion of Fromage.com because he thought it would be fun to start an internet business selling French cheeses, and it is) brought his wicked laugh and the smell of pipe tobacco. Jan Harrington brought her luggage because she'd be catching the TGV back to Geneva as soon as the workshop ended. Ann Pawlebrought ALL the homework revisions and a new poem. Janyce Griffiths, the quiet Canadian, tries to fade into the background but today she brought a poem that featured glowing feces.

We worked all morning then went out to have lunch in the neighborhood. Sunday, and all the good falafel places on rue des Rosiers were packed. So we ducked into a Jewish deli and had really dreadful food -- Jan, for example, ordered a HOT DOG, which turned out to be a better choice than the salad I sent back for lack of an egg -- but really great conversation. People here always seem to want to know WHO in America voted for the likes of Arnold and W, and WHAT were they thinking? And always, it just comes down to stupidity and greed and short-sightedness, as far as any of us can figure.

Anyway, it was my first bad meal in Paris this trip, EVEN including the little dinners I make for myself on the rare evenings I stay in. I have perfected my omelette fromage, so don't snicker. Friday night, I'd had dinner with Brett and Aileen at their apartment on rue Montorgueil and got to spend sometime being entertained by their three -- count 'em! -- little girls, ages 5 and 3 and 16 months. I also met their friend Corine, who's agreed to give me French lessons while she's temporarily unemployed. Saturday evening I met Sonia and Shakil and Shakil's son, Devon, for Japanese on rue St. Anne. This evening after the workshop, Brett came by and we walked around the corner to the rue des Rosiers, where I finally got my falafel at a place called Chez Hannah. Et voila.

Encroaching "Frenchness"

2005-02-10T19:23:00.000-08:00

Feb. 9

Fernanda arrived in the morning and this time I was ready for her, already drinking my first cup of coffee. We talked as she worked, and she’s very patient about helping me with my French, though I could end up speaking French with a Portuguese accent.

In the evening I stopped by the Village Voice and let Kathleen talk me into buying a handful of books — expensive here, but we must support Odile.

Then I walked over to Jeff’s and Mary’s for dinner. The two tiny circus dogs, Pandora and her puppy Snowbell, fluffy and white Maltese, greeted me ecstatically. “They love excitement,” Mary said. Jeff had prepared prosciutto and mango for the entrée; duck and salad for the plat. And then there was cheese, of course — Jeff knows how to choose the perfect camembert, Mary says; he simply tells whomever at the fromagerie, “I’m putting my life in your hands” — and we passed around the chocolates Heather had brought. John Baxter held forth about the wonders of E-bay. The wine was very old and Mary told us that, if you took in a little air with your sip, you could taste the berries on your tongue.

When it was time to go, I walked out with Jeff and the dogs — all three of them. Pandora and Snowbell and le pauvre Jake, who doesn’t stand a chance of getting much attention with those Maltese around, photogenic though he is. (Also, Jake snores like a little old man.) My cell phone rang in my pocket while we were walking up the rue du Regard. A call from the States, where it was still afternoon, and here I was at midnight on the other side of the world. Little technological miracles. What would my grandmother think? A couple of beautiful Black women passed and laughed at the little dogs, circling Jeff on their red leashes. “When I had one dog,” he said, “women used to stop to talk to me. Now they run the other way. I think I’m becoming a real eccentric.” No Jeff, you were already eccentric.

Riding home on the metro, I could smell the perfume of someone sitting nearby — something flowery and soft — and I breathed it in. On the stairs going out at the station at Les Halles, the smell of old piss was so strong I had to tuck my nose and mouth into the collar of my coat to breathe. Three men were lying on their backs on the concrete floor near the door, settling in with their bottles for the night. “Les Clochards.” I remembered the Hungarian woman who taught me that word, years ago in a café across the street from the Gare du Nord. We were eating mussels and drinking white wine. She was telling me how her son, when he was small, wanted to take Christmas gifts to all the clochards, to the men and women who lived in the streets. How, when his friend died, also still a child, he told her that his friend had become “a little fish in the heart of god.”

Feb. 10, 2005

Is it a sign of encroaching/increasing “Frenchness,” perhaps, that although there’s a boulangerie on every corner I feel compelled to make the trek to one of the two already my favorites? This noon – hunger at noon; call it breakfast or lunch — it was the boulangerie Garcia (the lovely madame at the counter may or may not be of Spanish descent; black-hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck) on the rue Vielle du Temple, almost to the rue de Bretagne. I like the “pain complet” with nuts and raisins, and sometimes apricots, but apples today. I like to put the little wrapped package into the pocket of my coat and see how far I can make it back down the street before I reach in and tear off a piece to put in my mouth. Perfectly fresh, perfectly delicious just like that. I make it a couple of blocks.

It’s always an event, a joy, just to go out into the streets, to partake of the street life, even if I don’t always make myself as presentable as a Frenchwoman does for a trip to the shops. I passed a woman on Vielle du Temple who at first looked to me like one of my own relatively slovenly tribe. Bare-legged, in a skirt and sneakers. Then I got closer and saw that she was wearing, on an otherwise bare face, the most gorgeous shade of lipstick, the color of currants. And that was enough.

I love seeing how the men greet one another here — and not just in the Marais, where so many men are gay, although that’s sweet, too. A man stopping on the sidewalk to lean down over a baby in the stroller and smile and make faces. Men who look like laborers, or who look like scholars, calling out to each other, smiling, kissing one another on the cheek. Does it just seem this way to me, or have I seldom seem men in America so unabashedly happy to meet one another?

The sky today is that sky I think of as pigeon-sky: a pearly gray. And a wind just sharp enough to make me throw my shoulders back as I walk.

Familiar Faces

2005-02-09T19:53:00.000-08:00

Friday, Feb. 4 – Tuesday, Feb. 8

On Friday I saw a poodle with dreadlocks in the Marais, took down the clock of birds that hung over the kitchen sink (too much ticking), and met Jenny for dinner in the rue Montorgueil, which I am almost able to pronounce. (Try it; see what it does to your mouth.) Au Rocher de Cancale, a café with history, I’m told. Beautiful salads in a beautiful old candle-lit room on the second floor. Beautiful waitress (“Look at her, she can always waitress” – I still wonder if my ex’s lawyer meant that as a snipe or a compliment) who brought another and then another carafe of water when Jenny and I kept talking long after our plates had been cleared, our wine glasses drained. Beautiful walk home alone in the dark through the beautifully crooked streets. Other women also out walking alone at — what was it, one a.m.?

I dreamt I was turning sharp pirouettes on the polished floor of my parents’ old bedroom. I dreamt my first husband was dusting our house with a vengeance. I dreamt I was shaking sand out of the pots and pans Pierre and Isa brought back from the beach.

On Saturday, my little family from Alfortville was coming for lunch. Naturally, they would be late. Naturally, I waited almost too long to get out to the shops. The boucherie was already closing its shutters at one p.m. No poulet roti. The woman at the fromagerie was already locking up – the French have their weekend, after all. No stinky chevre rolled in ash. But the best bakery I’ve found yet in Paris was open for business. Just when you think you’ve tasted the best bread ever made, you taste better bread. And the Italian traiteur sold me aubergines and champignons, little rolls made of ham stuffed with cheese, olives and artichokes. And I had salad and could whip up a vinaigrette. And Jenny was bringing macaroons.

At 2:30, little feet on the stairs and Lila, light as a feather, rushing right into my arms. She’s six this year and she dances non-stop. She balanced on one leg and posed in arabesque, a perfect imitation of the little gold fairy on top of the column at the Bastille, visible through the balcony doors. Antoine, serious since birth, an avid reader from the age of two, lay on the couch pouring over the books his parents had just bought for him at the FNAC. “No, no, no,” Pierre and Isa teased, “put that book away. You’ll have nothing to read on holiday.” This spring, as they do every spring, they’ll take the children to Indonesia for two months. They’ll spend all day, every day, together, swimming and snorkeling, Pierre taking photos, Isa and Antoine reading to their hearts’ content, Lila wandering into the village on her own, enjoying the attention she draws, little star of her own island life. The whole family speaks Indonesian now, though Pierre tells me they still sometimes confuse the words for “head” and “coconut” because they sound so much alike. We always make one another laugh. Isabelle’s laughter and mine still rhyme. These two are, I think, the happiest parents I’ve ever seen. Pierre watched Lila drawing pictures, chided her that every sentence out of her mouth always begins with “Mais non, “or Mais oui, Papa.” Then he looked at me and said, “You know, with children, it’s all happiness.”

We spent the late afternoon at my table, with cups of strong coffee and hand-rolled cigarettes and, yes, the tiny, intensely sweet macaroons Jenny had brought — “Cookies for Barbie,” I said. Pistachio-flavored and café au lait and chocolate and something pink — framboise, perhaps? Jenny sang songs and played games with Lila. Pierre poured over Peter’s books of photographs with something like reverence, something like awe. Later, Isabelle would articulate for me exactly what it is that makes those photographs so moving: “You can tell, this is a man who really loves people.” Who was it said that’s what genius is, “love, love, love?” I’ve yet to meet Peter Turnley in person. Maybe it should feel strange to be living in his apartment, surrounded by his work, but it doesn’t. It feels, in fact, like an excellent place to do my own work. I can sit here contentedly for hours, reading and writing and musing and staring out over the rooftops of Paris.

At dusk, everyone bundled up and kissed me goodbye. I washed the dishes, took a shower, answered some e-mail, then got on the train to Alfortville so that I could have dinner with the family, too. (“You still know the way from the station?” Pierre had asked. “By heart,” I reminded him.) It always takes longer than I think it will take to get there, though once I made the whole trip, door to door from Adrian’s old place near the Etoile to the garden on Rue Louis Blanc, in thirty minutes flat. That was the same summer, if memory serves, that I got lost in the Bois des Vincennes and, without meaning to, walked all the way to Alfortville. “You just followed your heart,” Isa laughed. This time it took almost an hour, which made me only half an hour late.

Alfortville has hardly changed at all in the ten years since I first visited, though Pierre and Isabelle tell me it’s become very “fashionable” lately to buy a house here, and thus as unaffordable as all the other suburbs of Paris are becoming. But it still looks to me like a small French town, fairly nondescript, a little frayed at the edges, a little turned in on itself, compared to Paris. I walked the long blocks from the RER station, along the empty back streets, into the center of town — as always, deserted after dark — then turned the corner onto rue Louis Blanc, walked past l’Hotel de la Poste — where we’d all posed for photographs once, that first visit, John Brandi and I and Pierre and Isa and Jean-Michel, too, because we thought it was hilarious for there to be a “hotel of the post,” and because we were all hungover, and madly in love — and finally I came to number 12, unlatched the gate, walked down the long path through the garden toward the big white house, a walk that always and forever makes me feel like some kind of prodigal bride.

Lights were glowing on the first and third floors; the second floor — Mario’s floor — was dark, as it often is these days. When I got to the door of what had once been Pierre’s apartment and is now “the family room,” I could see Isabelle in the kitchen, at the stove, her back to me. She was still wearing the red sweater she’d worn to Paris, but had turned her cream-colored scarf around so that the long ends of the bow were out of the way of her cooking pots. When this was Pierre’s apartment, it was two rooms, plus the kitchen and bath. After Antoine was born, Pierre and Mario knocked down the wall to make a communal space, and renovated the apartment on the third floor for the family. We always have meals here now, when I come, and I’ve sometimes slept on the fold-out couch. Isabelle laughed when I called her name, then opened the door to the stairwell and called up to Pierre.

So we had a lovely dinner of fish and fennel and a very old bottle of white wine — “Almost too old,” Pierre said. Inevitably, we rehashed old times. Inevitable, too, that we got into a discussion of politics, sinking almost into despair. Their sense is that America is taking the world down a very dangerous path, “And we can do nothing,” Pierre almost spat. But the children were with us for part of the evening, reading and drawing while we talked, trying the different sauces for their fish during dinner, and it’s not so easy to despair when they’re around. Lila even laughs at my jokes in French, how I call her hair “horses” (“Chevaux?” “Non, cheveux!”); and Antoine obeys his papa’s entreaties to speak to Cecilia in French “doucement.” In this context, I know, doucement means slowly, gently. But really, it translates as “sweetly,” as in, “Speak sweetly to Cecilia.” Should anyone feel so cherished?

At midnight, Pierre grabbed his coat and his bike — so that he could ride back home — and walked with me to the metro. He kept pulling me back out of the crosswalks; “Be careful, everyone’s drunk at this hour!” (Not that we were completely sober.) He’s the only human I know who walks as fast as I do, sometimes faster. Still, after we’d said goodnight and I’d run down into the station, the announcement came, “desolee’,” that the service to Paris was “termine’.” I went back up to the street — too late to catch Pierre and too rough an area to walk back alone – and considered waiting for the night bus. But when a taxi came along (which so seldom happens in Alfortville) I grabbed it and was home in the Marais in fifteen minutes. Et voila.

Pierre had asked me what I was doing while I was in Paris, if I was looking for another husband? I told him I wouldn’t consider getting married again unless I could marry both him and Isabelle.

Sunday was a good day for working all day: quiet and overcast. But by evening I needed an escape; I needed a BIG American movie. And so did Jenny, as it turned out. We met in Les Halles and went to see The Aviator. I loved it, and couldn’t help thinking how my dad would have loved it, too. He had always been fascinated with Howard Hughes. I understand that fascination better now. They were both in love with flying. Daddy would say, “Your old man always loved flying machines.” He never got over it. He must also have loved the way Hughes stood up to the system and won, when Pan Am was trying to get a bill passed to give them a monopoly on transatlantic passenger flights. I needed to see that triumph over the system, too, especially now, especially after my own recent encounters with “old-boys” networks. Sometimes it happens; sometimes the bastards are left sputtering, up to their ears in their own shit.

On Monday, I revised an essay, wrote a review of Lisa Pasold’s WEAVE for the Cider Press Review and worked on some new poems. Somehow, in Paris, writing poetry doesn’t seem like such an absurd way to spend one’s days. Pamela came by in the evening for a kir; Solange is still “incarcerated” in rehab, while her foot heals. But she sounded chipper when we called to say hello. Then we walked to the rue des Rosiers for falafel. Pas cher and delicious. When I walked Pamela to the metro at Hotel de Ville, a guy with a radio was dancing in front of the BHV.

On Tuesday, more writing, and shopping – since these are the final days of “les soldes.” But I’ve been more in the mood to stroll the rue du Temple, looking in the windows of the wholesalers, and the rue Rambeauteau – stopping in at the boulangerie, the fromagerie, the poissonerie, etc — than to shop for clothes. It’s been warm enough these past few days that people have been sitting outside at the cafes. I’ve started to recognize some familiar faces – the old man I see every day at the café on rue Rambeauteau, a pack of cigarettes ripped open on the table, a cup of black coffee. Sometimes someone is sitting with him and other times he’s talking out loud to himself. I’ve been asking myself why I enjoy so much just looking at people here, and it struck me that it might be because it seems that no one here is trying to look like anyone else, or everyone else; everyone looks exactly like him- or herself, which makes everyone fascinating to look at, and beautiful.

In the early evening, I met Kathleen Spivack at le Select in the 6th. “We need beauty!” she pronounced, and told me how well I looked. I’m feeling more at ease than I have in years, more at home in the world, as I always feel in Paris.

Later, I was rushing back from the little market a half-block away from my apartment and ran straight into Jenny Huxta, just heading into Au Rendez-vous des Amis. She was with her filmmaker friends who are here from London to make a documentary. The camera was rolling as we laughed and kissed, surprised and not surprised.

Crazy Day After A Crazy Night

2005-02-05T10:19:00.000-08:00

Thursday, Feb. 3, 2005

Yesterday evening the plumbing repair went on and on, and finally Tony -- despite his earlier optimism and growing determination -- left at 9 p.m., with a promise to be back in the a.m. with parts. So I packed a bag and walked to Dale's place, just a few blocks away. Took a (long, hot, luxurious) shower there, then joined the Sisters of St. Tongue around the table for something like (Dale's version of) jambalaya, wine, lots of chocolate afterwards. Adrian was there, and Sonya; Sylvie and Eva and Carolyn ("Howdy, Pardner!") Bazzini; Melissa showed up fashionably even later than I did. We talked politics and sexual politics and power and what's-becoming-of-teenaged-girls-in-America-now? And I stayed late, talking to Dale after the others had left, came back after midnight to the apartment, which was in post-Tony disarray, but I couldn't clean it up, couldn't even run any water.

Finally dozed off about 3 a.m. and woke to the doorbell at 8:45. The housekeeper had come, at last. (I'd been expecting her all Wednesday morning, had even risen early to be ready for her visit, so I was already a bit annoyed.) Why was she speaking so loudly -- so un-French! -- and why coudn't I understand her? And why was she smiling so broadly, almost laughing? Was it my attire -- Erica's big gray bathrobe, white socks and glittery slippers, my hair in two braids sticking out from my head a la some demented hag Pippi Longstocking? I got Brad on the phone to translate. Fernanda -- Portuguese, it turns out -- had had a doctor's appointment yesterday. Well, she couldn't do anycleaning when she couldn't run water, and I did't want to have to sort the mess out myself, once Tony finished, or wait till the following week for Ferenanda to return and get the apartment back in order. So, after much gesturing and some negotiations, Fernanda agreed to come back at 10:30.

At 10:15 I was making coffee (with bottled water) when Tony called, on his way with the part. He and Fernanda showed up at my door within a few minutes of each other. I had taken out the pigtails but hadn't yet dressed. I apologized for the way I'd behaved earlier, and Fernanda smiled and urged me to "rest tranquille." Then she and Tony went to work: crawling under the kitchen cabinets, checking out pipes and gutters from the balcony, loudly bemoaning the state of French plumbing, etc. At 11, I decided I'd better get dressed. Brad showed up a few minutes later. By then, all the drains were draining and the apartment was immaculate. A miracle for 63 euros. Mr. Turnley got very lucky, I think. But there was still my laptop to deal with -- the screen had started flickering wildly the night before and now it refused to boot up at all. I talked to Jenny Huxta, found out about a place near Beaubourg that does repairs, packed everything up and headed out.

Walking down rue St. Croix des Brettoneries (St. Cross of the Buttonery is what I call it) I saw a man actually picking up his dog's poop with a plastic bag. In France! But maybe he wasn't French? There was a woman standing off to the side, watching him with a look on her face of utter heartbreak and disbelief. A few steps farther down the sidewalk, another woman was getting off of her motorbike, taking off her helmet, shaking out her hair. She was wearing blue four-inch stilleto heels and neon green stockings under jeans rolled up to mid-calf. Remember where you are, I told myself. And decided to smile, square my shoulders, try to reclaim my inner je-ne-sais quoi.Then there was handsome Jimmy, from Guadaloupe (always wear your best sweater and lipstick when going to talk to tech guys) telling me that my mother board was shot, and it could take a month for the repair. Looks of despair, gentle begging. Finally he gave me the address of a place on rue de Turennes that might be able to do it in two weeks or less. (Though he tried to convince me, first, that I should just upgrade to a new G4, and he could transfer all my files to that almost immediately. Would that I had a few thousand euros tospare right now.)

So, on to the metro, to the 6th, to Jeff's for lunch. His tales of his sister-in-law's battle with cancer put my little problems right into perspective. We ate salad and bread and cheese and ham, while Lilith the cat slinked across the table between us, occasionally landing in my lap. We talked about what we're writing, what we want to write, how impossible it is to know if the work you do has any merit. And we laughed really hard, as we always do; and, as always, I forget what it was that made me laugh so hard. So, back to the Marais again... Waiting for the 96 bus on rue de Rennes I bought a postcard for Carine -- Sarah Bernhardt in black and white, with the caption, "Point n'est besoin d'etre jolie, il faut le charme." ("No need to be pretty, charm is the thing.") I still had my laptop in a shopping bag. I was still wondering, as I had wondered and would continue wondering for the rest of the day, what it is about beauty here; how it is that humans go around as if they feel beautiful, beautifully human, even old as some of us are. I kept wondering what had become of the feeling I used to have when I flew through these streets with my coat unbuttoned, sure that love was around the next corner, or at least some grand adventure was.

I got off the bus at the Place des Voges and walked up rue de Turenne until I finally found the computer place, "Aldorande" -- after much wandering around a courtyard next door, unmarked doors and misleading street numbers. The young man who greeted me -- alone in the shop -- said, "of course," when I asked if he spoke English. He also spoke, in addition to French, German, but bemoaned that his Danish had gotten rusty. He looked at my laptop and nodded his head: yes, it was the motherboard -- or more specifically, something in the video card, which is attached to the motherboard -- a problem this model has had from the beginning, so Apple would repair it for free. HOWEVER, he told me that Apple had closed some service centers in France, so the repair would take three weeks to a month. I considered whether crying would be effective with this guy, but decided against it. Instead I told him that I was a writer, all my work was on that hard drive, I'd lose so much time and money and ... He called his "chief" and got the okay to put an "express" order on my beautiful machine, so I should have it back in ten days, two weeks at the most. Merci, Guillaime.

I was just around the corner from Adrian's place by then, and Adrian had had the brilliant idea that I could use Erica's old iMac desktop while my computer was in the shop. Heading down rue Saintonge, I passed Adrian's favorite papeterie, and decided to go in and buy a notebook, since I might have to resort to writing by hand -- which might not be a bad thing, temporarily. But of course the only notebooks they had were notebooks with those little grids on every page, because the French "adore" them, the proprietor (a charmingblonde man) told me, because they learn to write with these grids in school, and to make every letter the perfect proportion by fitting each letter into one square. I told him that I was a writer, a poet, and that such perfection made me too nervous to write. He searched and searched for a notebook with blank pages or lines. I finally said I'd take one with the grids. He wouldn't have it. He put his hand over his heart and insisted he couldn't bear knowing it might have an advserse effect on my writing. He went into a back office and came out with a stack of blank paper, which he gave to me. Wouldn't take money. "Ecrivez bien!," he said. I thought he was going to kiss my hand, too, but he didn't. Just laughed. Even when they're only kidding, the French are so passionate.

Adrian was in her pre-travel frenzy -- getting ready to leave for a conference (and then Mardi Gras) in New Orleans in the morning. But she stopped what she was doing to help me load Erica's computer onto a set of wheels. We wrapped it up in an old beach towel, wrapped bungee cords around the wholething, tried "bumping" it down the stairs -- four flights, pas d'ascenseur -- butI finally picked it up and carried it in my arms like a well-fed dog. In her courtyard, we loaded it back onto the cart and I was on my way. It was much easier than I'd expected to wheel the computer through the Marais -- you always see people hauling strange cargo around in ingenious ways here -- and I got it back to rue des Guillemites without incident. Set up the computer --- which seems monstrous, and so ORANGE, after my little iBook -- and immediately got online to deal with the backlog of e-mail. (I'm begging people NOT to send me too many messages in the next few weeks.) And it's working, mostly -- freezes up from time to time, which means I have to shut down, have a bit of chocolate, and then reboot. But there are worse things. Et voila.

Poetry and Politics

2005-02-02T18:21:00.000-08:00

Feb. 2, 2005

I've settled into a fairly sweet routine of reading and writing and wandering the streets, these past few days ... trying to restrict my socializing to the evenings, but that's difficult when so many of the folks I know here are writers and/or work at home.

So ... I met Jennifer Dick for coffee late this morning at Le Boucheron on the rue de Rivoli. I spotted her sitting in the back of the room when I walked in. Amid the hello bisous she whispered in my ear and asked if I'd seen Vanessa Paradis sitting by the door. Well, I hadn't noticed her, since beautiful women are everywhere here, but I kept stealing glances in that direction in the hope that Johnny Depp might join her. No such luck.

Jen and I went to a couple of shops and finally purchased my new cell phone, which vibrates in my pocket just before it starts ringing and then plays a tune that sounds to me like a theme song from a cheesy French movie. Even if I DO figure out how to use all the options, I don't think I'll change that ring.

Good news in the lit-biz department from my pal Mr. Keillor, who wants to include "Slow Children at Play" in his new Good Poetry anthology. This on top of the recent good news from Best American Poetry and Billy Collins' inclusion of a couple of poems in the new Poetry 180 has gone right to my head ... and added to the anxiety in re: whether the newer work has any merit. Well, there's always something to be anxious about ... And the good news from the new low-res MFA Program at Western Connecticut that I'll be part of the faculty, starting this August. Et voila ... and enough, already, in the tooting-one's-own horn department.

Last night I participated in Adrian's ParlerParlor French/English conversation group -- there's always a demand for Anglophones because there are so many Francophones trying to perfect their English --and I heard again about a recent development in French bureaucracy that first blew my mind a few days ago, when it came up in conversation at the poetry soiree at Joe Ross's: they put MICROCHIPS in dogs here. Really. I keep thinking everyone's pulling my leg about this, but apparently they're not. If you bring your dog to France from the US you must get a microchip implanted under Fifi's skin. Joe's wife, Laura, told me that, in this way, your dog can be scanned, just like your groceries are scanned at the supermarket. (Is this really true?) And my French friends last night kept trying to explain to me how this is a good way for owners to keep track of their dogs -- if Fifi gets lost, her chip helps you find her again, somehow? -- and that it also has something to do with various "categories" for pets. I'm not sure I understood what was being said about pit bulls in this regard, but the whole thing seems a little ominous to me. Then again, I wonder if these chips also somehow control canine behavior, and if this is why there seems to be so much less doggy-doo on the sidewalks than I remember from years past? In any case, the French don't seem to share my alarm.

They do, however, seem to share my alarm about what's happening in U.S. politics, for which I'm endlessly grateful. I'm also grateful that, being French, the French are so very polite about this. It's always me who casts the first anti-Bush aspersion ... which elicits a world-weary and complicit smile from whoever I'm speaking with, and another deep drag on her cigarette, before she murmurs in agreement and what seems like relief that I'm not one of those Americans who actually voted for the idiot-king. I really and truly can't think how to carry myself in the world when my government is behaving in ways so much like the ways the Nazis behaved in Europe in the 30's.

And I keep coming back to what Sharon Doubiago wrote in Hard Country about not wanting to be a poet during the Vietnam war, "because what could I say/ when people were being murdered in my name?" I'm just going to follow my mother's example of open defiance, however that defiance can be expressed. She made her own sign, last fall, and taped it to the rear window of her Escort: a picture of Cheney -- sneering, of course -- that she'd downloaded from the internet, with a caption that read: "I felt a lot better after I said the F word, and so will your kids." Mom lives in small-town Kentucky, where a lot of people have been convinced they're voting for "morality" when they vote Republican. She left her pro-Democrat signs up long after the recent elections. She told me she wanted the signs to be there to remind people --when their wages keep going down, their taxes go up, their kids are sent off to Iraq -- who they voted for. I told her someone might start shooting her mailbox. She said she didn't care. My mother, the anarchist. May she live 100 years and never back down.

Yesterday I logged onto AOL and saw the double headline: "Is the Press Too Free? (Tell Us What You Think!)" and, just under that, "Hillary Clinton Collapses." Is the press TOO free? Is the press too FREE? No wonder Hillary collapsed. I felt like collapsing myself.

For a couple of months now I've been carrying around with me the post-election issue of something called Jerry Falwell's National Liberty Journal. I suppose I should burn it, but I'm just too agog. A good friend in Atlanta, who's not really sure why it's delivered to her mailbox, except that her parents are big Bush supporters, gave this tabloid to me. "They really love him," she told me. "But why?" I asked. "Well, they think he goes to church like they do, and they really like that tax break." These are upper-middle-class folks, which means they live very well, even by American standards, and that tax break doesn't amount to more than a couple of hundred dollars. "But do they need it?" I asked. "No," said my friend, and shrugged. So there you have it. My friend seemed as dismayed by her parents' attitude as I felt -- well, she's probably more dismayed, since they're her parents, and she's a progressive and a Democrat, herself.

She gave me the National Liberty Journal so that I might get a sense of what the mindset of the "religious" Republican right is like. "Moronic" is too mild a word. "Terrifying" is too mild a word. I know you've heard all of this before, but if you haven't read the National Liberty Journal, or something like it, you may not have a real sense of just how smug and delusional and dangerous this mindset it. Oh, and let's not forget self-congratulatory. Although every statistic about the election indicates that Bush was only elected -- if he was elected at all -- by the slimmest of margins, and that the "evangelical" voter turnout only increased very slightly, almost imperceptibly since the last election --these folks now think they own the U.S. government. The front page boasts headlines about "The Evangelical Revolution" and "The Return of a 21st Century Moral Majority," along with a map of the U.S. that is almost completely red, with only a few flecks of blue -- and "The Faith and Values Coalition" intends to convert those blue counties to red as soon as possible. Falwell himself wrote the lead story, which outlines TFVC'S "three-fold platform: (1) the confirmation of pro-life, strict constructionist US Supreme Court justices and other federal judges;" (Oh give me a DECONSTRUCTIONIST Supreme Court justice, please! Give me a POST-STRUCTURALIST Supreme Court justice, while you're at it.) "(2) the passage of a constitutional Federal Marriage Amendment; and (3) the election of another socially- fiscally- and politically-conservative president in 2008." There you have it, my friends, the plan of a big fat stupid white guy with a god-complex for "mobiliz(ing) religious conservatives around a pro-life, pro-family, strong national defense and pro-Israel platform, designed to return America to her Judeo-Christian heritage." Because "Our nation simply cannot continue as we know it if we allow out-of-control lawmakers and radical judges -- working at the whims of society -- to alter the moral foundations of America." Oh lord help us, they're working at the WHIMS OF SOCIETY! (Which could result in an actual majority of society being allowed to affect the society?! Quelle horreure!) And those OUT-OF-CONTROL LAWMAKERS! I don't know about you, but I get an image of guys like Senators McCain and Feingold running around in circles, ties askew, going berserk trying to pass godless legislation like campaign finance reform. What's next, an attorney general who advocates torture? Whoops.

I really don't know which mindset I despise more: the greedy idiocy of thinking it's worth saving one's self a few hundred dollars in taxes, in the short run, no matter what that costs in the long run in terms of public education, healthcare, libraries, roads, etc.... -- and to hell with the record deficits this administration is running up, and the costs of its war-mongering -- or the willful stupidity of believing that two human beings who happen to be of the same gender being allowed to make a legal commitment to love and support one another is somehow going to threaten all the happy, happy heterosexual marriages in America. And anyway, isn't LOVE -- not arrogance nor self-righteousness nor fear --supposed to be at the center of Christian theology? My mother says she's going to create bumper stickers reminding people, too, that Jesus Christ is The Prince of PEACE. I think all of this is even more upsetting to her because she feels as if her whole spiritual belief system has been co-opted by the cynical and manipulative likes of Karl Rove. I still hold accountable all those who simply believe what they choose to believe, and choose to believe what's easiest and most convenient for them to believe, and most self-serving.

I should, I know, end this rant, because we've all heard it all before, it's just too depressing, etc., etc. But I'm willing to bet that I'm the only person in my circle of friends who's ever seen the National Liberty Journal (and y'all keep in mind that I've NEVER seen Fox News, except for the excerpts included in the OUTFOXED documentary, so this stuff is probably more "news" to me than it is to a lot of people) and I've been wanting to share the outrageous language in its pages for months. To wit: in the "Moral Majority Timeline" on page 12, under 1988, the copy reads, "At the end of his presidency, Ronald Reagan has appointed three Supreme Court justices and 378 federal judges and has almost single-handedly defeated the 'evil empire' of communism." ALMOST SINGLE-HANDEDLY DEFEATED COMMUNISM! RONALD REAGAN! This is news I'll have to tell those slacker Poles next time I go to Poland, and somebody tell the Czechs, too -- Reagan did it, not you! Look, up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane ... able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! And speaking of Eastern Europe, the mother of my good pal Ed Landler was a Jewish refugee from WWII Hungary. She's still going strong in the San Fernando Valley, at about 90 years old. I asked Ed what his mother thinks about what's going on in the US now, because I keep thinking this is what it must have been like to be alive during the Nazi's rise to power. Ed summed up his Mom's take on the situation in a few words: "This is worse." The stakes are higher; the weapons are deadlier.

Several different people in the past few days have forwarded to me via e-mail the transcript of an interview Amy Goodman did with Seymour Hersh. Hersh asserts that our government, in effect, has been taken over by a cult; and that what we're seeing with the latest Bush cabinet changes is the purging of all those who aren't "true believers."

It's interesting to contrast this with politics and attitudes among Europeans. At about the same time I first started reading and fuming over the National Liberty Journal, I read an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about Italy (written by Ian Fisher, reprinted from the New York Times, and on page 9 of the AJC, unsurprisingly). The article discusses the relationship between church and state in Italy, which is almost overwhelmingly Catholic. And what struck me most is that the (mostly) peaceful relationship between church and state in Italy is the result of political and cultural maturity -- i.e., that people are willing to mind their own damn business about things that don't affect them, personally, and willing to think collectively -- and unselfishly? --when it comes to the common good. In other words, they're aware of the differences between private and public life. Fisher writes, "Italians routinely ignore the conservative Pope John Paul II on matters of private morality, like contraception, divorce or marriage ... but admire him deeply for his stands on caring for the poor or his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq..." It's just the opposite in America, isn't it?

And finally -- I swear I'll get off this soapbox in a minute -- I read a letter to the editor in Tuesday's London Observer from the Rev. Dr. Nigel Scotland, urging that the government NOT "curtail free speech ... (and) open debate on the dysfunctional aspects of religious belief and practice. There needs to be a recognition ... that all religions have the potential to lead to abuse, the curtailment of human rights, war and genocide." Amen. The apartment in Paris that's become my temporary home belongs to a photojournalist, so books of his haunting and gorgeous and heart-breaking photos surround me. One of those books, In Times of War and Peace, is full of images of the kind of suffering humans inflict on one another in the names of our gods and our systems of belief. They're subtle and powerful images. I wish they were plastered on billboards across America.

But I'm in France, and the plumber has finally finished fixing the drain in the shower, so I can clean up now and get to the party that's already started a few blocks away. It's a "hen party" hosted by Dale Novick, who's moved to Paris permanently from the States, and a whole bunch of my favorite women will be there: Adrian, Sonya, Carolyn, et al. There's going to be bitching galore about all of the above, and also laughter, and chocolate, and wine.

Lovelier in Paris

2005-01-31T14:43:00.000-08:00

Jan. 31, 2005

My father's birthday; he would have been 80 years old today.

In the morning, as soon as I wake up, I crawl down to the end of the bed, open the window and roll up the blind. The Pompidou Center in all its garish blues and reds rises up just beyond the gray buildings, the chimneys and rust-colored roofs.

When I go outside, finally, in mid-afternoon, it's warm enough to leave my coat open. I turn the corner out of my little street -- "Ah, the street they forgot," Joe said last night, walking me home -- and emerge into the swirl of pedestrian traffic in the Marais. I pick up some pears at a little market on rue Vielle du Temple. The first taste of the first slice is almost unbearably, almost obscenely sweet. I think I've never tasted a pear so perfectly ripe before. But maybe it's just that I've waited so long to eat.

On Saturday evening, Adrian came by with Barry, her friend from Santa Fe who's been visiting Paris for a few weeks (and who brought a "very special" bottle of red wine, too). She immediately declared that I'd gotten the deal of the century on this apartment, and helped me identify the monuments and landmarks visible from the windows: yes, that's the dome of St. Paul; and that's the "genie" (I'd always thought it was an angel) on the top of the column at the Bastille. Being on the top floor of an ancient building surrounded by other ancient buildings, I have plenty of privacy and all the peace and quiet I need. I'm high above the narrow little rue des Guillemites, which is a narrow, dark street with almost no traffic. The walls of the buildings seem to bow a bit in the middle, as if beginning to buckle under their own weight. Adrian peered over the edge of the balcony, ecstatic: "This was all a slum not very long ago. Look how everything's crumbling." I wonder what "guillemites" means?

Barry went off to meet some friends for dinner on the other side of town, and Adrian and I went out into the neighborhood -- her neighborhood and mine. We tried to get a table at one of her favorite restaurants, but it was Saturday night, no hope without a reservation. So we walked on a bit and decided to give Au Gamin de Paris a try. All of the tables in front were full and the bar was crowded, but the bartender told us, "Quelques minutes," and poured us each a kir. Very gallant, in that way of French men, making us feel welcome and cared for and carefree, all at once. But he didn't seem French, somehow, nor did the other waiters, at least one of whom looked as if he could have been the bartender's brother. Adrian cocked her ear and listened to them speaking to one another: "Arabic," she pronounced, "They're North African." Before we finished our kirs we were seated at a table near a fireplace full of candles and not far from a door that must have led to the kitchen, and from which we heard frequent bird calls -- a little too shrill, perhaps, but a good system for signaling when orders were ready. We shared salad and salmon and sole meuniere, then a piece of the chocolate gateau we'd spotted on the end of the bar when we'd walked in, and which Adrian insisted was part of the "regime," not dangerous to the waistline at all.

Later, we walked back to her apartment, where I picked up some things I'd left there last spring and borrowed a warm robe of Erica's. Then I walked home alone down rue des Archives, as a woman can do in Paris at midnight, with no fear for her safety. The streets were still full of pedestrians; the cafes still swarming and bright.

On Sunday, it was raining again. I left the apartment mid-afternoon and walked across the Seine along the Pont Neuf, knowing the rain wouldn't keep anyone at home, that the party I was going to, on the left bank, would already be in full swing when I arrived. When one passes others on the sidewalks with umbrellas, one has to raise her umbrella up to keep them from colliding. A sea of bobbing umbrellas; a tiny girl in a pink coat with a long hood that tapered into a point where it hung down her back, a pink tassel on the end.

I rang at 55 rue de Seine and, just as I was buzzed in, I heard someone running up behind me to get in the door before it closed. I turned on the stairs and saw Jeffrey Greene. We laughed and kissed hello. He told me he'd just gotten back to Paris from the country, just gotten back to France from the U.S., where he'd made another one of his 4,000 mile road trips. "You're crazy!" I said. "No, you're crazy!" he said. And we made our way up the stairs in the direction of the noise. I was happy to be walking in with him, both of us late, because I'd been afraid there wouldn't be anyone at the party I knew. But of course almost every poet I know in Paris was there: Jennifer Dick (who'd extended the invitation to me and RSVP'd on my behalf), Jenny Huxta, Michele Notebloom, Lisa Pasold, Heather Hartley, Barbara Beck, and a lot of other people who at least looked familiar. The occasion was a reception for and reading by American poet Rod Smith, hosted by American poet Joe Ross and his wife, Laura, who have recently moved to Paris from San Diego. When it was time for Rod to read, he stood in one corner of the sitting room, and those of us without chairs plopped down on the floor at his feet. At first I was afraid I was going to be bored -- uh oh, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry -- but then he started reading some poems from a notebook (still handwritten) about elves, really bizarre and hilarious poems that rearranged the old psychic furniture. Afterwards, Jeff and Heather and I hung around in the kitchen, giggling and gossiping. We tossed around the idea of putting together an anthology called BIG WHUP (how to spell that?) about all our stupid, failed romances. Jenny Huxta came through the kitchen and said she wanted to contribute, too.

When the party broke up, I walked to St. Michel and crossed the river there, then met Joe -- my jazz pianist pal who lives in a converted plumbing shop in the 19th -- in front of the Theatre de la Ville. We strolled to les Halles and had a casual dinner in a bistro, then headed back toward the Marais. I was craving chocolate -- what's new? -- and realized I had yet to enact my sacred ritual of eating a chocolate crepe in the street. Joe agreed to indulge with me, so we stopped at the next place we passed. I ordered a simple chocolate crepe, but Joe went for a crepe with Nutella AND banana AND almonds. The guy making our crepes just grinned. When he handed Joe this monstrous -- an ENTIRE banana -- concoction, Joe groaned. He had to walk me all the way back to my apartment just to finish it, and he still tossed at least a quarter of it in the bin. I just walked along happily dripping melted chocolate all over my coat. After Joe left, I went into the bathroom to wash my sticky hands and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I had chocolate on the end of my nose, chocolate on my chin. Lovely. I'm always lovelier in Paris.

THE BLOG BEGINS - ARRIVING IN PARIS

2005-01-29T09:08:00.000-08:00

Paris
Jan. 28, 2005

My AirFrance flight arrived at DeGaulle at nine this morning. The young Frenchwoman sitting beside me -- 2-1/2 months pregnant, “It’s ‘orreeble,” she said, “But I’m very happy... I think” -- managed not to vomit, and I managed a little sleep. Our plane began its descent and then ascended again, and the captain assured us we just had to wait a few moments, lots of traffic at DeGaulle, “It’s nothing ... unusual.”

So I’m back in France, where everything is “normale,” where it’s possible, still, to smoke and flirt and the waitress, arriving for her shift at the airport cafe, greets her colleague at the bar with kisses on each cheek and a stream of chatter. I’m having a cafe creme here because I’m already late, because of the snafu at the baggage carousel: huge suitcases jamming the belt, and then all the luggage backing up and the whole operation grinding to a halt somewhere down below. Finally, some of us found some Air France agents and they sent men with gloves, who crawled down the belt into the baggage area and freed the jammed suitcases and boxes, throwing them -- quite dramatically -- off the belt at our feet. “Not all French are this way,” a man with a camera, documenting the mayhem, told me. But the baggage handlers were doing their work with a certain je ne sais quoi.

I’ve decided to take the Roissy bus to L’Opera, and then get a cab to the Marais from there, sensing already that dollars aren’t going to go far in euros this year, and I shouldn’t pamper myself too much.

Jan. 29

Although the Roissy buses are supposed to come every 20 minutes, I waited with a group of other passengers at the door for an hour before the bus finally came. And couldn’t, at first, find a taxi at L’Opera. And dragged my bags around in the rain. By the time I finally got to the Marais, the man (Brad) who was supposed to meet me here with the keys to the apartment was long gone. But some women taking a cigarette break in the courtyard let me use the phone in their office, stash my bags in the vestibule, and then advised me to have a coffee at the cafe on the corner until the situation resolved itself. (They also complimented me on my French, asked if things "va bien" in the US, and seemed surprised when I answered in the negative ... The joke --sort of -- that it's impossible to have a cigarette in America, and -- not a joke -- that we have this idiot for a president. They seemed relieved by my response but, I suspect, would have gone on being friendly in any case. Guardian angels wherever I go ...)

So I spent an hour at Au Rendez-Vous des Amis and then met Brad, at last. The apartment is “charming,” as promised: on the top (sixth) floor of an ancient building on a quiet street in the heart of the Marais, with views of Beaubourg, St. Paul, a thousand rooftops -- windows full of sky.

The apartment belongs to an American photojournalist whose beautiful black and white prints of Parisiennes are everywhere. My connection to Peter is Jenny Huxta, a young poet-photographer I met about ten years ago, when she was nineteen and driving cross-country by herself. A friend of mine who’s a friend of Jenny’s mother’s called me in L.A. from Pennsylvania and asked me to meet Jenny when she made it to the west coast and then call back with a full report. I was delighted to make her acquaintance, and have continued to be delighted by her presence in my life. As I told my friend in Pennsylvania, Jenny at 19 was doing exactly what I wished I’d been doing at that age. At 28, her life is one big adventure. Our paths keep crossing and re-crossing; we always make one another laugh. She’s been living in Paris, off and on, for several years, and now speaks fluent French and supports herself by assisting photographers and teaching English. Her hair is a coppery red this year, which sets off her blue eyes and gives her a technicolor look.

Last night Jenny met me here and we went back down the street to Au Rendez-Vous des Amis (“the meeting of friends”) for an omelette and salad and red wine. We talked about politics and both of us cried, thinking about how a whole generation of immigrants -- her grandparents, and mine -- worked in the mines and the mills and believed they were building a new kind of country. And how they’ve been betrayed. How we have in America now a state as monstrous as any state, but bigger. The place was filling up with locals, with chatter and cigarette smoke. Two elderly women took the table next to ours. One drank beer while the other drank coffee; they flirted with the young waiter; they seemed to be enjoying the noise and the crowd and one another’s company. I thought about how, in the U.S., women like this would be sitting at home alone in front of television sets; about how what we miss is this kind of public life, the streets outside full of pedestrians, still, at midnight and the cafes packed with young and old. Pretty soon Jenny and I were giggling madly, catching up on one another’s stories of the past year. We decided we were missing a golden opportunity by clomping around Paris in our boots and jeans, where everyone seems to be walking around in his or her own movie, and we decided we’re going to start wearing capes. I walked her part way home to rue Montorguell to clear the smoke from my eyes and kissed her goodbye at the traffic light. Back on rue Guillemites, I fell into a nine hour sleep.

By this morning the rain had stopped and, by mid-afternoon, a slant of hazy sunlight was slipping into the narrow street. I went for a walk and to do some marketing. At the corner of rue Vielle du Temple and rue de la Perle, I saw Dustin Hoffman waiting to cross in the other direction. He was with a young woman I hope was his daughter. He looked happy and handsome and pleased not to be recognized. We passed in the intersection when the light changed. Then I passed a clutch of Frenchwomen -- middle aged, chic -- on the sidewalk, staring after him, pointing and smiling.

The first Post

2004-11-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

Testing. 1, 2, 25 and 4/25ths
Does editing work? Yes. Yes it does.