once again i find myself in paris. and as usual i am as happy as can be. starting when i was a teenager i've been to paris probably a couple of dozen times. if i could come twice that many times in the next 20 years, i would never find myself bored.
my son-in-law chris met me at the airport to get me and a prodigious amount of luggage back into the city. i napped a bit in the afternoon and we headed off on our first adventure. after school my grandsons carter (10) and calvin (7) play with their friends on the courtyards and parks near the school. apparently residents in apartments surrounding these courtyards and parks are not always delighted with the happy sounds of a dozen dozen young children racing about playing games. albeit the dozen dozen kids in france scream, shout and call out to each other in much quieter tones than american kids are wont to do.
as sometimes happens, a soccer ball ended up on someone's balcony. many of these soccer balls go to jail, go directly to jail and do not stop to pass go. they do not reappear. but as this balcony was not so high off the ground, we were inspired to try to retrieve it. chris vetoed sending a child who climbs as well as a monkey up the side of the building. so calvin wrote some letters of abject apology and we folded them into paper airplanes. sailing paper airplanes onto a balcony isn't as easy as one might imagine. fortunately an agile, athletic and tall friend, franz, happened along. franz climbed up without worrying chris excessively, put our paper airplanes on the balcony, realized he was acrobatic enough to retrieve the soccer ball, did so, and collected our apologetic paper airplanes.
yesterday betsy and i slept late, and then hurried over to catch the tail end of the saturday market. parisian markets are marvelous. french farmers select the produce for you, bag it and weigh it. for americans it seems as if you wouldn't get just what you wanted this way. au contraire. the farmer always asks when you will eat the bananas/melons/avocado/
chris and betsy are both imaginative cooks. we eat wonderfully here. chris made a terrific pork curry for us when i arrived and betsy whipped up a lovely picnic yesterday. we met friends for a perfect late spring picnic in the shadow of the eiffel tower. four other families also threw a little something together, brought a bottle or two of wine, stopped for fresh bread and converged with us on the champs de mars. when darkness falls the eiffel tower lights up. just about the time you appreciate how very lovely it is lit against the early night sky, the lights begin to twinkle for several minutes. the sight is enough to make you believe in magic. (and last evening we retrieved the soccer ball which got stuck high in a tree by kicking another soccer ball into it, utterly without the invaluable assistance of franz - but after 45 minutes of trying.) this afternoon we went on a sort of treasure hunt/mystery/history adventure in the city. for hundreds of years frenchman wanted the prime meridian to pass through paris. the paris observatory, the french academy, the louvre and any number of other notable parisian landmarks are all on the same meridian. in the 1880's greenwich in london, of course, won out and greenwich mean time is where the day begins. with 23 other equally spaced meridians marking the time around the globe. but in fairly recent memory the french have more permanently marked the paris meridian. within the city limits more than 120 brass medallions (arago is the astronomer who did significant work on the meridian - his name and indicators for north and south are on each medallion) were installed on walkways, courtyards, floors of public buildings and posts. we spotted 15 medallions today. the paris meridian runs from barcelona to dunkirk, and outside the city the paris meridian is being marked with a line of trees. we are now all tuckered out. but i think of you and look forward to being back in the u.s. in a short time. love, m |
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