IT SEEMS WE WON'T ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

Let me begin with an observation, banal to be sure but nonetheless important. For some mysterious reason, when I turned on our Paris television set I found that I could not get CNN international, but I could get Al Jazeera English. That station was my source for world news for the two weeks we were in Paris. Al Jazeera carried the first hour of each of the January 6 committee hearings, about which more later, but of course it carried a great deal else. One of the events which they covered extensively was a series of street protests in India by the Muslim minority triggered by disparaging remarks made by one member of the government about the prophet Mohammed. (She ostensibly made these remarks in response to some negative comments by Muslims about one of the Hindu gods but since I do not have a dog in this fight I did not track down the details of that affair.) There are something like 200 million Muslims in India – almost 2/3 of the population of the United States – so pretty clearly these protests were a very big deal if we adopt Jeremy Bentham’s caveat in his enunciation of the principle of utilitarianism that “each one is to count as one.” I would imagine the protest got not much attention at all in the United States. Once again I was reminded that fewer than one in 20 human beings live in America.  It is easy to forget this when one is obsessing about the fascist behavior of this or that Republican candidate for state or national office.

 

For Susie and me the trip was not only bittersweet, because we were selling the apartment that has been our home away from home for 18 years, but also physically extremely difficult. Paris is a walking city and neither of us is capable anymore of strolling casually along back streets and riverfronts.  I have many times written here about the long walks I would take each morning in old Paris but this time simply making it from our apartment to Le Metro, the café in Place Maubert, was a great effort even though the café is a little more than half a block away. Our biggest outing was to have dinner at Brasserie Balzar, one of my favorite restaurants. I called ahead and booked table 36, which I have learned is the ideal spot from which to view the restaurant while having dinner. Susie and I set off, each using a three wheeled roller, and by an enormous exertion of effort managed to walk there and back!  I checked this morning on my computer. The restaurant is only 550 m from our apartment. That was the farthest we managed to get in our two week visit.

 

Because the apartment has been sold unfurnished, we have to clear it out entirely. It is quite small (31.66 m²) and there is after all not much furniture in that space, but there are a number of things of which we are both very fond and for which we have absolutely no use here at home so all of them will simply be hauled away. One of our friends agreed to take the South African rug made by a woman in Rorke’s Drift, bought by me many years ago in a shop in Durban, South Africa. Another friend took one of the pair of lovely Philippe Stark chairs that we bought at the old Samaritaine store, along with a standing lamp and a set of carved wooden napkin rings that I picked up in the airport at Johannesburg. Our closest friend took the framed 18^th-century map of Paris that sat on the wall above my desk for 18 years, along with the other Philippe Stark chair, a Nespresso coffee maker, a heavy Japanese iron teapot, and a vacuum cleaner, which she said she very much needed. On our last day in Paris, I found myself running some glasses and dishes through the dishwasher, even though all of them and the dishwasher itself will simply be hauled away and discarded.

 

Our friends all expressed the hope that we would return to Paris for yet another visit but Susie and I agreed that it is just too physically hard for us now to manage the Parisian streets. 

 

The best thing about the trip is that the real estate agent who handled the sale agreed as soon as we left to terminate our TV/Telephone/Internet contract with Orange.  Orange is the most useless Internet provider I have ever dealt with and I will be delighted no longer to be paying their outrageous monthly fees from my Paris bank account.

 

So there it is. We sold the apartment for rather more than we paid for it, making it perhaps the only good financial investment in my long life. We bought it on a lark in the spring of 2004 and it has been a wonderful addition to our lives ever since.

 

Oh yes. Our cat gave every evidence of being pleased at our return, which is more than one can usually expect from cats.