Dimanche

Dimanche -- Sunday. The sense of living in a village, which permeates the 7th Arrondissement most of the time, disappears on a Sunday.

The French spend Sunday out of doors during the spring and summer, but it appears that they all go to relatives when the weather turns cold. Until I got to the market today, the streets were essentially deserted.

I found a better picture of the gold-highlighted rotunda of the church at the Hotel d'Invalides.

The other two pictures are a little different.

The top one is a Magritte. More on that in a moment.

The other is a photo of a small garden off the Rue de Babylone, the Jardin Catherine Laboure. More on that in a moment, too.

I made breakfast today. Pain perdu. It means, literally, "lost bread".

You know it by another name. French Fries are known here as "frites", short for "pommes frites", literally, "fried apples", although not really, because the "pomme" is short for "pomme de terre", or "apples of the earth", which is what the French call potatoes. French Fries are not French, by the way -- they began in Belgium. Belgians aren't known as Belgians, either -- they are called "Walloons", and I have no idea why. So, French Fries aren't French and aren't French Fries here....and Danish pastry isn't Danish (in Denmark it's called American pastry), and, well, French Toast is not French toast, either.

It's pain perdu.

And it is pretty wonderful when made with free-range fertile eggs and raw milk and fresh country butter and real cinnamon from Vietnam (which we can finally purchase once again in the US -- try it, it's a world different from what has been sold as cinnamon for the last 25 years, which is really a type of camphor tree bark from China that is related to cinnamon, but isn't). But the finishing touch is to make it from croissants. If you go bread shopping near the end of the day, you get deals on bread -- 5 large butter croissants for $2 is a pretty good deal, and two, soaked in eggs, milk and cinnamon make for a wonderful pain perdu. By the way, they DO have bacon here, but it's called lardons -- what they call bacon, we call Canadian Bacon. I don't need it, so I didn't have any.

Walked to the organic market - I took a number of pictures, but on the way, right adjacent to the Republican Guard headquarters, was this little pocket park.

This park symbolizes, for me, the vast differences between the French social model and the American model. In America, we treat taxes like they are fatal -- it's a personal affront to pay any taxes to any entity for any reason. Despite us having run up the largest (in pure dollar numbers, and maybe even adjusted for inflation, I'm not sure) deficit in our history in just 4 short years, we are hell bent on cutting taxes more and more and more.

The French, on the other hand, pay some of the highest taxes in the world. They even pay taxes ON taxes, in the form of the Value Added Tax, which taxes assembled items at each stage of their existence. For instance, a bottle of wine is taxed, of course. But, before it gets to the store, the empty bottle is taxed. So is the label. And the cork. And the capsule. Once it's all assembled, everything is taxed again, including the addition of a domestic tax if it's not for export, PLUS the VAT.

Now, we know that's a lot of taxes. And every red-blooded American thinks of this as confiscatory, as leftist at best and Communist at worst. But, take a step back for just a moment.

Taxes serve a purpose. Taxes allow for expenditures in a common way to provide things that can't be done privately.

What can't be done privately, you might be screaming......

Well, no matter how much money Bill Gates has, no matter how expensive his car might be, purchased with HIS money that HE earned and kept safe from taxation, he can't drive it past his driveway unless there are public roads. And it helps if there's enough of them to handle the traffic. And it really helps if they are in good repair, so that he doesn't wind up buying his car a second time via the mechanic's bills.

What does this have to do with the park? Take a good, long look at that picture again? What do you see?

More important, what DON'T you see?

There's about a half-acre of lawn there. It's green. It's trimmed. It's healthy. It has NO weeds.

The plants are in wonderful shape. There's vegetable gardens in beautiful condition, esparliered fruit trees, and pathways.

The flowering plants have flowers. Live ones. The dead flowerheads have been removed. The weeds don't exist. And there's not a speck of trash to be found, anywhere in the park. I walked all the way around it, all the pathways, looked under the hedges, everywhere. Not a single piece of trash, no cigarette packages, no McDonald's boxes, no TackyBell wrappers. It's maintained.

Bill Gates can't make that happen, either. Warren Buffet might be able to GIVE a park to the City of Omaha's children, but it will look like crap in a year. Guaranteed.

How often have you walked the streets and been repulsed by the trash? When did you last see a park that looked as nice a few years after it was planted as it did when it was new? How about when it's 135 years old?

We are so obsessed with "keeping what's mine" that we are willing, no, actually, we are PROUD to sacrifice the very quality of life that is one of the few things we could do with our money that would make us happy every time we notice it.

No, I'm not advocating that we adopt the European model. There's a million reasons it won't work for us. Gasoline is $6.37 a gallon for unleaded here, but that's OK because it's $73 a month for unlimited use of the 14 subway lines, a half-dozen commuter train lines, and all the bus lines in the city. It's one of the ways they choose to spend their tax money. We, on the other hand, choose to exercise our freedom to sit in traffic for 2 hours on a Friday trying to GET to Highway 5 to go somewhere. Which is fine -- it's the American way, and much of the world aspires to it. I just hope they fail, because most of the world doesn't have the open land or capital to actually pull it off.

I bought museum cards today. They aren't cheap -- $21 for one day; $42 for three days, and $63 for 5 (consecutive), but they allow you unlimited entry and exit at about 70 museums throughout Paris. I went to the Pompidou Center today -- Walt, you should be proud of me. My FIRST museum was a Modern Art museum. And I enjoyed it.

The Magritte (one of several on display) was one of my favorite pieces. Just because. First of all, it looks like something, as opposed to the deconstructionist manifesto that led to 50 square foot canvases that are snow white. Second of all, what it looks like is amusing while being disturbing. I don't know, it's just kinda cool.

Had my first meal "out" today -- un sandwich Grec complet -- a pita Gyro (made of actual meat, not a massive cylinder of ground meat) with hot pepper sauce and veggies, along with fries and an Orangina. Total tariff: $6.90. Metro'ed home from the Marais, watched the Niners game and did a little writing.

It's 10 pm now, late in the 4th quarter. I'm about out of time outs.

See you demain.