I See Dead People

I know. It's been a while, and you are all just Jonesin' for the next exciting episode of The Old and the Restless.

I forced poor Kelli to stay awake until 11 our time the night she arrived -- it was a terribly long day for her, but she immediately adjusted to Paris schedule, sleeping until 8 AM and being right on the clock since then.

I've gotten to the point, now, where I rarely consult a map. If I'm trying to go to a specific place, then I'll look when I get in the vicinity to be certain I don't overshoot, but otherwise, I'm doing pretty darned well on my own. Of course, like any magician's trick, there's a, well, trick to it.

Wherever you go in Paris, there the Metro is. It is alleged that no place in the old city is more than 500 meters from a Metro station, and I believe that just might be true. And, every Metro station has a map of the area......

I showed Kelli the neighborhood. We took the Metro from where the bus left her off, got off one stop from our house, and walked past the Ecole Militaire, the West Point of France. It's a large "building", actually, a university. As we walked past the front, which has a spectacular view of the Champs de Mars and Eiffel Tower, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, on the ground.

But first, a word of explanation.

On our first trip to Europe, we went to Pompeii. Kelli was standing there, blonde and all, looking at these two workers behind a rope barrier who were excavating a building -- Pompeii is only about half unearthed so far. There she was, all, liike, standing there and all, and, well, you know, like, one of them gave her a piece of volcanic rock from one of the walls they were excavating.

Now, that's bad enough, you know -- one antiquity sprited to the New World, right?

So, on a subsequent trip, we went to Piazza Armerina in the heart of Sicily, where there is a Roman hunting palace that was buried in a mudslide a long, long time ago. It was recently discovered, is partially unearthed. We arrived there just as it was closing for lunch, but the very tall Italian archaeologist who was cataloging the Senate Meeting room's thousands of tiny mosaic floor tiles noticed that Kelli was standing there, all blonde and everything, with, you know, like REALLY blue eyes, and, well, you know, he gave us a private tour while the place was closed. We got down onto the floors, walked in areas closed to the public, and, well, you know, he kinda gave her a lapis mosaic tile and an onyx tile from the floor of the room. It had a number on the back and everything.

So........this kind of thing just happens -- not to US, but to HER.

Anyway, I looked down on the ground, and there was a chunk of decorative something or other, the same color as the building. After a lengthy examination of the cornice of the building, we found the flower adornment up on the cornice which the fist-sized chunk had fallen from.

A photograph of this artifact of the Ecole Militaire is included for your enjoyment. Kindly send all Christmas greetings to Msr. Michael Duca, c/o The Bastille, Paris 75005, France. I'm hoping to have better luck with the Prefect of Police than did Jean ValJean..

We walked through the area, saw the market street, installed the new toilet seat which I purchased a couple of days ago (the former one, made of plastic, unfortunately was cracked when I arrived, and had already developed a taste for human flesh. You know once they go bad you can't save them....). Much to my amazement (to say nothing of the shopkeeper) I was able to ask for a replacement white oval toilet seat made of wood, and got what I asked for on the first attempt. This trip is rapidly becoming like the second season of Desperate Housewives -- still awfully good, but without any punch lines......

I bought a Pariscope (like TV Guide for a city instead of television channels -- it's great, 240 pages detailing everything that's happening in the coming week. The only place I've found for movie listings.....), we found an organ concert (free, even) at Notre Dame on Sunday afternoon. Went out to dinner around the corner, Kelli had moules frites (mussels and french fries, possibly her favorite French meal), and I had a small steak, cuit au sanguine. The couple eating next to us were from London, near Gatwick Airport, and retired. We got to chatting after we all were amused watching un Homard Americaine, aka a Maine Lobster, terrorize the other 12 lobsters in the tank next to us. He herded them into a corner, then backed them up the side of the glass until they were standing on their claws, I guess you had to be there to really appreciate it.

Anyway, they told us about a street market on the Rue du Saxe, so we went there on Saturday. We saw lots of astonishing stuff -- pig's heads, eels, more innards for sale than we knew cattle had. Bought a piece of poitrine du porc, or pork breast -- with the skin on. Seared it, followed the recipe Christophe Hille (of A-16 -- the best Italian restaurant in America) generously shared with me, and made braised breast of pork cooked in wine with green olives and chestnuts. It was mighty fine, but no match for Christophe's fine work -- have no fear, my friend -- you still reign supreme and there's nobody in second place.

Went out to make good on our threat, and video tape the Eiffel Tower doing its sparkly thing -- only, the NiCad batteries for our camcorder no longer hold a charge -- we got about 45 seconds of video before the battery pooped out. Monday, we go to FNAC in St. Germain to see if they still sell batteries that fit our camcorder -- we can get them over the web, of course, but not shipped to France in time.

This means, of course, that there's still a chance for some hijinks, as another episode of Language Fun in France, starring me, will take place. I wonder if we can figure out a way to run our camera off a di-electric dead beaver.

So, for now, you are safe. No videos, yet.

While walking down Rue Cler, we stopped into the wine shop -- it's a beautiful little shop, and I'm very proud of myself for buying wine at a real store and not a self-serve grocery -- I have to talk to the proprietor and tell him what I like, and it's gone quite well. His English, it turns out, is better than my French (whose isn't?), but he humors me in French until I get stuck.

Kelli missed, by one evening, the biggest holiday in the French Fall calendar -- the release of the Beaujolais Nouveau, made from grapes picked in September. It's barely wine -- even the corks are hardly tinted -- and the goal is to get as close to the original fruit as possible. I selected one of the dozens of Nouveaus he had in the shop, and asked him what would go well with the wine.

He lit up immediately, and uttered a phrase I've never before heard in a wine shop, and probably never will again.

"Do you like bananas?"

Now, I'm smart enough to know he wasn't suggesting we make Beaujolais smoothies -- instead, I had stumbled on the one unique Beaujolais in the store, one that had the definite aroma and flavor profile of ripe bananas. (Young soft cow and goat cheeses and dried salamis are the answer, by the way. We had all of those things with the wine Saturday night, and it was almost a giggly experience to drink this nectar that's about 2% alcohol.)

Well, I didn't wear her down hiking about the countryside for the first two days, so today I decided we'd do the real test.

We went to Pere-LaChaise Cemetery. A half-million square feet of crypts and mausoleums built on a rather steep hillside, and we walked through way too much of it (because, inexplicably, they do not sell maps at the main entrance to the Cemetery, only at the remote entrances on the corners of the property. Wait. It's France, there is no "inexplicable". It just is what it is, no matter what your definition of is, is).

Lots of famous people repose there, and some famous people are "pretending" to repose there. In the latter category are Moliere (who died 200 years before the cemetery opened, but who still has a sarcophagus), a fairly famous Frenchman who USED to be buried here but who was unearthed and moved to the Pantheon in the 19th century; the opera composer Rossini, who was buried in his sepulchre here, but was later extricated and extradited to Italy, and Maria Callas, who was NEVER buried here -- her ashes were scattered over the Aegean Sea -- but whose fans bought a space in the columbarium and put up a plaque in her honor.

Also here, the great French writer Collette, Isadora Duncan, Oscar Wilde (whose memorial was covered with lipstick-laden kisses, and which has the following of his quotes left under a vase of flowers -- "the dreamer is a person who can only work by the light of the moon; his punishment is that he sees the dawn before anyone else"), James de Rothschild (there is a large Jewish section to the cemetery), Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein (is there a there HERE, Gertie?), Alice B. Toklas, Honore de Balzac, Eugene Delacroix, the brilliant French painter of the Revolution (his famous painting of Liberty leading the people was the basis of the logo for the play "Les Mis"), Marcel Proust, the painter Modigliani, and, perhaps most famous of all, the shooting star that blazed across the rock and roll sky for a few years in the 1960's, Jim Morrison.

Some of these resting places are pictured above. Perhaps the most fun was at Morrison's grave, which was marked with only a plain wooden cross for many years. A young British girl of perhaps 20 was there with her Mum and friend. When Kelli asked me to remind her who Jim Morrison was, I said "he was the first TRUE rock star, lead singer for the Doors, who, in 1970 at the age of 27, died in Paris of an overdose of everything. Heroin, cocaine, speed, alcohol, hashish, life itself." The young lady, who did not even realize that she possessed appendages until Morrison had been deacaying for 17 years, told her friend in a stage whisper "that's just not true, Jim didn't like any of those things -- he died of a heart attack"

Oh, please, dearie. Your MUM is barely old enough to have flung HER knickers up on stage at Jimmy; you are not even in the same arrondissement as the Clue Store.

Yes, Jim Morrison died of a heart attack, and his system contained lethal doses of multiple drugs at the time his heart was attacked. It stopped. He died. It was not a natural death, and it has not been a natural after-death, either.

Paris is largely closed on Sunday, until after dark, when it bursts into life -- everybody is on the streets -- we took the Metro back to Notre Dame for the organ concert, then wandered across the Left Bank -- we found a fabulous "Canadian Bookstore" behind the eglise Saint Severin, on the Street of the Parchment Makers, cleverly enough. Sweet young lady there who told us we didn't need a guilde book for Chartres, to save our money and just rent the audio guides to the cathedral. We had a delightful time in a shop barely 20 feet wide that had every conceivable space occupied with books, usually but a single copy of each -- including shelves on wheels that slid in front of other sets of shelves, like the "wall of screws" at Home Depot. This shop was more tightly crowded than my mother's garage; it was a sight to behold.

Walked, just like I knew where I was going (because, oddly, I did) across the Quartier Latin, past the famous cafes, Les Deux Magots and Cafe Le Flore (hangouts of all the famous Paris writers, from Big Ern Hemingway to Scott Fitzgerald to William Burroughs and Anais Nin), and headed for the restaurant near the house that I've been trying for over a week to eat at -- Le Square.

Closed on Sundays, as well as every other time I get there -- I have a sneaking suspicion that they have video cameras on the perimeter, and when they see me coming (I've approached from three of the four cardinal compass points now), they get all the patrons into the basement, put all the chairs up on the tables and darken the place within seconds. It must be quite a carnival to watch........

We ate at Pizza Tina. Tina is Barese, from the city of Bari, where a certain great aunt whose memory I revere came from. It's on the Adriatic side, up on the heel of the boot. Tina spoke French to me when I went there the first time, but when I heard her speaking Italian to one of the staff, I started chatting with her in Italian (having not used the language in 4 years -- I amazed me that I could carry on the conversation). Tonight, with Kelli in tow, Tina was at her mercurial best -- caring for customers, then sitting at our table and fanning her self in an operatic fashion, telling me how horribly dull the customers were, in a sentence that was 50% Italian, 30% French and 20% English, without pause. She brought us a special aperitif before we ordered, and when I asked for the Tortellini Boscaiola "con senza piselli", without peas, she said yes, with enthusiasm. Then, later, she came back and confirmed in Italian that I wanted the Tortellini "with nothing on it but peas", in Italian. I feigned great anger, corrected her, and she bubbled away giggling like a schoolgirl -- of course, I'd already heard her order the dish 5 minutes earlier without peas.

After the meal, she asked how everything was, and I told her "tutto bene, ma mi tortelli in arrivo con senza piselli -- perche?" (everything was fine, but my tortelli arrived without any peas? Why?" For just a moment, I got her -- she looked horrified that she had misunderstood, and I had to wink rather broadly to get her to realize that I not only got the joke, I could also return fire.

A fun evening -- tomorrow, Kelli gets a Metro pass, we don't walk 8 miles a day, and we go do battle with FNAC, the Fry's Electronics of France, trying to find batteries for the video camera. Wish us luck.