Paris Journal 2013 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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It wasn’t really a feast,
but rather a picnic – an indoor picnic. On the dining room table, I
arranged olives, radishes, cheeses, half a baguette, bananas, a few slices of
roasted chicken breast, a few slices of Paris ham, bananas, dark chocolate
squares, and maybe a couple things I’ve forgotten. Experience has taught us
that the best way to watch the Tour when it comes to Paris is on French
national television. So we did. With a picnic, in the dining room of the
apartment. I adored the aerial views
of the palace and especially the gardens of Versailles. We generally don’t have any desire to visit
Versailles again, but seeing it from the air was a treat. The gardens look like lace from that
perspective. We enjoyed watching the
relaxed ride into Paris. The approach
to the Tuileries was a bit different this year – it showed us Les Invalides
and the Institut de France. Paris is so wonderful to
see from the air. I often have dreams
in which I fly. Sometimes in my dreams
I soar over Paris. Do other people dream
about flying? I don’t know. Perhaps it is something that happens
because of all the swimming that I do. The best part was the light
show at the end, at dusk, on the Arc de Triomphe. Wow!
It was spectacular. The
occasion? This was the 100th
Tour de France. Here’s a 10 minute video of the show,
taken by Vincent Germain. This morning I had to give
the plants on the balcony a torrential dousing with the watering can. They depend on me for their very lives in
this heat wave. After caring for them, I went
for a walk from about 7:30 to 8:30AM, on the Champ de Mars. The Champ de Mars is no
longer plagued by illegal vendors selling Eiffel tower trinkets; the
pickpockets and con-artists are gone from there as well. Finally, it seems, the police and the justice
system have found a way to work together on this problem. In recent years, the police
were frustrated by the fact that after they would arrest these offenders, the
justice system would simply release them again and again. Of course, there has been a
political change in the meantime, and the administration of the city of Paris
is of the same political party as the executive branch of the national
government. I’m just saying . . . . Maybe that’s why the
official entities involved are now working together successfully on this. The result is a sense of
well-being among those of us enjoying places like the Champ de Mars in
Paris. The Champ was a serene
place this morning. I saw a man
meditating. The sprinklers were turned
on in the vast lawn. Peace. Quiet.
Calm. Those few of us who were walking on the Champ were silent. The space between the rows of trimmed trees
felt like a cathedral. The morning light was
filtered by a slight haze. Unlike yesterday morning,
the air did not feel light and cool.
It was heavier, and I don’t think that was because of humidity. Later this morning, back at
the apartment, I checked the AirParif web site. Sure enough, we are experiencing an “alert”
due to a high level of bad ozone in the atmosphere. The heat cooks the
emissions from autos, trucks, paints, solvents, and other things to produce
bad ozone. That, combined with very
little or no wind, causes episodes of pollution. One way in which bad ozone
affects human health is by stiffening the arterial walls. If you have high blood pressure and you
find yourself in a place with a high level of bad ozone, just take it
easy. This is not the time to process
a whole lot of that bad stuff through your lungs. So that’s why I’m walking
so early in the day, before the heat and ozone levels climb. I implemented one of the
Cooley cooling procedures for apartments without air conditioning. Freshly laundered sheets now hang from
clotheslines erected in the living and dining rooms, and fans pointed at them
are causing a cool-feeling ET (evapotranspiration) effect. Ah. This is a good time to
read. The book I’m enjoying now has an
interesting section in which the protagonist’s mother presents a narrative
about her childood in Hungary, when the Nazis were taking over. Her tale of survival and loss is
frightening. But she never loses hope. This tale reminded me of my
friend Peter Hilger, who has written a memoire about his years trapped inside
Nazi Germany as an American citizen (his dad was in the OSS, a precurser to the
CIA). His book, War Torn, comes out in August.
He brought a review copy to church one day, and I read some pages in
it before and after the service.
(Peter and I usually sit in the same pew at church.) His style of writing seems
just like his voice – the way he talks.
I can’t wait to read his book. In the book I’m reading
now, The Promise of Provence, the
protagonist goes to Provence after her marriage falls apart. There, she finds a new way of living. Cynthia S. made an
interesting nonfiction book recommendation, Paris: The Biography of a City, by Colin Jones. I plan to check it out. In an email to me, she wrote that my
“description of the Arènes de Lutèce made me think of Jones's section on that
-- he calls it more a memory than a monument, since there isn't much left of
the original arena but it's important to remember that it was there and what
its significance was. That's a theme of his -- how and what Parisians
remember about their city, whether legend or fact, and what's behind or under
the places we see now.” Paris was
also the title of the most recent Edward Rutherford tome that I read. I treasure Rutherford’s books, and I try to
read them slowly so that they last for as long as possible for me. I made Rutherford’s Paris last until we arrived here; in fact, it lasted for several
days beyond our arrival in Paris. Am I obsessed with this
city? When we’re here, I am.
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Monday, July 22, 2013
A
man meditating on a court in the Champ de Mars.
Scenes
from the Champ de Mars early in the morning.
The sprinklers were turned on.
These
two little statues are at the top of the monument below.
The
Monument des Droits
de l’Homme
(Monument to the Rights of Man) on the Champ de Mars. |
