Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
poems, essays and works in progress
April In Paris--The Debriefing
Maybe some of the bad things you’ve heard about France are true. But we wanted to go anyway so we bought our tickets. Fortunately, they sent us to a different France. They sent us to the France of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Julia Child, and M.F.K Fisher. They sent us to the Paris of Mark Twain and Henry James and Henry Miller and Baudelaire and George Sand and Céline and Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir and to the Paris of Adam Gopnik. And they sent us to the Cote du Rhone of Van Gogh and Peter Mayle. They sent us to the France we dreamed we’d find. And our dreams came true.
We are back home now from Paris. Back home now from Sablet. Back home from Arles and Saintes-Maries de la Mer.
I am rested and I will be able to write now in some detail about the trip. I bought two little travel journals foolishly thinking that I might fill them both up on the trip. Foolish. There was much to write about of course, but writing is a solitary occupation and traveling with five other people, even my beloved family, left little time to write.
It was a family vacation in which each person was on a voyage of discovery. I remember the night in Provence that Veneet and I stayed up late, just the two of us, discussing our demons. I remember walking at sunset with Jessica and Deborah through the quiet streets of Sablet, with a cat in every window and carefree children playing in fragrant gardens. I remember walking with Deborah and Elaine through the vineyards of Domain de Piaugier to the fortified medieval aerie of Seguret. And I remember watching Camen and Jessica making dinner for the family in our rented farmhouse and how my two beautiful daughters and the wonderful colors and aromas of the provençal foods they were preparing were washed together into an impressionist blur like a painting by Cezanne.
The waiters and the shopkeepers and the taxi drivers of Paris treated us with grace and humor even when we over-packed ourselves into their cars and even when our infantile French made it difficult to order a simple meal or buy a corkscrew.
We will always have Paris. Whirling around under the lighted latticework of the Eiffel Tower at dusk in a fine rain. Climbing Montmartre and up the steep steps and into Sacre Coeur. I remember eating crepes on the street like pizza and eating pizza in the Italian Restaurant next door to our hotel where the owner shook my hand with the ebullience usually reserved for his favorite regulars and I remember that he was unable to hide the fact that he had fallen instantly and hopelessly in love with one of my daughters.
I fell in love myself in a café on Rue Princesse in St. Germain and with shop girls and waitresses and girls on bicycles and with the endless stream of feminine pulchritude that washes through the streets of Paris like waves from some transcendent sea.
We all swam in the sea of Paris and in the sea of the South of France. And we will remember collectively and one day die subjectively with our rich and loving memories in tact of a journey that comes for a family but once in a lifetime. Merci beaucoup, mes amis. Vive la France. Je suis tres heureux.
---Larry L. Dill
May 7, 2006
Waynesville, North Carolina
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2004, 2006 by Larry L. Dill
on the Gypsy Riviera in the South of France LarryLaLarr