April in Paris… or not exactly

While I am fortunate to have ever been to Paris at all, I have never been there in April.  Songs and movies seem to suggest that to be in Paris in April is pretty much to fall in love, but I’m hoping that being wherever we are today (with a little consciousness thrown in) might give us that April-in-Paris feeling, even if we’ve never quite had that April-in-Paris feeling, at least not in April and in Paris.

While much of Los Angeles virtually is a movie set, with even super-luxury houses having brick or marble facades and stucco along the unseen sides, no British Manor house or French Chateau would need to be approached from only one direction; but in Hollywood it’s all about what’s “in the shot,” and the rest be damned.

Even if you hail from New York, San Francisco, Chicago or Boston (all fine cities in their own right), Paris has the uncanny feeling of making one feel as if one is not on a movie set, but in a movie setting—the real deal, the original to be copied.  Paris is dream-like, for me anyway, particularly the old streets winding through the Marais, buildings emanating the charm of history and authenticity.

Other places try to evoke or emulate the charm of Paris, but Paris just is.  All cities have humble beginnings if you go back far enough in time—like when all of Paris was a muddy island in the Seine (now the Isle St. Louis and the Isle de la Cité), and so all of America is at a city-charm disadvantage in comparison, with Notre Dame Cathedral rising into the sky five hundred years before Columbus even found America.

Charm takes time, centuries really… and I have every faith that if America can maintain its existence for another six hundred years our cities are going to get some real charm going.  Or maybe Paris will crumble under the weight of all that projection and Portland or Missoula or Mumbai will become the center of some ineffable ability to embody charm.

But maybe people are a bit like cities, and since none of us are getting any younger, maybe a contrarian, even a touch un-American, approach might be to trust that emerging and ever deepening wrinkles on our faces may be like the winding streets of an old city—places and faces that will not send people of cultivated taste running in fear, but rather leave those of discerning taste eager to wander around, explore and just be.

In many cities you have to “do” things to have a good time, but in Paris, just walking, hanging out, being is satisfying.  Same with people—and as we mature we come into our charming authenticity, thanks to a little urban planning perhaps, but also resting upon our own rich histories of revolutions and plagues we can enjoy the meandering sweep of time rather than trying to hang onto over-rated youth.

I imagine old men playing pétanque under towering marronier trees and I think how I like that feeling, that sense of the scuffle of gravel and the thud and clack of the ponderous boules, and even though it’s a lot of romanticized projection, I do just like it.

To walk with your lover through gardens and over bridges, to kiss in arching doorways, to gaze out atelier windows at the zigzagging rooftops filled with myriad lives begging for imagining… is to have the April in Paris feeling.

Perhaps for some of us April in Paris is being in bed with the Sunday Times (New York, The Guardian?) with rain falling outside; for some of us it might be the exotic Amazon or trekking in Nepal.  For some of us it might be a trout stream or a magnificent golf course… or an escape to the movies with popcorn and an old friend, or the adrenaline of a new romance.  As parents it might simply be the rare moment when everyone is together and everyone is happy to be doing a common activity—the ice cream after the complaint-heavy walk, be it to Bertillon or Baskin Robbins.

So, let’s dedicate today to drawing hard upon our memories and our fantasies and channeling the best of both into whatever our April in Paris feeling looks, tastes and feels like—and then letting that essence infuse some part of today, savoring the sweetness of lives richly lived, both externally and internally luminous, drifting toward some virtual Place des Vosges where we parents might gather in spirit as the kids play exuberantly in the park and we are free to enjoy each other and our own pleasures—sacred, sensual and arcane.

Namaste, Bruce