A First Day in PARIS

I was a weird little kid. I was somewhat knowledgeable and would have been absolutely thrilled to wander through the Louvre as an eleven-year-old. * But I didn’t visit until I was thirty. I did go to Paris for a single day when I was twenty-nine. It was the Monday after the middle weekend of my first fortnight in Britain – thirty years ago next month.

My Australian friend, Jeffrey Hardy, was living in Farnham, Surrey, and was an actor in the Michael Redgrave Repertory Theatre there. He invited me to visit. I saw him in a performance of Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers. I recall that I stayed with him at the home of a Miss Titmarsh, and used Farnham as my base for going around England. I went as far north as Edinburgh, and had lovely days in York, Cambridge (to hear the choirs at Kings College and St. Johns), Oxford, and London, of course, for St. Paul’s, Temple Church, Westminster Abbey, and the Queen’s Chapel at St. James Palace— the National Gallery, Tate, British Museum and the V & A. I took a boat trip to Greenwich, and enjoyed a beautiful Sunday at Canterbury Cathedral.

My brother Sherry and his wife Sallie had recommended I go to Paris, if only for a day. So from Canterbury, I took the train to Dover and had a night crossing to Dunkirk and arrived in Paris early Monday morning. I didn’t take any public transportation, but walked all over the city. I had planned to do only three things for sure: visit Sainte-Chapelle, Notre Dame, and Les Invalides (Napoleon’s tomb). Of course, I did more. It was a perfect autumn day. I particularly enjoyed strolling through the Jardin Luxembourg, and climbing the Eiffel Tower as high as you were then allowed to go.

On my return to Gare du Nord, I noticed the headlines: “Jacques Brel Est Mort!” So my first day in Paris, was the first day that Jacques Brel was not alive and well and living in Paris.

A year ago July, I was in France for my nephew Sheridan’s wedding in Nantes. I spent July 4^th in Paris and most of that in the Louvre. My Polish friend, Adam, texted me, and I replied: “Here I sit in the loo in the Louvre.” Quipped AK: “So that’s how you celebrate your national holiday!”

* As an eleven-year old, I stunned our dentist neighbor from Baltimore, whose cottage adjoined ours on Pine Island on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The Cooke family had just returned from a vacation in Europe and put on a slide show for us. Dr. Cooke proudly showed us slides of his favorite places in Italy. When he put up one particular slide from Venice, I said: “It looks like a Titian.” I don’t think I had ever seen it before. It just looked like a Titian to me. In fact it was: the Assunta (Assumption of the Virgin) in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice’s enormous Franciscan church, where my partner Dennis currently resides in an inlaid Moroccan box underneath an enormous chest within sight of that wondrous altar piece.