bright lights, big city

Since we slid past the winter solstice over a week ago, the days have been getting longer, but I don’t think anyone has noticed yet. It’s still dark when we wake up and dark again by a few minutes past naptime. Paris really pulls out all the stops on holiday lighting – the Champs-Elysées is a corridor of blue lights and icicles, and I’ve recently learned that even my beloved electric light trees in our local fountain are the product of a city-sponsored contest, “Paris Illuminates Paris,” which has invited lighting designers to unleash their imaginations on city streets since 2004. The spangly tree-of-lights display at Place Victor Hugo actually has a title – “Sapin Féerique” – though come to think of it I’m not sure if that refers to the metal trees G and I watched get hoisted in the fountain with a crane, or the lights in the real, bare trees surrounding the place. Frankly, these look flung up a bit too casually for a “lighting designer” (it’s what I like about them), but maybe they are going for a total effect.

The whole “by design” nature of the lights is a testament to a well-administered modern city, but it kind of puts a kink in my romanticized imagining of Paris as having organically evolved over the centuries to feed the felt needs of the human psyche, boiled down to a longing for light, especially in winter. And yet, what makes it less magical that this patient illusion of beauty is planned and worked for (and who did I think put up the lights? Elves?)? After all, other than the benefit of a river running through, Paris is short on beauties of geographical accident and long on those that are the cumulative effort of human imagination, carefully tended over time. And when you add to that how far north we actually are, and the vagaries of Parisian weather – let’s just say it isn’t the quality of the eternal sunshine that gives us the “city of light.” Instead, even without the holiday extravagances to carry us through the dead zone of the shortest days, there are streetlights and river lights and the most beautifully lit monuments known to man. At night the decorative statuary on the Grand Palais actually looks as if it is on the verge of rising into the heavens. The crown jewel, for me, anyway, is the Eiffel Tower, which, in addition to being lit constantly with the usual dramatic monument fare, twinkles for absolutely no reason at all, every hour on the hour, for ten minutes. The effect is just glorious – almost enough to make me believe in god, and certainly enough to earn my undying gratitude to Mayor Bertrand Delanöe, who caved to public demand and extended the twinkles indefinitely past their splashy debut for the millennium. When our little neighborhood darkens the holiday lights in mid-January, I’ll depend on the Eiffel Tower to get me through – February, particularly.

And then…we’ll have a new baby in a few weeks, and it’s prompted us to start having conversations about what our life might look like when we go home to the states, as ultimately we must. We talk about it as “going back” even though physics and experience tell us there is no such thing. My life here in Paris still feels so new that I expect things to be different every day – when I called to make an appointment at the salon where I last had my hair cut, oh, nine months ago, I was utterly surprised that the same person who cut it before was still there, would still be able to cut it again. While it seems normal, expected even, that two or three small storefronts across from us have already closed and reopened as new entities – the suspicious video shop is now a real estate agent; the unfriendly toy store is, as of tomorrow, a lighting supply. Yet somehow my vision of home, like any place left behind, is frozen in amber. When we left the states I was barely a mother; we’ll return with two little boys, not babies, even. So I don’t know if it will be more disconcerting for things to seem completely familiar or completely changed. Stranger still, I’m sure, is the huge place Paris will occupy in our imagination once we’re gone, in inverse proportion to the faint blip we’ll leave on the register of the city. “Our” Paris will be its own reflection, no deeper or truer than any, giving the lie to the faint sense of ownership or belonging that we feel over the average tourist. The specific memories that, to us, belong to Paris forever – G’s first steps, nighttime visits to Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter, the action of lifting a stroller onto a thousand Paris buses – will simply close over without a ripple into Paris’ collective consciousness. Which is fine; they’re our memories, not Paris’.

We’ve been getting the annual check-ins with friends and loved ones, cataloguing a year in which, again, we’ve failed to keep in touch the way we might have or wanted to. Mostly blessedly ordinary lives and passages, moreso because of the few wrenching changes we’ve heard about, which leave me sad for days. Even if a calendar is no more significant than a way for humans to keep tally, some people we love are coming into 2008 with too much left behind and too heavy a load to carry forward. I’ll be thinking of them when we pop a clandestine bottle of champagne and, weather willing, wake our son to let the tiny lights on the Eiffel Tower illuminate the first few minutes of our new year.

Bonne année, everyone.