in the garden

We woke up to a glorious morning last Sunday, so we packed up the boys and took the bus to the jardin de Luxembourg. I am often convinced our memories of Paris will be packaged as one long parade of Sundays – it’s an unwritten law in France that Sunday is family day, and on a Sunday afternoon it can seem like everyone is going somewhere with a bouquet of flowers (but where do they buy them on Sunday?) for mother or grandmother or Aunt Agnes. And all the parks are full, full. So I suppose it’s inevitable that our Sunday outings, more than any other, make us feel part of the fabric of things. And we don’t even have to visit Aunt Agnes.

The magic of the Luxembourg Garden, though, is that it’s Sunday every day. There is simply no time that you can pass through that gate without seeing multiple generations participating in perfectly executed rituals of leisure. For me, it’s the apotheosis of civilized society – the example I would hold up for Why We Are Not Likely to Blow Ourselves Up Yet. Case in point: there is a coat rack anchored in concrete in the middle of the boules playing area, alongside a kiosk where you can buy un éxpress to sharpen your game. It’s probably my favorite place in Paris, even though the competition is tight – it makes me happy in a simple and uncomplicated way, and I look forward even to the bus ride. I think S looks forward to it, too – it’s an easy bribe to make me happy, and you get to be outside to boot.

The jardin is a peaceable kingdom, ruled by fonctionnaires (and not, as it might seem on first glance, by the gendarme types in fancy dress guarding the French Senate, which is the former Medicis palace facing the fountain. They pretty much stick to their own business unless you walk on the grass somewhere near the Senate. Understanding which pelouses, or lawns, are actually meant to be trod upon in the jardin de Luxembourg is not for the faint of heart.). The fonctionnaires each preside over some domain of directly administered activity, such as the man who rents the toy sailboats, and the sticks to push them with, at the pool in front of the palace, or the one who takes the tickets and turns the crank on the crank-operated carousel on the west side of the park. The fonctionnaire closest to my heart, truth be told, is the one who operates La Roseraie, otherwise known as the best public toilet in the known world. It’s as if you have magically stepped off a garden path into your own bathroom, at home, except that an impeccably groomed, bespectacled bald man greets you at the door (this would be startling at home, of course, but it feels quite welcoming otherwise). La Roseraie has become somewhat of a pilgrimage point for me, having spent all my time in Paris with small children, and about half of it pregnant. But many a visiting unbeliever has been converted to the faith.

The fonctionnaire-administered activities are all run as concessions, so that there is a small fee for participation in these particular pieces of liberté, egalite´ and fraternité. But the fonctionnaires wear their mantle of authority, and commerce, quite lightly, and the sublime sense of order generated by their presence spills over into more informal practices. Joggers, strollers, chess players, tai chi practitioners, and sun worshippers share the space quite comfortably and without interrupting one another. In a way, it does seem like a democratic paradise there on the Left Bank, though, good republican that I am, I’m not sure you would have the same quality of orderliness in a country that had never been ruled by a king.

When we arrived at the jardin on Sunday, we entered at the southern gate and came down a long allée that leads directly to the palace. We stopped at the pool to watch the boats, and then took a turn along the north side, sharing that allée with the joggers. At the Orangerie, people had dragged the green metal chairs that populate every Paris park to the south wall of the building and were sitting in twos and threes, taking in the sun. Since I had the baby strapped in front and was walking a few paces slower, I had a good view of G narrowly avoiding collision with a number of joggers and then winding his way among the sun worshippers, flirting like crazy. G has never met a demographic that he does not take as a challenge to assault with his charm. S just followed along behind him, murmuring in French when it seemed appropriate.

We had strategized for a limited time window by confining our walk to the north and central parts of the park; on the west side, in addition to the carousel, there is an enormous and wonderful fenced in playground (also with a fee) that is a magnet for G but also a destination point in and of itself. We thought the day seemed better for strolling and not too much planned activity. G is still a little too small to understand the theory of boats and sticks, and is mostly happy to run; however, there had been some discussion between the parents about the ponies.

All along the central allée of the park, you see, a group of very patient, if slightly grumpy, men give pony rides to children (the description of the men applies just as well to the ponies). The animals are loosely roped together in two groups of about six each; one group also boasts a green and orange painted wagon. Up to last week, G had shown an enthusiastic but cautious interest in the ponies – I was able to convince him to ride in the wagon on one visit with friends, but a deep love for the stationary horses on every carousel in Paris had not translated into wanting to ride on one that was warm and breathing and smelly. Last Sunday, though, G walked right up to the nearest group of ponies and patted one on the backside (he cannot read the sign that says not to pet the ponies, and his parents, they are slow on the uptake). After some energetic finger-waving and tut-tutting from the pony men, we extracted G and determined that he really did want to ride a pony this time. S gave over the money and one of the men hoisted G up onto the pony in question, a small fat white one with a dirty forelock and swishing tail.

G sat up straight and tall in the saddle – and for once, not wiggling – while the man tied him onto the horse with a rope and fitted his feet into jerry-rigged rope stirrups that hung about five inches above the regular leather ones. When the man pointed, he grabbed onto the saddle horn with both hands and hung on. Once the last small child was tied firmly into place, the same man who had managed G took the lead rope and guided the ponies into a slow walk across the gravel. S and I were both watching G’s face as this happened, and it’s a moment for which I will be grateful the rest of my life.

Since G started talking, it has been customary for his life to unfold with running commentary, even if no one seems to be within earshot. When the pony underneath him started moving, my child was struck dumb, and he did not make another sound until the pony stopped again at the end of the circuit. I think there were just no words in his limited vocabulary to describe what he was feeling.

Well, maybe one. When the ponies stopped at the post, he looked up at S and said, “More.”

S paid up. We watched him go up and down another time, sitting up on his pony, smiling to himself as if he were receiving a visitation by angels. We braced ourselves for a tantrum when it came to the end of the ride, but he was so completely exhausted by joy he practically collapsed into S’s arms. S asked the man what the pony’s name was that G had been riding. It was Dondi. We told G, who then patted the pony on the face and said “Bye bye Dondi, see you next time.”

On the way home on the bus, G cuddled up into S’s arms and said, “I love Dondi, I love Dondi so much.” G has his own little pantheon of things and people dear to his heart that merit that grave pronouncement, ranging from our friends’ daughter J to our old friend D from Washington to, well, falafel. As strange an assortment as it sounds, it’s not random. G understands “like” as a word for describing things that give you pleasure of one kind or another – he likes yogurt, and Sesame Street videos, and slides. But he also grasps “love” as a word for something more transcendent – a connection or experience that leaves you different than you were before. He and J were born under the same difficult, but wonderful star; our friend D taught him part of the alphabet and told him she remembered when he was born (the first person outside of what he understands as his family to know that); “falafel” is a code word for the times when yes, we eat falafel in the Marais, but also for the first time he got to ride the train without being strapped into the stroller. And now Dondi has been added to the list.

That G understands this at two both exhilarates and scares me -- the capacity to feel such complete happiness also leaves you vulnerable to cataclysmic disappointment. When I watched his face as he rode the pony I could feel my heart breaking, and I also wished I had the power to make him feel that way every minute of his life. There is a Richard Wilbur poem in which he describes the experience of watching his daughter try to write a story – talk about exhilaration and disappointment -- as being something like the time a wild bird was caught in an upstairs bedroom of their house. The family could not approach the bird, but could only leave a window open and watch the creature throw itself against the wall again and again until it finally found the opening and cleared “the sill of the world.” The last lines of the poem read:

“It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.”

Now I understand what Wilbur meant. I think we’ll go back to the jardin de Luxembourg tomorrow and look for Dondi again. At least I can give him that.

The image is of the boules playing field in the jardin de Luxembourg. If you enlarge the image, you may be able to just see the coat rack in the middle distance.