goodbye stranger

We leave Paris in a week, and it’s making me emotional about the strangest things. I’m not a saver, and yet I fetched out the cancelled bus tickets from the bottom of my purse for the two lines we take most often and stowed them in the pocket of B’s baby book. It was an awful, rainy day on Friday, but it was the last of S’ vacation, and so we went to the Louvre and had lunch among the horrible humid crowds in what is basically an underground mall food court and I still misted up as we walked back to the bus in the driving rain.

“Boy, you really do love Paris, if you love it today,” S said, and he meant it as a compliment. But I think it is the complement of the sublime and the ridiculous that truly gets me about our life here, the constant refraction of my daily life with small children against such an eternally beautiful backdrop, the crowds and the rain notwithstanding. It’s as if the cliché of Paris (which is true) is a defense against the mundane repetitiveness of raising a toddler and a baby – my nostalgia for their babyhood will be shot through with Parisian light (and a healthy helping of soaking rain).

For example: the week before the Louvre, we were out and about on a very specific errand, which was to find and buy a plastic toilet-seat insert that will allow a thinking-seriously-about-potty-training G to sit on the grown-up toilet without falling in. The errand was designed partly to encourage G in his endeavors, partly to distract him from his obsession with putting various objects – coins, small toys – down the corrugated hose that vents our air conditioner to the outside. You can imagine that my house is divided as to whether introducing a new level of chaos is such a good thing, especially just days before we pack up all our worldly possessions and change continents (S’s attitude: continents, continence, what’s the big deal?). Anyhow, it turns out that the toilet-seat insert -- which, after visiting the supermarket baby section and the droguerie (home of all orphaned home supplies, from mop buckets to small appliances), we finally found at the pharmacy -- is called, in French, a “siège reducteur.” Now I, for one, would be delighted to own a device that would reduce the size of my rear merely by sitting on it. And I am also certain that such a device exists in France, and can also be bought at the pharmacy, but it likely is not made of blue plastic and shaped like a hippo (instead, it vibrates and you have to rub a special cream on your fesses before using it). But for G, onward and upward.

As we left the pharmacy, seat in hand, a bunch of dudes who looked like they were in no particular hurry to get anywhere were drinking beer and passing around a small radio that was blaring, improbably, Supertramp. G smiled and waved, they smiled and waved, and we went on home to put the seat in the potty. I meditated a little on the idea that there is a time and a place for everything, and how that is underlined by the formalities of French culture and the beauties of Paris – that it opens up to make a place for us, and the tour buses, and the bums listening to Supertramp, is nothing short of a miracle. And for a moment I began to trust Paris to show me the way to an elegant leave-taking that will maybe impart a little borrowed grace to me as I go.

Then G came running in from the bedroom saying, Mommy, come look where I peed. Sadly, the siège reducteur was dry as a bone. It turns out the air conditioner hose has uses beyond toys and small change. Elegance, not so much, but I’m grateful all the same. Paris, thanks. We’ll miss you more than you know.