Running for Your Life: A Paris Dream

It’s two days into our visit, our first since October. (Why I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks; I’ve been pretty much off line since May 30). Jet-lagged, I awake from a long nap at 10 p.m. in our top-floor Paris apartment with horizon views of the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre.

From the bed I see that the dark, stormy cloud cover has changed. In its place, against the still-bright sky, is a cloud shape of an ancien regime French schoolgirl in a bonnet. I’m amazed, thinking that she is so long in the sky that she is permanent, but as I watch, now wide awake, she slowly changes to a cockroach-like bug about to be taken by a predator and then the cloud-play is swift: shifting to a toupee atop an ever-broadening face, and it is at this time that I see M is awake too, and she answers to my question, “Do you want to go out for a walk?” with a decisive “Yes!” – and in a half-hour we’re at the Seine, under the darkening sky, the cobbles streaked with rain, the place deserted beyond my wildest imagination and for one of the rare times during the past two weeks there are few clouds to be seen when I realize that it isn’t the late evening sun that had floodlit my cloud show but a full moon that is now high above Notre Dame Cathedral.

Next: Running for Your Life: Why Paris?