En Plein Cœur de Paris (Right in the Heart of Paris)

 

The ingredients: Beauty. A body of water. Culture. Walkability.

A block and a half to the post office. Drop them in the box.

Loop around rue des Écoles and back down rue Pontoise to the gym. It’s Sunday night and closed. But you take an iPhone photo of the schedule taped to the window. Yoga and Cardio and Stretching and Salsa all day.

Cross Blvd. St. Germain and continue down rue Pontoise past a restaurant with tables outside, which looks inviting. But it’s too close, we wanted a longer walk. Rue Pontoise comes out on Quai de la Tournelle, and Voila! it happens again. We emerge along the banks of the Seine in a state of delight. How little it takes to generate happiness. A river. Evening light. Your hand in mine. The statue of Sainte Geneviève in stone rising above the Pont de la Tournelle and the Seine.

The legend goes that in 451 when word came that Attila and the Huns were about to invade the city, Geneviève held them off with the power of her prayer. And she became the patron saint of Paris. In 1928, the sculptor Paul Landowski was commissioned to sculpt a statue of Sainte Geneviève to rise above this bridge.

“Did I tell you what the sculptor went through with this sculpture?” you say.

“No, tell me!”

“Apparently, Landowski wanted it to face west towards Notre Dame. But the city insisted that it face east as a rebuke to the Germans against whom the French had fought WWI. As a kind of echo of Geneviève’s resistance against the Huns centuries before. You can see who won.”

The statue faces east towards Germany.

“Where did you read that? It wasn’t in the account I read.”

“In Colin Jones’s book, Paris: Biography of a City.”

“It’s 8:00 p.m. and still light. I love these late evenings.”

“And soon it will still be light at 10 p.m.”

We cross the bridge. People are lined up with cameras trying to capture the sun setting behind Notre Dame.

One couple, the woman with legs like sausages, is kissing so intensely I have to watch. The man is gripping her jaw with his hand as if it’s a fish that might slip back into the Seine if he doesn’t hold tight. I love to see hefty middle-aged couples convulsed with passion.

We cross into the central street of l’Île Saint-Louis and pass all the familiar shops and restaurants. One more bridge and we’re in the Marais.

We pass a Jewish temple. A rabbi in a fedora comes out and scolds a couple of young male students. His gestures are classic. He holds up his hands to the sky in helpless dismay, but he speaks fluid French; there’s something dear and funny in this combination of the familiar and the strange. Richard asks, “How do you say “Oy veh” in French?

Men walk by on the other side of the street with tefillin[1] and payot[2].

As we turn onto rue des Francs-Bourgeois, I spot graffiti on a wall that I've never seen, an old-fashioned full-length portrait of a man.  "Do you have this one?

"No," you say, and pull your camera from your bag.

"Why does it not surprise me that you just happened to have that camera on you?" I laugh. 

You snap the image from several angles and we continue on. A little lèche-vitrine[3]. Here’s a long dress in a shop window. I don’t wear long summer dresses, but this one I like.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“Nope. It’s not you.”

That’s all I need to hear.

I hoped there would be an empty table outside. There’s a slight breeze but the air is warm. We don’t want to eat indoors. And there is, in the corner against that ancient wall. We sit across from each other, one table away from a young French couple, who, like most French people, modulate their voices so that you can talk without the conversations of others distracting you.

Foiled in our last attempt to have galettes, tonight there are no obstacles. We’re radiating joy and the waitress feels it, comes up to our table and smiles and laughs!

I’d forgotten that they have galettes with goat cheese here, which is better for me than cow’s cheese. And more important, is delicious.

You look flustered. Too many great choices; what will you have?

The waitress laughs. She’s small and dark-haired and possibly Middle Eastern.  She takes our orders and comes back with a big bottle of Pellegrino, pours it for the two of us.  

“I have to tell you one thing about you that I really love.”

You raise your eyebrows. Moi?

“You. I know how hard these first two weeks of French classes have been. I think four hours of instruction in a new language are the equivalent of eight hours of work at anything else.”

You nod in agreement.

“What moves me is the way you put your whole heart, mind, body and soul into learning something new. Your wholeheartedness—you approach everything that matters to you that way.”

You nod.

“The way you disappeared into your office all day Saturday memorizing pronouns and articles, and then practiced them later with me. Really, the French language doesn’t have a chance against you. You will master her. Just like Sainte Geneviève conquered the Huns by her attitude alone!”

You laugh. The galettes arrive. “Bon appetit!” The waitress sings, and swings away to the next table. We hold hands above the meal, thank the goddess Demeter for this food that smells so good we have to cut short our thanks and demonstrate our gratitude by quickly digging in.

“Ohhhh.”

“Ohhhh,” you echo.

“No, this is the best place for galettes in town.”

“I have to agree. And this one has goat cheese, which I haven’t found anywhere else. I’d offer you a bite but it’s too good.”

“You can’t have a bite of mine either.”

“I wouldn’t want one, with all that boeuf on it.”

We eat, sighing. “I passed a men’s shop on St. Germain with the perfect black linen jacket for you in the window. That is, if you want one.”

“Let’s go by after dinner and take a look.”

After dinner, we cross the street and Voila! there’s a graffiti image that I hope is… “What do you think that is,” I ask.

“An octopus,” you say.

“I could use that image,” I say. You photograph it, and then as we walk down rue des Francs-Bourgeois, there is another, in orange. And then another green one. You photograph each.

The Missing Star

The restaurants we pass are all wide open now to the street. Many are full of men with men, in groups, in couples, and standing in front of the restaurants, hunting. And very tall, thin black men who look like models, walking arm in arm in the street.

We cross in front of the Hôtel de Ville de Paris. To the right is a long fountain and a carrousel, to the left, the magnificent ancient building.

“Look at the light behind that statue.”

We look, then glance at each other. No words are needed. The joy on your face mirrors what I feel.

Through the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame, the square in front of Notre Dame. Boys are tossing up a toy lightning bug, which twinkles in the church’s dramatic lights.

Tourists eat ice cream. A Russian family crosses our path.

A girl is draped across a boy’s lap; they’re kissing. The beauty of this city brings out romance.

We look for the jacket, but the shop must be farther up St. Germain. You’ll pass it tomorrow on the way to school.

The secrets of the magic of this city: beauty, the river, the culture, but most of all, that you can walk everywhere. If we were meant to drive every day, we’d have been born with wheels on our feet.

[1] From Ancient Greek phylacterion, form of phylássein, φυλάσσειν meaning "to guard, protect"), are a set of small cubic leather boxes painted black, containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah, with leather straps dyed black on one side, and worn by observant Jews during weekday morning prayers.

[2] Payot (also peyot, payos, payess, peyess, peyos Hebrew: singular, פֵּאָה; plural, פֵּאוֹת‎ At Yemeni jewish it is called 'Simonim' too סִימָנִים) is the Hebrew word for sidelocks or sidecurls. Payot are worn by some men and boys in the Orthodox Jewish community based on an interpretation of the Biblical injunction against shaving the "corners" of one's head. Literally, pe'ah means corner, side or edge.

[3] Window-shopping. Literally, “licking the windows.”

Sweet Delight

The theme of the day announces itself as we enter the Petit Palais:

I await my turn as Richard’s photography bag is scanned.

A woman pushes between us, and puts down her purse.

“Excuse me,” I say. “We’re together.”

She mumbles something in French, and elbows past.

A long line to buy tickets. I photograph the two busts of an African

couple with glowing eyes, one in a turban, gorgeous against the

marble wall. Richard finds a vent in the floor where cool air rises.

He’s always hot, a bull. One man at the counter and twenty people in line.  

I listen to the man offer a tarif réduit[1] to the woman in front of

me. She doesn’t look senior enough, forty at the most. I see in his

eyes his intention to insult. He holds up his hand awkwardly, two

plastic caps—or condoms?—on finger and thumb. Two more

euros.

The exhibition’s downstairs. The ticket taker tears my ticket half

with the images of a duchesse and a tigresse.

“Ohh,” I exclaim. “I wanted them for collage.”

He looks puzzled. Tickets are for tearing.

We gaze at Blake’s poems and etchings of Dante and Chaucer,

The Canterbury Tales, The Inferno and Paradiso, Songs of

Innocence and Experience. History is a perpetual fight between

tyranny and liberty, said Blake. That’s the struggle in all countries

and families. Some oppress. Some are oppressed. Some bolt for

freedom.

As a child, Blake saw "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic

wings bespangling every bough like stars." Later, he blasted

slavery, child labor, and the oppression of women. Some called

him crazy. Would that we all were crazy like Blake.

Look at his drawing of the Recording Angel! This is what it is to

be an artist: to write in the book of life one’s experience while

alive, rather than waiting to read it in the Book of Judgment after

death. Blake saw visions of the truth behind the veil.

One museum guard has a wooden leg. So naturally, he’s the one

they assign to move around from room to room. Like a noisily

clumping Ahab, making it hard to focus.

In the last room, a Jarmusch DVD plays. Johnny Depp tells an

American Indian named Nobody that his name is William Blake.

Nobody quotes Blake,

“Every night and every morn,

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.”

I see the dark-haired woman who was in front of me in line.

“You don’t look old enough for a reduced ticket,” I say in French.

She looks surprised.  "No, I'm not."

“The ticket taker was rude.”

“Yes,” she concedes, “but what can I say? I’m a woman, and he is a man.”

“You could protest,” I say, thinking of Blake’s defense of women.

She shrugs, docile.

We emerge into the air, hop on the Métro. At the next stop, a group

of dark-haired young women gets on, and yells at each other.

One stands against a pole and sneezes twice, spraying Richard,

who sits right below her. Everywhere we go today, this leitmotif:

humans being animals, artists being angels.

[1] reduced rate (for senior citizens)

Paris Encounter

How she intrigues me!

With her orange hair,

a fringe of ragged bangs

high on her forehead,

‘90s punk rocker style,

she sits in a corner,

leaning against the window,

gazes out at me

with such intelligent eyes.

She doesn’t look away;

she blinks, still holds my gaze.

What is this look?

I wouldn’t call it happy,

nor is it sad. Just aware.

Thoughtful. Musing.

She doesn’t seem to mind

my standing close to the window

talking to her in a low voice, enchanted.

She touches the glass with one horny finger.

Her breasts are gray over several folds of belly.

A shaggy orange cape, draped

over her shoulders, covers her long arms.

She grins wide, shows her sharp teeth,

and turning towards the glass, kisses me.

She glances up, looks away, shy,

gazes back at me.

There are giant branches of driftwood, dead trees,

thick rope and black tires in her house,

but none of that interests her.

She sits by the window, yearning.

I’d like to take her home, but everyone would object.

The gardienne would throw up her hands in horror;

our good bourgeois neighbors would be alarmed,

call a special meeting of the syndic[1];

even Marley le chat would be incensed.

Anyway, our ceiling is too low. In her native land,

she sleeps in a nest of branches she builds

65 feet from the ground, sometimes with a roof

to protect her from the rain. She’s a solitary

acrobate des arbres[2], athlete of the air.

[1] Syndic de copropriété, a board that oversees common property in an apartment building in France. Like a Coop board.

[2] Acrobat of the trees

Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This

At last! After a week crowded with workmen in the apartment, Giovanni painting, Marcus re-plumbing the shower, Richard’s first week of French lessons at l’Alliance Francaise, and the rush to meet our journal deadlines, tonight we have a date. Going to the Sufi dancing and dinner last week was so pleasurable that we decided to make it a once-a-week ritual.

Marcus will be here at noon to finish up the shower in Richard’s office. It should only take a couple of hours. But where is he?

I make a late lunch, omelette with onion, tomato, zucchini and mushrooms, with steamed broccoli and spinach on the side, and raisin toast, olive oil and almond butter. Just as I finish cooking, at 1:45 Marcus arrives, almost two hours late. He has brought his brother, Christian, who helped us the week before to unpack our boxes.

I want Christian to have a copy of our journal, The Numinosity of Things, since he is mentioned in it, so I print it out. The printer runs out of ink. It’s new, an unfamiliar Canon, and I don’t yet know how to put the ink in. Richard is out.

Just before Marcus and Christian finish their work, Richard returns. He replaces the ink in the printer, and I try again. It prints out half the pages and stops. Marcus and Christian wait, but we cannot figure out what’s holding up the pages, and we don’t want to hold them up.

Richard studies his French homework. I answer e-mail. Then we’re free to saunter over to the Jardin des Plantes[1]. Every once in a while, we crave the company of animals, lots of them, and there’s no place in Paris with a more wonderful assortment from around the world.

It’s so warm outside, 75 Fahrenheit and humid, I don’t even need a cardigan.

“Spring is really here,” I say.

Richard knows a short cut, past La Baleine Café, into the Jardin des Plantes.

And then we see—the combination of its being a weekend day and the first really warm day of spring has brought out half of Paris.

We pass the wallabies and stop.

“Look! They’re hopping around with babies in their pouches.”

“It IS spring,” says Richard.

At the entrance to the zoo, there is a line of at least 100 people.

We glance at each other. “Too crowded.”

“Let’s go to the Natural History Museum.”

But there, too, the line is too long. We meander into the gardens. There is the first display I’ve seen this spring of a uniquely French way of planting flowers, long beds of taller, bright flowers, in this case, pink and purple tulips in one; yellow, orange and white poppies in the other; alternating with long beds of lower flowers, small and white. The French pay attention to beauty, and this is truly beautiful. Couples lean down to get close to the tulips and look them in the eyes. Men and women take close-ups of the blooms. Richard joins them.

At the end of the long beds are flowering cerisiers[2], and a large tree with dark pink blossoms. Pelouse interdite[3] say the signs, but no one pays attention. Children laugh and run on the grass. Tourists and natives walk up close to the trees to look and to take photos. One cerisier is so thick with white blossoms that dozens and dozens of bees dally inside its branches.

We meander down rue Mouffetard. Let’s go check out a new restaurant a Parisian friend recommended, Dans les Landes, I suggest. We turn around and walk in the opposite direction down rue Monge. We pass Violette’s flower shop, and there she is, looking like a red-haired Colette, out in front, talking to friends.

At the restaurant, we find seats outside. The waitress asks us what we’d like to drink; we ask for the menu.

“Oh we don’t serve food,” she says. “Not till 7 p.m.”

It’s 5:00. Thierry, an excellent furniture maker and antique seller who sold us an armoire last week, highly recommended this place, but it won’t work for our date tonight. We cross over to rue Mouffetard.  

Here’s a health food store that might have the vitamins that we’ve run out of. A trim French woman helps us find the best prices for each thing we’re looking for. We usually speak French with the French, but sometimes, when it involves looking for things like turmeric or 5-HTP or Ester-C, we revert to our native tongue. Better to be sure of getting what you want than to practice French for five more minutes.

A man wearing black leather and shades, a solemn caricature of an American film hoodlum, waits to speak to this woman. He begins speaking English, and we hear that he’s mocking us, as if we’re the kind of Americans who never bother to learn the language. I’m surprised. It’s not like a French man to be this openly mocking. Grouchy maybe, but not this style of rude jeering.

After the woman has finished helping this man, we have one more question, whether there’s a better buy of Ester-C capsules than the one we chose.

“Oui,” she says, and zips over to another shelf.

“He was mocking us, wasn’t he,” I say.

She nods. “He’s Belgian,” she says, as if that explains everything.

The man passes us on his way to the cash register.

“Blagueur. Moqueur[4],” I say.

He doesn’t respond.

At Delmas, where we usually have the best galettes in town, we sit in a corner. It’s early and there is only one other table of six young Italians near the door. We don’t need to look at the menu. We wait.

And wait.

And wait. No waiter appears. Finally a group of four men, dressed like Mafioso, come from another part of the restaurant and sit down to eat. One seems to be the owner or manager.

We tell him we’ve been waiting 15 minutes. He turns to go look for a waiter, but we say, “That’s all right. We’ve waited long enough.”

Everywhere we go today there seem to be obstacles. This is beginning to intrigue me. Some Saturnian spirit of obstruction seems determined to block us at every turn.

So let’s go to Picard Surgelés. This is a store that we passed often when we first started coming to Paris. It’s one of those words that is misleading for English speakers. Like traiteur, which sounds like traitor, but means “catering,” surgelés sounds medical. We’ve cleared that up, and heard from numerous French people and Americans how exceptionally tasty and high quality the French version of frozen food is.

The store is simply rows of freezer bins, well marked: soups, pastas, fish dishes, desserts, as antiseptic as a hospital. (You probably could perform surgery here). We stock up on pastas and soups, and leave.

Walking down rue Lacépède, Richard accidentally bangs my heel with the bag of frozen food. It feels like the back of my foot has been scraped off.

“You have no spatial sense,” I say. “I’m walking behind you now.”

(We are well-matched, we agree, he without a sense of space, I without a sense of time.)

He says he’s sorry, but it sounds perfunctory to me, a “man apology,” which by female standards, sounds like no apology at all. I’m in pain!

I, wanting a sense of empathy from him, ask for same. A small matter of tone, which women recognize instantly; men, not so much.

He gives a positively grudging apology. Now it sounds like self-defense, as if caring he’d hurt me was the last thing on his mind.

Being a woman, I point this out.

He begins to sing, "I'm Sorry," an old Brenda Lee hit.

It sounds like mocking to me.  I say so. “Just say it like you mean it,” I ask.

He, being a man, explodes.

I shrink from his yelling in the street in horror. Sacré Bleu! Quelle horreur! In my family of origin you don’t shout in the street. You don’t shout, period.

Without a thought, without making a decision, my feet lead me straight across the street, as far as possible away from him. The date, it seems, is over.

But I want a date. Hmmm, who can I go out on a date with? Someone who is good company, someone who won’t yell at me. I know—me! What would she and I like to do tonight? Dinner? Or a movie? Well, why not both?

I meander down rue Monge to rue Lagrange, and Blvd. St. Germain, then right on Blvd. St. Michel until I come to Place St. Michel. There are French break dancers performing on the sidewalk in front of the fountain where Saint Michel vanquishes the dragon. I wish I could vanquish my own dragon, this passionately allergic reaction I have to what I perceive as callousness.

To me it seems so easy: you hurt someone; you didn’t mean to; but at least you can communicate to the other that you’re sorry. Nothing is more instantly soothing. And for me, nothing is more galling than when that generosity isn’t given.

I check the theaters along Blvd. St. Michel and Blvd. St. Germain. I’ve seen “Les Yeux de Sa Mère.” The others are lightweight French concoctions and heavily violent American killer-thrillers and action flicks. I muse on the question, “Do violent films inspire violence?” Of course they do. Wherever callousness is acted out or depicted, it increases the acceptance of unkindness, lack of empathy, cruelty.

I keep walking. Maybe that theater on rue Serpente will be showing a good film. Yes, they are, but neither starts for an hour. Do I want to see a Spanish film about a photographer who sees the picture of a woman who died before her marriage and who then falls in love with her image (yawn), or The Fighter? I’ve heard raves about the latter, so even though it won’t give me my daily French lesson, that’s my choice.

I walk around the rue St. André des Arts area, looking at menus. Nothing appeals. Back on Blvd. St. Michel, and there is a Boulangerie Paul.

I order a tourte chevre courgettes[5] at the counter.  The Asian proprietor heats it up.  I take it to a table outside.  The tourte is half cold.  I don't want to take it back to be re-heated, or I might miss the movie.  It's one of those days. 

Five minutes later, the proprietor is outside, shooing away a group of three women who are seated, eating. He noisily stacks the chairs while people are finishing their meals. This is so un-French I’m shocked. I know of no other country where it is a national right to sit in a café, having ordered only a café crème, and read, write and converse for hours without being pressured to leave. He hurries a young African-American woman away from finishing her sandwich. I’d spoken with her at the counter and learned that she was from New Orleans, and yes, the town is healing but it still has a long way to go.

I gobble down my tourte and leave.

At the theater I buy a Perrier.

I find a theater seat, but all during the previews everyone is talking as if they’re in their own living rooms.

Finally, the film starts, and it’s worth watching. Christian Bale is such a strange actor. A former boxer, now addicted to crack, he plays the role as a charming, self-destructive fuck-up.

I’m thirsty, but the bottle of Perrier won’t open. I almost break my hand trying to open it. It’s that kind of day.

After the film is over, I ask the guy at the concession stand if he can open it. After a struggle, he does. But don’t I want a cold one? He fetches a key and opens the drinks machine and puts a hand around several until he finds one that’s cold. Oh, how sweet is this gesture!

Having walked a couple of hours, I head home down Blvd. St. Germain. I begin to think about this weird day.

All we wanted was to go out together and have a good time. And all day long it’s been one obstacle after another, an unusual number.

At home, the lights are off and Richard is asleep. So is Marley.

I remember what the psychiatrist, C. G. Jung, used to do when he was baffled by the seemingly insoluble problem of a patient. He would cast their natal horoscope to see where the knots were. Not to predict anything, rather to see what the pattern of stars were at their birth. He did the same for moments and periods of time.

This makes no rational sense whatsoever. But the synchronicity of far and near, (or as the ancients said, “As above, so below”), is perfectly understandable from the perspective of intuition.

I open our astrological calendar, and look at the position of the planets. Oh, of course. It’s the New Moon today, with Sun and Moon in Aries. That’s action. A day when you want to go out and experience life, walk around, go somewhere, spend some money. Or it can be anger. Aries is the warrior, the fighter. Yes, the day had that kind of energy. And what better film to see than The Fighter?

There are two more aspects and they couldn’t be any more difficult. The moon in Aries is square Pluto in Capricorn: Anger. Volatility. Blow-ups. Pluto, the god of the underworld, the dragon.

The moon in Aries is opposite Saturn in Libra: action, anger is fighting with obstacles in the way of keeping one’s balance. I think of Athena, goddess of Libra, and her Medusa shield of snakes. She is usually the one with the cooler head, allowing peace to prevail over war. But with Saturn in Libra, there are obstacles to this peaceful approach.

“Mama said there’d be days like this, there’d be days like this my mama said.” And maybe they’re written in the stars.

[1] The Garden of Plants

[2] Cherry trees

[3] Keep off the Grass

[4] Joker. Mocker.

[5] Goat cheese and zucchini pie (a small tart, really)

The Numinosity of Things

Celestine

Great wars of liberation are being fought all across North Africa and the Middle East. Lesser wars of liberation are being fought in France, too. Here in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, we battled the forces of French bureaucracy to liberate our household goods from Le Havre customs.

We valued most of the fifty boxes at $50 each. Many contained books, writing supplies and journals. Many contained art. How do you assign such things a dollar amount? Customs was suspicious. ALL were the same value? Were we smuggling precious objects to sell in France, without declaring them, so we didn’t have to pay taxes? Or forbidden items?

The struggle to release our stuff took forty e-mails, twenty phone calls, 300 euros and three weeks, but we triumphed.

One week ago, the boxes were delivered to our door. The man who drove the truck three hours from Le Havre carried some of the boxes down to our cave[1], most of the boxes to our apartment, and with the help of a Romanian worker named Christian, he carried my maternal grandmother’s heavy wooden trunk up five flights of stairs, since it wouldn’t fit in the ascenseur.[2]

The truck driver, a shy, florid man in his 50s, who looked as if his favorite pastime was eating, seemed ready to pass out as he entered our living room. Christian, younger and fit, was smiling, unfazed.

The driver accepted a glass of water, but would not take a tip.

Christian stayed all afternoon, helping us slice open boxes with sculptures and paintings inside. He broke down the cardboard boxes for recycling, while we greeted beloved works of art as if they were old friends who’d made a long journey across the country by covered wagon, then a voyage by slow ship across the Atlantic, only to be held unlawfully in jail for nearly a month.

Are objects alive? Of course. How else to explain the numinous quality, the spell cast on us, by the things we unpacked?

These things spoke to us! They told us stories. Sometimes one would break into song.

Time or space won’t allow me to tell you every single story we heard in the several days of unpacking, but here are a dozen:

1) The trunk. The big, round-backed, dark brown wooden trunk belonged to my Norwegian-American maternal grandmother, Esther Moe Heimark. Esther was a poet and playwright who also bought antiques, which she sold in the small Minnesota town where she lived with my grandfather, Julius, and their three children. This trunk is the perfect size to contain the following:

i) My grandfather’s accounts of his parents crossing the United States by covered wagon, farm life in Minnesota, and leaving the farm to become a doctor.

ii) Copies of my uncle Jack’s Heimark family history, with photos.

iii) Genealogical books about my Kitchell family ancestors, Puritans who fled religious persecution in Kent and Surrey, England, and arrived in Guilford, Connecticut in 1639.

iv) My own oral history interviews with my parents, transcribed and bound as a gift to my family. How strange and heart-breaking to read it and hear how lucid my father was, just a year or so before his dementia began.

 2) A bentwood chair, also of dark wood, from my grandmother Kitchell’s apartment in the Sequoias assisted living apartments in San Francisco, where I and my cousins Kit, Mark, Liza and Hank visited her often in the two years before she died. She was always warm and nonjudgmental towards my then-boyfriend, Gary, a wild and wooly bohemian painter. An American blueblood herself, I never saw one instance of snobbery from her.

3) Dana Point, a painting that Gary painted, shortly after we left the schooner, The Flying Cloud. We had lived on it for two years, renovating it to go around the world. The painting has three levels: landscape, woman’s body and bird. It is surreal, like the work of Salvador Dali.

4) Celestine, a papier mâché bear and two tree branches that my sculptor sister, Jane, made to honor our father. I first saw it in her art studio in Boulder, and bought it half a year before her nearly sold-out art show at my brother, Jon's, and his wife, Leatrice’s, art gallery in Phoenix, Arizona. Celestine stands in the non-working fireplace of our living room, leaning forward eagerly, just as my father did in life.

5) The soft wool blanket with bears and men and women holding hands that my mother knitted and gave to me. I told her I repaired a couple of holes Marley had made in it while kneading me as I read in bed.

“Oh, that was the worst thing I ever knitted,” my mother said.

“But it’s beautiful!” I said.

“I mean, it was the most difficult of anything I ever made.” 

6) A painting by Kathleen Morris, Shrine for Couple #3, from my Santa Fe years when I earned a living as a traveling art dealer, which brought me to Los Angeles. I stayed in a suite at the Chateau Marmont in the late ‘80s, a very good time for selling art. I began to find the excitement of the city more appealing than living in the country in Santa Fe, and moved to Los Angeles in 1990. And there I met Richard.

7) Books by friends. Richard and I met at a 1994 poetry reading at a bookstore, Midnight Special. Later, with three friends, we started a poetry reading series at the Rose Café. It lasted three years, and exposed us to all the rich work of the poets of Los Angeles, and later, from other parts of the country and beyond.

8) The photo of Carolyn Kizer reading her poems at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She was the first person to read at our series at the Rose Café, and became my poetry mentor and friend. Later, we bought the Paris apartment she and her architect husband, John Woodbridge, owned.

9) Prayers to the Muse, the cross that my sister, Jane, made for me when I received my M.F.A. in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. It is made of red leather book end papers and dry wall mud. Antioch gave me more friends than any other experience I’ve had in my life. Six of them joined me weekly for a fiction reading and editing circle at our house in Playa del Rey for years, which continues now with us Skyping between Los Angeles and Paris.

10) Charlie the marble. I opened a well-wrapped package and out tumbled Charlie. Charlie, a photographer, was married to my great friend, Polly, with whom I lived in two communes in Berkeley in the late ‘60s. Richard and I loved visiting Polly and Charlie in their warm, art-filled Berkeley home over the years. Charlie died several years ago after a liver transplant. A glass artist whose work Charlie photographed took his ashes and made 300 glass marbles out of them as gifts for his friends. Richard and I each have one, which we keep on our desks and play with. Richard wrote a sonnet to him. We talk to Charlie. He’s so pleased that Polly’s painting and sculpture are being shown in various galleries, well reviewed and selling well.

11) My sister, Jane, made a modern Kachina, The Minotaur, for Richard. He is a Taurus. It captures his Bull spirit, and now raises its arms in the goddess salute of ancient Crete in the nonworking fireplace in his office. (We were married in Crete, since our personal myth originates there.) The heavy stone at the base made it very difficult to ship to Paris. But we found an art packer, Jorgen, at Box Brothers in Santa Monica, who devised an ingenious way to keep the stone from breaking away from the papier mâché figure, and this totem figure arrived intact.

Page 113, The Red Book

12) C. G. Jung’s The Red Book. Richard and I saw a show at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles of this magical book of mandalas that the great psychiatrist, C. G. Jung created as a vehicle for his own healing. This may be a universal method of healing; drawing a daily mandala was my way of healing, too. For my birthday last year, three of my siblings, Jon, Ann and Suki, gave me a book certificate. I bought this book with it. It is so numinous that I can’t read it yet. But at the right time, I will.

[1] Storage units in the cellar of the building for each apartment owner. The caves are ancient, eerie and cold. You can imagine Edgar Allen Poe setting one of his stories here.

[2] Elevator.