Happy Birthday

 

In the United States, members of the Teamster's Union take their birthdays off. That's a great idea, so Kaaren took the day off from writing Paris Play. Instead, she and our visiting friend Tristine, for two days made the rounds of Paris publishers, then had two celebratory dinners, one with Tristine, her friend Barbara, and me at our friend Richard's marvelous Lebanese fusion restaurant, Savannah, the second with a group of friends from my French school, L'Alliance Française.

In place of her prose, here's a tribute to the god Hermes, the god of liminal spaces, of entrances and exits, of passages, of doorsills and of windows. Paris has so many doors and windows, in styles from gothic, to baroque, to rococo, to plain, they are an endless fascination: Where do they lead? What do they hide? What do they reveal? How long have they been in service? Do they squeak, or are they smooth operators?

Today, Paris Play is wordless, a silent door or window into our Paris.

--Richard