Twenty Planes

One evening on my way to visit the Musee d’Orsay, (or Carnevale, I hadn’t decided) I passed the open door of a large Église. Inside it was dark: little light came through the windows—it was already getting late—and all the walls and arches and columns were painted in various colors and patterns. It was stunning. it seemed to me unbelievable that this building was just a step off a street, and that people passed it by all the time, just as I might have passed by, and never see the tapers in the corner, the green eagles perched above the arch.
By the time I came out I realized it was getting too late for a museum to be worth it, and, as I stood in a moment of indecision, a bus stopped nearby: 95 destination Monmartre. Well, that sounds fine, I thought, and got on.
If I ever make a list of traveling recommendations this will be one: just ride buses around a city.
I got off at Sacre Coeur stop, and just kept walking upwards, hills, steps, until I found myself in an strange alley with a prehistoric looking rock and an unexpected view over the city, the Eiffel tower doing its disco sparkle in the distance.
Then, higher, yes, I saw the cathedral, ivory stone, yes, gazed down the steps, over all the lights of Paris, yes I oohd, and sighed, and listened, and breathed.
There is a frightening oasis of a ‘tourist monmartre’, where everything seems to be in miniature. But once outside of this haven, walking around the dark, slightly menacing streets was some of the best time I spent in the city. I felt for the first time that this was the irreplaceable paris; that this could not be berlin, or new york, or new orleans or any and every other place I’ve been.
I walked into a time capsule of a tumbled about closet, actually a clothing shop with silk top hats, dancing shoes from the 50’s, dresses, gloves, purses and jewelry.
The time for the shopwoman seemed stopped as well, alongside the coats and capes.
I stopped to pick out flower tasting tea cakes, lavender, rose geranium, orange blossom. All bright fuschia and violet.
But it was time for me to wind my way south and so, remembering the word for ‘lost’, I used it copiously with other ruins of my high school French.
Less lost, near the Opera I caved to the aroma of roasting chestnuts. Having finally gotten used to asking directions in French I appealed to one man, who asked me, ‘Portuguese...?’
‘mm, English?’ I said.
‘Deutsch?’ he responded.
‘Ah yes’ I said triumphantly (in german) ‘I speak that’.
and so we talked, for a few minutes, with intermittent english and spanish and portuguese words and, somewhere in between the five languages, had quite a pleasant interchange.


There were more moments of reveling and revering over the next few days, but then thursday, stepping onto the twentieth plane so far this year, I flew from the French sky blue back to the German gray, suspended an instant between dreams and monuments.