I’ve carried more than one baguette back to a Paris apartment. Including the one missing from my photograph, which we’d just bought.
World Record & A Lot of Dough!
Category: Live In Paris
Title from a “Diana Krall” album. Photographs from a very favorite place and time
La Chanson Des Vieux Amants
Cooking for one is easy, with leftovers. So often, it’s just a warm up.
Long ago, home at 2 or 3 AM, after a part time gig with a client who was willing to pay me for tech stuff nobody else would touch, trying to keep a blown up life together, I’d find a note, about dinner, warm in the oven. And tonight, putting that into the oven to warm, I was back in Paris and her smile.
This Foolish Heart
Today, my eMail had an announcement of a new record. Yes, I’m ancient. La chanson des vieux amants.
Musee Rodin is – wonderful. There is a terra cotta bust on the second floor that had me remembering to breathe. Paris, Ballet and Music – just take me now Great Spirit
True Confessions
Palais Garnier, Paris
True Confession: I tuned to watch the 2014 SuperBowl for the sole reason of hearing Renee Fleming sing. Football – meh.
Today, eMail brought me the 2024/2025 Paris Opera Season Programme (once you buy Tickets online, you’re on the email list).
Ms Fleming will perform next March, in 2025. If the Boss Lady was still alive, I’d be scheming to sell her that we could afford the plane tickets plus we really should visit Paris. I’d sell her with this excursion: Chihuly At Biltmore . She was a ginormous fan!
Letting Go
Rue Ferdinand Duval & Rue du Roi de Sicile. A block from Rue de Rivoli.
There is a framed print of this by the only real portrait my sweetheart allowed – okay, I caught her unaware. Made this with a Sony P&S in 2007, before a Parisian pickpocket “liberated” it from my jacket, hung on the back of a bistro chair. Pretty much the only crime you need to be aware of in Paris. I sort of owe him. The camera was worth not much and it precipitated an encore career. But that’s not what this is about.
In widowerhood, eventually, the afternoons are quiet. It is, like Martha Stewart says “A good thing”. The practical necessity of daily routine, at least in my case, dictates attention to preparation of the evening meal. And eventually, you start to read the “Use By” dates on magical stuff that, if you were like me and married to the Italian Julia Child, needs to be disappeared. And for the best of reasons, let it go. But there is no easy disposal of physical reminders.
I’ve had the luxury of time to digest an overwhelming menu of hard on the heart. Salved by the memory embedded in a photograph. And I highly recommend the Ribeye & Pomme Frites at Le Bucheron. It’s a few doors left of the crosswalk in the photograph
She’d Hate This – Love Story
Her given name was Martha Jane. She did not like Martha. She used M. Jane. So she’d hate this – the last track on the 1972 Allman Brothers Album: Little Martha (freebie on the Internet Archive). Last song Duane Allman wrote before he died in a motorcycle accident. Recorded with open tuning, with Dickie Betts. It is upbeat, kind, gentle and tough, what I miss every day, since she died.
We met in the snow filled parking lot of a neighborhood saloon. I was hiding out from a long failed marriage, delaying going home. We knew as soon as we saw each other. Scared us both. Eventually, we healed each others scars. Lasted almost 3o years – till death we did part. Paris was where we healed.
Olympic Poster Debut
My favorite place in Paris was and is the Musee D’Orsay, seen her from Pont Royal. My sweetheart tolerated me going there three days in a row. This is, I think from 2017. The 2024 Summer Olympic Posters were unveiled there, today. Prior to an almost as important Taylor Swift Concert
I made the photograph below early on a Wed., when if you get there at opening, wave your Visite Pass and stride to the elevator for the fifth floor, you’ll have about twenty minutes before tourists, innocently invade.
For the Z Man
Marais Saturday
It was just luck that I met a co-worker in RTP who owned and rented an apartment in the Marais District of Paris. I promised my sweetheart photography would not disrupt our visits. And the good part about a non-business trip is, you can live in the ‘hood. The Marais is a good ‘hood.
The Last Time I Saw Paris
It was the last day of our fourth visit. On Friday afternoon, the day before our flight home, in late afternoon, well before our dinner reservation, I took the Metro, with my camera bag, from the St. Paul Station near our rental apartment to Champs-Elysses and then Montparnasse Station. It was, like most cities, busy and there was no way I was schlepping my tripod on crowded cars.
Atop Tour Montparnasse ( which most Parisians regard a very large sore thumb sticking up in the sky), 630 ft above the street, slots through thick plexiglass panels offer a sort of tripod.
That evening, we had a fine Parisian restaurant dinner. Next morning, our prearranged shuttle took us to DeGaulle Airport. And next day, Sunday, I was making promotion photographs for the “3D Jazz Project” Dance Company at Cary Ballet Conservatory. Life was very good.
The Boss Lady had me make a 5 ft wide canvas print of this that hung over our stairwell. Stupidly, I had it mounted on too light of a frame and it warped. I disappeared it after she died. The next version will be much smaller (apartment sized) and robustly mounted
In early 2021, the tickets we booked in late 2019 for our last planned Paris visit were refunded, after I sent the airline my sweethearts death certificate.
We will always have Paris.
Post Script: Our third visit (same apartment in Marais) was in the fall of 2016. I’ve no explanation of why it took nine years to return. But a few days after we got home in 2016, we both sort of danced around the idea that we really needed to go back – the kitchen renovation could wait until 2018. And we and it, did.
Late Sept. and early Oct. in Paris is glorious. And the new season at the Paris Opera has begun! This month, I’ll finish the punch list (cabinet trim) from the 2018 kitchen reno. In preparation for sale. But nothing I could do would replace holding hands on the Rue de Rivoli or our corner hangout at Le Bucheron or …
Wherever you’re Paris is, just go.
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