French 75

Open Season

I don't have a lot of rules. I'm not a rules kind of person. I'm not even one of those the-only-rule's-that-there's-no-rules person. But I do have one exception that proves my no-rules:

Christmas may not begin until the Friday after Thanksgiving. Period.

I already vented some spleen over this in October, so indeed this is neither new nor perhaps very interesting. And besides, in Paris most merchants have had their decorations up since Armistice Day.

But in the concrete, in the here and now, it means mostly that it is open season on Christmas music. Coffee and toast in the morning with Louis Armstrong's version of "The Night Before Christmas" ("This is Louis Satchmo Armstrong talking to all the keeeeds, from all over the woooooorld.") I go for more consecutive rounds of Al Hirt and Ann-Margret's duet of "Baby It's Cold Outside" than I am entirely comfortable admitting.

Not quite a rule, but a request: Christmas colors are green, red, white, gold, and perhaps blue. Not pink (is it me, or am I channeling Andy Rooney suddenly?), and definitely not orange. Which is why the photo at left might suprise you a little bit.

It was not taken in Miami, nor in Scottsdale. But on the Boulevard Haussman. The "concept" Christmas at Au Printemps left me a little cold. I can just see the design genius who dreamt this one up, waving his hands at the meeting, "Tout à l'Orange! Tout à l'Orange!"

I bet the sketches looked great. But back in the real world, said "or-ahnze," when combined with the store's signature turquoise, takes things in a very different direction. Very "Tout à la Howard Johnson's!"

I find myself, oddly, craving clam chowder....

And Away We Go

I may be too late, having already made my inaugural holiday post, but I would nonetheless like to take a quick moment to thank the party responsible for the yellow splendor that was Fall 2006 in Paris.

Because it was beautiful.

Thank you, whoever you are.

I am a little sad to see it go. At some point in late September I started going to the Luxembourg Gardens every day, for no reason at all except to look around. At first the difference from one day to the next was hardly noticeable at all. And then, one day, everything was different. All yellow and crunchy, like living in a bowl of tortilla chips.

And then, suddenly, the trees are bare, and it's winter.

But nature abhors a vacuum, so of course in this case, as with everything else, there are off-setting penalties. It is precisely because there are no leaves to obstruct the view that one can, from the warmth of the Café Rostand just across the rue de Medicis, watch the sun as it sets somewhere in the general direction of the fifteenth arrondissement.

This same sun will head west, crossing the Seine and eventually the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi and the Sierras, and in nine hours will appear, at least from the point of view of a person standing at the foot of the Campanile on the Berkeley campus, to set between the two uprights of the Golden Gate Bridge. I only know this because the sight of it in December 1984 is burned into my memory -- and very nearly my retinas.

Just another one of those miracles, just like everything else, for which we are indebted to the same whoever-you-are.

Christmas Luxe

From top to bottom: Hermès store (replete with horse-hooves SFX); two views on the Place Vendôme.

Home for the Holidays

My brother, John, used to work as an account guy at UPS. On Christmas Eve whatever year it was, he was the last one to arrive at my parents’ house for dinner. He had been helping out that night behind the counter, and came in wearing a perfect drugstore-issue red-and-white fake-fur hat, saying, “I figure nobody could get mad at a guy in a Santa hat.”

Which I thought was a fine strategy. And a funny one coming from him, because John is around six and a half feet tall. Meaning that anybody, save for the most pugnacious, looking-for-troublest one in any crowd, would think twice before getting mad at him, even without the hat.

But I stole this logic a few years later, when the drive north on Interstate 5 from Los Angeles became a regular part of my holidays. “Five” is a nerve-wracking road under any circumstances. Two lanes in each direction, stretching ahead, uninterrupted as far as the eye can see, with the fast lane on the right, and the suicidally fast lane on the left. The grayness of it, the flatness of it, the lack of scenery, and the profound sense it gives one of being in the middle of abso-flipping-lutely nowhere make it one of those stretches of road that people are hell-bent on getting behind them.

So I started wearing a Santa hat on the drive home for Christmas. My rationale was that my wearing the hat, and singing Christmas carols aloud (the passenger seat stacked with cassettes), and with feeling, would make my fellow drivers take note of me, recognize my fundamental humanity (for which they would otherwise have no regard, period), and be less inclined to cut me off, or to plow into the back of my car at 95 mph.

(I don’t know if you ever hoped to make the acquaintance of someone who knows the words to “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” as well as Serge Gainsbourg’s “Baby Alone in Babylon,” but if so, you can now strike that one off your wishlist.)

To bolster my safety voodoo, I began adding other elements to the ritual: a detour to Peet’s Coffee in Pasadena before taking Highway 210 out of town; a visit to the Carl’s Junior near Buttonwillow for Kriss-Kut™ Fries (this was phased out in 2002, once I discovered how many days’ worth of Weight Watcher points were to be found in each cardboard container); a moment of prayer for the thousands of cows by the side of the road at the Harris Ranch; pit-stop at Anderson’s in Santa Maria (pea soup optional) before the final stretch home.

Find me as insane as you like, but in nearly seven years’ of driving that road, I had no problems, mishaps, break-downs, or traumas.

Except for last year.

After quitting a job, packing, cleaning, loading CDs into iTunes, saying goodbyes, fine-tuning details (and losing my voice for a week, to boot), I finally hit the road at about 3:00pm on Wednesday, December 21. I got a block away from my apartment before realizing that I had left a piece of blue cheese and two hardboiled eggs in my refrigerator. Knowing that these might be rude surprises for the as-yet-unnamed tenant who would someday move in, I circled back around.

I finally hit the road at 3:10pm, hoping to get home in time for late dinner at Cesar’s in Berkeley.  So there was no time for detours, nor for coffee, nor for Highway 210 out of town. I somehow beat the traffic out of the Valley and was so relieved to get to Valencia as quickly as I did that I didn’t really pay much mind to the flashing road signs that indicated delays at the summit, 20 or 30 minutes ahead of me. What was that all about, anyway? And who cares? I am in the middle of a heroic effort. I am getting out of town. I have a dinner date to get to.

And so I thought. And so I kept driving.

You can divine at this point that I was not wearing a red and white fake-fur Santa hat. Every December I have to buy a new one, having lost, invariably, the last one even before Christmas Day. But in the midst of all the boxing, sorting, organizing, and prepping, I hadn’t had time to buy one.

My car was packed to the gills, and I was sure that I could feel my trunk riding lower to the ground with every mile that brought me closer to the Tejon Pass, which is at just over 4,000 feet. But my little car hung in there, and I reached the summit, tipping over to the downhill part of the ride, to be greeted with a sea of brake lights.

I came to a stop. I spent the first 15 minutes thinking happy thoughts, taking my foot off the brake pedal a few times a minute, waiting for the break to come. The break that I knew was just around the corner.

I waited. I reached over to the passenger seat, and selected a Christmas album. Spike Jones. And I started singing along. With feeling. Even during the tricky parts: “Ingle-jay ells-bay, Ingle-jay ells-bay, Ingle-jay all the ay-way.”

I willed myself not to go insane. I continued to sing, and to take my foot off the brake pedal a few times a minute, certain that a break was just around the corner. When my lower back started hurting, I put my foot up on the seat, and used the handbrake instead.

And I kept singing, along with Ella Fitzgerald (“thumpet-ty, thump-thump, thumpet-ty, thump-thump, look at Frosty go”), and along with Ronnie Spector, imitating her Bronx accent (“Froo-wa-stee da Snowmin, was a haa-ppy, jolly, so-old….”). I looked around me, and as it grew darker, the scene changed from that surreal traffic jam at the beginning of “8-1/2” to something strangely cozier, faces lit intermittently by the soft red of brake lights. I kept singing for two hours. I sang along with the Peanuts, humming the intro to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” (“loo, loo, loo, loo-loo, loo, loo-lo”), and did my best to pussy-cat even a fraction as well as Ann-Margret does in her duet with Al Hirt of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

I sang, and I worked the brake pedal, and lo, then the break did come. Apparently the right lane had been closed down. Never mind that all of this might have been avoided with the rather simple placement of pylons along the mile or so leading up to the closure. Never mind. I was on my way. I was going to miss dinner at Cesar’s.  No problem. I would have pea soup in Santa Maria.

I made it home safely that night. And I made it to Paris just over a week after that. And for now, this is home.

Almost a year later (to the day, nearly), I have zero emotional recall whatsoever of those two hours, or of the drive north. I know that I was beside myself with frustration, and that I was exhausted and thrilled and nervous and all of that. But I have no recollection of it at all.

I do remember trying to emulate Peggy Lee’s cooing, misty-eyed voice -- more breathe-along than sing-along -- there in the dark at just over 4,000 feet:

“and this song of mine, in three-quarter time, wishes you and yours, the same thing…too.”

A Tale of Two Trees

I arrived in Paris on December 29, 2005. The view through the back window of the taxi that brought me from Charles de Gaulle was my first-ever glimpse of the street I would be living on, and the building that I would be living in for the next year. It was a lot to take in: even more than the physical place itself, there was the sort of unbelieveable fact that I had made it at all. Swamped as I had been in details, in lists, in lists of lists, in packing, and in a non-specific fear of the unknown, it was easy to forget the relatively certain fact that I would reach my destination.

After heaving my two very heavy suitcases over the threshold, I hit the lighted button marked "Lumière." The entry way to the building lit up to reveal a cheerful, stout little Christmas tree waiting just inside the porte cochère. Standing at attention like that, it was the first thing to greet me in my new home.

Funnily enough, I found the tree very reassuring. In my first hours in France, in this flood of new data -- the hum of scooters, the cool and damp of the air, the heaviness of the door, the smoothness of its brass handle, the smell of someone cooking something, somewhere, not too far off -- the sight of a decorated tree was wholly familiar. No adjustment, translation, explanation required. It was Christmastime when I boarded my plane in San Francisco, and it was still Christmastime in France.

A year later, not quite to the day, I came home to this street, this building after a five-day visit in England. This time, however, no gigantic suitcases to heave-ho, just one heavy overnight bag, and one big-ass 41-year-old (because I am in fact on crutches right now, having fractured a bone in my foot last week. I myself am the oversized luggage to be dragged over the threshold).  Again, I hit the button marked "Lumière" and again I was reassured to be greeted in such a way by a decorated tree standing at attention on the other side of the porte cochère.

But this go-around, there is one very big difference: the veil has been lifted. I now know what it's like to live in Paris. For me, that's huge.  I don't know if I belong here ("belong" is a big word), but I do feel at ease here. I feel content, and I feel as if there is a place for me. But mostly, I feel a real relief at not having to wonder anymore what it would be like to live here. We all have our questions to answer, things we wonder about. And though the whole of what I do not know could fill millions and millions of pages, and there is plenty more which remains mysterious (amen for that) on this one thing I am pretty clear. And for that I am very, very grateful.

The Freudian in me is happy to note that this years' photograph, as opposed to last year's, was taken facing west and into the light.

Into the future.