PARIS REALIZED

Just like so many events in our lives that we plan, anticipate, visualize, with expectations of a certain sequence of activities and certain outcomes, the realization of which being entirely different, so too was my trip to Paris in May.
I have just reread my first Paris posting and realized how naive and incomplete my expectations were. But then life's experiences, even those that involve professional guides, cannot always be planned, with any certainty, down to the minute. Childbirth is an example that comes quickly to mind.
And, yes, let me say that childbirth is not an inappropriate comparison here. If you will pardon my laboured analogy, I certainly felt pregnant with excitement and energy in advance of my first trip to Paris. And while I was travelling with a group of twelve other women, I was, nevertheless, on my own.
The seven hour flight was, in itself, a less than pleasant experience: cramped seating, plastic food, barely visible TV screen, and the sheer terror of flying over the Atlantic in a heavy metal tube, hoping the pilot was "Sully" certified.
Driving into Paris from the airport was not dissimilar to driving between any airport and city: Industrial parkways, construction, traffic, American fast food chains. Surely there was more to Paris than this North American suburb replica!
And then, about 30 minutes into the drive, we came upon the City of Lights itself. Here, at last, was the architecture, the sandstone buildings, always only four to six stories high, with the ubiquitous wrought iron railings, flower boxes; four lanes becoming two, straight highways becoming loping, narrow streets; and just ahead, the omnipresent Eiffel tower presiding over the city; now entering the 7th Arrondissement (district), pulling up to the front door of Hotel Muguet, on Rue Cler, my home for the next seven days.
Hotel brochures and advertising can be deceiving, even more so on the internet. I had pictured my hotel room, with a balcony, gazing out upon the Eiffel tower, where I would drink a glass of wine each evening before going out to dinner. Alas not so; instead, my assigned room was on the main level, just down the hall from the front foyer. How disappointing, and yet, as they say, one balcony door closes, another one opens. As it turned out, the room location was perfect, allowing me to quickly run back for this or that adjustment of wardrobe or forgotten item, "Yes, I should bring my sun hat." "No, I don't need the umbrella today." And Msr. Eiffel was always there for viewing, just a block from the hotel entrance.
Each morning, the Paris Women would gather in the foyer to review the day's agenda. The mornings were usually programmed, with the afternoons unstructured to allow individual sightseeing, napping (who needs to sleep!), shopping, meandering (meandering became my favourite individual activity). As I became more familiar with the city and comfortable with the metro system, I would just head out from the hotel, with my friend, Eiffel, as my landmark, some days going left, some going right, and would let the afternoon unfold itself. The 6th day, I excused myself entirely from the group, and took the whole day to wander the streets, dancing along the Champs Elysees with Fred Astaire, (or was it Gene Kelly?).
The first day was a tour of the 1st Arrondissement, the upscale shopping district of Paris, the location of the famous Angelina's restaurant, with the thickest, most scrumptious hot chocolate "in the world." Here also we could go to Bon Marche, and pick out gourmet picnic food to take to a nearby park, hidden, literally in the middle of Paris, behind a few old stone buildings.
Everywhere, fountains, ponds, trees arching over pathways creating tunnels of greenery, dotted with benches for lunch or lovers.

It is noon hour, and Parisians have gathered around the ponds, on their portable lawn chairs, bare feet up on the cement borders, catching the spray from the fountains, their lunch baskets on the ground beside them. Their inner city noon-hour respite temporarily transposed into a resort atmosphere. The French know how to make the most of every condition and circumstance, a lesson I wish had learned much earlier in life. I should have come here sooner. "Yes, you will be happy, but you will not know it."
I have been asked my favourite impressions of Paris. Was it the Bistros? French cuisine? The shopping? The Seine? Notre Dame Cathedral? Monet's lillies? Rodin's sculture? The museums? The unmistakeable flair of French women, always with scarves flung round their necks? Women and men, in business attire, biking to work in the early morning? The energy of families, spilling onto the cobblestone streets on a Friday evening, standing at a curb side bar, or at a small, crowded table, laughing, talking, drinking wine, children sitting politely with their parents, also engaged in the conversations? The Eiffel Tower? (I wept when I first walked along the park avenue leading to its base, and looked up at the grandeur, so much larger and more magnificent in person.)
Yes, it was all of those impressions. But, curiously enough, even to me, there was something more that grabbed my imagination beyond anything I had expected. (Like knowing you will, of course, love your baby, when it finally arrives, but never anticipating the intertwining complexity of emotion and thought.)
The greatest excitement for me was actually associated with the design and architecture of the buildings. As numerous as the ponds and fountains and parks (Parisians love water, stone, and greenery.) were the traffic circles, with a triangulation of little streets, sometimes as many as six or eight spreading out from the centre square, with their adjacent triangulation of sandstone buildings. This fascinated me. I would stand in the middle of a square and rotate in awe of the little streets that would visually converge into their own little triangles off in the distance. One day I actually walked around one of the old structures just to satisfy myself that it was not an optical allusion and that it truly was a triangular construct. I thought of the infinity of wing spans. How exciting to walk into a building and throw out one's arms, imagining them gradually extending to the diverging walls as one walked through to the other side of the building.
That is the image I held as I flew home from Paris. My own wings had now been forever expanded. And as I hold them and my memories close to me now, I wonder where I will fly to next. Like Paris, life is a pattern of repetition with variation. The question is how to make the variations meaningful, as if encountering them for the first time.