The Return

California is once again home, and feels it.

See new material, courtesy of Tom Kealey’s Creative Nonfiction, at thoughtkitchen.wordpress.com.

[Partial] Bibliography.

Since the European re-entry, in roughly chronological order:

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway (reread)

My Uncle Napoleon, Iraj Pezeshkzad*

The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, John L. Esposito

Home, Sweet Home.

To make up for lost time, some highlights of the last seven weeks, in quotation form (how else?):

“Across the street is a man in full beard, a very short black dress, and white stilleto boots, talking comfortably with the boy I was walking behind into the Place de la Republique fifteen minutes ago. The boy wears jeans and a gray sweatshirt, hood up. They are accompanied by three men in suit who speak loudly in French and a woman in a black blazer who does not speak at all.”      

    -waiting for the nightbus, upper Marais, ca. 28 sept.

“Donne-la du vin. Il faut être-” [insert bellydance-like undulations here]       

    -Mami (host grandmère)

“I think we have to get an Ile Flottante.” 

    -Maman à Paris

“The sky is haze-filled, as though one fat glaring ray of sun were beating down on all of Fosses-sur-Mer. To the south, refineries tower over the steely water and above us to the north are red rock buttes. One stands alone and bare – a church is carved out of its top. It is 9:30 and already the sun is hot. It looks closer to Israel than Paris as we speed past olive groves and sandy calcite hills. There are fires set at the farmhouses along the road and the smoke mixes with the haze – the sky is bony, nearly white. Everything is green but still. Frozen in the glaring beige light.”

    -back of the bus, Marseille to Arles

“Le souvenir est plus fort que la réalité du présent.”

    -Christine, overly florid Bing-hired tourguide

“Elle a l’air d’une comédienne, non?”

    -Ali (Man from Maroc n°2)

Analysis of Regression.

I am back in Paris. In truth, I’ve been back for a while but the temptation to continue reliving the month in non-Paris parts of Europe was too great and I spread out that writing and rewriting as long as possible. So maybe I’ve missed some of Paris that needed to be shared. Tant pis.

Back in Paris is not so bad a place to be. As with any return to an old place there is a return to old habits. But in the city of hopeless romance who can blame a little answer searching, whether it be in the stolen kitchen, the unrepeatable kiss, or the bottom of several bottles?

Get Back.

Maybe we spent that whole month learning about ourselves and each other. Maybe it was a crawling, shuffling education, complete with a brick-weight book and decimal pointed exchange rates. Venice (minus Mestria, our only encounter with which involved making ourselves scarce in the face of drunken dental students) was the smallest city we were in but we gave it the most mileage. Hard smooth cobblestones under our bare feet we weaved our way back across the uncrossed canals, twisting through passages we came to recognize and turn to with confidence. Our Rome-loosened tongues ran with with our legs, and we haunted that city, keeping pace with all those old ghosts.

Venice fashions itself – not without reason – a literary city, a Paris flooded and squished. Hem’s second haunt. At the very least it is inhabited entirely of characters: the Great Plains Americans, clutching our map upside down as they warmly try – oh they tried! – to give us directions; the fifty-something Italians, infinitely elegant and without a word of English, who fretted to see two young girls, burdened with overflowing bags and lost; the dreadlocked crowds of Santa Margherita; the Parisian art students with their Pernod and cheap beer; the woman behind the DHL desk who spent fifteen minutes on the floor wrestling with tape and cardboard to ensure the safety of an overly large model skeleton in its cross-Atlantic journey; and Casanova himself, complete with boat and manservant and the same lines he’s been casting for three hundred years.

Memories that do not belong to you sound overindulgent and sentimental. No one cares about my self-realization, about clarity achieved over a plate of seppe al nero and gondoliers laughing at tourists the next table over. But in Venice every corner was crisp, stones were hard, and boats rocked exactly with the current. After a month of figuring out the next move we stopped and let crystallization and focus happen as they would.

It’s a Man’s World, Baby.

The Romans were known – are still in a way revered – for their gluttony. Vomitoriums, orgies, bloodbaths. Everything to the max. According to Christine, the Stanford-hired, questionably reliable tour guide who recently squired us through Arles, this was thereason for their downfall. Regardless of any declining empires, upon arrival in Rome, we knew how they felt. Self-punishment came in the form of a series of leaky green tents, barely wide enough to contain two miniature twin beds. But we were in Roma, and that old pagan spirit got into us. I blame the gelato (breakfast of champions) and the forty-five second rush of a quarter mile hitch.

Whatever it was, it was infectious; Italy rose in our bloodstreams, pumping daring and confidence to our heads. We were in control. We were exhilarated. We were, to anyone who cared to listen, writers for prominent men’s magazines back home - paid research, expense accounts, the works. Words flowed like those poor fat Romans’ wine, and upon boarding the train for Venezia, we knew. Italian is our internal language; in that place, we are ourselves.

Icarus in the Garden of Eden.

The Dalmatian Coast. The Jewel of Croatia. Land of abundant vegetation – figs, grapes, pomegranites falling at your feet – and poorly made, poorly rented, poorly judged cars. Our wings were clipped.

“This is Magical Fairy Tale Land,” or the Dawn of Realization.

In Budapest I ate tender duck for under 8 dollars, watched old American movies with Magyar subtitles, bathed in ancient pools and was massaged by a small Hungarian woman with strong hands. I called my mother and said only, “You have to go to Budapest; it is a fairy tale.”

Rapunzel Lets Down Her Hair in Krakow.

Krakow looks like you would like to think Paris looked in the fifties. In a space smaller than the septième. This leads to some creativity in planning – and monotony in actuality. Meaning we had high hopes, a ridiculous night, and four days of routine that was comforting until it turned sickening – literally, though Chimera we love you still(I will not say the same for Hispanski). But Krakow will always live on in our meringue-filled memories as the start: of literary gobbling (and occasional indigestion); of the soundtrack; of coffee and vodka; of the list. Not to mention (and believe me, I will not) certain behavior on a top-floor balcony.

Life is One Big Conte des Fées, or the Rest of our Time in Fairyland.

Post Berlin, where the Dublin update came from, the internet access became too hard to find/too expensive to maintain long enough to do our destinations justice/too undesirable as a way to pass the time. Take your pick. End result, this is the grand sum up of the most unbelievable month of my life. I did not think it possible that so many magical, wish-fulfilling, life-fulfilling things could happen that continuously or constantly. Hence, the fairy-tales.

The Princess and the Pea, or the Tale of an East German Mattress:

Arrived in Berlin with some soucis. Completely alleviated by youth concept wine bars, lunches of champions (gelato), experimental Irish cooking, impossibly high-ceilinged apartments, and one truly beautiful, brown and orange, pop-art daisy printed mattress.