humor

Paris: The photography class makes me shutter

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On the morning of my second full day in Paris in the purple velvet head-boarded bed on the second floor of the three-floor flat at the top of the 60 wooden spiral steps behind the red door on the Rue Le Regrattier, I opened my eyes.

 

 

“Am I really in Paris?” I asked myself. “Oui, oui,” I answered, which reminded me I needed to go to the bathroom.

 

Unlike the previous morning in which we ate our way through breakfast to lunch in one sitting, we needed to be in Montmartre by 9 a.m. By planning ahead the previous night, we were able to wait until the very last minute and barely make it.

 

Our teacher, Elena, met us at the Anvers station and took us to the carousel near the Basilica de Sacre-Couer. We forgot to bring a camera for the grandchild, so we took turns attending to the child, marveling at PIGEONS!, and paying attention to Elena in between shouts of “Feather!” “Bird!” “Roly-poly!” “Ant!” “Guess what?!”

 

 

For my sake, Elena went over the basics of shutter speed, aperture, focal length, and perspective. My brother and daughter know all about that: he has some of his photos hanging on the walls of a multinational corporation in Houston; she took photography classes in high school. Like any good Texan, I was bred to shoot and ask questions later, so I needed to practice asking questions before shooting.

 

Probably the most important camera technique I learned was how to hold a ladybug in one hand and take pictures with the other. (Someone had to hold the bug while the child had a chocolate gelato.)

 

We spent the morning trekking through Montmartre admiring the works of outdoor artists at the Place du Tertre, the cobblestone streets with their colorful shops, and the Moulin de la Galette (a windmill converted into a restaurant) on Rue Lepic, the street on which Van Gogh once lived. If you are in Paris and have a van, go. You won’t rue it.

 

(If you are a new reader, I’m sorry; I get my word thrills anyway I can. If you are not a new reader, try not to rue so.)

 

 

After the photo shoot, we took the metro back to Ile Saint Louis, stopping at the local boulangerie for bread, croissants, and macarons. In that imaginative way we all had, we made sandwiches on good bread, sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and basil drizzled with olive oil, and then a little oil and balsamic dipping sauce for the batard. (Note: no letters were harmed or eliminated in any word of that last sentence.) Just as some people can’t get enough of a certain song and end up playing it over and over until their brains explode, we could not get enough of the various breads and ate them over and over until our thighs and derrieres exploded.

 

After lunch. the beds kindly offered naps, so we each took one.

 

 

We spent the evening leisurely exploring the island, walking over to Notre Dame to watch the street performers, and sitting along the Seine for several minutes at a time until the ducks or swans moved, in which case we needed to relocate to get as close as possible. When you are five years old, this is de rigueur (French for “hard to do when you are sixty years old”).

 

Two years ago I visited Paris with my brother and we spent every moment visiting sites and seeing as much of the city as we could. I loved it. This time, we visited less and lived more. I think I loved that even more. More than all the glitter and shine of Versailles, I will remember waving to the passengers on a boat gliding down the Seine on a soft summer night and seeing the delight in my grandchild’s smile as they waved back; and watching the wink of lights on the water as the sky darkened, and the lights along the river brightened.

 

 

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Next installment: As the French say (or should): A whale of a good time always has a fin

Paris: Hurry, potter, and the bedchamber of secrets

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In which we potter, then hurry

 

 

Most people don’t know this, but gravity is much stronger in Paris than in Wisconsin, so we found it hard to get out of bed in the mornings. When we did, we pottered around, drinking coffee, applying lots of butter to help the croissants and bread slide down our throats, and doing more brazen staring out of our windows into the apartments across the way and down at the passersby in the streets.

 

 

On the first morning at half past a bag of croissants, we noticed it was almost time for lunch, so we cleaned up the breakfast dishes and prepared more food. Time had that elastic quality, seemingly stretching out before us forever when suddenly it snapped back and we realized that unless we immediately grabbed our things and carefully rushed down the 60 stairs, twirling ourselves silly, we would miss our appointment at the Eiffel Tower.

 

 

We get an eyeful of Paris

 

I don’t think this is the right way.

 

Under the Eiffel Tower

 

Our reservations to ascend to the top of the Eiffel Tower were for 1:30 p.m. and we managed to allow ourselves enough time to ascend from the nearest subway station at approximately 1:30 p.m. We needed another 10 minutes to get to the tower. One person in our party wore one of those Parisian pouts, sure that we would miss our opportunity, but we hurried forward, arriving just in time to stand under the hot sun for a good 30 minutes. That is the value of having reservations.

 

 

Between the apartment and the Eiffel Tower, the grandchild’s feet decided to grow and the shoes that had been fine up until that point, suddenly began to produce blisters and loud complaints. Band-aids helped for a while, but every time the child spoke they fell off.  Just kidding; we minions carried the child aloft in our arms.

 

 

As our elevator angled its way up to the top deck, both my daughter and grandchild grew quiet. Anything high is low on my daughter’s list of fun things to do, but she forced herself to walk to the edge, lean on the railing, and take pictures. My grandchild grasped my neck and refused to look. I slowly moved toward the railing and began commenting on how tiny the cars and motorcycles looked. When I said that the people looked like the ants in my grandchild’s ant farm, interest replaced fear, and soon we were laughing and enjoying ourselves. When we spotted a soccer field, the shoeless one stared for a while and then said, “Guess what? I see Alex and Grant. They play soccer.” I casually mentioned that they lived in Wisconsin, not Paris. With infinite patience, my grandchild explained that sometimes they played in Wisconsin, and sometimes they played in Paris. Who knew?

 

 

After our eyeful of Paris, we carried the child to the nearest shoe store, a very posh little store with posh little shoes for posh little feet for people who have the posh to pay. To protect the shoes, I bought $15 socks (the cheapest they had), and the child found a pair of sandals, which my brother purchased. Once the incredibly expanding feet were accommodated, we all felt 35 pounds lighter. Literally.

 

 

We were five kilometers from the Pompidou Museum, but we decided to walk, stopping at a café along the way for some refreshment. We arrived at the museum late in the day and wandered around. The grandchild liked the video installations, and the two of us spent 20 minutes watching a black and white film narrated in Spanish and English that consisted of wooden trains carrying the names of political movements and ideologies on top of them. We sat on the floor in a small room, the child enraptured by the monochrome trains that sometimes climbed the wall, sometimes dumped all of the letters, or rode across the ceiling, all narrated in a monotone voice. I have no remembrance of what was said, but the only way I could get my grandchild to leave the room was to say how important it was to let mom and uncle know about this fascinating film. Thankfully, five-year-olds have short short-term memories; after sharing the exciting news with mom and uncle, we discovered other inexplicable art and then the outside fountain frequented by pigeons, or as my grandchild says, PIGEONS!

 

Love locks on the Pont de l’Archevêché: one of the key places in Paris to practice picking locks.

 

A view of the Seine River. If you fall in, they say you will go in Seine.

 

Around 9:00 p.m., we strolled back to Ile Saint Louis, stopping at Norte Dame to watch the street performers and admire the sky. We lingered on Pont Marie, our closest bridge, to wave at the boats sailing by, so we didn’t return to the apartment until 10:30. I don’t remember exactly what we ate, but I know it included bread, cheese, tomatoes, fruit and wine because every time we shopped that’s what we bought.

 

 

The Bedchamber of Secrets

 

 

After showering, I heard noises in my bedroom. My pillow sat propped up on the headboard and said it had some secrets to tell me. It could only whisper, so I had to put my ear up to it to hear: it was something about Montmarte and a photography class the next morning. I didn’t feel the full gravity of it all until the following morning.

 

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Next installment: Photography classes make me shutter

 

NOTE TO READERS:  Yes, I broke the law of parallelism in the title. Yes, I did it for cheap thrills. You can try to get even with me, but I doubt our paths will ever cross.

Are we in Paris yet? Whee!

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 à Paris /ah, Paris 

 

After just two days in Hungary, we left for Paris par avion. The avion in this case was Jet Blue, and it was, as they say in the vernacular, a trip quick.

 

Since we traveled intra-Europe, we carried somewhat small luggage, something we were thankful for when we arrived at the apartment on Ile Saint Louis and had to carry them up the 60 winding, wooden stairs. (Yes, we counted. Many times.)

We did a lot of “stairing.”

 

The apartment itself had three levels and an additional 20 steps. On the first floor of the flat, we had rooms for living, dining, and kitchening; on the second, we had two bedrooms and a bath; and on le tippy-top, another bedroom and bath. After we unpacked, we opened the windows, brazenly stared into the neighbor’s apartments across from us, wished we had cigarettes to casually flick as we pouted and looked insouciant, watched the people on the street below, and planned our first excursion: grocery shopping.

 

 Choco-chan the teddy bear lies exhausted on the suitcases. It’s hard being carried up all those stairs.

 

 

Our kitchen. Notice les flakes de la corn.

 

My brother’s leg insisted I take its picture. Here it is.

 

After a fabulous lunch at Les Fous de L’Ile restaurant, we went to the nearest shop for ice cream. Not just any ice cream, but Berthillon ice cream, the crème de la crème of ice. Every day, crowds of people line up at the Berthillon shop on the Ile Saint Louis for its ice cream and sorbet. Each scoop is made of only natural ingredients; the flavors vary with the season. Thankfully other shops sell it, too; otherwise, we would still be waiting to get to the counter. In order to please the locals and try to fit in, we ate some every day. (Word to the wise: fitting in with the locals and fitting into your clothes may at some point cause conflicts.)

 

 

In penance for eating not one but two scoops of Berthillon, we walked to the Louvre, a little over two miles away. At a decent clip, that would take about 40 minutes, but we were indecent, stopped every few minutes to take pictures, AND had a five-year-old with us who noticed every cat, dog, (Look grandma! A French poodle! Oh! A pet shop!), bug, and bird (Grandma! Pigeons! Pigeons! PIGEONS!)

 

At one point on the walk, my daughter grasped my arm and yelled, “Mom!” I couldn’t distinguish the main emotion in her voice – pain, astonishment, fear, indigestion– and panicked, thinking she had hurt herself, twisted her ankle, contracted rabies, or maybe had a root canal without anesthetic while I was taking pictures or admiring my five hundredth pigeon with the grandchild. “There,” my daughter pointed, trying to catch her breath, “there is the Eiffel Tower!” And sure enough, like a small keychain ornament, there it stood. (As you can see, both my daughter and grandchild use a lot of admiration marks. For the sake of my more delicate readers, I have omitted some of them. (You’re welcome. (However, I am now bracketed in by all of these parenthesis and need to break out. (They make me claustrophobic.) (Help!))))

 

This is what my daughter did on her first visit to the Louvre.

 

We couldn’t stay long at the Louvre; it was late, so we headed back to the apartment to eat and put the little one to bed. We ate a light dinner of Caprese salad, croissants, various French breads smeared with real butter, some fruit, some chocolate, and French wine until there was nothing light about the dinner or ourselves.

 

This became our favorite spot in the apartment.

Even the tomatoes are elegant in Paris.

 

As is my wont on vacations, I collapsed into bed, this time in my purple velvet head-boarded bed to dream of the next day’s adventures.

 

My room in Paris.

 

Next installment: Paris grows on me (Curses on you, Berthillon!)

If I’m not here, I’m there

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At the end of the semester I received a large gift wrapped in calendar paper: three month’s worth of days. Each day is a gift certificate, good for 24 hours, to be used any way I choose.

 

I am taking three week’s worth of the certificates to Europe, where I will ramble around, stopping as often as possible to gape and wonder. I plan to use my eyes a lot. I’ll carry a camera and try to remember to use it. I placed a little sticky note on the camera: Your jaw is dropping again, please close it; the locals are staring.

 

The trip is a gift from my brother, large enough to include bringing one of my daughters and my grandchild. My life is full of unmerited favor and love, which explains why gratitude is splashing out of my eyes.

 

If you live in Europe, please look for me. I’ll be wearing still brown hair with newly added highlights, large-sized sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed hat. I’m the small woman rambling with her feet and her mouth.

 

 

I hope to send some postcards now and then, as well as read and comment on other people’s blogs. If not, I have days and days of summer left to do just that.

 

In the next three weeks, if I’m not here on my blog, it means I’m there.

 

Until we meet again here, thank you for your months of reading, commenting, and liking. I like you back.

 

Greetings from Accordia

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Accordia is an obscure country on the far, far border of the west that most people miss because they go one step too far and end up in the east. It’s an easy mistake, especially if you are prone to circular reasoning.

 

 

If by chance you find the border, you still might miss it because it’s such a small country. Accordia consists of one large alp. It’s national motto is “Accordia: A Hill of a Good Country.”

 

No one had heard of the country until recently (today, in fact), but it is the birthplace of the accordion. Accordians are touchy about this subject, and if you want to push an Accordian’s button, just casually mention that Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann invented the accordion in 1822. After the bellowing stops, tell the person you were just kidding. Normally, Accordians aren’t that loud, but they are if you push them.

 

 

For unknown reasons, I was selected out of all of the millions of people in the Interlands to be the official representative of Accordia. I have been recording their vibrant history and plan to publish some of it sooner, later, or both.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Accordia is an obscure country on the far, far border of the west that most people miss because they go one step too far and end up in the east. It’s an easy mistake, especially if you are prone to circular reasoning.

 

 

 

 

If by chance you find the border, you still might miss it because it’s such a small country. Accordia consists of one large alp. It’s national motto is “Accordia: A Hill of a Good Country.”

 

 

 

No one had heard of the country until recently (today, in fact), but it is the birthplace of the accordion. Accordians are touchy about this subject, and if you want to push an Accordian’s button, just casually mention that Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann invented the accordion in 1822. After the bellowing stops, tell the person you were just kidding. Normally, Accordians aren’t that loud, but they are if you push them.

 

 

 

For unknown reasons, I was selected out of all of the millions of people in the Interlands to be the official representative of Accordia. I have been recording their vibrant history and plan to publish some of it sooner, later, both, or either.

 

 

 

 

Frequently Not Asked Questions: Three

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Why is your hair still brown?

 

First, let me say that I have never seen or heard of the color “still brown,” so I cannot answer your question.

 

However, since you asked and made me look, I checked online and discovered that a number of stills are, in fact, brown. My hair color is very close to the still used to make Ukrainian vodka that is pictured in Wikipedia, kindly offered to the world by Arne Hückelheim. So that answers the question you didn’t ask: Is your hair still brown? The answer is yes; however, I much prefer that you call it moonshine brown.

 

Now back to your question. What exactly are you trying to imply? Are you interested in probability theory? Did you suddenly notice the green grass in the picture of the vodka still and realize that I have green eyes? Do find that odd? Or is it just me? More importantly, shouldn’t that last question really be: Or is it just I?

 

Naturally (and that’s what were really talking about when we speak of hair color) all those minor questions lead to the ultimate question: What are the odds of having both brown hair and green eyes?

 

I don’t mind answering that question, but if that is what you are asking, I wish you would have come out and asked me that in the first place.

 

As you know if you have ever taken Biology 301 Biomathematics at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Sarah Otto asked her students that very question in her lecture notes and gave a simple formula to discover the answer based on Bayes’ Rule.

 

P(B|A) = P(B) P(A|B) / P(A)

 

If you are like Dr. Otto, you probably understand this; if you’re like me, you don’t. To me, it looks like someone stuttering in math.

 

(Oddly, the motto at UBC is “a place of mind,” written in lowercase letters. Apparently the Biomathematics department took all of the capital letters to use in its program, so none were left for the motto. The world is full of these small sorrows.)

 

Third (and this is my last attempt to answer your question), I entered the world with dark brown, almost black hair. Somewhere along the way, I lost it and started wearing blond hair. In adolescence I grew tired of that, looked in the mirror one day and noticed I was a brown-haired girl, the literal meaning of brunette, so I forsook blondism. My freshman year in high school, I grew nostalgic, remembered the fun I had as a child and bleached my hair blonde. I didn’t have more fun, so my sophomore year I returned to my roots and went au naturel, hairwise.

 

Fourth, if you must know, my hair color is merely a pigment of my imagination.

 

Bang! Bang!

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Do you like to scream? Do you enjoy gasping? How about startling others? Do you have vehement enthusiasm that you want to share with the world? Or do you just like to boss other people around?

 

If you answered yes to any of those questions, I imagine your writing or typing has bangs.

 

Bang is one of the exclamation point’s informal names. According to Wikipedia, “dembanger” is another. However, I spent at least ten minutes Googling that word and couldn’t find any information about it, other than simple definitions that all mirrored the Wikipedia article. (Note: Ten minutes on Google equals one year’s research.) None of the online dictionaries list it. Wordnik wants nothing to do with it and vehemently declares that it is not a valid word for Scrabble. Ouch! So, I have serious doubts about dembanger and suspect that it is a sly joke, slipped in by Koavf, Rich Farmbrough, Waacstats, Bearcat, Rjwilmsi, or Woohookitty, the top six editors on Wikipedia.

 

I do not doubt Thomas MacKellar though. According to his book ‪The American printer: ‪a manual of typography: containing complete instructions for beginners, as well as practical directions for managing all departments of a printing office, the bang was called “the sign of admiration or exclamation” back in his day. That day was over 51,000 days ago, which is to say, around 1870. (Admiration moment! Just reading that title makes little marks of admiration go off in my head! Long titles make me swoon!)  MacKellar says “the sign of Admiration…denotes surprise, astonishment, rapture, and the like sudden emotions of the mind, whether upon lamenting or rejoicing occasions.” Sounds elegant, doesn’t it?

 

Most grammar guides and stylebooks ask the writer to refrain from showing too much admiration. Use your words, not your marks, they tell us. So you can imagine my surprise (!) when I came upon not one but two marks of admiration in a book by Nancy Etcoff who somehow managed to write a book in spite of having her hands full. She holds both an M.Ed. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in psychology. In the past, she held a post-doctoral fellowship in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. How she managed to write anything at all is a wonder. I can only imagine she had to set those things down at some point so she would be able to type. Her book, Survival of the Prettiest, looks at beauty from an evolutionary standpoint, although you might have guessed that from the title. I found it thought-provoking. However, if you’re like me but trying hard not to be, you might startle the first time she goes Bang! on page 23. When she goes Bang! again on page 51, you may start wondering if you have accidentally wandered into a Western. Don’t worry, there’s no more shooting after that.

 

I can’t deny that it shook me up. Exclamation points! In a non-fiction book! What next?!

 

Exclamation marks used to be harder to make. On the old typewriters, you had to hit the single quotation mark, go back one space and hit the period. Now you can hit the bang sign with no extra effort. Still, I think it’s a good idea to watch your bangs. They may not get into your eyes, but they can get into your reader’s eyes.

 

If you use them a lot, talk to your grammar doctor. They’re terminal, you know. Some people who overuse them learn to stifle their admiration and practice restraint. Others don’t care; they live large and prefer to end with a bang. You may be one of them, but not me!

Dick and Jane: Bulwer-Lytton and Hemingway

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 Look, Jane, look.

See the dark.

I cannot see the dark, Dick.

I see the storm.

I see the night.

I see the dark and stormy night.

Run, Spot, run!

Run in the rain, Spot.

Funny Spot.

See the torrents.

See the rain.

The rain falls in torrents.

Look, Dick, look.

See the wind.

The wind is violent.

See the big word.

See the big wind.

Look! Puff can fly.

Bye, Puff, bye.

See the man.

The man is old.

The man can fish.

He is in a boat.

I can spell boat.

See me spell.

S-K-I-F-F.

Where is Spot?

Where is Puff?

Where is Dick?

Where is Jane?

They are not in the boat.

The man is alone.

The boat is in the water.

See the boat float.

The man can count.

He can count the days.

He counts to 84.

Look at the fish!

Look! Look!

Where are the fish?

Ha, ha.

I made you look.

There are no fish.

The man has no fish.

Cavort

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Cavort: to prance; to frisk; to caper about

 

Since the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) is not sure where the word “cavort” comes from, it throws up its mighty dictionary hands and declares that the etymology is uncertain.

 

Other sources are not so sure of that uncertainty. The Slang Dictionary suggests that it comes from cavolta, Lingua Franca for “prancing on horseback.” (If your poem about John Travolta has been languishing in a drawer somewhere for lack of a proper rhyme, let it languish no more. According to me, cavolta rhymes perfectly with Travolta, who is best known for prancing on dance floors.)

 

Other than its rhyming potential, why should we give any credence to the suggestion by The Slang Dictionary? Aren’t slang words, words without a high school education? And does this have anything to do with rabbits?

 

Those are all good questions. Let’s start with the first. The original publication of The Slang Dictionary appeared in 1891 and was aptly named Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present: A Dictionary, Historical and Comparative, of the Heterodox Speech of all Classes of Society for More than Three Hundred Years. With Synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc. Any book with a title like that deserves our trust, so I’m happy to give it all of my credence, if necessary. (Seven volumes were published, and Volume II is free to read at Google Play. You can learn what “can’t see a hole in a ladder”1 and  “to have no milk in the cocoa-nut”2 mean.) Its entry for “cavort” also offers other proposed etymologies, including curvet, French for a certain style of horse leaping, and the Spanish word cavar, which refers to the pawing of a horse. The OED reluctantly admits that “cavort” could be a corruption of curvet, but stresses that John Russell Bartlett, an American, said it, and you know how the Americans are and what they’ve done to the King’s English. Then, the OED curtly dismisses the idea that “cavort” is related to the Spanish by saying it “has nothing to recommend it. So there.” Those last two words aren’t really in the entry, but they are implied.

 

The second question about slang is complicated and deserves more discussion. For now, let’s just say that I think of slang as street poetry. The best and brightest slang words end up making an honest living in the mouths of most Americans, and many go on to make it big, appearing in poems, novels, and the mouths of politicians, educators, and commentators.

 

The answer to that last question is so important and of such a personal nature that it deserves quotes. “Yes, this has everything to do with rabbits.” And let me say thank you for asking, because I could have spent the entire day talking about words, when all I really wanted to do today was post a video of some of my yard bunnies cavorting outside my window.

 

You’ll have to wait a few seconds for the high jumps. Enjoy.

 

 

1highly intoxicated

2to be insane

 

(Note to reader: Any connection to any definitions on this blog to anyone who writes on this blog is tenuous, possibly serendipitous, and highly irregular.)