Paris Is

Paris is a lot of things. It’s cool grays and pastels. It’s the beautiful textures of sandstone and granite, it’s the Eifel Tower and the Champs Elyse. It’s bright colored restaurant awnings and ebullient French waiters and little restaurants’ that you stumble into totally by accident where the whole place shakes when the Metro goes right under where you are sitting. And the food is ethereal and the waitress looks like somebody you would see at Denny’s . It’s a pretty French girl running down the Boulevard Haussmann in a Paris drizzle with a newspaper over her head and every man on the street craning his neck to watch her because she has great legs. But most of all it’s a litmus test. The things that make Paris and the French so endearing and make me get tears in my eyes whenever I think about going there annoy a lot of people. I have friends who go there and return shrugging their shoulders. Paris didn’t take. They shouldn’t go there. They should go to Las Vegas or somewhere. They should go to North Dakota to visit the family. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. They won’t take the time to figure out the Metro and the RER. They’ll never go to Saint Chappell and see 270 degrees of the most beautiful stained glass in the world light up in the sunlight. Because the line was too long. Really. Then I have friends who go there and send e-mails saying Woo-Woo. Just Woo-Woo. Paris has a history, it has a feeling unlike any other city I’ve ever seen. Fourteen million people live there. Parts of it are dangerous and riding the Metro late at night is not going to be a habit for me. But I don’t want to know when I’ve made my last visit. And having been to a lot of other cities Paris is the only one I feel that way about. Rome, we have wonderful friends there, ditto Milan, special places and special people but we go to see the people not the places. Ahh, then there is Paris. We have special friends there as well, you can’t imagine how special but if they weren’t there (God forbid) we’d still go there. We’d stay in the Concortel in the Rue Pasquier, I’d pet Elton the Hotel dog every morning and we’d go out for another adventure. I can’t think of another city I feel the same way about.