Separated at Birth

Street construction on Rue St. Denis.

Fancy schmanzy fountain on Blvd. St. Germain.

Celebrityspotting

I am convinced I saw Bernie Madoff going along the Rue de Rennes on a Velib. I will swear on a stack of Bibles that just around the corner from our apartment William Shatner was waiting for the 69 bus. My wife is understandingly skeptical. She sees these as hysterical sightings of a desperate man.

It is easy for her to be blase. Over the past year she has seen on, and around, the streets of Paris: Gerard Depardieu getting on a motorcycle, Katherine Deneuve (twice) shopping, Sharon Stone having a glass of wine at Brasserie Lipp, Julia Delpy pushing a stroller near Saint Sulpice, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Arielle Dombasle out for a stroll, and director David Lynch. I've seen practically no one.

It's a DNA thing. Either you have the Celebrityspotting gene or you don't. I don't. You would think in Paris where Popes, Presidents, Olympic torches and celebrities of all kinds waft through it would be like shooting fish in a barrel or whatever the equivalent French expression might be. And it is, if you have the requisite karma.

Yes, I once saw Juliette Binoche shooting a scene from a movie but that was only because my wife literally took me by the hand and pointed out the massive agglomeration of movie crew and the aforementioned Ms. Binoche standing in the eye of the storm of activity. And yes I also saw David Lynch but that was only because there had been a gargantuan poster in the window of a bookstore on Blvd. St. Germain announcing he would be in town for a book signing.

I think the gene is somehow attached to the female chromosome because my daughter, Deirdre, has it. In her relatively short life has seen close-up or met: Wesley Snipes, Quentin Tarantino, Barack Obama, Wayne Newton, P Diddy, and, for all I know, the Pope. When she came to visit last spring I mentioned David Lynch was signing books. We wandered over by the bookstore that evening where, yes indeed, you could see him inside. Without hesitation Deirdre and her husband, John, went into the store and within seconds purchased a book, ripped the shrink wrap off of it, got David Lynch's autograph in it and were involved in a conversation so long his publicist repeatedly tried to interrupt to move the line along, but he was having none of it. At that point Deirdre had been in town all of about five hours. I had been in Paris five months.

And so it goes. For all I know I have elbowed Carla Bruni out of the way at my local Monprix to get a bunch of bananas and I walk obliviously through the rues and boulevards cluelessly passing celebrities. Wait a second, I think I just saw Mick Jagger get out of a Smart Car on my street. Gotta go.

Fascinating French Fact: France is slightly smaller than Texas.

I gave my blood for France

You never know where an idea will take you. In our case the brainstorm to move to Paris resulted in me standing in a generic medical examination room with my blood dripping on the linoleum floor.

Qualifying, and requalifying, for a Carte de Sejour requires, among many other things, a physical. I am not a fan of being unclothed in front of strangers or being punctured by them, even if they are medical personnel. But if people need information about your body there is no alternative.

Which is how we ended up in a bleak, utilitarian medical office in the 17th. There was the appropriately humorless bureaucrat at the reception desk, a woman who, from the looks of her face, had all the joy sucked out of her life around 1992 and never got a refill. She seemed disappointed to find we had an official letter of appointment and were there on the correct day and time. She pointed us upstairs.

There we found her antitheses: cheerful, helpful people who patiently explained to us in simple French what the process would be. We were early and watched the clients arrive: a young Asian woman, Japanese I think, who kept getting up and pacing around; a couple with an infant; a tall young African man, a college student I guessed, reading a textbook. And us.

The staff drifted in: the black technician who would give me my eye test and prick my finger; a woman doctor in a white lab coat; a lanking balding guy in a loud tropical shirt. They seemed to genuinely like being around each other. A lot of joking and "how was your weekend" chat.

Dripping .

                  .

               . 

         BLOOD
The physical was very basic: a simple questionnaire, an eye test, blood pressure cuff, a quick finger prick for a blood sample. It was after the prick that I had the bleeding problem. The technician only half-covered the hole with the band-aid and so a substantial amount was oozing out. I knew I would clot eventually but in the meantime my hand was dripping red dots on the floor. What followed surprised me. He apologized and nervously started layering band-aid after band-aid on top of the bloody fingertip. Now I had an oozing stump of a digit which looked very post-amputation.

The second last step was an X-ray. It was like a scene from a French farce: Open one door. Enter a large closet. Lock door. Remove shirt. Now that you are half-naked, open other door, step into a large dark room where two women briskly tug you over to an X-ray machine and push your naked torso up against very cold metal. Inhale. Hold. Click. Voila. Back in the closet. Shirt on. Unlock door. Out to the waiting room.

THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW
Eventually I was summoned to see the doctor. He turned out to be the guy with the wild and crazy tropical shirt -- pineapples and palm tree designs all over it. He already had my X-ray (see above) on his light box. The image of my pacemaker glowed in it like a weird alien spacecraft drifting through a black night. To my relief he spoke English.

The conversation went something like: "You are old. You have a pacemaker. And your blood pressure is a little high."

"White coat syndrome," I suggested.

He shrugged in reluctant agreement. "But you also have health insurance and money. So welcome to France."

Afterwards we sat in a cafe down the street and had two champagnes to celebrate. For the first time in our lives were not just tourists. We were now visiteurs.

Mysterious French fact: The word for "prostate" in French is feminine.

Jokes from the bums

For some reason the few people I have meaningful contact with in Paris are the clochards, or what my father would call: bums. I have a predisposed liking for them as one of my grandfathers was a bum. Literally. (The last time my mother saw him he was a homeless man begging for quarters on a street.) So there is a kind of family tradition there. On at least two occasions the locals felt compelled to make wisecracks about my jogging. I suppose when your whole day is a physical challenge: trying to find a place to eat, to sleep, hauling your crap from one spot to the next, passing the time like a character from a Beckett play, the idea of putting on a T-shirt and what look like a pair of nylon undershorts to run around in circles and deliberately tire yourself is absurd.

There are two guys who have been living not far away in the back doorway of a Shell station mini-mart on Boulevard Raspail. How long they have been there I don't know, but they are as much a neighborhood fixture as the Musee Maillol diagonally across the street from them. One guy has long gray hair and a beard. The other guy has dark matted hair and glasses. Crammed in the doorway is some sort of duvet for their bed, their sleeping bags and two backpacks which I guess contain all their life’s possessions. I have seen a lot of people stop to chat, including the manager of the mini-mart. They sleep in the doorway all year long, even this past brutal winter.

Although they have a small plastic bowl with a perfunctory “Monnaie, SVP” sign in front of it, they are not aggressive beggars and actually don’t seem to care if you put money in it or not. I must have passed them hundreds of time going to and from my run. Mostly I just nod. A couple of times I put money in their dish to their great surprise. One day I was walking past them sweaty and relaxed on the Rue de Grenelle on my way home and the graybeard said, "Hey!"

I turned. "Where you going? The track is that way." And he started laughing at his own joke. I knew Spring was here.

The other, more droll comment came from a black homeless guy sitting meditatively on a bench tucked in a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens. He studied me each time I went past. I have a grim, preoccupied look on my face when I run, like I’m thinking about a dead puppy. So as I loped by him a third time he urged, “Allez. Avec JOIE” which basically translates into, “At least try to look like you’re enjoying it.”

Fascinating French fact: The word clochard comes from the French verb clocher, to limp.

Sunday In Paris

NEXT TRAIN :04

Animal Intelligence

A pigeon crapped on my head today. I was running my last lap of the Luxembourg Gardens, when I felt a warm, semi-solid dollop of goo splat on the top of my skull. Even before I smelled it, I knew what it was. You don't mistake something like that for rain. My attempt to wipe it off only smeared the poop around, creating a greenish birdshit mousse that made my hair stink and stand up in very odd ways. But this special event got me thinking about the complex relationships the French have with their animals in particular. And about animal intelligence in general. Let me explain.

If one were do some sort of I.Q. rating of the animals in Paris, dogs would be at the top of the brain chain. Every day you see them out on the street, self-possessed, four-legged boulevardiers. usually ambling yards ahead of their owners, thinking doggie thoughts, off on a doggie mission, lost in doggie world. Unlike their American versions, the dogs of Paris rarely take note of people. They don't pant or pander or snarl or bark or hop up obsequiously or even look at you. Many stroll along leash-less, although an owner and leash are close by. I once saw a dog carrying its own leash in its mouth, sparing its master even that burden. For all I know they may vote in presidential elections.

At the other end of the animal I.Q. spectrum are pigeons. They are far, far, far at the bottom. They are underneath the bottom. To put it another way, their intelligence only slightly higher than gravel.

One of my first impressions of the Luxembourg Gardens was how spectacularly dumb pigeons were. Unlike most creatures with eyes and ears and the ability to walk, not to mention the ability to fly, they were beyond dense. Barely a day went by when I did not almost step on a pigeon during my jog. The scenario was always the same. After I almost tripped over it, the bird would frantically flap its wings and coo and then run around in a tiny circle on the same spot like one of the Three Stooges, giving me multiple chances to step on it or accidentally kick it again. How do they keep from getting run over? I wondered. (Answer: They don't. See photo above.)

First I thought all the birds of Paris were all dimwits on the wing, until my wife and I were waiting for a train at Gare Austerlitz. We were sitting in the inside portion of a cafe. I noticed that a small posse of sparrows were loitering suspiciously outside the automatic door. Whenever a customer walked in, a sparrow would fly in behind him in a kind of I'm-with-him move, then flit around until it found a table with crumbs or, even better, a sympathetic diner. One flew over to the table next to us, perched on the back of a vacant chair facing a woman reading her paper and stared at her with its beady little eyes until she smiled and tossed it some crumbs.

I'M SO HUNGRY I COULD EAT A HORSE . . . REALLY.

Of course critter love does not extend to all animals in France. Go to the markets and you'll see skinned bunnies and the heads of piglets hanging from meat hooks. Go to some neighborhoods and you will find signs for chevalines, horse meat butchers, like this:

Although my understanding is the French are losing their appetite for eating a distant cousin of Seabiscuit, this shop I saw was doing pretty good weekend business. (In case you're wondering, the older the horse, the more tender the meat.)

IN THE COUNTRY

Once you get away from the city there is a big attitude shift. You will not see French people carrying their dogs as though they were made of porcelain or hauling them around in precious carriers with mesh netting windows so Monsieur Le Fido can get a little air and see the sights.

"Country people are more basic, more grounded," is how one veterinarian put it to me.

She has a thriving practice in the Limousin and during one of my visits she showed up late for lunch looking distraught. She accidentally hit a cat. "I can still hear the thump of the body when I ran over it," she moaned.

She figured out which farmhouse it belonged to, went to the front door and nervously knocked. "Do you have a red and white cat?" she asked the woman who answered.

"I have two," the woman said.

"Not any more," said the vet. Then she told the cat owner about the accident.

The woman shrugged. "Better the cat than me."

"This is what I like about country folks," the veterinarian said. "They see animals as animals. Not as people or substitute children."

Later she was complaining about a young horse she had recently bought and how aggressive and untrainable he was. When I suggested she sell it, she replied, "I couldn't do that. He's too dangerous. I would worry he would hurt the new owner."

What about loaning it out for breeding?

"He's not that much of a thoroughbred. I'll try one more round of training."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"I'll eat him," she said.

Bon appetit.

Fascinating French Fact: The oldest public pet cemetery in the world is Le Cimetière des Chiens on the outskirts of Paris.

Getting out and around

You get punished for being a homebody in Paris. In the past few months I missed seeing the runaway horse, the naked pole vaulter and most recently (sigh) the naked models walking down the street where I get my hair cut, all of whom were galavanting just blocks away from our apartment. Oh well. Ever since I opted to blow off Woodstock and stay home and drink beer with friends, I felt like my destiny is always to miss the real party.

Fortunately I've discovered if you do manage to get out and around and keep your eyes open, there are still little surprises to be found. Some examples:

The other day I was passing a neighborhood wine shop which had their weekly specials in the window. Among them was a bottle of Cotes-Du-Rhone which caught my eye. The reason was the label.[See above left. Take a close look.] It had bumps all over it, like Braille elevator buttons, I thought. I told my wife I saw wine for the blind. I told my friends. I got the look usually given to people who say they have seen a UFO.

But I was right. The label was in Braille. I learned that since 1996 the wine maker, Michel Chapoutier, has been labeling all his wines with Braille, partly as an homage to the previous owner of the property who created a shorthand version of Braille, and partly to make his wine more accessible to wine lovers with impaired vision.

(Sometimes forgotten among in the thickets of history is how much various French innovators have done to improve the lives of the handicapped. A blind autodidact and gifted musician and inventor, Louis Braille gave the world the raised dot reading system used today on books, elevator buttons and wine labels. Another Frenchman, Abbe Charles Michel de L'Epee was the first person to establish a school exclusively for deaf children. It was replicated in the United States with the help of one of his teachers.)

* * *

On a more mundane note, I am constantly fascinated during my Parisian walkabouts by the extremes to which people go to keep their bikes from being stolen. This person removed his seat and U-locked the bike to a tree guard. It must take him an hour to get ready for a ride:

And I cannot get over the fact that sometimes you can turn an ordinary street corner and see hundreds of rollerbladers coming at you:

That's almost as good as a runaway horse.

Fascinating French Fact: Abbe Charles Michel De L'Epee is interred in the historic 17th century church of Saint-Roch on the Right Bank, where there is a statue of him and, below it, a thank you plaque from the blind people of Belgium.