In Honor of Notre Dame Cathedral: Memories from an American Girl in Paris
I’m dedicating today’s Throwback Thursday post to Notre Dame. As I sat hypnotized in front of the television on Monday watching her burn, it was as if someone had taken a match to a page of my own story. In flames, this place that had born witness to 850 years of the best and the worst of humanity, to the ravages of war and the triumphs of love, and to one freckly-faced American girl’s coming of age. So I recount that page of my own story here, where it can be preserved forever. Just like the precious parts of the Notre Dame Cathedral we’ve lost, but that will live on in the memories and stories and photographs of millions. I’ll also share some of those photographs throughout this post, beginning with my own:
Groundhog Day
After graduating from high school, I felt like that groundhog in Pennsylvania. What’s his name? Which is to say, disoriented. Like someone had dragged me out of the hole I’d been sleeping in all winter and thrust me into the still freezing air in front of throngs of people gathered at Gobbler’s Knob shouting “what’s she going to do, what’s she going to do?” Can I at least get a cup of coffee and an almond Danish before I have to predict the weather and announce my life’s intention? I’d been accepted into the same large public university both my parents had attended and for which I’d always been required to favor red and not blue.
The most important day in Utah was the day the Utah Utes would play the BYU Cougars in football. The Holy War it was called and Utah couples regularly called off engagements and got divorced over it with the judge ordering the children wear purple to keep the peace. Anyway, I was certain I would flunk out of college, but what else was I supposed to do?
Except for my two blue uncles who worked for the railroad, we were white collar with a bunch of letters behind our names indicating that we’d spent a lot of time in school avoiding real work. My parents both had master’s degrees so the natural order required I achieve at least one level above their average.
Luckily I had received plane tickets to Europe, wrapped in an old cereal box and junk mail and secured with used Band-Aids (that part might not be true, but it might be), from Vera as a graduation gift. Vera, my 82-year-old BFF and great aunt was as plucky and eccentric as she was kindhearted and generous. Maybe backpacking through Europe with her would be enough to distract me from the pressure to earn a M.D., J.D., Ph.D., D.D.M, “pick one,” when I’d barely squeaked through the last three years of high school with straight A’s in an attempt to bring up my 1.1 GPA from my last year at Albian Middle School.
Europe: The Outline to the Plan
The plan, if you could call it that, it was more of an outline to a plan, was to fly into Paris where we’d spend three days before taking the train to Strasbourg where we would meet up with Vera’s dear friend Helen, a spry 76. Then we’d spend three weeks roaming around France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
“Okay, but where are we staying? Do we have hotel reservations? Did you purchase the train tickets? How will we get back to Paris for our flight home?” Those were my questions to Vera for which the answer was, “oh, we’ll figure all that out when we get there.” Vera never cowered to adventure and was always one to wing it, liberated from embarrassment and with a healthy reserve of karma.
Breakfast At Oh Six Hundred Sharp!
Now while my parents sent me out into our neighborhood on my bike totally unsupervised and without a helmet, let alone knee and elbow pads and a Life Alert button (looking at you modern day parents!), my dad was level 10 type A when it came to travel arrangements. Not because he was nervous about it really, maybe just the opposite. He traveled for a living, sales, and had honed efficiency to maximize the time he spent at home with his family. He was George Clooney’s character in “Up in the Air” minus his ruthlessness masking acute loneliness. It took him exactly 38 seconds to pack his bag and half that to unpack.
And for trips with his family? He didn’t want to waste any time dallying around frittering away another Broadway musical trying to figure out which bus to take. Everything that could be pre-booked in advance was and each day we had an agenda something like: take a taxi from the airport to the Marriott Marquise, unpack, walk to the Neil Simon Theater for a matinee of Cats via 52nd street to Broadway and turn right, early dinner at Sbarro 1600 Broadway, walk around Times Square before it gets too creepy, back to hotel to relax and laugh our butts off watching a suited Mike Rowe – neck wrapped in a bold print tie, sitting at a desk in front of a brown stone fireplace with brass accouterments framed by drab artificial flowers and a dark wood-framed mirror – attempt to hawk item number C-5624, a Precious Moments figurine on QVC:
Precious moments, I hope your day is full of them.
I’d respond back to the TV while flipping through a hotel magazine, “Thank you, Mike. It has been.”
Perhaps these little figurines would add a bit more preciousness to your day. You remember how the Grinch stole Christmas? Those little Who-ville kinda guys, yeah I can hum a few bars. But don’t these look like those guys who hung out in, what was it, Who-Ville? Cindy Lou Who? Like Smurfs sort of. The precious moments. Don’t they? Anybody remember that? Whoville. What were they called, Blair? Hooters, Whosits, The Who’s? Hosers? I remember Cindy Lou Who, that’s who this looks like. C-5624 is the item number. Thirty-one fifty will be the QVC price.
By now we’d know this was going to be good. My brother James and I would probably scoot to the foot of the bed, laying on our stomachs with our chins resting on the palms of our hands supported by our elbows giggling at the word “hooters.”
It’s the Precious Moments figurine boy and girl on a seesaw. There’s the Precious Moments hair, complete with the stylized cowlick in the back there. The little, borrowing from the buckwheat design, the Precious Moments hair. And there’s the little boy on the seesaw you can see it’s kind of a primitive seesaw they basically just took an old 2 x 4 and a rock, but the little boy with superior weight has kept the little girl elevated on the other end of the seesaw.
Dad would chime in with “$31.50 for a 2 x 4 and a rock. What a bargain. Colleen, hand me the phone!”
Each piece is crafted of course with porcelain bisque and painted with soft pastel colors. It features the name of the piece on the bottom. What is the name of the piece exactly here? Ah, Love Lifted Me. Love Lifted Me. Actually, from a technical standpoint, it was your weight that lifted me, but I’m sure some, some love is in there as well.
“From a technical standpoint…hahahahaha. Keep stretching Mike, two more minutes to kill.”
Precious Moments are all hand painted in soft pastel colors on porcelain and you can always recognize Precious Moments at a glance, it’s not something you really have to ah ponder heavily.
James and I would sit up and mime pondering Precious Moments by putting our pointer finger to our temple and tipping our head to the side with a subdued expression.
They are easy to recognize, the expressions are all similar. The figurines do vary quite a bit in terms of um what’s going on, but you can see all sorts of you know tender little scenes being created by Precious Moments. Did we see the girl or the boy earlier?
“The boy!” we’d shout in unison.
I think we saw the boy. Let’s take a look at the girl close up there, if we can. There she is, I’ll turn her, there we go, right to that camera. She has a little tiny mouth down there sort of puckered closed as if to say “hey look you wanna put me down?” and he’s over here saying “I don’t think so” and she’s saying “come on please put me down” “I don’t think so” “come on really, I’m getting dizzy” “I don’t think so.”
“Put her down, you jerk! Her crotch is getting sore and she’s late for dinner!”
Thirty-one fifty. You know what he’s going to do, don’t you? He’s going to roll off there real fast and she’s going to come crashing down, run home and tell her mommy and they won’t be able to see each other for a week. That’s the real precious moments.
Rolling on the floor laughing our assess off.
Breakfast From the Back of a Garbage Truck
With dad, we experienced pretty much everything a city had to recommend it and while it’s satisfying to suck every last kernel off an ear of corn or lick the tiniest smudge of melty chocolate off your flattened out Kit Kat wrapper (guilty), my parents did not prepare me for Vera’s style of travel which was more like throwing a bunch of half rotten fruit you rescued from the back of a garbage truck into a pot, cooking it up with some sugar, and hoping the resulting compote tasted good and didn’t kill you (which we literally did on this trip to Europe).
But prepared or not, I had packed my red, exterior metal framed backpack with sweatshirts I would wear inside out, shirts I got for free from Vera that she got for free from some organization asking her for money, two pair of shorts, and pajama pants I wore as both night and daywear, and was about to board flight 44 to Paris to represent America. Which goes a long way in explaining our less than flattering reputation.
Teenage Musings on our Arrival in Paris
I kept a detailed journal. It opens on August 20, 1996 with: “Well here I am sitting patiently aboard flight 44 to Paris. Mom cried at the airport thinking about her baby girl all grown up leaving for a new place and part of her life.” She may not have been crying about that at all – mom took this same trip to Europe with Vera when she was my age, so she could have been feeling sentimental about her own experience. Or maybe it was a displaced eyelash. But I was at an age characterized by narcissism, so I went on to say, “I was just thinking of something interresting so here it is (would make a great book or movie!). A young girl just begining to see the world from the eyes of an adult, eager to discover her place in this life and an old lady entering the last leg of hers, looking for one more chance to discover.” I seem to have missed that one in the theater.
So it’s 8:30am Paris time and, according to my journal, “we are above the clouds looking down and the sun has risen. It’s gorgeous. I feel like crying, swept with emotion, but I won’t you know me.” We landed a few minutes later and after claiming our backpacks that weighed at least double what a similarly purposed one would today, we were walking around somewhat aimlessly among throngs of well dressed people in light weight fashionable scarves and jeans tapered at the ankle, not speaking English, when it occurred to me that I should have asked Vera another question: “how will we get from the airport into the city?”
So I proceeded to ask her now, knowing it would have been fruitless to have previously inquired, and she responded with, “let’s hop on one of these buses and see where it takes us.” Now I really felt like crying. But I didn’t. You know me. Instead I lugged myself up the lofty steps of the congested bus, displacing someone from their seat when there wasn’t room for people to get by my giant pack hanging out into the isle and wondered if college would be cake compared to this. I should have applied to Pepperdine after all.
Vera’s spirits remained elevated high above that of a person having just been cleared by the IRS, and her karma and – endearing if you were me or irksome if you were a local resident passenger on the bus just trying to get home from the night shift as a baggage handler – attempts at communication with our French speaking driver paid off. We were delivered to the city, within mere blocks of that most famous of Paris landmarks, the city dump de Paris. No, just kidding, the Eiffel Tower. We’re here!
Room and Board
In Vera’s mind we would amble around the city during the remaining hours of daylight and look for a place to sleep – probably in some random person’s apartment who would be glad to have us stay free of charge, waking us in the morning with café, a home cooked breakfast, delightful conversation – sometime after dinner. In my mind that meant we were sleeping curled up on our packs covered in underwear blankets in a dark ally where we would accidentally spend all our food money on drugs due to the language barrier. No.
So I said, “it would make me feel better if we looked for a hotel room now.” I followed this up by applying a mustache and dark glasses to my real fear, the ally, by making what was actually a perfectly valid point: “I think we can cover more ground if we have a place to leave our packs.”
Kind of like back home when I would try to convince Vera to let me drive her dive bar on wheels by flattering her with how cool I thought banged up Geo Prism’s full of beer cans were when, really, I was terrified of her driving which went something like: slam on the gas until you’re within an inch of the bumper in front of you then slam on the brakes. Repeat until your teenage passenger, by some miracle, has only sustained a moderate case of whiplash upon reaching your final destination, but having further tarnished the reputation of elderly drivers.
We had a budget of something like 50 U.S. dollars per night. We visited three discount inns, probably the Paris equivalents of Motel 6, Travelodge, and Microtel and at each one there was a desk attendant with pouty lips who had shaken her head with an expression of regret and “no room available” and a sign posted with rates hovering at four times our allotment anyway. So when we were greeted at inn number four, Hôtel Sèvres Saint Germain, with a warm smile and a quote of $120 per night in perfect English by a lovely woman wearing a slick dark ponytail and kind eyes, I suggested that we splurge and Vera relented. “Maybe she can even help us figure out how to take a train to Strasbourg,” I was thinking to myself, already anticipating our next obstacle.
It was a tiny room in the attic, sparsely furnished with two single beds and a table in between just large enough for a lamp. But it had a private bathroom and enough floor space for our packs and V’s travel rituals. I’ll always remember that room as the first place I saw an old woman laying on the carpet in her threadbare, nude colored, high wasted, nylon underpants and drab white bra bobbing up and down like it was trying to flirt with her belly button, doing the bicycle to loosen her bowels. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the last.
After settling into our room and giving into jetlag for a short nap, we explored around a neighborhood characterized as intellectual and non-conformist after World War II and home to the famous Café de Flore and the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and savored our first taste of fine French cuisine: dry cereal and an orange. Intellectual was a ten-pound-salt-water-taffy-on-an-industrial-sized-pulling-machine stretch, but non-conformist fit us like a finely tailored trouser or the opposite of what covered our furry pale legs that day.
Vera had a reputation for being a tightwad, frugal or thrifty if you’re a kindly soul. It’s a trait that I’ve inherited, one that seems to expand with age instead of expire with increasing means and sometimes infects your loved ones. As evidence of V’s ability to stretch a dollar, or in this case a franc, I offer up the meals I recorded in my diary during our three full days in Paris before we met up with Helen who would seriously cramp our style with her extravagant, spendthrift ways.
The Paris Diet
Day one: cereal sans milk and half an orange each for breakfast and for dinner plain bread, lettuce and a carrot with no dip or dressing, half a peach and half an apricot. No lunch. Day two: plain bread, lettuce and a carrot with, you guessed it, no dip or dressing, half a banana, and half a chocolate chip cookie (splurge!) for lunch and a dry salad of lettuce, carrot, and tomato and four slices of an orange for dinner. No breakfast. Day three: the usual breakfast (which I can only assume was cereal with no milk because we didn’t have a place to keep it cold and some fraction of a piece of fruit), naked salad and a “yummy” store bought croissant (splurge!) for lunch and a salad (shocker) and a pint of grocery store ice cream (double splurge!) for dinner. Vera should have branded this: The Paris Diet.
We didn’t waste any time at a quaint outdoor Parisian sidewalk café playing musette accordion music – sipping café au laits at a bistro table for two while nibbling on a buttery pain au chocolat each instead of roughly cutting a mass produced croissant down the center with a plastic knife to split, while people watching in red and tan rattan chairs.
Instead, we would spend thirty extra minutes at the Louvre, sound asleep on a large round white leather tufted bench decorated with a fringe skirt and placed at the center of a gallery for the purpose of viewing an ornate ceiling painting, not for hosting tired tourist naps. Even today, when I weigh the prospect of a flaky chocolate pastry versus that nap, it’s almost a tossup, with the chocolate just squeaking by. That was a great freaking nap.
And our negative three Michelin star dinners meant we had more time for getting lost on our way to the Cathedrale de Notre Dame and the Musée d’Orsay and the Opera National de Paris. And with me in charge of the map and a little help from our new friends Abdiel from Israel and Naoki from Japan we made it to the Arch de Triumph from the Eiffel Tower in under three hours.
Directionally Challenged
I believed two things as gospel back then. First, that comfort was tantamount to fashion (still do), which is why I was pegged as an American by Abdiel and Naoki even before uttering a single word of unintelligible French; and second that north was whichever way you were facing (I’ve since also learned that the earth is round). But, even so, I was still slightly more stylish and far less directionally challenged than Vera.
On our last afternoon in Paris, sitting along the banks of the river seine – in what must have been perceived as a particularly romantic spot judging by the number of R-rated PDA’s and marriage proposals we witnessed, even though it was the site of a former prison that housed inmates bound for the guillotine during the French Revolution – V and I were the Odd Couple savoring the Gothic secular architecture of La Conciergerie with Notre Dame in the distance while watching boats sail by, reminiscing about our journey so far, and anticipating what was still to come. But first we had to board the correct train to Strasbourg tomorrow.
Mademoiselle Salome – our friend at the extravagant and overpriced hotel reception desk with daily fresh flowers ravaged from the earth only to wither up and die 24 hours later – keenly attuned to our limitations, had written out detailed instructions to the train station in English along with a hand-drawn map with a level of detail that made me think she should retire from hospitality and tourism and become a crime scene investigator.
Return Trip
After successfully navigating the subway we arrived at the elephantine train station three hours prior to our scheduled departure time. We put on our best “sweet but dumb American” act (it wasn’t an act) so the woman at the ticket booth might show mercy and sell us two tickets to Strasbourg at the going rate and not for an extra 100 francs she would slip into her pocket.
My kid and former colleagues can attest to my chronic earliness – if I’m not fifteen minutes early to the bus stop or a meeting, I’m late. And when in a foreign country with a train ticket on which there are none of the roughly six French words Vera and I knew between us and numbers formatted like times of day, but that require complicated math to convert to standard time, three hours early felt walking into class halfway through the pledge to stares and glares like, “how dare you disrespect America? Get your frickin hand to your heart and pretend you know how to pronounce indivisible.”
We thanked our lucky stars for the multi-lingual Iranian expat Good Samaritan, Hamid, who had been visiting his girlfriend Roya in Paris and offered to help translate our tickets and get us to the correct line with just 2 hours and 45 minutes to spare. After killing 20 of them looking at pictures of his travels, mostly close-ups of Roya making exaggerated facial expressions framed by colorful hijabs, we said our goodbyes as he ran to his train departing in five minutes. “Nice meeting you Hamid! Safe travels! Thanks again!”
Three weeks later in Germany, on the night prior to Helen driving us back to Paris to catch our return flight home to America, Helen and Vera raised two steins to offer a toast to their young travel companion: “if at 76 I can navigate the Autobahn tomorrow, you can navigate college!” and “you’re my Sarah, you can do anything!”
Despite the fact that Helen’s anxiety laden and terrifying performance on the Autobahn – that ended with her dumping Vera and I off on the side of the highway like hitchhikers she’d tired of, because her nerves “can’t handle airport traffic after all that” – didn’t exactly inspire confidence, the trip changed me.
Little buds had started forming on dead looking branches and I knew, deep down in a place rooted out by two old ladies and Europe, and Paris, and Notre Dame, that I could do it. And three college degrees later, I sat in my university office with a plaque on the door that read “Professor,” across from a terrified freshman student reflecting back at me my former 18 year-old self as I assured her: “you can do this!”
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was Prof. Cruise. And neither was Notre Dame Cathedral. It took 200 years to construct her. And in the 850 years since, she’s been ravaged and worn and repaired, but she survived. And even today, after I gasped as her towering and iconic spire collapsed in flames, she still stands, damaged and exposed, but also strong and defiant. With the parts of her we lost to be rebuilt more beautiful and resilient than ever. So she can bare witness to the best of humanity still to come. We can do this!
Class Dismissed.
