Home to ParisMy father took me to Paris for the first time when I was ten years old. We stayed in a little hotel on the rue des Saints-Pères, in a sparse room crammed between the staircase and the courtyard and featuring the smallest bathroom I’d ever seen. Coming from Oklahoma, where everything was showy and enormous—from trucks to belt buckles, grocery stores to steaks—Paris was a revelation: quietly sleek, understated, built on a human scale. Each morning we’d walk around the block to the boulangerie, and I’d perch on a tiny velvet-topped stool to drink my chocolat chaud and eat my croissant. I loved Paris immediately, and my father was very, very proud.
I couldn’t stay away. I went back at 18, living in hostels and on the cheap, and at 21, I moved in with a French family to spend six months soaking up the rituals of life à la Parisien, falling in love with leeks vinaigrette, the crumbling beauty of Père Lachaise cemetery, and even a French boy. At 23 I returned again, this time with a year-long position in a high school in a wealthy Parisian suburb. I rented my first apartment, found my corner boulangerie, and joined the ranks of local commuters in grumbling over métro strikes. I relished building a little French home of my own, even if it was only a temporary one, and I must have written a thousand letters, if only to be able to print my return address—the word “Paris” standing especially tall and graceful—across the back of the envelope. And of course, one of those letters was to my father, inviting him to visit.
He arrived in late May, bringing an early wave of summer heat. He was 73 but a spry traveler, and he gamely trekked the steamy sidewalks with me as I introduced him to the city as I knew it. In the Parc Monceau we picnicked on pain au levain, a ripe hunk of Langres, and skinny sweet haricots verts; in the Place des Vosges we watched old women and babies. He wrote down the details of nearly every meal we ate, from marinated fresh sardines at Le Repaire de Cartouche to oeufs en meurette at my humble neighborhood bistro. He marveled at the Haussmanian buildings and their stately façades, and he studied stilettos and springtime legs.
But only a season later, the man who’d walked Paris with me was bedridden. In mid-September, he was diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer of the kidney, an especially virulent strain that rapidly spread through his bones. Barely able to move, he lay there, and he traveled. He hallucinated and dreamt aloud; he went duck hunting; he swam in a grotto in Italy; and we spoke French sometimes,
his garbled command of the language better than it had ever been when he was well. One day, as I leaned over the railing of his bed, he looked hard at me, eyes oddly shiny and clear, and told me that he wanted his remains to be taken to Paris. “Maybe you could put the ashes in little boxes that say, ‘Where the Heart Is,’” he said quietly, “and leave them in inconspicuous places around the city.” My father was ready to stop traveling. In dying, he wanted to do what he’d been unable to do in life: to make Paris home.
Today, when I talk about Paris, I always say the same thing: it’s there that I’m loneliest and happiest. What I call loneliness is a delicate thing, like a blown-out eggshell—somehow both empty and promising, incomplete and beautiful. Paris couldn’t be anything else, because it’s full of my father. Late one night last summer, my mother and I stood on the Pont Sully and pulled from her purse a Ziploc bag full of powdery ashes. As the wind blew in from behind us, we opened the bag and let him float out over the Seine. Two years earlier, I’d stood on a street corner only blocks away, watching him wave to me from the terrace of the Café des Phares, wine glass in hand. That night on the bridge, he was there still, watching us and waving out over the water. He was home, and because I was with him, so was I.
Home to Paris
My father took me to Paris for the first time when I was ten years old. We stayed in a little hotel on the rue des Saints-Pères, in a sparse room crammed between the staircase and the courtyard and featuring the smallest bathroom I’d ever seen. Coming from Oklahoma, where everything was showy and enormous—from trucks to belt buckles, grocery stores to steaks—Paris was a revelation: quietly sleek, understated, built on a human scale. Each morning we’d walk around the block to the boulangerie, and I’d perch on a tiny velvet-topped stool to drink my chocolat chaud and eat my croissant. I loved Paris immediately, and my father was very, very proud.
I couldn’t stay away. I went back at 18, living in hostels and on the cheap, and at 21, I moved in with a French family to spend six months soaking up the rituals of life à la Parisien, falling in love with leeks vinaigrette, the crumbling beauty of Père Lachaise cemetery, and even a French boy. At 23 I returned again, this time with a year-long position in a high school in a wealthy Parisian suburb. I rented my first apartment, found my corner boulangerie, and joined the ranks of local commuters in grumbling over métro strikes. I relished building a little French home of my own, even if it was only a temporary one, and I must have written a thousand letters, if only to be able to print my return address—the word “Paris” standing especially tall and graceful—across the back of the envelope. And of course, one of those letters was to my father, inviting him to visit.
He arrived in late May, bringing an early wave of summer heat. He was 73 but a spry traveler, and he gamely trekked the steamy sidewalks with me as I introduced him to the city as I knew it. In the Parc Monceau we picnicked on pain au levain, a ripe hunk of Langres, and skinny sweet haricots verts; in the Place des Vosges we watched old women and babies. He wrote down the details of nearly every meal we ate, from marinated fresh sardines at Le Repaire de Cartouche to oeufs en meurette at my humble neighborhood bistro. He marveled at the Haussmanian buildings and their stately façades, and he studied stilettos and springtime legs.
But only a season later, the man who’d walked Paris with me was bedridden. In mid-September, he was diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer of the kidney, an especially virulent strain that rapidly spread through his bones. Barely able to move, he lay there, and he traveled. He hallucinated and dreamt aloud; he went duck hunting; he swam in a grotto in Italy; and we spoke French sometimes, 
his garbled command of the language better than it had ever been when he was well. One day, as I leaned over the railing of his bed, he looked hard at me, eyes oddly shiny and clear, and told me that he wanted his remains to be taken to Paris. “Maybe you could put the ashes in little boxes that say, ‘Where the Heart Is,’” he said quietly, “and leave them in inconspicuous places around the city.” My father was ready to stop traveling. In dying, he wanted to do what he’d been unable to do in life: to make Paris home.
Today, when I talk about Paris, I always say the same thing: it’s there that I’m loneliest and happiest. What I call loneliness is a delicate thing, like a blown-out eggshell—somehow both empty and promising, incomplete and beautiful. Paris couldn’t be anything else, because it’s full of my father. Late one night last summer, my mother and I stood on the Pont Sully and pulled from her purse a Ziploc bag full of powdery ashes. As the wind blew in from behind us, we opened the bag and let him float out over the Seine. Two years earlier, I’d stood on a street corner only blocks away, watching him wave to me from the terrace of the Café des Phares, wine glass in hand. That night on the bridge, he was there still, watching us and waving out over the water. He was home, and because I was with him, so was I.
