Lord’s Day

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Lord’s Day
There have been worse days, much worse, days I don’t ever want to remember, days I won’t ever talk about, but this one will do—not painful, not horrifying, not nightmare-making, just a barefoot walk from one end of a cow pasture to the other and coming out with too much crap between my toes and a lingering fragrance. It started with a razor in my hand. Somewhere—and don’t ask: it could have been a novel by Saul Bellow or a list of amazing facts that no one ever wanted to know or a voice whispering out of a wishing well—I had once read that it takes about one hundred and sixty strokes to shave. I had counted and had come up with just under one hundred and forty, a fourteen percent discrepancy, but that was a long time ago, and when this random memory decided to pay me a visit, I thought I would count again. No point in asking: I don’t know why, but I had decided and, as I shaved in the morning, started keeping track of the long and the short strokes. It was at about forty that I went away, a phrase of an obviously former girlfriend that meant and, I guess, still means I’m not paying attention, I’m wool gathering, absent, sitting in the lap of a daydream. Tomorrow is another day—we all know that—but this was the third day running that I had lost track, lost the thread, got plain lost in deep thoughts about—I don’t remember. Maybe the polish on Parisian men’s shoes, a shovel leaning against a fence, the deep almost-orange color of egg yolks in France. I dried my face, more or less brushed my hair, and went out, looking for today and waiting for another chance tomorrow. The first stop on the trolley is a park, a new one by the standards of Paris, built on the site of a prison, and containing an astounding playground jungle-gym that resembles a Norman tower that has collided with the Centre Pompidou—little buildings with the axe-blade peaked roofs, the sides pierced at anarchistic angles by pipes for sliding and giggling in. But I have come for something else. I want pétanque, and just outside the park, opposite the pigeon roost, there is a little court, dusty and tan like all the others, but narrower. I have not come here to watch. I decided that I could overcome my normal timidity and ask to play—and anyway, having watched more than too many hours of the game, I knew and still know that it is a game that no one plays well or knows anything about, so what handicap would I bring? So far so good. Two old gents—required by various laws and underwritten by the Mairie de Paris to be at their stations from sunrise to sunset on le terrain—are there, but not playing, just chewing the fat. With them is a teenage girl, maybe a granddaughter, saying not much, looking around, wondering how she got so old, and so male, that she is supposed to play pétanque. Figuring a game of fours is better than twos, I step onto the court—or maybe it’s a pitch since the Brits also play it—cough up some courage, and ask to play. The two vieillards look in my general direction, one leaning his head from side to side, either to adjust his hearing aid or to figure out where this voice is coming from. Not a word. I ask again. I’ve been invisible in Paris before—sometimes because of my vibe or whatever it is we tend to put on when we, like me, go away which is rude, and sometimes because I’m sticking my nose and the rest of me into a place where I’m not welcome or just don’t fit: a wraith speaking the language, but without the substance of familiar flesh to see or even deal with. Nothing. Maybe little French boys are warned right out of the cradle not to roll hollow steel balls with strangers. I retreat, walk back in the direction I came, and cross the street to look in the window of a showroom selling Chrysler 300s and Dodge Chargers. I had seen a couple of each in the streets in the last week, and they are sore thumbs in Paris. The same car, really, both of them are thick, aggressively sharkish, and all too together for a city filled with some of the ugliest cars in the world: to see une ‘tite nana get out of a Mégane or an aging Peugeot 206 is to witness a head-on wreck of hot and dowdy. The Chryslers are so unFrench that I wanted to know how’s business. But the showroom is closed, and the main door has been condemned. I ask a middle-aged couple with groceries if they know when the showroom might be open. They look puzzled, peer in the window, and say, “What strange looking cars.” Is it ever open? They don’t know. But you live in the quartier, don’t you? “Of course.” And? And they go. Feeling mopey and wanting to get off my feet, I find a café with a seat in the sun and ask for coffee. Trying to cheer myself up, I look around, and over to my right there is a family, mother, father, and daughter around twenty, all dressed in we’re-visiting-Paris-clothes, which is to say they could be from anywhere, including the suburbs. But unlike tourists, the are sitting quietly with their eyes downcast—at my distance, their eyes could be closed—and their hands folded in their laps. God in heaven above—they’re praying! A Norman Rockwell moment in Paris, a miracle. Or maybe not because there must be people, even a century after Catholicism was ushered out as the state religion, who pray or the poor churches would have crumbled and fallen down out of sheer loneliness by now. How sweet. Not remotely religious,…
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