There is a wooded trail I run that tells me the season, in case I lose track, which I can do…the sharp hill part especially, where the sleek oak leaves have now amassed, and their big acorns with them– have never seen acorns this large, or numerous, and there’s been much discussion about what this means for the winter to come. Hmmm. My vote is in: hard.
Oak leaves down, November. They are slippery even when dry, and wet, on the uphill, and with the marbles of acorns below, well best dig in hard. Something about the oak leaves of November remind me of Paris, more than any other season.
Thinking a lot of Paris this past week, like most of the world. It was end May the first time I traveled there, barely a year out of college, but it was October when I went to live and study, and somehow the fall is how I remember the city. Cold rain, wet leaves, days getting shorter and shorter til you end up with still dark at 8 and getting dark by 3.
The beautiful bittersweet song of autumn Les feuilles mortes, we Anglophones know as Autumn Leaves. Funny how the French call things a little more as they see them, and we Americans want the ‘appy ending always. Listen here to one of my favorite versions sung by Yves Montand, heartbreaking, and here to lovely Frank Sinatra. Dead leaves vs. autumn leaves, one, words written by the great poet Jacques Prévert, a full frontal rendering of the vagaries of love and life, the other, Johnny Mercer’s, a lighter rendering of summer love lost to fall.
Cultural differences, cultural chasms in our attitudes to a million details. But we are ever mutually fascinated, despite shows of contempt. Our history has long bound us, and of course we all unite in the aftermath of the attacks. La ville lumière touchée au coeur, Paris will never be the same.
As I heard one commentator say, in Europe, in France, history matters. They are not blessed, or cursed, with the ADD of history we seem to suffer from. They have survived many desperate, bloody moments, and survived. But they remember in a way we do not, yet. It can be a ball and chain remembering, forged in the need to survive. It is one of the things that made me realize how very American I am, after all. Our almost reckless hope and self-confidence as a nation renders us in fact a little reckless, and nearly untouchable, and gives us a sweetness and creativity that entrance.
Sweeping up the autumn leaves that hold so many memories, and regrets, of a time that, truly, was a little simpler. A time when a Friday night at a concert, or in a café, that most parisien of all things French, did not involve executions and drive-by shootings.
Que le monde est petit. Nous sommes tous parisiens.