NEEDLING

The plane left Houston almost two hours late. I arrived in Paris much later than planned. It’s been over one and half years since I’ve been living in Austin now, and when I stepped off the airplane, everything was familiar ... the people standing guard, the police with machine guns, the smell of the place, even the coldness and unfriendliness of the place … I followed the exit ramp into the airport and through the passport checking point looking through the glass at the people waiting to board the plane I’d just exited, the people looking at me through the glass wall … for the first time in 1.5 years, I was home. Off course, that’s not true, my home is now in Austin where I have my family, great friends, a job, a car, a dog, prospects of moving up in the world, buying my own home, where I’m going back to school—something which had been impossible for me to do here—where I’m finally starting to find a routine, and where I can even think of eventually opening my own business. Seven years I lived here. I couldn’t find a descent job, I was on the doll for most of it, never once did I ever have some proper prospects for the future, reasons among others why I moved back to Texas … and yet … and YET, this place where life was so freaking difficult, this place feels like home like no other place I’ve ever been or lived and flew through! Is this euphoria, felt upon stepping back on French soil, only felt because I know I’ll be back on that plane in less than a week, that I’ll be back at my job and my little rental house and driving my car, walking my dog, doing my thing, in just a few days? Probably to some extent, though not entirely. Every time I’ve left Paris, and that I’ve come back to Paris, this has been how I have felt.

I met Pierre at St. Lazarre. We walked quietly to his and Ana’s place in the neighborhood of Batignole. Cold grey and wet, the streets of Paris with its dog shit, urine smelling walls, and speeding car freaks, but also with its small bread and cheese shops, pedestrians of all race and color, five to six story buildings, small cramped streets, metal bridges, endless train-tracks, small parks, and food stands right in the open, greasy meat being cut into bread and sold out of dirty plastic windows … the smells, the noise … I stepped into a student demonstration as I got off the RER in Chatelet, and again as I was stepping out of the underground at St. Lazarre, hundreds and hundreds of school-aged kids screaming their heads off, running en-mass down the subway’s alley-ways, adults standing around amused by the whole scene, joining in the yelling and screaming in between puffs of cigarettes, others walking totally uninterested in the goings on … Paris. Non-stop activity.

Pierre and I stepped back down to go to the market place to pick out diner. We chose some rouget, some leeks, some charlotte potatoes, and some shallots. At the cheese shop, we bought some conté, some tomme de brebis, some fresh goat cheese—so fresh it looks like chunky yogurt—and some epoisses, which the cheese man covered with a little marc to liven back up. We then made it to the wine shop for a couple of bottles, and stopped of at the café for a couple of demis before coming back up. Svetlana brought the bread and the deserts. Fouzia also came over. We all sat around in the kitchen and prepared the food while we talked, then we sat at the table and ate non-stop till 11h30, finishing off the ensemble with a little tequila I’d brought over.

It’s like I’d never left, it was like one of hundreds of such diners we’d had in the past. When you go shopping together, then you come home and sit around the table with a little red wine before you even start preparing the food, and when you do, everybody pitches in, or at least sits around the kitchen as you do the work. In the past, I would almost always do most of the cooking, but I’ve lost my hand a little, and last night I contented myself with chopping the shallots and drinking the wine. Then when the food is ready, you sit around the table and tell stories, and drink, and laugh all night long. The television is not on, maybe there's some music, but not necessarily.