I think Paris is screwing with me.
First, there was the non-summer. The days are already appreciably shorter than they were, and we still have had no more than maybe three days of bona fide summer weather. I don’t mean to undersell: we’ve had more than our share of amazing spring days, and it’s shaping up to be a pleasant fall. But those days where it is unambiguously hot from the time you wake up groping for the A/C knob at 4:00 in the morning to the moment you fall fitfully asleep under a damp sheet at 2am…well, no; not a whole lot of those around.
The mind-numbing quiet could be pleasant if I were spending it in 95-degree heat with a mojito in my hand, I decided this afternoon, but damp and cold and rainy and I still have to walk four blocks to find an open bakery? Not okay.
I was thinking this, in point of fact, on my way home from the grocery store (seven blocks from said bakery) with the handles of my unexpectedly heavy bag cutting into my palm. I resolved, nonetheless, to go the long way around to our street (we don’t do grid patterns here), which would put me about halfway between our building and the bakery, and decide then if I felt like lugging the stupid thing any further or just getting bread later.
A minute or two later, having remembered that the long way around is distinctly longer than I had been counting on, but having reached that point where turning around is nearly as far but much more annoying, I considered just sitting on someone’s stoop and yielding to the cranky.
Which is when the sun came out.
Not entirely; not at first. It was a glimpse, and then this tiny patch of blue off to the side that promised another one. Which is lucky, because if it hadn’t still been tenuously cloudy when, having picked up the pace of my trudging, I rounded a corner, I might never have noticed the light where no light should be.
My baker is back. The one two blocks from me; halfway between me and the other bakery, right at the point where my stupid detour would have forced me to choose between going on and going home. The one with the best baguettes in Paris, as far as we’re concerned, which are still 20 cents cheaper than the ones further away. The one with the aging rock star at the counter (really, really tan now) and the nervous little gnome husband stoking the ovens.
She was helping an elderly customer when I came in, and the woman was so slow and chatty that the rock star ended up doing our entire transaction in facial expressions and hand gestures around her, but that was just fine by me–I’d just been standing back there, grinning like an idiot, and I’d've happily done so all afternoon.
See what I mean about Paris?
Oh, and the thing that nearly made me choke on my crepe (this one involves some necessary profanity; feel free to stop here if you’re likely to be bothered by it):
We went to my new favorite café this weekend, and ended up sitting next to a group of what can only be described as Euro-trash, and please believe that I do not use that term lightly. Which was fine (because annoying people are much easier to tune out in French) until the two women wobbled off to the restroom, leaving the man alone to look around and notice Jolie. And just reach over and start petting her under our table.
Excuse you?
Look: my dog stares. It’s kind of weird, and we’re working on it. She’ll just stop and stare at people in the middle of the street, and it’s so absurdly impossible to convince her to move at all until they’re gone that I usually just let her do it–they may well not notice the staring, they’d certainly notice the scene I’d have to make to move her. But please, people, stop just reaching for her without so much as glancing at one of the humans on hand, ‘kay? Jolie’s a sweetie, but not all dogs are, even here. Plus, it’s just rude. And I laugh at you when she jumps away from your hand–I know she’s trying to play, but I’m just as happy to let you think that you’ve scared her or pissed her off. Because you. Were being. Rude.
Anyway, we gaped at this guy (super-oiled mullet-and-ponytail combo; way to go, guy), and at the women who returned and proceeded to do the same thing, until they went back to their conversation. Then Nick muttered, “It’s not like it’s far…just go to the bird store and get your own.”
This one took me a minute. “Bird store” is a fairly uncommon word, especially for someone like Nick, who has a deep and abiding hatred of French vowel combinations. Then I recalled that we were fairly near the row of pet shops where we bought Jolie, several of which also advertised themselves as bird stores. I reminded him that “pet store” was a much easier word just as a shriek of laughter punctured our eardrums from the next table.
“They could buy a bird, anyway,” he said through clenched teeth. “They could buy a bird that says ‘Go fuck yourself.’”