Return

Getting back from the Other World isn't the half of it. You pick up the sticky, precarious thread of your days just as you left it dangling. It's waiting for you.

Celine

Here's an interesting article on problems facing Paris by Andrew Hussey, a British historian of Paris, that appeared in the Sunday Observer. 

Good stuff, though I note that he gets the bit about smokers wrong ("smokers are still beyond being a persecuted race in Paris, as a visit to any bar will prove.")

If all goes well (and nearly 70 percent of French people support a ban on smoking in all public places 
according to a survey I saw last year)  the smoky days will end on Feb. 1, 2008. Currently, there is no smoking in offices and public spaces. Bars, cafes and restaurants have until the end of January to ready for the transition. See this BBC article. 

Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity

An article that appeared in the International Herald Tribune this morning about volunteering in Calcutta.

Politically correct

"Tout le monde est d'accord pour critiquer la pensée unique."

Gustave Parking

The horizon

My grandfather died on Thursday, at 92. He had survived my grandmother by less than a year, and he was the last of my grandparents to die. That is the definition of generational change.

Speaking with my uncle by telephone, I got a sense of what it felt like to be on the front line of life, so to speak. With both of his parents dead, he is, he said, "an orphan." Because he had been living with my grandfather and because he has struggled financially, my grandfather's death presents him with the possibility that he'll have no place to go. "I remember when I was a little boy in Sudbury," he said, referring to his childhood home in Massachusetts. "It was sunny and warm outside, and I had a sandwich, and I went to sit on the back porch. Nothing could ever go wrong. My mom and my dad were there to take care of me, and it was always going to be just like that..."

I lost my mother 13 years ago. I have only my father left. How will I stand up when I'm in my uncle's shoes?

Is pigeon poop really lucky?

Today, sitting outside a Starbucks (yeah, I know -- and there are 29 of them in Paris now!), I was shat upon by a pigeon. SPLAT! Right on the shoulder. Fortunately, my not-very-tasty coffee (small Americano, woefully overwatered) was spared, but I was left with a very nasty feeling after I had wiped the greenish-white goo from my shirt, such that I didn’t derive much joy from my prime people-watching spot on the boulevard Saint-Michel.

Nonetheless, I was very excited, having long known that pigeon poop brings good luck. So as soon as I got home, I changed my shirt, and went out to buy a lottery ticket. I excitedly explained my situation to the guy at the cash register and said that I wanted something that paid off immediately, owing to my lucky circumstances. Naturally, I sauntered out of the store confident that I'd be picking up the champagne tab tonight.

But something must have gone wrong. I scratched off all of the scratchy spots on my lottery ticket, and ended up with zilch. I came one number from winning 10,000 euros, but unfortunately that wasn’t close enough. Perhaps the pigeon poop was just lucky enough to get me my numbers that close, but no closer. Maybe it was the wrong kind of pigeon or something. I was sitting fairly close to a woman with a lot of shopping bags. Could that lucky pigeon poop have been meant for her? Or maybe I was fated to have some terrible accident on the way home, and my lucky pigeon encounter averted it.