in the garden.

In the streets of Paris, there is so much to take in. The homeless woman breast-feeding her baby as she begs for money just a block away from the homeless man who has a box of bunnies and a sign that explains that both he and the bunnies could use a break. The tourists who are lost and who hold their Paris Practiques upside down, searching for a rue that they won't find if they keep holding their map like that but no one stops to suggest a simple redirection. There are the musicians -- in the streets, on the subways -- some who carry instruments, others who carry the sounds of their own voices and, my personal favorite, those with karaoke machines. It seems to me that if all of the musicians in Paris got together and formed one single orchestra, they could sell the karaoke machines for a profit, choose a sizable and central location, and have some sort of united band that could garner money, attention, fame. Something tells me that they are not interested in this idea, but I like to imagine as I am walking to pick up 8 year old Andy from school that they could line up on the Boulevard Montparnasse and play a piece so loud and so full that the cemetery there might come alive somehow.

In the streets I also see people pissing. It isn't an important observation, to be certain, but in this past week alone I have 8 people in broad daylight (this is not even counting those I have seen at night) stopping in the street to piss. Women, men, children, adults, everyone gathers to piss in the streets of Paris. This is one of those unfortunate realities that comes from living in a city that I had forgotten about, those things that we don't want to admit, along with the catcalling/name-calling, the drug offers, and the solicitations in another language that I can understand just enough to say, "Laisse-moi tranquille." In the mall not far from my house, where I took Andy for our first outside-of-the-house adventure together (he wanted to buy The Blues Brothers and The Gremlins on DVD), I saw a man spank his crying child as crowds pushed past (totally unfazed) to get to their destinations. These are all odd things to take in and I only write them down now because I think that these observations mark for me my understanding that my romantic city of Paris is also sometimes vulgar, sometimes upsetting, sometimes confusing and often baffling. I live in a different world now and it is in some ways the same Paris that I lived in before, but I am not necessarily the same person who was here two years ago.

In the garden though, that is where I learned the most this week. In the garden, I learned how to "utiliser la force" when playing Star Wars with Leo and Andy. They taught me how to wield one or two light sabers at the same time and how it is possible to die eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve times in a single game and have it not matter at all. After all, the game can't continue if the babysitter cannot be killed yet again. In the garden, I learned middle school slang words watching Leo play badminton with his friends, inviting his little brother to join them even though he has yet to really learn how to wield the racket. I learned how to quiet down Al, the pug, who is excited by noises that no one else seems to hear and loves eating badminton birdies. I learned games can be invented and re-invented. I learned that card games which come with poor instructions in both French and English can be played nonetheless; in the garden, we sat for hours playing our version of "Miam Miam", a sort of Slamwich card game that required us to devise our own rules when the directions were too confusing.

And when their parents came home in the early evening, and they ran upstairs to say hello ahead of me, I learned that the garden (which has a full grown tree with a swing and space to run and to breathe) struck me as one of those safe spaces, those lucky finds that I am so grateful to have access to. Away from the main streets with their car horns and small daily disasters, there is a small yet spacious garden where I can see the evening coming on without having to share it with those distractions, where I can learn what it means to grow up in a city, and where I catch myself reflecting in a mix of both French and English, a small triumph or perhaps merely the exhaustion setting in from the end of another well-lived day.