Paris

Tonight Paris is having its Fête de la Musique, held on the summer solstice each year. There were a few posters around town but not much in the way of publicity that I could see. Still, the whole city knew about it, it's everywhere. We just came back from la Place de la Bastille, where there are between five and ten thousand young people rocking to concert bands from Quebec on a big arena stage. La Fontaine at the end of our block has an acoustic group singing original songs (mostly in English, oddly, in fact a lot of the music out there is in English), and the bar at the other end of the block has a rock and roll band that was playing "You Really Got Me" when we left our hotel and were playing their own bluesy version of "Tainted Love" when we came back. Every bar and street corner in the neighborhood has music -- there was a Jamaican guy with an electric guitar literally standing in a phone booth with the door open singing reggae songs, plunking and singing as throngs of people flowed around him. Salsa in the Cuban restaurant, music from Corsica in the Corsican restaurant, music everywhere.

It's Tuesday night, about midnight. I'm sorry for anyone trying to drive. The pedestrians rule the road tonight. People are drinking in the streets, dancing and singing and hollering along with the music, beautiful happy people jammed shoulder to shoulder, migrating in clusters from one stage to another, smiling and laughing as they squeeze past one another, stopping to talk to friends and blow smoke in each other's faces (I believe smoking is mandatory here).

The whole city is like this, there is music everywhere all the way across Paris. Everything is free, the bands are playing for free, people are pushing their kids in strollers and teenagers are goofing around, sneaking kisses and jostling one another, trying to be cool. The old people have a dance in their step, too -- oh, we did see two old ladies covering their ears and rolling their eyes, but everybody is in on this, the whole city is rocking with one rhythm. There are classical stages, punk rock, Latin music from various countries, hymns and symphonies, folk singers, jazz of course. We have the windows open in our hotel and you should hear the roar, chanting crowds, booming subwoofers, drums, cheering.

We are the classic American tourists, we don't know anything. We saw the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, shopped at the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, pickpockets stole our credit cards and locals looked at us dumbly as we mispronounced the most commonly used words of their daily vocabulary. It is a blast. Generally there is someone everywhere who speaks enough English to accomplish the task at hand, but even without common language we have figured out how to determine the proper sizes of clothing, we have ordered meals and navigated the transportation system. People are happy to help, even if they give you a funny look. Ask for crème brûlée in a French restaurant and they have no idea what you are saying, until a French person pronounces it correctly. It sounds the same to me, but they really don't know what you're saying. Crem Brew-lay, what's so hard about that?

The architecture, the majesty of Paris is totally overwhelming. I mean it, you cannot absorb all of this. Gold-plated palaces, huge towering cathedrals, mansions with gardens and ponds and statuary -- every time you turn a corner another wonder bowls you over, something more stupendous than the last stupendous sight you just looked away from. I can't overemphasize this, there is so much incredible beauty in this city that the ordinary person is shaped by it, the Parisians walk in beauty and grace because they are surrounded by beauty and grace.

Of course the place is swarming with tourists, and I'm sorry for the poor locals who have to put up with this. You know how it is, clogging the escalators, standing there trying to figure out how the Metro works. We have asked a lot of people for help, and mostly they have been very kind. Yesterday we needed to know which direction to take the bus to get to Notre Dame, so I asked two older ladies who were waiting at the bus stop. As I started speaking you could see the fear in their eyes, some foreigner was babbling and it sounded like a question and he would probably expect a response from them. I said, "Can you please tell me if this bus goes to Notre Dame?" And when I finished the sentence they looked at me and then at each other, and then one of them said "Oh, Notre Dame!" -- pronouncing it correctly -- and then they pointed to the other side of the street and happily indicated where the crosswalk was.

Today we saw Oscar Wilde's grave. People have written all over the monument, scribbled thanks to him and signed the stone, and there were a bunch of people sitting around the gravesite, talking quietly. We saw where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are buried, too, in the same plot. And of course we had to look at the probably empty gravesite of Jim Morrison, who I figure is living somewhere in the Midwest with a fat wife and a mortgage, working a straight job and glad to be alive. There were a lot of people at his grave today, and others clocked us as Americans on the paths of the huge cemetery and asked us where he was buried. In a cemetery with Chopin, Balzac, giants of history, Jim Morrison's grave appeared to be the one everybody wanted to see. Well, maybe there were more people at Edith Piaf's.

I have not been fair to Paris. I didn't learn the language, I haven't seen any of the famous museums, didn't see a show, attend the opera. I honestly can't tell you what Paris is really like, I know what the people sound like when they talk but I don't know what they're talking about. I can only report my experience as an alien crash-landed on a strange and different planet where the cosmic axis is shifted and ordinary things are oddly extraordinary. But this in itself is a significant and worthwhile experience, to find yourself among people who seem to have integrated nature and society in a way that is philosophical and beautiful and satisfying to them, people who participate in their culture as if they owned it, it is worthwhile to walk in a land where you don't know the ways and have to ask people the simplest things. To stand there stupidly reading the numbers on the coins while some wise-guy cashier looks past you disdainfully, this is good for you, it's worth doing. We have one way of doing things and it is not the only way.