Things I Don't Know

I could fill a book with the things I don’t know. What am I saying? I could fill thousands of books. I’m thinking about a few weeks ago in Paris and how I didn’t know where Paris was on a map in comparison to Rome. How I didn’t have any sense of Paris itself. Where was the Eiffel Tower, for example? Where was Notre Dame?

We visited Notre Dame. It’s been rebuilt since the fire that pretty much destroyed it in 2019. I was newly working at the library back then when the fire was burning. My partner at the desk pulled up the news on her computer, and we watched the fire overtaking the roof, the spire falling. I gasped when it teetered and dropped. I had no connection to Notre Dame. I’d never seen it in person. I knew next to nothing about it, and yet, I was still horrified and near tears. Something about the history of it. The beauty. 

Notre Dame is on an island on the Seine River, another thing I didn’t know. We crossed a bridge and joined a long line to get inside the cathedral. The bells were tolling. I was looking up at the roof that I’d watched burn six years ago. Now everything was gleaming and bright. A priest was saying mass in French. I didn’t know what he was saying, but also, all of that longtime Catholic school teaching hammered into me, I knew. 

Last week I was sifting through my photos, still a little jet laggy and coming down from the high of our whirlwind trip. I had sworn of the news but the news had not sworn off me. 

I can’t watch anymore, I told a friend. It’s too much. I compared it to driving along and seeing a car burning on the side of the road, except every road has a car burning and every moment of the drive, there is another car in flames, and another. 

No, my friend said, it’s worse than that. It’s not a burning car. It’s like your own house is on fire. 

It was funny that we were having that conversation the same day we weren’t looking at the news, because later, when the news seeped in, there was the East Wing of the White House, demolished. I gasped when I saw the photos. I had been under the impression that nothing could shock me anymore, but there I was, shocked anyway. 

It’s like Notre Dame, I said to one of my co-workers. But we did it to ourselves. 

She shrugged. Notre Dame was over 850 years old, she said. That part of the White House only goes back to 1902. 

Still, I couldn’t get over the comparison. I don’t know how we come back from this. But then I’m a coward, a long-buried terrified part of me awakened, the part that avoids the streets where the cars are on fire, the one who flees the burning house.

Something else I learned about Notre Dame. There used to be a rooster perched on top of the spire, an enormous weathervane that contained saintly relics. When the spire fell, the rooster crashed with it. The people in Paris thought it was gone for good, but miraculously, they found it in the ashes. The saintly relics were intact too. A few months ago when the new spire went up, it went up with a new rooster. The original is inside the cathedral. 

A symbol of hope, I heard someone say. I took a picture of it. 

 

Quiet Space

I didn’t go to the protest yesterday because I had to work a shift at the library. I did drive by, though. A good two thousand people turned out in our neighborhood. The crowd stretched down to my street. My husband was one of the people. He was waving the American flag. 

The library was quiet when I got there. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t the library always quiet? I mean, it is. But not in the old shushy way it used to be when I was a kid a million years ago. Now we’re a meeting place. We host community programs and school visits and lectures and English conversation classes. Patrons do work on the computers. Tutors tutor their students. Toddlers screech and laugh and throw tantrums. 

Every once in a while, a parent will warn their kid to be quiet, and I enjoy piping up to say, It’s okay. This isn’t a quiet space. You can talk. 

What’s quiet about the library is there’s never any background music blaring. Never any ads. No one ever tracks you or tries to sell you something. If you want to sit there all day, feel free. We have decent bathrooms and drinking fountains and comfy chairs. Also, if you want book recommendations, come up to the desk and I will give you some.

Everyone, no matter what their income level or ethnic background or immigration status, can check out a book. Or one hundred books. When I was a little girl, the library was my favorite place. I walked there with my mother and younger brothers. This was after my father died, and we didn’t have a car. The trip was about a mile and took us up a big hill and through a lovely, sprawling public park. 

The youth librarian was friendly and kind. She helped me pick out books, and after getting to know my reading taste, she’d have books chosen and waiting for me. Eight or ten, which is about all I could carry home. When I was eight, my mother remarried. We moved into a nice house. We owned a car. We were doing okay on the surface. But not far under the surface things were not good. Still, I had the library. 

I walked up the hill and through the park by myself. I read my way through the youth department. When I was eleven, I won a prize in the summer reading program, and the librarian took a picture of me holding a book and sitting formally in front of the big windows. In the photo I look somehow both shell-shocked and grateful. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that books saved my life, that the library did. 

I worked there all afternoon, missing the second protest in the city, the big one downtown. My husband waved the flag at that one too. I know why so many people were gathering. Fear. Anger. A desperate need to speak out against corruption in this administration, the creeping or already crept over authoritarianism, the cruelty. 

A reminder too that there are so many of us who care about what we are about to lose. Public schools and National Parks. Public Health and scientific research. And libraries, although, I suspect they are far down on many people’s lists of institutions worth fighting for. 

Meanwhile, I checked in books and checked them out. Chatted with a stranger about their favorite movie. Helped someone who was fiddling with a job application. Found the perfect book for a little girl and put it into her hands. 

  

First protest, 2014, to save school libraries, Art, and Music

Me, age eleven, in my quiet space, my happy place

Off the Map

We were going to take a plane from Rome to Paris but a friend suggested we take a train. This way we could really see the countryside. We could split the trip in two parts: up to Turin in Northern Italy, and the next day, through the Alps and on into Paris. So, that’s what we did. 

On the train we sat at a table facing each other, my husband and I, and our daughter and son-in-law. His parents live in Paris, which was why we were heading there, and he was hands down, the best person you could have in your corner on a trip like this. Equal parts tour guide, translator, ticket purchaser, restaurant-picker-outer and food orderer, and interpreter of French cold medicines. 

Also, he brought me coffee every morning and would serve it accompanied by a little biscuit that’s supposedly for digestion. The “biscuit” is a cookie with a chocolate glaze and you dip it into your coffee and the chocolate melts, and now I’m pretty much spoiled for life.  

But back to the train ride. The train travels 180 miles an hour and you hardly feel it. The Alps come looming up and then blur past. I was reading a novel called Rodham on my phone. The book is a fictionalized reimagining of a young Hillary Clinton before she met Bill and their early time in grad school getting to know each other and falling in love, but then suddenly, halfway through the book, she dumps him, and then it’s an alternate reality that turns out so much better for her, and for all of us. 

I felt like I was in an alternate reality myself. The days in Rome, in Turin, in Paris. The train speeding along, the little towns. I didn’t know where I was. I wanted a map, but at the same time, I didn’t want a map. When the train would race into a tunnel and wind around a snow-capped mountain peak, I would try to shut my brain down and just take it all in. I was doing the same thing at all the places we went. The churches, the castles, the little cafés. Everything was beautiful. It was almost too much. 

The bright green paint on an ancient door. The purple flowers climbing up a stone wall. The arrangement of cheese on a pretty plate. The days stretched on and I never knew what time it was. The statues and cathedrals and cobblestone streets blurred together like one of Monet’s Impressionistic paintings. 

We went to his house! Monet’s! And saw his garden with the pond and the lily pads, looking like they were pasted on the surface. The curved bridge. The flowers. I could not stop taking pictures of the flowers. One day I made the mistake of looking at the news. It was horrible as always, but it felt very far away. I had a head cold and the French cold medicine was possibly making me loopy. 

Je monte avec. Je descends avec. was written on every door of the train. "Don't forget your bags," our son-in-law translated for us. But then he added that it literally says something like, "I get on with it. I step off with it."  

Maybe the world back home wasn’t the real world, but this place was, with the bakery on every corner and the high-speed trains and a street musician randomly playing the Norah Jones song Come Away with Me as we strolled along the Seine. Maybe there’s no maybe about it. It was real. It is real. 

I’ve taken it with me. 

Roman Holiday

I am in Rome. Not in Rome exactly. But on a hill outside Rome. The hill overlooks a lake. The lake used to be a volcano. On the other side of the lake/volcano is a castle and a little town.

My family is here for a wedding. Our longtime dear friends’ daughter is getting married today. Friday we all flew in from various places and checked into the hotel, which is actually a monastery that dates back to the 13th century. I hadn’t slept at all on the plane.

Mainly, this was due to how packed in we all were and then there was the guy in my row who had a cat in a carrier under his seat, and at some point during the night flight he said, Sorry! because his cat had just pooped in the carrier. But who needs sleep when you are in Rome for a weekend-long wedding?

We arrived just in time for lunch, which was spread out on tables that overlooked the lake. The scene was like something in a movie, the kind with the stone veranda and the tablecloths and the gardens and the pasta and wine, and then suddenly, Meryl Streep comes whirling out singing. On the plane (before the cat incident) I was reading the book Taste by Stanley Tucci, which is about his love affair with Italian food, so I knew that the pasta was only the first course, and there would be many more courses, and I was right. Grazie, Stanley Tucci.

Can you believe we are in Italy, we kept saying to each other. (No, was what I was thinking.) It was the wine and the zero hours sleep. That view of the lake. I couldn’t get over it. The castle and the cute little town on the other side.

The next day we all hiked through the forest and walked on precariously narrow roads to see the castle up close. Apparently, it’s a big deal because the pope uses the place as his summer home. Twenty thousand steps later we were back at the monastery for more pasta and several other courses. The placemats had words written in Italian, and I tried to parse it out. Something about eating and living was my guess. Which seemed like a nice sentiment.

But then I went on the monastery tour and learned that the place was briefly a kind of health center in the early 1900’s and their motto was EAT SLOWLY AND CHEW WELL. In the cute little castle town, I drank a cappuccino and slowly ate and chewed very well a cannoli and snapped a picture of a sign outside a gift shop that said, Earth without Art is just EH.

I walked with my best friend, the mother of the bride, and had a flashback to a million years ago, when we were young mothers, chasing our little kids around the backyard and filling their plastic sippy cups with chocolate milk, and now here we all are, wandering the cobblestone streets and clinking our wine glasses.

Last night her daughter made a toast and for a brief jet-laggy moment, I could see the chocolate milk sippy cup instead of the champagne glass. Outside the window was the suburban backyard and the other little kids shrieking on the swings. And then it was back to where we were, where we are, in the ancient monastery.

Cheers, we said.

Lunch on the terrace

View of the lake and the castle at night