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.