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.