Winter 2006

Gay “Paree” at Eighty-Three

A daughter's gift of a whirlwind trip
Paris, France

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OUR DAUGHTER HAD NO SOONER been hired for a position in Paris than she decided that she, her husband, and our two grandsons would give me “the trip of a lifetime.” Oh boy, I thought, April in Paris! But their offer to entertain me came in February. Nevertheless, for a month I hummed “I love Paris every moment of the year” to put me in the proper mood, and I brushed up on my ninth-grade French.

Getting there was easy. A limo whisked me from the DeGaulle Airport to the family’s apartment off of Victor Hugo Circle, only about a fifteen-minute walk from the Arc de Triomphe.

After a three-hour nap, I wobbled over to the Arc with Ray, my son-inlaw. We took an elevator to the top — pretty good view from up there, especially up and down the Champs- Elysee.

Our next day’s stroll to the Eiffel Tower brought us about an hour’s wait in a serpentine line to ride up the elevators. As the queue wormed its way along, I observed first-hand the French propensity to cut into lines given even the smallest opportunity. To avoid this, you need to become very friendly with the people immediately in front of you, leaving no more than an inch or two of space between them and you.

Spectacular views of the city from the top of the tower make it worth the wait. When the tower was built in the late 1800s, it was the tallest building in the world.

The next day we drove out near Reims to visit an American cemetery where one of my uncles is buried. He was killed at age twenty in World War I, only four weeks before the end of the war.We found his grave with no trouble and wished him well.

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