Trepidation

I remember the first time I saw Paris. It was sometime in the 1970s, when, as a flight attendant with the now-defunct airline, Pan Am, I dragged my weary self onto the tiniest elevator I had ever seen, in the lobby of a rundown Montmartre hotel. So small was this ancient contraption -- whose door was a see-through metal grate whose permeability was disconcerting -- that I could barely squeeze my moderately-sized suitcase in with me. Then I pressed a button and the elevator rose slowly, its movement almost imperceptible, to where it ended its run, right inside my tiny room. I was as disturbed by this experience as I was enchanted.

Yet, finally, I was in Paris. This held more than the ordinary excitement inherent in the introduction of an overly-romantic 21-year old to the City of Light. My mother’s parents had met in Paris, during World War I – a French milliner and an American Army captain whose romance blossomed when American officers were billeted in the millinery school facilities. They married, toured France – he on a motorcycle, she in the attached sidecar – and, shortly after the war ended, became the parents of my mother, who was born in a chichi Montparnasse clinic. I have the sepia, first photos of her and my grandmother in that clinic, a facility so luxurious with its massive vases of fresh flowers and lace-draped and swagged bassinet, that my grandmother remembered her stay there as her best vacation ever.

At the time I saw Paris, my mother had not been back to the city of her birth. My grandmother had died a few years before; she had never returned to Paris. Neither had my grandfather. I was the first in our family to be in Paris since 1919, except for my father, who passed through briefly during World War II.
So I suppose that now, I should feel an immense sense of relief, of homecoming, at the prospect of returning to Paris to go to school (Le Cordon Bleu, no less!) and live for a year. Instead, I am living through a twilight time. At times, I exist in a state of anxiety about the future, sprinkled with flashes of regret and twinges of grief for everything I am leaving behind.
Goodbye brand-new, full-sized refrigerator and freezer and full oven and four-burner stove. Goodbye, my Japanese screens and prints and china. Farewell to my antique elm wood Chinese buffet, to my comfortable bed, to my cozy armchair where I sit and sip my breakfast tea while I gaze out on my new deck, the lovely garden beyond (my neighbor’s, but mine to enjoy with my gaze), my grape arbor (with the half-dead vines, thanks to a harsh winter), the finches at the feeder. And that doesn’t even begin to touch the surface of the regret I feel over the people I will be leaving behind – in what ways will they change and become people I don’t know while I’m gone? – and all the ordinary comforting and familiar conveniences of my settled life.

How settled? How about this: I’m living in the home in which I grew up, the house my father built and that I moved into when I was 11. Not that I haven’t traveled – I touched down in about 50 countries with Pan Am and haven't stopped traveling – but I welcome the familiarity of places I’ve known in this house for 40 years. I don’t have to close my eyes to see it exactly as it was – my mother’s blue wing chair, my father’s worn corner of the couch, the lilac bush, the bleeding heart, the hummingbird feeders, the riot of fuchsias dangling over the deck. And the memories? Many, mostly happy ones that still cause me to smile and laugh.

No one sympathizes at all, of course. They are plodding on with their lives while I jet off to --- Paris! – the dream of a city that has attained mythological status in the popular consciousness. Any talk of the tiny Parisian kitchens with their hotplates instead of stoves, their under-counter refrigerators barely large enough to hold a whole chicken and their stratospheric prices meets with the same sympathy that a size two woman gets when complaining about her extra weight to her size 12 cousins. Yeah, girl, suck it up.

One of the things I will miss the most, I am ashamed to admit, is my car. Not just because it is a little white sports car, fast and darn cute, but more importantly, because of what it represents in terms of pure practicality. I never have to wait for public transportation to come to me – I go where I want, when I want, even though realistically, I’m often caught in traffic jams and going nowhere and I know the whole situation is ecologically unsustainable. But a private vehicle is safety. I can be out at 10 p.m. without a second thought, locked tight in my reliable car in which I zip through even seedy neighborhoods, insulated, protected, cozy and warm, surrounded by my own choice of music.

In Paris, it will be the subway, the bus, the taxi or my own two feet that will take me where I need to go. And I think uneasily of the story I heard of a Paris acquaintance, a fifth-generation Parisian, who a few years ago, was surrounded by thugs on the Metro and relieved of his leather jacket. (He has since abandoned Paris for the French Riviera.) I know Paris is at least as safe, in general, as where I live now. But where I live now does not require me to be out night without the warmth and protection of my car.

Nor does it required to use my body to get anywhere, unless you count steering, shifting and braking. No, in Paris I will have to walk, something I am embarrassed to admit I rarely do now. I may even have to walk up several flights of stairs to my apartment – a trip which I may have to make more than once or twice a day if my apartment, like many in Paris, lacks laundry facilities. Then I’ll be making that trip with loaded bags of laundry, groceries, garbage and anything else coming into, or going out of, my apartment.

It should be great for my figure. However, I’m not in shape now, so that, too, is a cause for trepidation.

So I have decided to actively work to create joyful anticipation for my move. I will post lovely pictures of Paris around the house, and quotes about the lovely city where I will live. Things will work themselves out, I know. They always do.