Paris dreaming

The good news is that I’ve found a new way up to the castle. More interesting, with stuff to see along the way, versus the dull direct path we’ve taken before. As a tour guide, I’m always looking for ways like this to add a little more.

 

The bad news is that I didn’t tell my tour members how to get up to the castle itself, the end destination, the place they need to be. Which was also where we are sleeping tonight, I now realize. Speaking of which, it might not be particularly professional for my tour to see me in my underwear like this, though that’s how I like to sleep. Maybe I should find some pants before anyone wakes up.

 

But wait, I remember our Last Night Dinner, so the tour must be over. So even if I am in my skivvies with 28 people in this cheap hotel room, we’re all just civilians now. They’re on their own.

The confusion goes on from there, though the details blur away. That’s how it is with dreams, including post-tour deliria like last night’s. No logic, just the dismayed tension of realizing that after all the million details done right, some oversight, so slight, middle of the night, is going to bring it all to ruin.

 

Ruin, I say!

 

The first week after tour season is always like this, my mind flinching back as it starts to relax away from timetables and reservations. But sleep’s confusion fades into a beautiful Paris morning, fresh baguettes, metro arrivals and scooter departures and the Seine flows on unperturbed.

 

I have something else on my horizon now, a land very different from France. But in the meantime, I’m finding myself deeper and deeper in love with this City of Light. I’ve loved Paris since the third time I saw it. Affection that’s only grown from there.

 

So while I may be in a bureaucratic purgatory of inscrutable systems and overlapping insanity, whenever it grows to be too much or my enthusiasm shrinks to be too little, I walk for a block or an hour and Paris presents something new to love. Some new table with a cool drink, church of angles, fingers on a harp upstairs, out through the open casement window and all the Jacques on the street below puff pensively through the moment’s gauloises.

 

This city is one big honeymoon, and though my week will end, for a few more days, I do.