Edible Moments

Paris is a layer cake full of edible moments, so real when you experience them that the taste lingers, reminding you, always, of what you saw, what you felt, and what it meant to you at that moment. Paris is a city of statues, the great, the powerful, the intelligent, and many quite ordinary people and things representing the lived culture of the city. It is a city of light with a special glow at those times just after the sun sets and just before it rises. The icing between the layers is when the rain has just ended and the street lights have come on. It is a city of reflections. You see yourself in it if you are lucky. And if you are luckier still there is someone you love standing next to you. It is a city where perfection mixes with flaw as if one is using the other to its own advantage. A perfect shiny globe on a distressed and maybe even damaged table somehow seems just right, like the Japanese concept of wabi sabi. The flaw that shows you the way to perfection. And always in the background, like the layers of cake between the icing are the ordinary things, the posts that mark out driveways across the sidewalk, the million varieties of building fronts, balconies, railings, and doorways that tell you you are in Paris. It's cool and kind of gray today on rue Daguerre. We've just finished a quiet lunch at La Chope Dagurre and the street is almost deserted, I am looking into this window and suddenly feel it looking back at me. I can see what it means to be here, in Paris, free for now from the cares of normal life, enjoying the cake. This image is with me always.