For the love of a dog in a cold city

I’m not a dog-lover.  I avoid them whenever possible, a strategy developed over a late childhood spent delivering the Vancouver Sun newspaper six days a week.  The oversized canvas bag I used to stuff with about 28 papers every day had SUN in huge, black letters written on the side.  Dogs in my hometown read it as: BITE ME.

Eleven times in five years they sunk their fangs into my flesh by the time I turned 13 and passed the paper route on to a 10-year-old kid eager to be a moving canine chomping post in exchange for pocket money.

I was thinking of my attitude to dogs while strolling through the bitterly cold streets of Paris with my friend.  Paris is notorious for its dogs and the tonnes of crap they dump every day.  As he scraped a freshly laden smear off his heel one afternoon, I consoled my friend by telling him a visit to Paris wouldn’t be complete without glitching at least once through a fragrant pile of crotte de chien.

Then on our last day of serious walking my friend and I came across a white sheet of paper thumb-tacked to a tree.  We stopped and read the first few lines, and, because we realised how much of an honest cry from the heart we’d randomly stumbled upon, we read it to the very end.

The lines on that anonymously posted sheet of paper recall classic themes, and they won’t turn me into a dog-lover, but I think I’ll never forget how I came across them, and know I’ll look on dog owners in a different light from now on.

A dog creates bonds – hommage to Lumie and to dog-owners.

Lumie died at the age of 6, brutally ending a close, three-year relationship with the author of these lines.  Three years during which the novice I was in the subject discovered the special friendship which can bond a man to a dog.  Three years that allowed me to get to know other dog-owners, strollers of all ages with whom contact forms with an astounding spontaneity in a city such as Paris where a general distrust of strangers prevails.

I also often came across former dog owners who would not hesitate to crouch down and tell of their sorrow when their companion had left them – a great sadness that, quite often, they still felt a long time after.  Some had not yet “grieved” as the saying goes. They had tears in their eyes as they spoke of their vanished animal, especially if it resembled mine.

There was a time when everyone made fun of “these grannies and their little doggies.”  But in talking to those holding a leash you come to realise the irreplaceable role of a companion a dog can be to isolated men and women.   One day a woman said to me, “she’s my baby” when speaking of Pim, a beautiful German Shepherd that was said to have once been in a police squad sniffing out narcotics.

Often the owner would talk in glowing terms of the absolute loyalty their dog afforded them that a human companion would be incapable of showing.  They’ll also talk of their intelligence and ability to understand so many things without aid of a translator.  A lot is said through a certain look, by their impressive capacity to interpret the most trivial of your movements and gestures.

All this I was able to find in Loulou, a little white Pomeranian born five years ago in Pennsylvania and brought home from New York with my luggage in 2008.  His first owner, a Taiwanese lady who was learning French, had named him Loumi, a nickname from the French word for light: lumière.  My daughter wrote He’ll be an angel dog on learning of his death from an incurable disease.

These personal revelations might seem quite laughable at a time when the Syrian regime pursues its massacre of an insurgent populace fed up with decades of tyranny, where Tibetans set themselves on fire to protest Beijing’s colonial brutality, where Europe’s destitute are dying every day of cold and the people of Greece slowly sink into poverty.  You might tell me it’s a lot of sorrow for such a little dog, a silly little thing.  There are surely greater sorrows.  Nevertheless, they don’t erase this one.

Paris views old and new

What I mean is: a couple on this short slideshow everyone has seen, others not.

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Paris day 2: watch the gang of thieves in action

I may just be one of tens of millions of tourists who’ll visit Paris this year, but maybe if enough of them complain about the gangs of thieves roving the popular spots of this great city, something will finally get done.

Day 2.

I went back to Montmartre by myself the morning of my second day to catch the views now that the sky had cleared to an impossible blue.  I also went there to try to film the gang of thieves that had harassed us the day before.  My camera doesn’t take the greatest video, but the clip below will give you a good impression about what tourists have to deal with here.  Not just at Montmartre, but in front of Notre Dame cathedral and the Tuileries gardens to name just two places my friend has been forced to yell at them this trip just to keep the herd at bay.

Watch how they swarm around these Asian tourists, who are forced to flee in fear:

They carry these clipboards they thrust under your nose to distract you while the rest of them – having failed the courses in the finer arts of pick-pocketing – start patting you down like some TSA officer on too much coffee.

I hung around a bit hoping to get a closer shot of them, but by that time three of Paris’ finest flics ambled past and the gang had disappeared.

As the police trio strolled toward the grand staircase leading up to Sacré-Coeur, I approached one of them and said, “Bonjour Messieurs, I’m sure you’re aware of that gang of young women accosting tourists up here.”

“Ah, oui,” said the tallest one.  ”You mean the Romanians.”

“Yeah, the Romanians,” I said.  ”They are SO AGGRESSIVE!  Yesterday I had to yell at them in English to get their paws off me.”

“That’s what you have to do,” he replied.  ”You have to get rid of them.”

“That’s what you have to do on the street,” I said, “but don’t you think that’s trying to take care of the problem at the wrong end?  It’s like drug trafficking.  Can’t something be done to stop them before they even get out here?”

He gave me a Gallic shrug, sighed, turned toward the stairs and said, “Yeah, well, you know….”

A week in Paris: Day 1

I may be pining for the canals of Holland and hoping they freeze over again, but for now, a trip that’s been in the planning for quite a while before Europe turned hard and frosty is finally under way.

It’s great to be back in France.

Things have changed a lot since I was this blond kid of 22, faking a photo in front of a wall plastered with pissing forbidden.

I’ve come to Paris to meet up with an old, old friend, who’s so old he’s here because he just retired from 25 years of teaching and is on a celebratory tour of France and Morocco.

By the end of this week, we won’t have spent this much time together since we tramped through forests and across beaches far beyond the last reaches of Tofino, BC more than 10 years ago.

We met 26 years ago at university in a programme of professional teacher training.  My friend went on to have a fine, rewarding career in teaching for which over the years he won the respect of countless students and colleagues.  I found I hated teaching and failed the course miserably, starting what turned out to be a four-year downward spiral of failed attempts to get going in another direction that only really stopped when I left Vancouver for good.

We’ve remained good friends all this time, but don’t see each other that often.  In the last 10 years  I’d say we’ve hung out fewer than a half-dozen times.

But meeting him today at his short-term apartment in the 20th Arrondissement, it was like he – and the way we’ve always been hanging out together – had never changed.  We had breakfast together jabbering for what seemed like ages about our lives, wives, plans, and such before heading out in the cold.

Day 1.

We walked for miles through the streets of Paris, my friend as my guide.  We saw a few old men along the way, and I remarked that you don’t see many of them of that age in Germany.

We ended up inside Sacré Coeur at the summit of Montmontre after running the gauntlet of an extremely aggressive gang of Eastern European street thieves.  A tight pack of 20 or so girls between I’d say 16 and 22, they swarmed around us like hornets, thrusting petitions in front of our faces to get us to sign – and hopefully distract our attention – while accomplices threw their hands all over our clothes in a brazen attempt to figure out where our wallets were hidden.  Turning around and hissing DON’T TOUCH ME, GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME was the only thing I could do to get them to back off, but they only paused for a second or two before attacking a passing Japanese tourist with the same tactics.  As the poor woman tried to flee down the steps of Montmartre, we yelled at them to leave her alone or we’d call the police.

My friend said they’ve actually been hauled to Paris and are held in a type of slavery, forced to steal upward of €300 a day and if they fail to do so, they get the shit kicked out of them by their captors that evening.  Forget having police patrol the area so the tourists don’t get hassled, what about throwing in jail the mafia that organise it all?

With that happy thought in mind, we went down the hill to buy cinema tickets for a showing at 3pm.  It turned out to be one of the most horribly depressing movies I’ve seen in ages, highly inadvisable if you’re suicidal or have loose razor blades lying around.  It’s called Louise Wimmer and tells the story of a fiftyish woman who’s left her husband and is waiting endlessly for a place in social housing, sleeping in her car, working as a chambermaid and pawning off her few possessions in a slow, desperate attempt to stay afloat before she finally goes under.   I suppose if you’re in France anyway and haven’t had your daily dose of Albert Camus (everything is meaningless, the best thing you can say about any day is that you haven’t decided to kill yourself –  hah-hah, Gosh, don’t you just love the French…) Well, just go see this film.

After the film we parted.  He went home to bed, I went over to the Théâtre Antoine near to where I’m staying where I bought us two tickets to go see a play for tomorrow evening: Inconnu à cette Adresse.  (Address Unknown)

This time the choice was mine.  It’s a two-man play based on the book by Kressmann Taylor and tells the story of the relationship between a Jewish American and his German business partner during the early 30s as the Nazis were gaining power.  I’m sure it will be equally as uplifting.

Place des Vosges, Paris

We walked from our hotel near the Gare de l’Est through the streets of Paris to the Marais, which is where what’s left of the old Jewish quarter can be found. It was the Pentecost holiday Monday so not many shops were open, but we didn’t care. We were winding our way to find the school where K had worked as a teaching assistant at Lycée Victor Hugo 27 years ago.

A quick snap of her in front and we were on our way again, this time to Place des Vosges, one of her favourite hangouts during the year she stayed here.

We’d just turned a corner when we stumbled upon this scene: two police cars blocking the road, a half-dozen cops standing around, one holding a grumpy homeless man they’d handcuffed moments before. By the crumpled mass of soiled sleeping bags and dirty blankets, you could tell they’d used the grand covered sidewalk of the south side as a place to crash, and I guess they’d gotten into such a fight upon waking that someone called the police.

That’s not what I found interesting, though. It’s what was happening across the street in the park.

A whole row of kids on a school outing, or maybe in the park at recess, checking out the cops busting the bums.

They were gawking at the scene for a good five minutes before a teacher came along and shooed them away.

This is what we enjoyed most about Paris. Just being there, taking our time and taking it in.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Paris sunset

Paris. Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 2045.

It was a wonderful trip.

More later.

Into the ghosts of 1968

I’ve never been one to hit the streets with enough guts and grit to throw paving stones and firebombs, overturn cars and land in jail for a night or two.

Not a rebel, about the only thing I ever did to resist the deep-channel path my parents had laid out before me – of course you’ll go on to university - was to say Fuck It one day in Spring 1980, use the money I’d earned over the Winter to buy a backpack, a ticket to London, Let’s Go Europe and a Eurail pass, putting off for the second year in a row a university program I had no interest in continuing.

Arriving home a year later to begin a different program, I soon got restless again and started looking for a way to get back to Europe. Since I was now majoring in French, it made sense to go to France to learn it there for a year.

By the time I arrived in Grenoble in 1982, the flame and fury of the May 1968 Paris riots were already ancient history. Landing in the wrong place at the wrong time, this is about all the mischief in France I ever got up to:

When my wife and I get to Paris in a few days for a week of revisiting old friends, old haunts and old memories, it will be tempting to wander down a street or two which 40 years before was barricaded with burning cars and strewn with debris, but I doubt we’ll actually do so.

Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Chicago, Paris, Prague: I started paying attention to the news in 1968 after taking over my brother’s Vancouver Sun paper route. I was amazed to learn how the world outside our quiet, isolated little burg dug out of a corner of a still-undiscovered fjord on the West Coast of Canada could be roiling in such chaos, but I was only eight years old and too young to grasp much of anything, especially why the world was going through what it was.

Just an object of derision to my brothers’ friends, one of whom pointed and laughed at me from the back of a car one day and said: he still thinks his prick’s just for pissing!

Vive la révolution? Vive l’amour!

I can’t wait. Did I mention it’s going to be just the two of us?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

The French Anne Frank? A new holocaust diary is published

Amazing story and a book recommendation in one, so I thought I’d pass it along.

It’s about the diary of a young Jewish girl living in a major European city during the Nazi occupation of her country. Described as beautifully written and quite personal, it details her life and that of her family members leading up to their deportation to the death camps.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Anne Frank, right?

No, it’s Hélène Berr, the diary of whom has become an instant best-seller after its recent publication in France nearly 65 years after her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Comparisons to Anne Frank are inevitable. But while Frank detailed a life spent in hiding from the Nazis in her Amsterdam home, Berr tells a story of everyday life under the German occupation in Paris.

Before being sent away to die along with most of the rest of her family, she gave it to the family cook, who passed it along to Berr’s fiancé, who eventually gave it to Berr’s niece. After an editor noticed a group of girls gathered around a display case trying to read the diary at a Paris holocaust exhibition, the niece was approached with the idea of publishing, but it took another five years to come out in book form.

The book sold more than 26,000 copies in its first three days of sale in France. Rights had already been sold in 15 countries before the French publication, but an English translation is slated to come out only in September. I can’t wait that long, so I’m going to pick it up at Amazon.fr and hope to translate an extract or two over the coming weeks.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Time before Tuesday: the con in Cannes

Dear all,

I guess none of us can get by in life without lying from time to time. Some make it a way of life, – an art form – but I’ve never had a memory good enough to even consider that route.

But now that the overblown media orgy of endless red-carpet photo-ops, over-hyped trailers and brain-dead-boring directors’ press conferences of the 60th Cannes Film Festival has safely drawn to a close, I’m once again reminded of how my old friend Vince and I BS’d our way into getting a free pass into every film shown 24 years ago at the 1983 edition.

We had been studying French for eight months at the Université de Grenoble III and been living with French families for a bit longer, so our language skills were already pretty good. The two of us had even made a pact never to speak English with each other while playing tennis or on ski trips, we were that serious about learning French.

So after exams and with time on our hands, we pile into his little 2CV car and headed south to the Mediterranean. We arrive in Cannes about two days after the festival has started, spending about a day walking around and gawking. That got old really old really quick though, so we start to wonder how, without being journalists or celebrities and with absolutely no connection whatsoever with the film industry other than being regular paying movie-goers, we could somehow get into seeing at least a couple of films. They don’t sell tickets.

So the second morning – after sleeping a night on the beach cuz all the hotels were booked and back then they didn’t have those gawd-awful tents strung up and down the main stretch – we decide to head for the main accreditation centre to see what’s up.

We go inside the lobby and off to the left in the corner, a bored-looking fat man with a long, bushy beard is seated at a booth flipping through a magazine. We go up to him and say “we’re here to get our accreditation, please.”

” Ah, oui, bien sûr, of course, can I see your invitation please?

Here’s where it began. Unscripted, seat-of-the-pants merde de la vache perdue as we used to say in elementary school for some reason.

“Uh, we’re American students of French cinema and we’ve been sent down from from the University of Grenoble to do a report focusing on the similarities and differences between a French, an American, and a third film of our choice as it pertains to …”

“That’s OK,” he says. “I don’t need the details Do you have a letter from your cinema professor?”

I look at Vince. “You were the one who went to pick it up that day. You’ve got it, right?”

“No way,” he says. “I gave it to you the other day while we were packing. It’s in the blue envelope.”

The fat guy is rolling his eyes by now at our little piece of impromptu cinéma, so he says, “you DO have student cards from the University of Grenoble, don’t you?”

“Ah oui, bien sûr!” we say, whipping them out.

“OK,” he says, pointing over to the right. “Go over there and get your photo taken and come back to me when you’ve got it.”

This, then, is the grin you get when you know you’ve just told a bald-faced lie, don’t care, and can’t believe you’re about to embark on a week-long movie-watching binge.

Those were all simpler times, of course. No biometric ID, no taking off your shoes or dumping liquids before boarding planes, no facial recognition technology. There’s no way we’d be able to pull that off today.

all for now,

Ian

PS: Those with a little knowledge of French will have caught the bilingual pun in the title.

PPS: I don’t recommend binge movie-going, even if it is for free and there are sometimes canapés in the lobby. Because Cannes is a place to shop films whether they’re destined for Oscars or the dollar-bin at Blockbusters, you can see the worst trash in the morning and a masterpiece in the afternoon. You come out of it feeling like you’ve eaten a huge buffet dinner night after night, never remembering whether you’d had filet mignon, lobster, peanut butter sandwiches or humous with pita – maybe you have, right after the other, but you’re so dazed and bloated you can’t remember. Six films a day for a week and I can recall the name of only one of them: Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Given the restaurant scene in that film,  it’s rather appropriate.

Snows of winters past, present and future

Hi Vincent,

Glad to see you’re checking this out, and in honour of that, this one’s for you.

So you were back in Grenoble over the holidays, eh? I can’t believe it’s been almost a quarter-century since we spent a year haunting the halls of Université de Grenoble III. It’s a wonder how we managed to cram the French language into our heads between tennis games, skiing trips, late-night crawls and a fear-and-loathing road trip to the 1983 Cannes film festival, but at least we paid enough attention in class to catch the drift of the snow report on the radio early one morning when it said, “40 centimetres de poudreuse aux Deux Alpes ce matin…” and, putting our enthusiasm for sitting through another droning grammar class on the imperfect subjunctive on hold for just one more day, came away with this memory:

I know what you mean about the sorry state of the European winter this year and how awful it must have looked three weeks ago atop Alpe d’Huez midst rocks and grass and nary a flake in sight. But you have to remember that over here, winter has been lagging behind even in the best of years. At St. Anton only last year, we got dumped on so heavily one morning, something like 110 cm, the whole valley was at a complete standstill for most of the day.

That was in the middle of March. We’ve already booked for a couple of weeks there again this year, so since it’s still a few weeks away, there’s still a lot of time for the snow to pile up. But even if the skiing isn’t that great, we still have lots to do. We’ll be in a quiet little Dorf called Pettneu far away from the ski circus of St Anton. Our Little Red-Haired Girl is as crazy about odourous, oversized farm animals as she is about skiing, so last year when she found out on arrival that a dozen dairy cows were in the barn out back, she was in heaven. Home for the day she’d doff her ski suit, wolf down some chocolate, haul on the horribly smelly cowshed duds we insisted she keep on the balcony, then bound outside again to go nurse the three calves she more or less adopted for two weeks. The innkeeper / farmer was happy, we were happy, and we’re staying in the same place again this year.

So maybe you can bring your snowboard over here next year and you could teach this old curmudgeon some new ways to wiggle down the hill. Not only have I STILL never tried snowboarding, I have yet to even hop on the carving bandwagon. Still hanging on to some 205 cm racing boards I picked up from a dealer three years ago – probably the last of their kind, because you don’t see them anymore. An elderly instructor last year took one look at what I was using, took off his glove, shook my hand, called me a hero, and invited me to ski with his group just to show them a short guy could make long ones turn.

From the flatlands over to you,

Ian

© 2007 lettershometoyou