Beauty and Ballast

Paris 2024

I was in Paris last fall to visit my middle son, Peter, who was studying there. His class schedule was packed, and my hotel room was tiny, so much of the short trip was a self-led walking tour around the Left Bank. Not a bad gig.

On my first full day there, I walked to the Luxembourg Gardens, where Peter had tried to take me the night before, but Daylight Saving Time had surprised us, and the park was closed early. After a perfect breakfast the following morning --- espresso, chocolate, bread, cured ham --- I ventured out toward the gates alone.

The formal entryway gave way to rows of gardens where I watched a handful of older men playing pétanque and kids sitting around smoking and kissing. Then I strolled further along the stone paths where gardeners turned over the beds. It was a damp day and overcast, but the clouds were bright.

I wandered into an open promenade and ahead of me saw a fountain surrounded by an octagonal pool of perfectly still water and I froze in place. I’d stepped into the exact spot of an old family photo, almost as if I’d stepped through some tear in the fabric of time. It was like déjà vu but more visceral than that --- a soul-level double take.

It’s a little misleading to call it a family photo – my family and I were not in the picture. We were all just there when it was taken, and I think of it as a family photo because it ended up in the album from that trip. It was a photograph my mother took of a little French girl, maybe two and a half or three, wearing a nice dress and proper shoes, playing near the fountain. Back then, my father worked as a marketing executive for Pan Am, and my family flew for free. We were in Paris for a long weekend. I’d just turned thirteen.

I’ve been to Paris a couple times since – once again as a teenager on a trip offered through my high school and later when we took the boys about ten years ago. But I had not been back to this fountain since that very day.

When my mother died nine years ago, this was one of the photos I’d stopped at and even studied --- that I thought to myself, as I sat on the floor going through the boxes of her albums and negatives, was objectively good. I decided then that although she spent countless hours painting, her gift might have resided more in her photography; it was more nuanced and heavier in the right way.

Some of her photos were wonderfully poignant --- flowers up so close that they edged toward the surreal, their blooms flaming out, some of the petal edges ripped. She captured highly energetic landscapes too, with layered, sometimes cryptic or ruptured backgrounds, but everything always attenuated by beautiful color and classical composition. And there were many photos where what came across most strongly was a shared hush between seen and seer: a kind of stealth quiescence in her witness that suggested a deep respect for all of life and nature and people.

And that squared with who she was. Although my mom was quite private and did not speak often of her faith, it occurred to me recently —— as I’ve wandered through her world again and even showed my boys —- that what rang through the corpus felt almost like a prayer, or a form of worship, and strangely like an assurance to me too, sent through time.

That day in early summer of 2016, only weeks after she died, as I sat with her work on the floor all around me, I texted my sister Jenny with the revelation: Mom was such a good photographer! I remember also being sad then that I hadn’t discerned such an important thing in her lifetime. All to say, the portrait of the little girl at the fountain had some history and resonance beyond just a snapshot from a family vacation forty-three years ago.

What was especially wild to me was that I’d entered the scene at exactly the spot where my mother stood that day. I was seeing through her lens, decades later.

Reflexively, of course, I started to look for the little girl. But I quickly remembered that she would be old enough now to be a mother herself. In fact, if she had any kids, they’d likely be too old to be playing at a fountain in the middle of the day. If they existed at all, they were probably in middle school somewhere in the Paris that stretched out beyond me, low and long, honed and pale yellow in every direction.

I stood there for a good while, a crowded field of feelings scrambling for space and voice. Of the group of us there that day, standing just outside my mom’s frame, only Jenny and I remain.

I was jostled from the trance by squeals of laughter: two little boys, about six or seven, came running toward me, almost crashing into me. One was trying to catch the other, and they were laughing. The present clapped back, winning me out of a past I couldn’t quite inhabit or hold, and woke me up to Now --- which can sometimes feel almost frighteningly impervious and neutral to me, but when it clapped that day, it felt solid, like it was calling me with an open hand. I was thankful for the boys that way.

What those adorable boys prompted in me was a posture --- life was moving forward and I had eyes to see it. Where the girl once was, there were boys running, buds had blossomed even in the damp and cold, gardeners were working the beds and European cities were hosting long-traveled visits. The world was undeniably prospering itself in some mysterious, ineffable way.

The memory of the little girl at the fountain, though, ended up being a kind of portal because I spent the remainder of that day, after shopping chocolate and hitting a bookstore, before an early dinner with Peter, recalling to myself the details surrounding the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan. You see, it happened on the same day my mother snapped that picture. It all came back.

I remembered my family being told by another American in our small hotel (a Taylor brother from Taylor Wine --- my dad had reported to us delightedly after they’d met by chance at check-in): Reagan’s been shot. And the next morning, all of us waiting with Mr. Taylor-Wine for the delivery of the New York Times to the hotel -- to get the facts. Who was the assassin? What was the motive? By then, we’d heard through the front desk that Reagan was expected to live.

Back at my present-day tiny hotel room waiting for my son to be ready for dinner, after a quick Wiki search, I got the exact date, March 30, 1981 --- the day the two shootings took place. From there I also learned that in 2011 a Washington Post reporter wrote an exposé to decent reviews – Rawhide Down. ('Rawhide' was Reagan’s code name.)

I ordered the book when I got home to burn off the jet lag but had to wait a while for it to get good, because the poor author, in laying the groundwork, had to wade through a bunch of personal histories —- including that of John Hinckley Jr. and his criminal obsession with Jodie Foster. Even in its crafted retelling, delusions like that tend to be emotionally airless —- inward and recursive. A closed circuit.

But I have to admit, when I finally got through all the context and backgrounds to the actual assassination attempt, on page eighty-something, when I got to that morning, and the event I was primarily curious about — the unnamed girl in the dress at Luxembourg and my mother’s interest in her — was being placed in time, at last, right next to Hinckley’s gun going off, Brady collapsing, Reagan being shoved into the limo, struggling to breathe, I was strangely moved. It was the reason I ordered the book, of course. I wanted to get the two things properly oriented. I wanted to introduce them.

I avoided my own delusions throughout the exercise. I knew the two events weren’t actually connected. But they were layered in time, superimposed as it were. And it was supremely satisfying to be allowed to relate to the facts in this way --- to hold Reagan and the girl next to each other --- slide them closer together in my mind and then tease them apart. And marvel generally at what happens in a single day on Earth.

My mentor from graduate school, Viola Farber, used to say to us: Somewhere in the world, an elephant is walking in the forest. She liked being enigmatic and had a look to match. My guess is that she said it so that while we got granular about our choreography and exhausted ourselves with our projects, we would remember the point of it all —- how deserving of our attention, translation and wonder this vast world is —- and recall to ourselves why we were artists in the first place. Because --- somewhere in the world, an elephant is walking in the forest.

And somewhere else someone is pulling out a gun, and somewhere else someone is playing in a dress. And somewhere else someone is standing nearby and thinks it’s beautiful. And takes a picture.

---

Viola Farber, Summerspace, 1958

TIP – Off to the top of my head, Paris in Springtime instead.

TOTE – Chocolate Stateside: The Chocolate room, Brooklyn, NY. The best.

TRUTH – Time is not impervious or neutral. It’s Given -- in love, for love. But fallen.

For my Mom,

In her August birthday month when so many blooms go bust and start again.