Deux

Sleepless again at odd hours scribing with the stylus of my right thumb on an electronic tablet no bigger than my hand, the past, present and future converging in technology as in my life.

How could I have known at the end of December 2010, when I was begging for crumbs at love's table-i.e. the buffet spread at my ex's place in Brooklyn, my once second home, for a winter solstice celebration to which she invited me as one of the select in her life--that at the end of December 2011 those crumbs would read as, well, crumbs in comparison to the rich feast of friends the first days of the solstice in Paris have laid out for me? Last to awaken Christmas morning, I rose to find these friends, normally from my life's outer rings, had set out croissant, toast, butter, jam, juice and champagne on the dining room table, and waited for me to catch up to them.

Timing is everything only if you make it everything.

An hour later, freshly scrubbed, we greeted the sun breaking through late morning clouds as we strolled to Sully Morland metro station to catch the train to Chatelet then switch to another that would spill us out into the Christmas tempered bustle of Les Puces marketplace.

Dan, veteran of the stalls, led us to his favorite marchés, but nothing caught our eyes enough to make us lay down our Euros for antiques and tchotchkes. Several hours of browsing did make us want to lay down our Euros for lunch, however. Back on the metro, both the Pound imagiste poem and the 80s Berlin tune on my mental tracks, we rode back to Chatelet. We emerged not to faces in a crowd but the plate glass of Brasserie Benjamin. Crepes for Christmas? Why the hell not? Make that crepes, bordeaux, crepes, coffee and chocolat chaud. At the table next to ours, two 20- something Americans too precocious for their own good, discussed human rights struggles on a first date.

Back out in the gloaming, we followed our feet to pretty Saint Eustaches. Christopher and Wils tired quickly of the tourists and the ritual inside but Dan and I, the Jew and paganist/lapsed Catholic, lit votives, took pictures, walked thrice around the perimeter. Adam the architect sat and contemplated.

Dan and I eventually followed the architect out and let him lead us to the Pompidou Center, which he'd only ever read about in schoolbooks. Nearby in a square, a mother and father kicked around a soccer ball with their kid. The mother was the goalie, which somehow didn't surprise me.

Adam, who'd never traveled outside the US til this trip, led us on to City Hall next, for an up-close look at the shimmering lights of the hall's holiday decor and the two-tiered carousel that we'd only seen from a distance the night before. The skating rink too blared light and excitement, the evening crowd, released from their familial holiday obligations, shredding the ice, perhaps writing over and over on its blank surface their past year's memoirs.

Home for the night, after quick naps or phone calls to family, all of us--Wils and Christopher arriving 20 minutes behind me, and Dan and Adam--gathered again around the table, this time for a Christmas supper of wine, cheese, spiced leeks, and eggs scrambled with potatoes and spinach. We laughed about everything and nothing, whipped out, like good gays, pictures of our cats, shared small war stories about our upbringings, took pictures of the yule log dessert before we devoured it, suggested outings for tomorrow.

Went to bed full.