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| "Quand j'étais un petit garçon, je voulais être un New Yorker/ When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a New Yorker" |
When I was growing up, my perception of media was somewhat warped. For the majority of my childhood, my family had a small black and white screen TV with no knobs and no cable to bring us the magic of brain-rotting consumer entertainment. We were the only family I knew of not to have a color TV set, and one of the few still using rabbit ears to bring fuzzy incomprehensible images of late 80's/early 90's broadcast network programming (primarily Star Trek the Next Generation and ABC's TGIF lineup). My parents were quite proud of this. We were more of a radio family, listening regularly to our local NPR affiliate station out of Paonia, Colorado for the majority of our news and "cultural enrichment." Our one window into a wider world of media was our primitive VCR, equipped with a remote control attached to a three foot long chord. I remember walking to the "Q and T" gas station a few blocks down the street from our house which had a small video rental service, boasting of dusty titles mostly from decades past. Ironically, the bulk of the films my mother would let us rent were originally shot in black and white, so the limitations of our colorless television set didn't pose a problem. By the age of five, I was enamored with the personalities of actors like Cary Grant, Kathryn Hepburn, Fred and Ginger, Clark Gable and so many others who I thought of as familiar friends. I had also developed a love for two cities that provided a backdrop to many of the stories that played out on the screen: New York and Paris. In my imagination, I would place myself on the Art Deco balconies of New York or the street cafés of Paris, never thinking that these were places that actually existed in real life. Now that I have made a life for myself in one of the cities of my childhood daydreams, I feel that I owe it to the little boy inside of me to experience the other.
Somehow, last summer I had accumulated a slight savings surplus in my bank account. I am still in shock that it happened, but in late July, after all of my bills had been paid, I had several hundred dollars sitting there, just staring at me, daring me to make some sort of choice. I stewed and I pondered and I turned over the possibilities in my mind of what could be done with the money. It wasn't a large enough sum to even pay a month's rent in my Manhattan apartment, but it was too large to just ignore. I thought of a number of very sensible things that could have been done with the tiny little gift I'd accidentally given myself, but then the little boy inside of me began tugging on my shirt sleeve reminding me of my life-long hope to someday see the "city of lights." I remembered the passport that I gotten six years ago and had never used, and then without even thinking, I was looking up airfares and plotting which cheeses I needed to try. I wasn't about to grow another year older without having at least a stamp in one of the empty pages of my little navy blue travel document, so I booked a ticket that happened to be just the amount of my savings, landing me in Paris 5 days before my next birthday.
For the past six months, I've been dreaming of Paris. I've been revisiting many of the old films that I watched as a child and reviewing museum catalogs for the Louvre. I've gone to many of my favorite museums in New York to brush up on the French painters and sculptors I hope to see while there, and I've even been reaching deep inside of my brain to pull out my dusty college French class vocabulary. I suppose I've always been a bit of a Francophile, which was no easy task to become while growing up in a rural mountain town of Western Colorado, but I am as I am nonetheless. The majority of the fun has been in the hope itself of fulfilling a dream and making it a reality, but a strange thing occurred in my process of indulging in my Paris daydreams, that I had not expected...
For these months that I've been trying to connect with a city across the ocean, I've found more reasons to embrace and experience and love the city in which I live. I have always loved New York, but in searching for Paris, my own city has become so much more alive to me. Whether I've been listening to French language audio programs while on the subways, and taking more time to contemplate the world around me, or sitting in coffee shops and cafés, making time to meet with friends and discuss plans, I've been making more time to slow down and be open to the wonderful things happening here and now. I've even been taking time to sit by myself in public places and make new drawings with no particular objective in mind. I've been taking more frequent little weekend walking excursions with my camera to capture the lovely things I see every day in the city, and becoming giddy over the possibilities of more New York adventures to come. The main new discovery for me has been that now I've lived here for nearly two years, I am finally beginning to feel like this place is my own and that I really do belong to it. There have been many places I've loved, but nothing has ever penetrated deep into the core of my being like this place has. For the first time in my life, I know I am right where I need to be. If I could ever love a person in the way I love New York, I would be content for the rest of my days.
At the end of this month, I will finally take my long-awaited journey to a city I've hoped to know since I can recall. I am certain that I will find a great deal to love in Paris, but I feel confident to say that my heart will always belong to New York. I am sure while there, I'll be thinking of Josephine Baker, the archetypical American in Paris singing "J'ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris" (I have two loves, my country [America] and Paris), only in my case, I'm a man in love with two cities.
