Paris itself represents the timeless values of human progress.
Those who think that they can terrorize the people of France or the values that they stand for are wrong.
~President Barack Obama
Paris has long been my ideal. While I concede that my love for Paris is romantic, mine is not a postcard passion prompted by landmarks or lovers or croissants. It is true love, borne of reverence and gratitude for liberty pledged to tolerance and humane consciousness.
I read the news now. Every day.
There was a period when I covered my eyes with my hands, as a child hoping that the fright will vanish if she does not look. I put on the blindfold after Peter got sick and died. Peter told us that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer as if confessing to a crime. He said that he had been weak during his constant coverage of the September 11 attacks and had succumbed to smoking again. I wanted to say, “Peter, you are not weak. There is no shame in being sick. You are magnificent.”
Baby Honey died yesterday. “Baby Honey,” an apparent misnomer, as she was the sovereign grown-up and her temperament was not an easy and recognizable sweet. Baby Honey was a strong, old-fashioned, hat-wearing, proper, church-going, God-loving woman. And yet, as I mine memory, I realize that her name is indeed fitting, for thoughts of Baby Honey are inseparable from the sweet, verdant scent of Easter Sunday.
I am slow to tears. Of the scores of movies that I have watched, the hundreds of books that I have read, each medium has provoked but a single crying episode. The movie, I am embarrassed to name. The book, Great Expectations, during the scene in which Pip awakens to find that he has been nursed to health by the ever-loving, all-good Joe, the rustic brother-in-law whom Pip has discounted and discarded in typical social climber fashion.
Tonight, I add to the book count, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.
While bibliophile tortoises shun the evil digital destroyer, I hippety-hopped aboard the e-book revolution sans reservation, having been an owner of Kindle 1st generation. I am not nostalgic for that earthy book scent, the graze of wafer sheets against my fingertips, the multi-colored mélange of rectangles stacked upon shelves. Though a romantic of the early nineteenth century sort, I am not a traditionalist and can easily forgo old conventions in favor of new conveniences.