A friend last night remarked how eerie it was that I had written only days ago about Paris.
I had thought it wasn't really about Paris, at least not by design. I was musing, as I often do, about life and love and other profound mysteries. The elasticity of the human heart. The beauty of a crisp autumn day. The sweet buttery taste of a perfect croissant.
The caption at the bottom of the television screen remained unchanged for hours last night: At least 153 killed in Paris terror attacks. This could not be happening again. Less than a year after coordinated attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish grocery store and a few other gratuitous kills, satire lives on and Parisian Jews still buy food and people walk around, feeling safe. Months from now, Parisians will again enjoy concerts and soccer games on a Friday night, and an entire country will no longer be on lock down. C'est la vie. La vie continue.
I am glad I remember Paris the way I do, exactly six years ago, when I finally fell hopelessly under its spell. The news coverage of last night's carnage was, somewhat mercifully, blurred by darkness. Mostly, I listened. To the not-so-distant wail of sirens. To tongue tied reporters trying to articulate what is still, to most of us humans, unthinkable. I wondered if Paris would look familiar to me when the sun came up. I wondered if the croissants would ever taste as good.
When I returned home from my first visit to Paris, I couldn't eat bread. Especially French bread; even the still warm, extra long loaves cleverly packaged in white bags adorned with tiny French flags. I learned, soon after, that it's all about the water. You just cannot replicate French bread with Chicago water. You can come close, but you can't make a New York bagel here either. French bread.* New York bagels.* That's the best we can do.
As humans, we adjust to these things, the minor adversities and inconveniences that go hand in hand with our instinctive will to survive and our realistic expectation that life is not perfect. Life goes on, la vie continue, without French bread or New York bagels in Chicago; there are certainly enough simple pleasures out there to keep us content, to help us appreciate the ones that are harder to come by.
Life also goes on after the unthinkable happens. We don't forget but we keep going. A sparkling new tower lights up the sky by Ground Zero now, lit up in red, white, and blue stripes, in solidarity with our friends across the pond. Tragedy is a part of life; we mourn, and then we keep living. I like to think it's not only because of a lack of better alternative. There really is a lot of good stuff here.
My Paris post the other day, my 'love and loss and mysteries of the universe' post, was a little bit about game theory. About how love isn't -- or at least shouldn't be -- a zero-sum game. Love for one thing doesn't -- or at least shouldn't -- cancel out love for another. And, I suppose, we can only hope that the kind of hate that cast darkness over Paris and humans everywhere last night cannot take away all the good stuff. I marveled, only days ago, about the capacity of the human heart to stretch and always make more room. I despair, today, about the capacity of a frightening number of seemingly heartless humans to hate and destroy and fail to see what seems so obvious to the rest of us.
It's counterproductive to wonder when the next monster will come out from under the bed, hell bent on destruction. But on mornings after, when the sun comes up and the unthinkable mess is in full view, it's tough to focus on the croissants. No matter how many terrorists have blown themselves up or let someone in law enforcement do the honors, we know it's not a zero-sum game, and there are plenty more where they came from.
Social media enabled folks in Paris to mark themselves safe. It was reassuring, for those of us who immediately ran through our mind's Rolodex to account for friends and loved ones who might be in harm's way. It would be nice if we could think of "safe" as a permanent status, but we all know better.
We'll always have croissants and French bread and New York bagels, and we'll always have Paris. And, la vie continue, because that's how we roll, Well, la vie continue.*
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