The imaginary traveler

Here's what bothers me the most about these Covid-19 days, going on and on without resolution or salvation (or, in this city-state-country, sanity): the inability to grab a ride to the airport and head for somewhere interesting.  We have been holed up so long, keeping busy with the mundane work and make-work that fill the day, not to mention tiring, desperate negotiations of space when we do venture out for a bit of air.  Travel seems like a lost dream that haunts me.

It's not that I don't have plenty to do.  But these days Paris and Provence seem to have taken over the dream waves.  The romanticism of the place grows as farther I get from the possibility of return any time soon. I pick up articles and books on French life, fiction and non-, and download French movies, especially those with my favorite actors...Juliette Binoche, Patrick Bruel, Fannie Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, Sandrine Bonnaire, Gerard Depardieu.  I lean in, listening hard to their spoken French more than watching the translated words at the bottom of the screen, though I miss more than I catch.  In the air, French songs even Alexander will dance to.

On Prime, I found a teacher who laid out the verb faire (to make or do...the French think of them as the same verb) in idioms I could actually use, should I arrive on the Blvd. Raspail wanting to take a walk or do some shopping.  I've copied them down, each day memorizing another of the two-page list.  Tu fais la tete a moi?  Je le regard...

Pathetically, I leave my Paris guide book on the table so as a book or film flashes a scene at me, I can open the map and pinpoint it exactly, perhaps even remembering when I, too, walked over that very pont.  Yesterday, the latest issue of France Today tauted a neighborhood in the 19th arrondisement that I hadn't heard about, though apparently it's becoming trendy.  I made a note to find an apartment there for a month or so, somewhere close to the tiny streets of burgeoning art galleries and ateliers, convenient outdoor cafes, and small hidden prizes among les bistrots. I see Saint Chappelle is in easy walking distance for concerts.  Ah!  bon, there is an open-air market, where I can get everything I need, even if I leave on the next plane without bothering to take a suitcase.  

photo:  France Today

When the French decide I am responsible enough to resume visitation, I promise myself to be the first one off the Paris Star from London.  (Maybe I should fly to Heathrow now to be ready ...will they let me in?) 

 I promise to wear a mask everywhere and slide far enough away around crowds.  I will pick a morning when everyone is at a boule tournament to visit the Jacquemart-Andre and, though I love lunching in that elegant salon, will picnic all by myself in a quiet copse of that little garden attached to a little museum on a street I can't remember right now, except it was down the rue from the Carnavalet.

Is all this fantasy healthy, I wonder? And yet I can feel it in my bones, particularly today when a sort of wanderlust has sacked my energy.  Though I have kept the ordinary going...cooking market vegetables, tearing out and re-hemming a difficulty in what ought to be a simple child's quilt, making list upon list to do another day, watching Alexander learn with his virtual schoolmates...here is this blog post about Paris.  It could easily have been about Menerbe.

Outside my window, the leaves of the tulip poplar drop yellow, one by one.  I think of the plane trees along the boulevards about to do the same.  It's not a difficult leap to make, imagined or en realite'.