I’ve been dreaming about Paris lately. Not that I’m living there again, but that I’m in the midst of a “pop over for a long weekend” trip. I see old friends and older friends and meet a new baby who isn’t new anymore. I go grocery shopping (mmmm---the grocery stores of France. Not even the markets, the bakeries or patisseries, but the grocery stores, with rows of exotic chocolate bars and familiar shampoos, with more varieties of dairy products than you can begin to understand). I walk across bridges and consider myself lucky—two of my favorite activities while I lived there.
I pause in the middle of this paragraph to pull banana bread muffins out of the oven. Mmm. No banana bread muffins in Paris. Unless I made them. Which I wouldn’t. I’d never be able find a muffin tin or baking soda. There were things like this that I missed, comforts—foods and things I couldn’t seem to find, baby powder and Fresca and microwave popcorn and big, heaping plates of nachos. But these all fade into the background, along with the hassles of living away from your native country, dealing with bureaucracy in a second language, finding a time to call your brother nine time zones away and not being close enough to attend any but the most monumental family gatherings. These are all forgotten, and as I dream of walking down the narrow alleys around my old apartment I don’t even have to pause to sidestep dog poop.
The hardest thing about my time in Paris was ultimately that I had too much of it. Too much free time and looseness. I worked 12 hours a week in a high school and gave the odd English tutoring cum babysitting lesson for an hour here or there, but mostly I watched bad tv made worse through dubbing. I wandered. I rode the metro from one end of the city to the other and then back around on the other side of the river. I woke in the morning with no plans, nothing scheduled, nothing expected of me. This proved deadly for me—the most structure I ever implemented was a food-centric project here or there, such as trying every kind of chocolate mousse in the store. All that got me was that I had to safety pin closed my bridesmaid’s dress to my brother’s wedding.
I could get up in the morning and wander all day. I could visit parks or settle myself among the mosh pit of gravestones in the cimetiere Pere Lachaise. I couldn’t do much more than wander, though, because my sketchy teaching job involved even sketchier pay. The first year, I could go “visit” my favorite pieces of art; the Chagalls at the Centre Pompidou, michelangelo’s slaves at the Louvre. The second year, however, my intimacy with dead artists abruptly ended, the romance ruined when they stopped letting teachers in to the permanent collections for free and made us shell out 8 euros like common tourist. I couldn’t afford to spend that much on a whim, and I wouldn’t enjoy staying long enough to justify the expense, so I found myself back at home, watching “Little House on the Prairie” or “Starsky et Hutch” (Starsky et Hutch, Starsky et Hutch, les nouveaux chevaliers au grand coeur mais qui n’ont jamais peur de rien).
So maybe I didn’t get much accomplished. But the point was that I could have. I think these dreams don’t mean that I actually want to hop over to France for a weekend. I’ve got a job that won’t let me, a bank account that won’t let me, and personality that dreads doing anything that hasn't been planned for at least a month in advance. Oh, all that, and I’ve got a wedding to plan.
Yikes! I’m getting married. Freud said that dreams, as well as symptoms of mental illness, were the realization of a desire. When you dream of killing your brother, and you counter that you don’t want to kill your brother, he explains that all these desires are balanced by counter-desires that keep them in check. Maybe he’s just making you crazy, which makes a teeny little part of you want to kill him, while the rest of you wants to continue to love him and grow up with him, at least until the next time he teases you about that big zit on your forehead. While I'm not crazy about most of Freud's theories, I've gotta say I think he's right on the mark when it comes to dreams.
In case you forgot I had one, this is my point. Marriage is scary. Case in point (there’s that word point again!): as I am about to connect myself permanently with another human being, I begin to dream of a city that meant, for me, no schedule, no rules, no boyfriend, few attachments, and lots of time to wander aimlessly and ponder difficult questions like “where the heck am I going” and “no really, where am I going, this street must be stuck in the crease of my map” and “ nutella-banana or nutella-coconut?”
Suddenly it seems there will be no more wandering. No more not knowing where I am headed. No more getting up whenever and going wherever. I am attached. I have a job, an apartment, insurance, two cats, and a fiancé who will soon be a husband. The thing is, I want this. I dreamed of this. My fiancé, my Joshua, is a fantastic, funny, and loving guy who is a good cook and an even better dancer. My cats snuggle with me at night and call me mama (that’s “mow” in cat, in case you were wondering). I like my apartment and this city and my job. I like our neighbors. I like being close to my family. I even like getting up at the same time every day. I like Tupperware and the satisfaction that comes from using a powerful lightweight vacuum cleaner. I like the rituals of home life, and I know that there are more to come as we move into a house and start having babies.
I do want to go back to Paris, but I don’t want to pop over for a weekend. I want to live there for a year with my husband and our young child. We will both have jobs and will have planned to make this move. We will continue our adventures, the two of us, hand in hand through those narrow alleyways of Paris with a little one in tow.
