...dancing and reacting have been my life for the last 10 years. I've bemoaned this fact for just as long. It's time to let go. The message arrived this morning, in the form of the closing line in the last of the three novelettes, of Patrick Modiano's, nobel prize winning: Suspended Sentences.
This last novelette entitled: "Flowers of Rain" takes you back and forth within the narrator's life over the course of almost 50 years. Now of course, it doesn't hurt that it's set in Paris or that he hovers around the Gare d'Austerlitz. When he shares his pondering over those we've known in Paris who are no longer in our lives and where they may be or NOT be; my heart seized in my chest. It's not my time, but I feel him, the places, and the lost people all the same. He captures the mood and feel of Paris like no one else I've read. We wandered Paris together.
After many dog-eared pages, that last line may as well have been the last line for the whole book of three:
"And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner."
I sat on the sofa in my Columbus Street living room, as I put the book down and turned off the floor lamp. The light from the street snuck into the living room through the open, loovered shutters, while the ceiling fan sucked as much cool air as it could into the room. Shadows of lines and bars on the walls surrounded me. Prison or Pleasure?
I learned to do my dangle dances in Paris. It's easier there. It feels right, okay, and really...just the way it's supposed to be. I should be able to take life here in New Orleans just the same way. Why not? My Paris Professor has taught me how...it's time to rediscover the pleasure and the adventures that "lay right around every street corner" in New Orleans.
My first step...getting in touch with one of my men who keeps me in books-David Munroe. Not only did David's gift of the Modiano book take me to Paris, it brought me back home to New Orleans. It's coffee time, David!
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