PARIS, FRANCE - Moving about the City of Light with my sweet Jimmy last week, I couldn't help but remember Ernest Hemingway.
Not the man himself. I am and always will be completely devoted to my husband of 30 years but the writer’s declaration that Paris is a “moveable feast” had taken hold of me and wouldn’t let go.
The constant sound of cars and foot traffic. Men and women munching on baguettes while marching down crowded streets or seated sipping wine along crowded sidewalks, cigarette smoke rising above them. And row upon row of magnificent, monumental architecture.
No matter how slow you move about, it takes your breath away.
Two days in I was simply in love.
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Not even coming face-to-face with the Place de la Republique, the site of a memorial to victims of the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks, each time we stepped from the Crown Plaza hotel, our temporary residence, or the constant news reports about Donald Trump's latest gaffe could change that.
One night after strolling from one side of the city to the other, sleep refused to come to me. The majestic Champs-Elysees, picturesque Montmartre and popular Belleville still held sway over me, and all I could do was lie there and talk to God.
I felt so grateful and I wanted him to know it.
As Jimmy slept peacefully beside me, I remembered meeting him 30 summers ago in Sacramento. Falling in love and marrying him just four days before Christmas in 1985 in the church where I’d clumsily recited Easter speeches as a child. The three moments when we found out we were pregnant. That horrible time we learned I’d miscarried. The birthdays and anniversaries. The deaths. The unexpected challenges. Three times packing up our home and unpacking in other places with more promises and greater challenges.
And I marveled at how each time we’d arrived on the other side of those challenges a little stronger, a little bit more determined, a lot more in love and appreciative of each other.
I knew what King David must have felt when he declared in the 23rd Psalm, my cup runneth over. In the words of my Antioch Baptist Church North family I was “sipping from my saucer ‘cause my cup had overflowed.”
I was happy that we hadn’t let fear keep us from experiencing God’s blessing as so many of people do.
All over Paris, I saw people, including visitors, as determined as we were not to live in fear. Not that I felt particularly brave; I just refuse to live my life in fear.
If Parisians could work through what happened there, if they could declare they wouldn’t live in fear, how could we not? Isn’t that what we did after 9/11?
I have no doubt that Parisians know their home may still be a target. You still can’t enter large venues without being frisked. Armed guards were still patrolling the area around the Eiffel Tower.
But if ISIS hoped to terrorize them into paralysis, it failed miserably.
I learned a long time ago that stuff happens and when it does you pick up the pieces and move on. I sensed the people here had somehow learned that, too.
As many as 129 people were killed and more than 350 were injured in the tragic events of Nov. 13 but none of it, as far as I could see, had destroyed residents' will to live.
Just as Jimmy and I learned how to heal ourselves, it was clear to me that Paris, thank God, is trying to do the same.
In the weeks leading up to our trip, I was taken aback by how many friends and family members thought Jimmy and I had taken leave of our senses when they learned where we’d chosen to celebrate our anniversary.
But nothing and no one could have made us change or plans.
From what I saw last week, from what I felt moving from one side of the city to the other, Paris remains that “moveable feast” a young Hemingway once saw, and fear has no part in that.
Despite her recent wound, I sensed the City of Light returning to her old self where the love of all things beautiful seems to gravitate and will again.
I come home re-energized with renewed admiration for the current generation who occupy Paris. They are strong and resilient and remind us over and over: “we will always have Paris.”
Now Jimmy and I own a piece of her as well.
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