Finding My Paris

I need to find my own Paris. My dad found his, the actual place, during World War II. Then he left it to return to the young wife he'd left in the States and the infant son he'd never seen.

Before Europe, he was just another kid who'd one day walked off the farm. After that, he was, well, whatever he chose to be. He never said if he felt the experience had changed him. I think he's one of those who would take pride in the notion that it hadn't. But Jesus, Paris.

Maybe Key West was my Paris and I didn't know it. No doubt, it's as profoundly affecting a place as I'll ever experience. But the whole time I was there it seemed to exist as, I dunno, a commercially-processed footnote to history or appalling glimpse at a possible future. You know, the futile search for Hemingway's ghost or the grimy panhandler, a block from the hotel, who pulls back his hand when he looks into your eyes and sees your ragged soul.

Maybe it was the company I was keeping at the time. I was there with my wife, and neither of us was much inclined to share more than living space with the other. Every day, we'd walk the length of Duval Street and dutifully linger for the sunset at Mallory Pier. And never once, in the whole time, did we even hold hands.

Maybe, over time, we'd just grown away from the idea. But there was also some well-founded distrust. So that anytime afterward, when I'd think of the Keys, it was always about finding a new life, a life of my own.

So maybe that's my Paris: not really a place at all, but any means by which this life might finally be my own...