Finding My Paris

[thisnewday]

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...

Comments

[swamp-rose.livejournal.com]

"Paris?"

"Key West?"

Or somewhere in your soul - so perfectly unattainable? Keeping a dream alive?

Or - just go. Or - just stay.

Pros? Cons?

Sometimes "realization of a goal" is more disappointing than not going.

At least, you would still have your dreams.

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

well yeah, there's certainly truth in all of this. but, in the end, you've died a slow death. and the worst of it has gotta be that, just before the end, you realize your dreams have preceeded you. and by a most unseemly interval.

now, i'll grant you, there are probably worse things. in fact, i think i've lived through some of them. but this is not the way i want to feel, as i'm drawing my last breath.

so the question really is, how do you create that choice, if, in fact there's to be one...

[swamp-rose.livejournal.com]

Alternatives? Choices made without knowing consequences?

What if you were drawing your last breath in Paris/Key West and never held your little guy?

Can not such a reality supercede an old dream?

We of the free will have the power to create a new dream.

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

you know, i really have done a lot of things for the sole purpose of being part of my grandson's life. and i've never regretted any of them.

but i also think that, after he and his dad moved out, the level of pain was such that i tried to find other places to invest my life.

and now i'm struggling to reconcile all of that with the renewed opportunity to participate in his and his dad's life more or less full time.

so the short answer is, yes, to have missed out on any of it, including the pain, would have been a tragedy almost without precedent or parallel in my own life...

[swamp-rose.livejournal.com]

a life well lived is the best revenge. don't know who said it. no one wants our angst anyway. too much for them to handle.