Sights & Sounds

As we sat in the Luxembourg Gardens Tuesday evening, eating homemade pasta salad from Tupperware, Ashley and I heard a strange sound: the faint roar of an airplane overhead.

Most weeks, the sound of an airplane isn't strange; along with traffic, sirens and mobile phones, it's part of the din of everyday life. But after six days of no flights into or out of Paris because of, as one aviation consultancy dubbed it, the "Ash Attack!!!" (the name is theirs; the exclamation marks are mine), this one made us stop and take notice. Jet vapor trails also usually aren't anything special. But when I glanced out of my office window the next day and saw them crisscrossing the sky, I was mesmerized for a few seconds. The ordinary had disappeared for a while, and when it returned it felt a little eerie -- like when the power goes back on and your refrigerator starts humming again.

At the park, we scanned the sky for the plane, but even though it was cloudless and blue we couldn't find it. One of the surreal aspects of the flight stoppage is that one couldn't have had better weather in which to fly than those six days when you weren't allowed to. Mornings in Paris are still crisp, but the heat of the sun during the day suggests that, after a winter that was long and cold (by Parisian standards at least), spring has finally arrived. That's why we had decided to have un pique-nique in the park Tuesday.

Seeing no plane, we returned to our dinner and the other sounds and sights: tennis balls thonking on the courts behind us, pigeons perching on the head of the statue of Paul Verlaine in front of us and, to our right, a man intently reading l'Etranger, by Albert Camus. Not even the sound of two Americans chatting in English about how their days were and what they wanted to do during the coming weekend could pull his eyes from the pages.

Earlier in the evening, as I was walking on a boulevard clogged with rush-hour traffic and pedestrians to meet Ashley, I heard the sound of a clarinet. At first I thought it might be coming from a busker on the street, but I also noticed that the sound was muffled. Then I turned to my right and discovered the source: it was a man at the wheel of a Peugeot sedan. He had been playing while waiting for the light to turn. When it did and the traffic began to move, he set down the clarinet on the front passenger seat and continued on his way, presumably to his leçon.

Just another (extra)ordinary week in Paris.

-- MBB

P.S. Here are some random photos from another pique-nique we had in the Luxembourg Gardens on Saturday. This one was with former colleagues of mine from DC. Two of them had come to Paris for work two weeks ago, but had to stay a week longer when flights were grounded. A third, who now lives in the south of France, was supposed to come to Paris last weekend, but couldn't because not only were there were no flights, there also were no trains --French railway workers were on strike. Unlike volcanic eruptions that disrupt flights across an entire continent, French railway strikes are anything but freak. From my experience so far, they are (to use a meteorological simile) like squalls that you can see coming across the water. They stir things up a bit but leave them pretty much as they were. I picture labor leaders exchanging wide-eyed glances last weekend at the timing of this particular stoppage.

Just another extra(ordinary) week in France.