This entry aspires to catalogue, not to reflect. Its descriptions are haphazard and secondary, but they'll have their way with the story, I imagine.
Christmas was what Christmas has always been for me, the happiest of occasions to ignore the inevitability of work-like things and to revel with family. And Natalie's family revels well. Even though sister- and brother-in-law Alia and Brandus were tossed about by the frivolity of travel gods and arrived from Colorado halfway through Christmas dinner, and even though a relation had found him- or herself involuntarily obliged to the state's judicial system for an as-yet-to-be-determined length of time, and even though I still have trouble keeping up when twenty or so people from the same family are seated for a meal, I loved my Christmas in Dalton.
And yet... Natalie's grandmother had been hospitalized just before the holiday, and, sadly, we learned that she had been suffering from an ovarian cancer that had metastasized aggressively. She was unable to leave the surgical ICU, and her absence at Christmas was marked.
Almost immediately after returning to D.C., I rode up to Philadelphia with Ryan for the MLA meetings. I should note at this point that the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Years were travel intensive. That will be more than clear soon, but part of the matter, here, is what remains a general anxiety about flying. The good news, though, is twofold: again, I spent enough hours on planes to feel cured (we've seen that fade before), and the several flights we took on Canadair Regional Jets, something that had me worried, were actually just fine. In fact, the RJ doesn't feel much smaller than the mid-range MD88s, depending on where you're seated. The back row, between the aft-mounted engines, is less than elysian, but row 8 isn't bad.
Anyway...
I have absolutely nothing to say about MLA that hasn't been repeated by the legions already. I recommend attending before going on the market, though, as the pressure is primarily to take it all in, instead of running to elevators and tweaking the fine points of interview presentations between hotel rooms. I felt edified by most of the sessions I attended (and I went to a lot). A few times, I regretted not submitting proposals to a panel.
Philadelphia was nice, at least the ten blocks of center city I walked. Good to see a few friends who've moved along.
The celebrated interview sort of gets beyond my efforts to say anything about it. I repeated my silly assertion that this is "where I do naïve and reckless things," at least twice. Not surprisingly, I left the room (announcing stupidly that "there are apparently these discipline-specific cash bars, and I really need to go to one") feeling a little tingle of regret. It was very good to meet Chuck, Miriam, and Nick; always good to see ...Zombie and Matt. We were very pleasant, generally, even when asked to announce whether or not we read each others' blogs. Somehow, I got out of answering that.
The life writing cash bar was, as a matter of fact, very much worthwhile. Got to talk for a bit with a few notables in the field without feeling network-y.
So, furiosly swimming out of the MLA whirlpool, took Amtrak (a first for me) from Philly to D.C., unpacked, repacked, pet the cat, and got to Dulles within a few hours to catch our flight to Munich, where we were to catch a quick flight (see above, "Canadair Regional Jet") (God, I love Lufthansa) to Paris. The flight over was nicely uneventful. The Munich airport less cool than Frankfurt, which has great steel girding and rigging everywhere. MUN felt like Ikea. The quick flight to Charles De Gaulle (see above, "back row") went well, but was mostly subsumed by the glee of arrival). As most of you reading this very likely know already, CDG's escalator/moving floor system may well be the best use of the space age aesthetic in a public space. I could be wrong, here, but the image of all these people in glass tunnels riding across an atrium from level to level just looked so Alphaville.
We took the RER into the city, having purchased Metro cards, and lost some purchasing power by making dollars into Euros. Lots of trash.
The city met and exceeded expectations. My recommendation is to arrive cynically, ready to be let down by this place everyone's been telling you is so wonderful since you were a high-school freshman in French I. And so I did. And so Paris won.
My introduction, as it should be, was rushed and metropolitan. New Year's Eve on the Metro, rushing along sidewalks to get to the cafe below Katherine's apartment, where she and Amy would meet us. When we showed up, under the sound navigation of Natalie, whose ability to get around and to communicate in the language laid the foundation for my happy visit, all was perfect. A good reunion with college friends on a Paris sidewalk... Katherine the hostess was sublime. A welcoming friend with an apartment overlooking a park in the sixth arrondissment cannot be over-appreciated.
I saw the places one sees when one hasn't been to Paris. Notre Dame gave me chills. Shakespeare & Co. was sold out of copies of A Moveable Feast (I actually had to whisper to the clerk, dreading her response. She made it clear that, no, six copies had been sold in the last couple of hours, so, sorry, we're out.). The Eiffel Tower is much higher than you think. If you're not certain whether or not your fear of heights lingers, this is not the place to learn. The first level was plenty high for me. This was the vantage point for the new image in the (dave e) header. New Year's Eve dinner still makes me drool. Our dessert course arrived around 12:30. Mmmmmmmmm.
We left on the second, having learned late on New Year's Day that Natalie's grandmother, who had seemed to be improving before we left, had passed away. We were up all night on New Year's Day, trying to book flights all the way to Chattanooga, the closest airport. In the morning, Natalie had an interesting back-and-forth with our Parisian cab driver, who insisted on the feasability of [t]he [a]merican [d]ream until Natalie asked for an example. After a good many hesistant starts, he managed to describe Will Smith, whose name Natalie offered... He knew we were from Washington, and as we arrived at CDG and worked out the tip, he observed, tu es politique! oui, monsieur... bein sur. c'est vrais. nous sommes politiques. Four flights in twenty-four hours. My notebook entry for January 2nd: "CDG - MUN - IAD - ATL - CHA."
Our funeral week in Dalton was hard on Natalie and her family though the comfort of a large family's gathering made things better, as it always will. Jimmie Bailey spent her life in a small-ish town and was a sort of town matriarch. I was astonished but unsurprised by the number and the feeling of the crowd who attended the visitation and the funeral. Many will miss her.
We made it home, much to our cat's relief, last Wednesday.
Posted by dave at January 16, 2005 8:35 PM | TrackBack