“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

There is something universal about a screaming baby. And there are four of them on the plane.

This is Air France direct, an “Airbus A380”—our home for the next seven hours, along with 552 other people on board. Double decker. When I flew home on one of these monsters in 1988 after a year away, they messed up my ticket and I got to fly First Class, seated next to the pilot‘s wife on the 2^nd level, up a little round staircase. When they brought her a glass of wine and a magazine, they brought me one, too. This trip, however, is a far cry (get it?!) from first class.

Keep in mind, I have not travelled internationally since 9/11. Not since five weeks after 9/11, actually, when I left this same passenger to my right at 16 months of age for the first time in her life—out of her company for the first hour in the 9,912 hours she had already been alive—to take Paul to France. Nowadays, the seats on a plane, unless of course you have paid for first class, are less like seats than a docking station out of the Matrix. After neatly storing our svelte and quite blend-in carry-ons overhead (pas de problem—I wonder if every other international on this flight has brought stones from home or other contraband??), we then bend, fold, and slide our bodies into a VERY upright bank of L-shaped bays. Hmmmmmm…will the next thing be a flight…or an MRI? At online check-in, modern Jenny (ONLINE check in! On a CELL PHONE! What’s next??!) had changed our seats from the last row on the plane to a nice little row of three right up there by the wing. (Good news). A nice little row that, come to discover, doesn’t recline because it is one of two emergency exit rows (bad news). Happily, it is right next to the galley (good news), which is active all night (bad news). So much noise, clatter and slashes of light as they slide the ineffective little airplane curtain back and forth to prep and deliver 500 TV dinners, along with a round of 500 drinks before dinner and 500 coffees after. Every so often the galley lights would go off and they would draw closed the curtain for twenty minutes of pure roaring plane engine “silence,” at which point, you guessed it—the screaming babies would start up again. They took turns keeping the whole flight miserably awake. The girls were troopers–Sophie with her long frame bent and crooked, wedged sort of Gumby-style trying to sleep, and Ellie, who after her summer of 18-hour days could sleep anywhere–in her glory at the endless movie selection available in a little video monitor immediately in front of her. In fact, it is VERY in front of her, as even though our row doesn’t recline, the one in front of us does. So we can either drink our coffee, or in a pinch reach for theirs.

We arrive at Charles de Gaule airport, deplane, and are greeted by Laurent D, son of the family I lived with in 1985. He has just texted me a photo of himself, waiting, so I know who to look for in the sea of faces that wait outside the international arrivals hall, but he is taken by pure surprise to see this old gray-hair towing a suitcase of rocks and 10 T shirts. He looks right at me for a stalled moment of zero recognition and then, after a breath, he gets it. Hugs, hellos, introductions—the familiarity of a lifetime half-passed—it all comes flooding back. We are arrived.

We drive to his charming, being-renovated house in Gournay-sur-Marne. The Marne is a sleepy, ale-colored river winding its way northwest of Paris. Right next to the Disneyland France, which is on all the road signs as we go screaming past. Did I tell you the French drive fast? Did I tell you how fast? More on that later. Happily, I already have the Marne in my “Waters of the World” collection, so we don’t have to stop. His house is a charming brick and stone maison in the classic style, probably 19^th century and—thanks to their ownership and renovations, not being torn down. There are several others like it, they point out as we take a walk, that will soon be demolished to construct lower-income housing, which is a law in France. Every municipality must accommodate a certain amount of subsidized housing, so grand historic homes are being raised to put up apartments.

We are served brunch on a large plank table half inside, half out, as the dining windows—or are they doors?—open straight onto a little jardin and the morning air is fresh. It is 9:30 their time. It is 3:30 in the morning, ours. Remember those babies? Thank you, babies. Because of them the shell-shocked girls decide that yes, in fact, they do drink coffee. Espresso coffee?? Sure, why not. Anything to shake that hum out of our ears and head-achy jet lagged feeling. We make polite conversation, breakfasting in a house of people that weren’t here the last time I was—Laurent’s wife of 20 years (who, as it turns out, is not a mid-sized car), Agnes, and his two children, teenagers unhappy with the time of day they have been called to table from their beds. Theo, who is 16, and has just passed the Bac and Solene, 14. They are very not happy with the situation yet put on smiles of polite tolerance, a loose mix of their childhood manners well-taught and a newfound adolescent incredulity that something not quite of their liking is, indeed, transpiring. Insoucisance. Once again, universal. This is their first day of vacation and if it’s anything like our house, then right up to last night they probably thought they were in for a nice long, loose day of sleeping in and being un-accosted while their parents tended to vacation plans and packing. Instead, the Americans have arrived. There are strangers tromping up their stairs on a house tour and peering in their bathroom.

And not only that, their grandparents are arriving, who live 30 minutes away across the city. This is Irene and Claude, who were my age when they hosted me 32 years ago as a summer exchange student. The years fall away and once again I am with more emotions than words to express them. We eat–a feast of pastry, bread, sliced sausage and ham, everything you would picture in a Bonne Cuisine magazine, spread on a hewn oak plank table on a stone patio overlooking a thankfully less-kept garden. This is good, because with pounding headaches and wrinkled, stale clothing we are anything but fit for an elegant magazine meal. Pass the Nutella, s’il vous plait. And the café.

After the meal we walk. It is a pretty neighborhood with narrow sidewalks and a wide footpath along the river that leads to a park. It’s a weekday so there aren’t many folks out at the start of day, but this is a good call for us—to keep moving, to be outside in fresh air seeing things and already taking it in, beginning the “intake” mode of the traveler –awakening curiosity and wonder where our culture has so, so dulled this capacity. I walk with Claude, making small talk about the flight, trying to translate for Sophie, and catch him up on thirty years gone by. Up ahead, Ellie and Agnes walk together, conversing in French like old friends. In taking our leave, it is obvious we have made new friends, the way traveling will do. In the course of one meal, one walk, one scrap of a morning, I become a potential host to the next generation who would set foot off their soil and come to mine. Likewise, either of my daughters will be welcomed here, or anywhere life takes this family, at any time, for the rest of their lives. It is the code of hospitality, shared universally by those who love to travel. It is unspoken, and unnecessary to speak it. It is simply true.

After we say our goodbyes it is time for the car ride home, and through Paris. The very first views of the city I left three decades ago. We drive right to the tourist office to retrieve the museum passes I purchased online. Rue des Pyramides. Street of Pyramids?? C’est vrai. Come to find out, someone has stuck a huge glass pyramid in the courtyard of the 17^th century Palais de Louvre, where once there was not. Even peering out the tiny back window of the car I’m in, the span of time is not lost on me, and my nostalgia for paltry decades pales before the juxtaposition of eight centuries. In the 12^th century the first King of France, Philip II, built a defensive outpost near what was then the western border of Paris, along the bank of the River Seine.  Eight hundred years later the French president rallied for a Chinese architect to design a new entrance which (if you’re a critic) is an Egyptian symbol of death or (if you’re a fan) recalls a nexus of all corners of the world resembling, say, an international airport. And today, you enter the enormous Renaissance palace through a giant glass structure—71 feet high and 112 wide at one side. The pyramid is now on every picture, postcard, and rubics cube containing the nine most famous monuments in all of Paris. C’est incroyable! I’ve been gone long enough for an icon to develop.

Passes in hand, we are back into what has to be smallest car on the street—it is pretty uncomfortable, and the beginning of a pretty strong aversion of riding in cars that Sophie and I will develop on this trip. For one, my latent claustrophobia (unlike the rest of me) is wide awake, sandwiched as I am between my daughters in a teeny Renault “Clio” 4.5-seater. Next to this, the airplane seat is a Barcalounger. I am sick with jet lag, claustrophobia, and fear as my city whizzes past at 90 KM/hour through a tiny thumbnail window. Maybe it’s a good thing our timed tickets up the Eiffel Tower got canceled on account of strikes—as I recall that is a pretty tight space, too, and I will have plenty of upcoming opportunities to savor my claustrophobia in the 10 days ahead when I find myself (a) inside an elevator the size of your refrigerator, and (b) alone, on the top (6^th) floor in a hotel room the size of your bathroom. I’m not kidding. There’s a reason they call the toilets here a water CLOSET.

Now we are at last in Viroflay, at the little house on the rue Joseph Bertrand, and we are lugging our suitcases up two little flight of stairs to our first stop for three nights. It is much as I left it, minus children and a dog. I am desperate for a shower, the girls for Wi-fi, which fails even after much digging through papers and manuals by Irene, who uses a computer daily yet does not have the first clue how wi-fi comes into her house. In the end it involves texting Laurent so he can telephone his parents and instruct them on how their router/internet connection works and might be shared with the American visitors. It’s good to know that technological ignorance is, among other things, universal.

I don’t remember much about dinner that night except that it was eaten on a delightful garden patio. The girls did me so proud, so very proud, seated and making the best of jet lag and (for Sophie) a conversation she could not understand and Ellie–because it was souvenir talk—a  conversation she could not participate in. Well do I remember that head-ache, of being surrounded by talk in a foreign tongue. Words. Noise. And not part of it. When I was in Viroflay the first time my best companion was actually not the other teenagers my age but the neighbor’s nine-year-old little girl, because she and I could speak more simply, and therefore freely.

The girls also made the best of dinner. Their efforts to be at this table—to be awake, to be polite and more so, to be engaged and well…just there, it touches me to my tired heart. I am so proud of them I cannot look across the table at them for fear of tearing up, so I focus instead on what is now on my plate—a slice of what I first understood was fish pate, but I now think is chicken, a sort of minced meat congealed in a jelly-like substance and sliced with a knife. When I told Sophie it was fish pate her smile never wavered and she never flinched, not once. She simply cut herself a decent slice and gave it a go. Then a bowl of cold creamed beans, another bowl of taboule and salad, all cold, all delicious (except the jelly). They drink wine, we drink water and are most pleased with the basket of bread. We sit quietly while the dusk settles, watching the battery-powered Huskavarna lawn mower programmed to mow the little square of grass which constitutes the backyard. It is the replacement of a plug-in mower (with electric cord!) that I wrote about in 1987, coming from a 14-acre property to this postage stamp of a suburban property and marveling at their grass cutting method. Tonight, it is a determined little robo-vac with teeth doing the job, quietly, determinedly rumbling along like a puttering mole, bumping into the rockery or edge of the garden and then tracing and retracing its route. When we run out of things to comment on, or I run simply out of the ability to translate or to think at all, we sit, the five of us watching the little mower and the delaying sunset, which takes its own sweet time at 10:30 at night, to rest.

The night is very warm, and there is no AC. Only huge dormer windows opened wide to the streets below. No screens, and no breeze either–just wide open air and the noises of a passing car or voices and heel-steps as people pass by on the sidewalk below. In the morning, there will be jackhammers, but we don’t know that yet. It has  been 36 wakeful hours since we left home, and we are desperate for sleep. I climb into the childhood bed of their daughter, awash with old memories and a prayer of thanks for safe arrival.