Gay Pairee

That's Becca and her dog Squinchy

So, my friend Becca Rose is in Paris right now.  You don't meet people like Becca very much--she's kind of like a character in a book: she speaks English and looks like an average human, but then...there's something else, too.  You could chalk it up to the fact that she was home-schooled on a farm in Snoqualmie, Washington but then went to Stanford.  Or that since she was a teeneager, she's been running a hippie camp for Seattle's counter culture youth out on her parents' land.  She has a lot of  practice playing farmer, fairy, medieval merrymaker.

Becca just does what she wants. However, unlike other people I know who do what they want, she does it because she can't help it.  I suspect she sometimes tries to be like other people, and each time I see her, I feel a little pang of relief that whatever half-hearted assimilation methods she might be using are failing.

Anyway, Becca's subletting a studio apartment in Paris this summer because that's what she felt like doing.  She's there for another couple of weeks, and yesterday she pressed me to come visit her--like, next week--just in case I wanted to act on some spontanéité. 

You can stay with me in my artists' studio and get hit on by the 20 year old Halal butcher down the block and eat lots of figs.  She said.

Of course, Becca is unaware that her invitation fills me with this mournful brand of panic. Because I want to go, but just can't. First of all, my passport has expired; second of all, I'm too poor; and fifthly, I have a kid and two jobs. I can't, but I've always wanted to go to Paris, ever since I read the Madeline books when I was zero years old.  Sometimes when Odessa's feeling particularly magnanimous at bedtime, she says "I want you to read Madeline. It Mommy's favorite. It Dessa's favorite, too."  Which is a lie, but a generous one.

And here's an even more pathetic secret: when I'm feeling sad for no real reason, Bryan asks me what's wrong, and my answer is, I never got to walk around Paris at night.  And now I'm too old. Which makes no sense, but as humans, we enjoy a few inalienable rights, one of them being that we don't have to make sense if we don't want to.

So someday, when I'm very, very old--too old to walk--somebody will doubtless roll me around Paris in a wheelchair at night.  I guess that will be okay.

Boo hoo hoo hoooo!

Here's a boo hoo song just for poor old me:

Nils Frahm - Familiar