Another Paris Snapshot: the boy in the café
There are endless moments in life you want to capture, so picturesque and ideal, that the world, conspiring against you, makes an impossible task. So instead we commit the moment to memory, determined to explain it as best as possible when the opportunity arises.
I nearly forgot about him, the boy in the café, until I sat down to write tonight and came across my notes from the trip…
It was our final morning. The sun was still out, the air just warm enough to remove your jacket in the direct light. Wafts of smoked drifted up from the young group of people seated behind us. We were finishing up our conversation about what our ideas and our perceptions of “frenchness”, two glasses of champagne sat between us, our chairs turned out to watch the people. When a family came to sit at the table directly in front of ours. There was nothing remarkable about them, I probably wouldn’t have even been able to recall them at all if it hadn’t been for the boy.
There at the seat closest to our table, the young boy sat pushed his glasses on his nose, crossed his thin legs and opened L’Appel Sauvage, The Call of the Wild, by Jack London. He looked like a little scholar, the type of kid that answers everything seriously and rationally. No more than seven or eight in age and with a seriousness rarely seen in children. It was sort of like someone had taken our ideas of what a young bookish french man might be like and transported into the body of this child. He read until his tea came, which his grandmother help him prepare, and a salad with with thin slices of dried ham.
The whole thing struck me like a montage from the opening to a French film. It could have been Blame it on Fidel.
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