Another Nostalgic Memory

I don’t know why I’m compelled to write this: it may be the mention of Kibbutznik in the last post but one, or a conversation I just had with my Mam.

(I’m also not sure why I’m compelled to post three times tonight, but that may be the fact that I haven’t done much else today, and I’m onto my second glass of wine.)

When we took the trip to Israel, we also visited a number of other countries, taking advantage of the fact that we were overseas anyway—which is a big advantage when you live on a giant island continent.

One place we stopped was Paris.

I can’t remember how long we stayed there: I was only nine years old.

I can’t remember much of Paris at all, actually, except for the following three things.

We used to breakfast on croissants in street cafes in the morning. The croissants were fresh from the oven, and every croissant I’ve ever had since has been a vague disappointment—but I eat them anyway, in some kind of futile quest. The cafes also had sugar in individually packaged cubes instead of granules. When you’re nine, that’s about as exotic as it gets.

We went to the Louvre one day, to see the Mona Lisa—among other things. But my parents hadn’t checked whether the Louvre was open on Tuesdays, and it wasn’t. We were flying out the next day, so I still haven’t seen the Mona Lisa: despite having read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I’m still not sure whether seeing it on tea towels counts.

On the last day that we were there, we came across an Algerian street trader—the fact that he was Algerian isn’t relevant in any way, just additional information.

He was selling six-foot-tall, cylindrical balloons patterned with pictures of The Smurfs.

To a nine-year-old girl, these were entirely irresistible.

(Now, of course, I can’t abide The Smurfs: smug little isolationists, with their improbable language—making one word work as a noun, and a verb, and an adjective, and an adverb, and a proper noun. I wasn’t particularly distressed when Unicef bombed their village and I wasn’t alone, if I remember the reaction to that advertisement correctly. But that’s beside the point.)

So he had these balloons, and I was enraptured. He knew it, too. He kept saying, “You want one of these?”

I’d say “Yes” just as my parents said, “No.”

We were flying out that night, and the balloon was six-feet tall.

Then a gendarme arrived.

Street trading was illegal, so the gendarme told the man to move along. But there I was, a blonde, blue-eyed, nine-year-old girl, with starry, Smurf-inspired eyes.

So the gendarme gallantly presented me with the one balloon that the man had inflated for display, while running the man off.

My parents resisted, but I accepted with alacrity.

So there we were, walking along a street in Paris: my parents thoroughly bewildered, me quite satisfied in my possession of the balloon.

Behind us ran the street trader, shouting “You owe me ten francs!”

Behind him ran the gendarme, shouting “You! Move along!”

I have no idea what the pedestrians—or should that be flaneurs, perhaps?—thought.

Of course, we came to the Metro eventually, and we couldn’t fit the balloon through the doors. So my father put a hole in it with a pair of nail scissors, deflated it, and folded it into a pocket.

My parents swore we could re-inflate it when we got home.

But we never could.

Is that shallow, for one’s best memory of Paris?