Upon her return from a trip to Paris a few years before her passing my mother told me that if I ever made it to Paris, I would never leave. “There is no place in the world that is more perfect for you.” I took it then as a back-handed slight for my well-known penchant for hedonism, but I understand it now, as I write this from my second floor Airbnb overlooking the lovely park at Place d’Anvers, as gospel truth.

I have flirted with the idea of France for most of my life. Growing up in San Diego, we had to learn a language beginning in junior high school, and while nearly all of my friends learned Spanish (Duh.), I chose French. I went to French camp in the summer when I was 13 and learned how to French kiss with a beautiful young girl whose name slips my mind, but not her tongue. Later in life when I got serious about wine and began formal studies, I chose to pursue my French Wine Scholar as my first certification. All of this dancing around the perimeter, but I had never actually been there.

By age 58 it had grown into a phobia and had become a deep embarrassment. I could rattle off encyclopedic knowledge of French regions, maps, wine, history, and discuss with alacrity Camus, Kafka, Nietzsche, and maybe level one Foucault (Really, who can go beyond that?) but I would experience deep shame when I had to admit I had never even been to Paris after teaching a class on Rhône wines. “YOU’VE never been to France!?” I felt so fraudulent. It was if everything I just taught them was a lie.

What was keeping me? Perhaps a fear that France wouldn’t live up to my expectations? Or maybe it was just as simple as the planets never aligning. I can’t say, really, but with Covid came a renewed mission to sweep these dark cobwebs away from the corners of my psyche.

I tried to go in 2020 and again in 2022, each time being thwarted by the pandemic, but I finally made it this past May. And here I am today in Paris somehow for the second time in six months. And I have never loved a place so deeply, so quickly. It was made for me.

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In May, we stayed in La Marais, in the 3rd Arrondissement, a popular and trendy neighborhood, which was the perfect place to have my first landing in Paris. Surrounded by trendy shops, bars, restaurants, the Place des Vosges, but more so, the much-loved Boulangeries that live on every corner of this magical city. One might think that the French economy runs on tourism, aerospace, or even the wine industry, but Non! it’s butter. I can smell it right now coming through the eight-foot-tall windows in this apartment wafting teasingly from the Boulangerie down below.

From La Marais, we could easily walk everywhere, along the north bank of the Seine and end up at the Tuileries Garden, or across to the Île de la Cité, where we could see the massive Notre Dame under reconstruction, or the world-famous bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. We strolled in the magnificent Jardin du Luxembourg, and ate dinner on the The Calife, the upscale Seine River dinner boat floating gently under the sparkling Eiffel Tower. Our favorite YouTubers, Les Frenchies, guided us to one of the city’s best Boeuf Bourguignons in La Marais at Le Café des Musées. It’s every bit as magical as Emily makes it out to be, and I greedily bathed in the touristic light of it all.

Boeuf Bourguignons in La Marais at Le Café des Musées

This October’s stay is entirely different as we have opted for a real Parisian neighborhood where we can see and feel the people living their lives in real time. We chose the Ninth Arrondissement, just down the hill from Montmartre. The requisite boulangeries are still here, as are the prolific corner brasseries—it wouldn’t be Paris without them—but so are the coffee shops, the hardware stores, the vegetable stands, and the prolific wine shops each specializing in a specific French region. Yesterday, I bought butter, eggs, and cheese from a shop called Beurre-Oeufs-Fromages. I cried a little.

The playground across the street is full of children and their parents, or nannies, making that beautiful sound of pure joy that playing children make when climbing on playground equipment. The street sweeping machines go by early in the morning doing their best to sweep up the fallen golden leaves of the plane trees that line the street. We bought pink dahlias from the flower shop across the street and put them in an old dusty jar and placed them on our little dining table next to the window.

It’s mushroom season in October at our neighborhood vegetable shop

A couple of nights ago at about 3:00 a.m., I heard a French woman tearing someone a new one at volume 11. I never heard a reply, so I can only imagine it was a man being dressed down for some egregious offense. I lay in my bed cringing for him. Yesterday, out on the street, I saw another woman who was maybe five feet tall taking it hard to a man who was easily a foot and a half taller than her. He stooped over her as she held her face skywards berating him. I only caught a bit of the end of it in French where she said, “You don’t have anything to say? Non?” Lord help you if a French woman is angry with you.

I see the waiters in their long green aprons and starched white shirts from my window hustling to seat and serve the people sitting at the tables in front of the café across the street. The seats are always full, day and night, but there are always a few empty tables inviting me, as well. We’ve eaten at a different restaurant for the past three nights, but we’ve not walked further than two blocks. I left my hat at one by mistake two evenings ago, and they texted me by WhatsApp just after we left to come get it.

It all feels so right. Like I know it already and it knows me. It’s a place where I would never have to drive. The Metro is just across the street. Otherwise, we are already conditioned to walk several miles per day and there is just so much to see that the distance floats by. I would immediately get to know everyone in the neighborhood, nor would I ever run out of places to try, or objects to buy.

At the coffee shop the other morning, our sever was this very upbeat young man who told us in near-perfect English that he was originally from Buenos Aires. He was here studying architecture at The Sorbonne. Which meant he spoke Spanish, French, English, and he said he was also tackling Italian because it would help his job prospects. I asked him if he lived in the neighborhood and he said no, he lived in the next neighborhood over (Montmartre), so he knew nothing about this neighborhood. He told us that in Paris, nobody leaves their neighborhood unless they need to. He said that the lines between arrondissements were like borders, and between neighborhoods, they were rigid.

I understand this implicitly now. My Mom was right, there is no place in the world more perfect for me, and although I will be leaving at the end of the week to see more of France, I will be haunted by the most perfect neighborhood I have ever lived in.

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