Tweet if I missed the Rapture

Not noticing anything - but if, as Hemingway said, Good Americans go to Paris when they die, it's possible it happened without my being aware?

Lovely day today, sleeping late & then lunch just down the street at our friend Maud (the woman whose thesis defense at the Sorbonne we raced down from Amsterdam to attend, what, 3 yrs ago? She is an art/interstitial historian whose thesis was on Alexander the Great in Medieval iconography)'s newish apartment, meeting her newish baby (14 mos) for the first time.  Quel p'tit bruiser!  But she swears the sweater Delia knit him (extra big, she thought)  will fit him just fine.  Their building has a big courtyard with bushes & benches & jasmine, and a French-African family with 9 kids (one of whom now has a kid of her own) all live on the ground floor, and everyone in the building looks after everyone else's kids, who all play togetehr - it reminded me of a cross between a Malian village and the suburb where I grew up w/kids all running wild together in the backyards.

Maud took us to Musee de Cluny (and if you've never been, don't miss it!) for a courtyard lecture/demo on medieval swordfighting techniques. She herself is also a historical fencer (17c, not medieval), and when it was done she went into the museum Gift/Bookshop & badgered them about ordering A la Pointe de l'Epee  (oui, c'est Swordspoint en Francais), the darling.

Then we parted ways, and Delia & I walked on down Blvd St Germain to our old neighb in the 6th, utterly not resisting the siren call of Le Mouton a Cinq Pattes, a crazy discount hole-in-the-wall where we found adorable things for cheap and bought them despite our pledge to try to fit no more clothes into our overstuffed apt closets - did I mention that it's really hot here & we brought all the wrong clothes? - and then to bistro Atlas where we sat outdoors on rue Buci & ate salad & mussels & frites & drank a pichet of good dry rosé, and talked about Delia's next short story, and were, I think, as happy as it is possible, briefly, to be.

Walked back to metro first crossing the Seine on Pont des Arts, whose locks reminded me of Bordertown, and I'm going to tweet some photos of them & the legal graffiti in Bellevile,

...and then, on the metro going home...

 a busker with annoying patter started singing Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry. And I got all choked up, thinking of Bordertown.  I mean:

I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown...
Good friends we have had, oh good friends we've lost along the way
In this bright future you can't forget your past
So dry your tears I say...

Said, said, said I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown
And then Georgie would make the fire light....
Then we would cook corn meal porridge
Of which I'll share with you
My feet is my only carriage
So I've got to push on through...


How can I not?  But then, nearly everything makes me think of Bordertown these days. 

I'm overdue on several written interview questions (have I mentioned how very much I hate written interviews?) from lovely journalists/bloggers about what it feels like to be returning to Bordertown with the new anthology.  Maybe I could just send them the song?