BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The orange truck came speeding south on H Street. My kid Landen, 17, said, “There’s that orange truck. I see it everywhere. It’s following me.” He was half joking, but it’s true. I recognized the orange truck’s driver. He lives with his wife in a little bungalow on Blanche Street, close to St. Francis of Assisi Church.

Sometimes I see the same person everywhere. There’s a disfigured man who seems to haunt me. He passes on a bus, walks past on streets. He once roamed campuses while I attended local colleges. He appears in libraries and grocery stores—even on Internet sites. I’ve seen him for nearly 20 years and have pointed him out. He’s everywhere. (more…)

SAN FRANCISCO-

Hello, my name is Zoë Brock and I am a hopelessly hopeful romantic.

Love and I have a long and sordid relationship. We’re stuck to each other with that cheap, tacky glue that never dries properly and gets hairs and other bits of icky dirt and effluvia stuck in it and ends up looking like a coughed up owl pellet, minus the skeletal bits. It’s horrible, trust me.

Sometimes I feel as if I live my life adhered to the cheap pulpy paper bound between the flowery covers of a Harlequin romance novel.

Sometimes I wonder if some sticky-fingered house-wife isn’t pouring over the sordid details of my love-life, swooning, moaning and gasping at the more elaborately descriptive paragraphs as she takes a break between episodes of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and ‘Days of Our Lives’.

(more…)

PARIS-

It was a perfect spring Saturday, and the lovely Isabelle and I were enjoying lunch at a sidewalk café in Montparnasse with our friends Jennifer, Christophe and Marianne.

The Pennsylvania primary had been contested a few days before, and my French friends all had questions.

Not so much “Who do you like: Hillary or Barack?”

More along the lines of “Why is your electoral system so messed up?”

Now, I come from Washington, DC, the uber-center of politics in the United States.

I grew up hearing about primaries and caucuses, House sub-committees and Senate filibusters.

I could not escape it. (more…)

PARIS, FR -

“If you are lucky enough to have visited Paris as a not-so-young person, then
wherever you go for the rest of your life, even if it’s Palatka, Florida; Shangba, China; or Flint, Michigan (okay, maybe not Flint), it stays with you, for Paris
is a portable snack — but like the best snack ever: a crepe jambon et fromage on a cold day, for instance.” - JL Stankus

Montmartre

We left the windows open at night so the room was cold in the morning and the cold was good. (more…)

PARIS-

The ad usually states something like “Apartment offered in exchange for services,” a banal phrase that for students and young professionals here in Paris might seem attractive.

After all, lodging anywhere in this city is expensive.

Why not do a little cleaning or errand-running, and receive a free place to stay?

But it turns out that a lot of unscrupulous landlords aren’t looking for someone to mop the floors.

According to recent news reports, young women are being asked to prostitute themselves for a place to stay.

Sadly, women have answered these ads in droves. (more…)

AUVERGNE, FR.—

I am not from a Jell-O family.

We just didn’t develop the custom.

Never once have I uttered any of the following phrases, “I would have made Jell-O, but I didn’t have any mini-marshmallows,” “Can you please pass me the turkey- shaped Jell-O” or “It’s not a party without Jell-O.” (more…)

PARIS-

The Olympic Flame passed me by, and I didn’t even see it.

I was waiting outside Stade Charléty, not far from Paris’ Chinatown section in the 13th.

As the Olympic torch makes its second-ever global tour of the world before the Beijing Games this August, it swooped into Paris on a cold April day.

Already plagued by protests, starting with its lighting ceremony on Mount Olympus a few weeks ago, the Olympic Torch Relay (OTR) ran into continual hassles along its Parisian stretch, which caused organizers to stash the torch in a bus and keep it rolling through the city, the flame sadly reduced to a few licks of fire in specially-designed lanterns.

At Stade Charléty it seemed like the cop to spectator ratio was about 1:1. (more…)

PARIS-

Go to any movie theater in France right now, and the longest line will be for a fish-out-of-water comedy called Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Land of the Ch’tis).

The movie tells the story of Philippe, a post office manager who gets reassigned from a sunny town in Provence to cold Bergues, a small village in Nord Pas-de-Calais, in the extreme north of France, home to a weird people who call themselves Ch’tis.

Philippe’s new friend Antoine, along with a cast of wacky locals, welcome the newbie, teaching him how to speak Ch’ti (which to my American ears sounds like drunk French, the ‘s’ sound becoming ‘sh’, the end of each sentence punctuated with a sound somewhat like an angry duck’s quack).

Philippe, at first utterly aghast at the prospect of having to spend two years in this strange land where torrential rains start at the border and the residents breakfast on bread first slathered in pungent cheese, then dipped in chicory-flavored coffee, eventually learns to speak Ch’ti like a local and ends up loving the place.

When it’s time for Philippe to return home to the south of France, he is predictably sad to go.

Antoine explains to him the local adage that “People only cry twice in Nord Pas-de-Calais. When they arrive, and when they leave.” (more…)

PARIS-

Nicolas Sarkozy has been president of France for nearly a year, and in that time he has gone from enormously popular to a running joke.

Maybe that’s just the nature of politics: elect someone, then rail against him until he’s no longer there to kick around.

Or maybe, just maybe, the election of Nicolas Sarkozy was a huge mistake.

As words like “controversy,” “scandal” and “farce” continue to share sentences with his name, one must look back for a moment and try to understand how the French missed all the warning signs and elected the man.

Never known as a particularly warm and friendly guy, he was looked at pre-election as a break from the stodgy politics of his predecessor Jacques Chirac, a bright mind who would shake up the sagging French economy. (more…)

PARIS-

Three-quarters of the way through Cédric Klapisch’s Paris, a young African man who has already traveled a great distance from his home looks over the choppy sea from the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar and asks the ferryman who will sneak him into Europe if it’s all worth the trouble.

The ferryman, perhaps just eager for payment, replies that it is definitely worth it.

The young man, who is seen only in snippets during his long journey, carries with him a post card sent by a relative.

The black and white image is that of Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris.

Klapisch, and his mighty ensemble cast, bring that piece of photo paper to vibrant life in a wonderful movie that lives up to the gamble that is its name.

If you’re going to write and direct a film and call it Paris, it had better be worth the trouble. (more…)

PARIS-

It is so hard to talk about Paris.

Not for a lack of things to be said.

That’s easy.

But what makes it hard is being original about it.

How do you frame it?

What can you call the city that’s already been called by every name imaginable?

You try to come up with some never before thought of angle, some new twist on the old city, and how long is it before you realize it just can’t be done?

Even writing what I just wrote has already been written thousands of times.

It’s quite discouraging.

So, there.

Paris, the city of everlasting discouragement. (more…)

PARIS, FRANCE-

I leave humbled.

Humble. It’s a word I never understood as a child. A word I don’t think I ever really understood until very recently. It’s a word, like bitter, that needs to be lived before it can truly be understood. (more…)

AUVERGNE, FR.—

We survived the meals, the gifts and the togetherness of last week and now we’re ready to face it all again, albeit with a different crowd. (more…)

PARIS, FRANCE-

Although it’s not listed as a national sport, I’d have to say the preferred national past-time of the French is smoking.

In Paris, women smoke cigarettes while taking their babies on walks, pushing the stroller with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other.

Children take smoking breaks during recess.

And every cafe has a haze of cigarette smoke loitering at the bar. (more…)

PARIS, FRANCE-

Waiting at a stop light the other day, I saw a bus stop and begin letting people out even though there was no bus stop marked at that corner.

A group of about 20 business people got off and began crossing the street in front of me. One by one they began to gain speed, until they were running en groupe to the other side of the street where they all made a right turn and continued to run, holding their scarves and hats against the wind.

Just as the light turned green I saw what it was they were all running toward. (more…)