Taken decades ago...when I see this
photo, I remember walking
around Paris with Susan and John. Our friendship was in flower then,
but of course, who can resist maintaining a friendship with someone who
lives on a boat on the Seine, your personal free hotel whenever you can
get over to
le grand raisin? They'd come over at least once a year,
and we'd
flâner around Paris, eating and drinking, taking a few train
excursions here and there. I remember one up the Seine into Normandie,
marveling high on a cliff how different the meandering Seine looked in
that countryside from within its stone embankments in Paris, and another to
Monet's home in Giverny.
On one
trip in winter, I remember John was so cold that we'd walk, stop in a
bar for a cognac, walk a little more, have another cognac, spending the
whole day like this, never really blotto, but never really warm
either. Maybe because we weren't wearing north woods clothing for the historically cold temperatures.
Susan and John happened to be in
Paris to help me move from my first
péniche, the Connexus, to my second
one, the
Alphonse. Those were the days--moving was a matter of walking
from one boat to the next, directly in front, making only "several"
trips, not endless, with only as many possessions as I had at that
time--which, when I moved from Paris to New York after six years, fit
into two duffel bags plus a bicycle. Imagine. After we got me moved, we had a picnic
on the floor of my new
salon, the downstairs central space in the cabin, about eight by twelve square feet, below my
timonerie [plus the view
en face]. We have a
photo of that, too--it may have
been the same trip as the hats photo--though I can't now remember why
we had to sit on the floor. Oh, maybe this--the "furnishings" included
a beautiful mahogany table, its trim and the cut of its legs matching
the decorative elements of the solid mahogany-paneled
interior, but no
chairs. Later, I bought two folding wood and canvas captain's chairs, space-saving always
essential to living on a boat. Or maybe it was the reverse--I had the chairs but my landlord did not move the matching table from his front part of the boat to my cabin till later.
So surely, even though our
friendship seems past its most abundant flowering, it is a friendship
for which one would drive a mere eight hours in holiday traffic.
