Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

The Bicentennial Parade, Paris. July 14, 1989 [Photo by Rene Burri] Mindy and I tried to crash course our French historical knowledge but budgeting just a week in Paris that July of '89, we were mostly interested in hitting the Left Bank, the major museums, the cafes. She was a shopper, I wanted to see where the expat gliterati hung out, drinking absinthe, back in the day. We hit the Gallerie Lafayette, Les Deux Magots, Shakespeare & Co. We  climbed Notre Dame , took a boat ride along the Seine, saw the Eiffel Tower. We went to a bar where we bought our own drinks. I had a $9 beer; almost half of what I planned to spend on my hotel room. We took the metro to a famous Paris flea market where Mindy bought nothing but I spent $90 on a killer pair of black leather cowboy boots. I must have been out of my mind, I had to schlep those boots in my backpack all across Europe. As our week in Paris progressed, it was clear this Bastille Day celebration was a very big thing and we w

For six years in the nineties we lived in a little house on a hill on the west side of Los Angeles.  We always bragged that while the house might be small,  we had a million dollar view. O n a clear day we could see the Hollywood sign from our backyard.  The house was something of a gift. We inherited the place when the current tenants, our good friends Mike and Judy, found a house they wanted to buy and recommended us to the landlord. When they moved out, we moved in. We signed  the lease that dropped us within the boundary lines for our school of choice, just days before the deadline to register for a coveted kindergarden spot in the fall. Our son spent his entire elementary school life in that little old house, going from kindergarden through fifth grade in the same house, going to the same school, with the same friends. I call it a little house because it was. Just 1050 square feet. Two bedrooms, one matchbox sized bathroom, a kitchen so tiny that there was little more to it

Thank you  to everyone who reached out to me with suggestions on how to identify the man sitting next to my dad in the photo I shared last week. I've attempted to contact the Libyan embassy—who I have a hunch have bigger fish to fry—but we'll see. I contacted them on their twitter account which seems odd, I know, but the only way to email them is via a form which doesn't enable one to attach photos. If the twitter request doesn't get a response, I'll try snail mail. Still thinking of my dad, I thought some of you might be interested in a 'thinly veiled' short story based on our father-daughter relationship that appeared in Purdue University's Literary Magazine SKYLARK back in 1992.  With apologies to Joy for this thinly veiled attempt to piggyback onto British Isles Friday, the only connection being my British blood.  Last Dance Shannon squeezed some Lubriderm into her palm and took her father’s foot with its familiar high and bony arch