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Showing posts from 2020

The Height of Hubris : Climbing Notre Dame in 1989

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A Paris flashback for Dreaming of France. Voila! C'est moi with one of the iconic stone chimera of Notre Dame overlooking the entire city, the Eiffel Tower perfectly placed in the background as though by a giant set designer in the sky. I used to think the horned goat was a gargoyle but he's not. Gargoyles are the creatures fashioned into waterspouts, monstrous looking but serving the prosaic function of keeping water off the roof and the exterior walls of Notre Dame, minimizing damage from rainstorms. My bearded goat-friend is a chimera, a grotesque, one of hundreds added when the cathedral was restored in the 19th century by the architect Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc. Much of Notre Dame had been destroyed in the French Revolution, the French Revolution Mindy and I and a zillion other tourists and Frenchmen were celebrating that July in 1989. I was excited to climb to the top of Notre Dame but once I got to there and my friend Mindy wanted to snap a ph0to of me and my f

#3: The Boy Who Took Out His Eye

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#3, Tripoli, Libya We lived just outside Wheelus Airforce base in the '50s.  That's me on the back of the camel holding onto my big brother, Russell, for dear life. An expanded form of this story was published in the South Bay Reader in Torrance,  California almost thirty years ago when it won an Honorable Mention in a teeny, weeny writing contest. The Boy Who Took Out His Eye We lived in Tripoli when I was five years old, just outside Wheelus Air Force Base in Libya. We weren't military, we weren't even American but my father, formerly with British Intelligence had been hired to infiltrate the PX as a manager and investigate the cause of the store's outstanding financial losses. My dad turned out to be a great manager, in fact, he was responsible for bringing the hula hoop to North Africa, holding a big promotional party with hula hoop demonstrations, clowns, balloons, and lemonade in the parking lot. And he found the embezzler too, a good fri

Missing photographs

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That's me & my old man. My dad, daddy, dada. My father knows best. He would have been about forty when this picture was taken. I'm probably two, maybe two and a 'foff'. I had a little lisp so that's how I would have said it, not two and a half but two and a foff. So my mum used to tell me. We are standing, if I've got my familial history straight, in the back garden of my grandmother's house on Mansfield Drive in Hayes, Middlesex, about twenty miles outside London proper.  I wish I had just one photo of my father holding my own son in his arms like this, the way my sister does of our dad and her daughters. She has plenty of snaps of him playing grandpa: our dad standing in my parents' kitchen, holding one of the twins with both arms under her pink diapered bottom, one fat little baby arm thrown around his neck, her head on his shoulder, her other hand clutching at his sleeve. The look on his face; the pleasure he takes that he's been abl