Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

Tristram & Islolde: N.C. Wyeth  I ’ve been taking you back to Bandol with me lately. First came The Walk , then came Le Kiss. Here’s the final part of the story. The whole story is now available here and on Soundcloud and iTunes so you can start at the beginning if you like. Garlic & Gauloises It felt like we’d left Bandol and the beach far behind us. We had to be very close now, close to this place out in the middle of nowhere where Michel was going to take me dancing. Finally I could hear voices, shouts and real laughter; a boy’s hoot, a girl’s bell-like tinkle. Someone called out Veronique, Veronique, Vero! There was an answering cackle and something else, something in French that I didn’t understand. Whole words, snatches of sentences, floated through the still night air, loud enough for me to hear except that they were in French, and so, much like the sea breeze on this hot summer night, they fluttered and fell away before I could grab hold of...

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...

Pretty French Postcards My trip to France with Mindy in '89 was very different from my visit with my sister Nancy, sixteen years earlier, when I was twenty and she was just sixteen. When Mindy and I stayed in Paris, we stayed in a newish hôtel in the business district, an area called la Defense. Modern, comfortable, the kind of place that catered to business travelers. We could have been anywhere. Paris, France. Paris, Texas. New York City. What the hôtel lacked in character it made up for in amenities. A real front desk. A fax machine. A bar off the lobby. A bidet. The place that Nancy and I stayed at in the Pigalle had a fading painted number on the crumbling wall outside, a round black bell you pushed so the cranky old concierge, a French woman straight out of a novel, could open up and begrudgingly show you to your room, eyeing you suspiciously all the while. We barely knew what fax machines were in 1973 but if we had, our little no-name hôtel wouldn't have h...

That's me with the glasses and the sensible shoes. Look at the height of my mother's heels!  The first time I saw Paris it was December, 1958 and I was five. The old family photos show that when it wasn't dripping wet, the sky was a dull steely grey. This wasn't Paris when it sizzles, this was Paris when it drizzles. Cold. Miserable. Could it be that it just looks that way because the photos are black and white? Could be, but we had just left Tripoli where the sun blazed all year long; that wintry Parisian nip must have been shocking. Little did I know my parents were about to take me out of the fire into the frying pan, or to be more accurate, out of the fire into the icebox. After several years of living in North Africa, we were on our way to Canada. Canada where we would arrive, by boat, in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the middle of winter. Average temperature: Below freezing. Brrrr, baby, brrrr! But first, that stopover in Paris. My parents dragged us ...

Baie des Anges, Raoul Dufy/1928 The trouble with going topless on the beach in France is that while the French may not bat an eye, the prudish hybrid of British, Canadian, and American that I am—go ahead, call me a BritCanIcan if you can —isn ’t quite so nonchalant. Even though I was thirty something when my friend Mindy and I visited Nice, I still had reservations about taking my top off on the famous pebble beach.   The only time I’d ever gone topless before was with a couple of friends at a nude beach here in Southern California, a “secret” place where Topanga Canyon meets the Pacific Coast Highway. An unmarked path leads down around the cliff, you have to tread carefully to make sure you don’t trip and fall. An old, deeply tanned bare-chested man cruising around with a camera had made the whole thing feel creepy, and we’d left quickly, feeling dirty.  But I had that old man, leering with his camera, asking could he take our pic...

Image via thestudiotour.com One of the perks of working as a tour guide at Universal Studios was being able to tool around the backlot, getting up close and personal with the facades, mostly mere  painted pieces of plywood, nothing more than shells supported from behind by some 2 by 4’s. Sometimes the buildings were decorated with slabs of foam molded in the shape of bricks. On camera it works. Up close, the faux brick is slightly spongy to the touch. Just a bit of fakery.  While New York Street probably got the most use as a filming location, it was Little Europe that fired my imagination. Walking along the cobblestone road, passing the charming shopfronts, it’s easy to imagine French cafes and patisseries come to life.  The last time I saw Paris—and the Universal backlot—was in the mid to late eighties. These days I can conjure the same feeling of being transported to another time and place on my daily walks around my own neighborhood.  Built in 193...

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...

The Blue Sea by Helen Galloway McNicoll 1829-1915 The following is a collection of memoir posts I wrote documenting a trip my younger sister and I took to Paris and the South of France in the summer of 1973. The summer I was supposed to be backpacking around Europe with my boyfriend Derek, except we’d we broken up when he decided to go with a friend instead. The louse! I know it's a lot to read all at once, maybe break it up, they way I did? Look for the ••••••••  If I ever do write a book, a collection of my own stories,  these posts would make up a big chunk of the French chapter.  "Pig Alley!" My sister, sitting on the wide windowsill of our hotel room in the Pigalle, was reading from the guidebook we'd consulted to find a cheap place to stay in Paris. We'd neglected to read the fine print.  At the first hotel we tried I'd been so nervous and unaccustomed to speaking the language, that I'd forgotten to say Bonjour before I asked—in my rusty ...