It sounds so pretentious–for an Arroyo Grande boy, raised with heifers and chickens—a little boy so sheltered that he was almost overcome by the velvet-suited Santa on the mezzanine of Riley’s Department Store in San Luis Obispo, California–but I miss Paris.

I didn’t get it the first time I took my students to the great city. I think I was overwhelmed. The second time, with my literature teaching partner, Amber Derbidge, and our wonderful Breton tour guide, Freddy, I got it.

It helped, I think, that we’d came south from Anne Frank’s Amsterdam, then through the Ardennes, and finally across Northern France–a stretch of the trip that had begun at Metz, where we saw trout feeding, describing ringlets on the surface of the Moselle, just like the ones I’d tried so hard to catch in the Arroyo Grande Creek when I was little.

At Verdun, a museum guide took me aside and whispered “Your students are so respectful,” which might just be one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received, because she confirmed to me that they’d learned, in our classroom, what I’d taught them about Verdun.

We were greeted, in fact, with immense kindness. At Reims—I’d used, early in our school year, both Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan and Shakespeare’s Henry V to teach my students the meaning of nationalism —a local woman, delighted to meet young Americans, insisted on giving us a tour of the cathedral, one that wasn’t on our schedule.

We didn’t mind because she was so happy and she made us happy, too. It was Rockefeller Foundation money that was helping to repair shell damage to the cathedral facade from the Great War, and even though none of us could be mistaken for a Rockefeller, the important part, for this lovely woman, was that we were Americans.

We reached the coast and the D-Day beaches and the American Cemetery above Colleville-sur-Mer, where we found a local farmworker, Domingo Martinez, a Mexican-American, a member of the 79th Infantry Division, who was killed by fragments from a German .88 shell near Le Bot in July 1944.

Then, after the cruelty of the battlefields, we ended this trip in Paris. This time I realized how alive Paris is. I got it. I was as enchanted as a Nebraska farm boy—not that far a remove from my actual childhood near the farm fields that border the coast of central California—and when I briefly got lost in the Latin Quarter, I was unafraid. There was far too much for me to explore. I would get back to my students. Eventually.

In the classroom, I used to share the video below with my students to introduce them to my favorite unit—Nineteenth Century urban history, or La Belle Epoque—and they, and I, needed the sustenance we got here, in this chapter, if we were to survive the heartbreak of the First World War.

This year, another heartbreak—another disaster, this time in Covid—has forced the cancellation of the Eiffel Tower’s spectacular fireworks show.

So this blog post is a very little attempt to make up for what we’ll miss this New Year’s Eve. It’s one of several love letters I’ve written to Paris, where my father, an American GI—he spent two years away from my Irish-American Mom, seen here with my big sister—was a tourist in the late fall of 1944.

To teach what I feel to my students, I made this video for them. It’s oddly matched to an oddly beautiful song, “Bittersweet Symphony,” by The Verve, a song that in its own way, is a kind of masterpiece.

Joyeux Noel, my friends.

https://videopress.com/v/CP5FRbU8?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata

As you probably know, I have two nieces who are extraordinary. Rebecca, the younger sister, is a poet who chains words together, in meticulous lines, that seemingly don’t belong together (something I love to do), but in the strength of her writing—novel, original, but unpretentious—you suddenly, intuitively, delightfully, understand. Then the poem shimmers on the page.

Emily is a writer, too, but she’s taken the path of acting—in New York City, of all places—and while Becky’s poetry makes me sing little songs inside, with her providing the lyrics, I don’t get to see Emmy’s craft because she’s so far away.

Until I found a sample of it online in this video excerpt. I hope Emily forgives me, but I found bit of monologue so stunning—so oddly and happily humbling— that I wanted to set it down so I would never lose it.

And what I will never lose, either, in the immense pride I feel in my nieces, is the presence of my mother, whom I see in them, down to their naturally curly hair. Even more, and even more happily, I see the presence of my sister Sally. She was the last of the four of us, born when my Mom was 41, so she was kind of miraculous to us.

Her daughters, Emily and Rebecca, have only confirmed the miracle. They are Sally’s gift, and her husband, Rick’s, gift to us.

They are a reminder that the integrity of our family, in generations I’ve traced to the 11th Century, to churchyards in London and County Wicklow and Baden-Wurttemberg, has been made safe by a long line of remarkable mothers. Not a one was perfect. They were remarkable instead. They would instantly recognize Sally as one of their own. I can somehow see them gathering around her, some of them wrapped in warm Celtic tweed, all of them waiting happily for the chance to embrace the remarkable woman who was once upon a time my baby sister.