Jonathan and Darlene Edwards: “I Love Paris”
This is Esther, 1969. I include it simply because I love it so much. What a fox she was!
We flew to Europe at the end of August 1969 on Icelandic Air, in a prop jet. Icelandic was cheap and hip. It was known as the Hippy Airline. The stewards and stewardesses seem to have as much fun as we did and I’ve never eaten so much or drunk so much so often as we did on that flight. We had talked of spending time in Reykjavik before proceeding on to Luxembourg but I’m glad we didn’t. Iceland ca. 1969 really had little to show visitors. An English friend of ours, Geoff, stayed there overnight en route back home. He wrote that the one beautiful sight he had seen was a flume of colored water rising up in the bay. The sign on the building next to it said Sleuterheus (I’m probably butchering the spelling). He didn’t need to read Icelandic to know what that meant. They may have served us whale when we left Keflavik Airport. It’s the one meal I couldn’t finish.
We stayed overnight in Luxembourg, then took a train to Paris. The second week in Paris, our plans for the year changed. Suddenly Esther couldn’t tolerate wine or brandy –I mean, why go to France if not to sample the juice of the grape? She was pregnant, of course, which meant 1. our year abroad had suddenly become seven and a half months abroad, 2. I was the only one who would imbibe while we were there, 3. we switched from returning by plane to returning on an ocean liner because it would be more tranquil for the pregnant lady, plus we wanted to try it, and 4. we bought a car, our first in five years, because we realized hoof and bike wouldn’t cut it with a toddler in tow when we got back. We stayed in Paris until December, with side trips (in our new car) to Versailles, Chartres (a hunting horn choir was participating in a cathedral mass there), Caen and the lower Normandy valley, the Loire valley. We left early in December and exited to Spain by way of Biarritz and on to Bilbao.
(One song on the radio played over and over that fall, “Lay Lady Lay,” by Bob Dylan.)
We reached Madrid two days before Christmas and stayed the first week in a pension while we looked for more permanent lodging. On Christmas eve, we wandered across to the Plaza Mayor in the center of the city, where bull fights and auto-da-fes had been held in centuries now long past, and checked out the booths that filled it in anticipation of the holidays. We bought a pair of fake eyeglasses with a Groucho mustache attached, a red pageboy bob wig made out of paper (it looked incredibly fake), and a plaster dog turd that I swear looked just like the real thing.
I wanted to surprise Esther for Christmas so I went into a farmacia to buy a bar of perfumed soap. I’d taught Spanish in grade school and high school but had never had to learn the vocabulary for ordinary domestic items. (I was better at translating sor Juana de la Cruz and Borges and Pablo Neruda and Ruben Dario than I was at explaining how you set a table or ordered groceries.) I asked the clerk if they had sopa perfumada, not realizing I’d just asked for “perfumed soup.” It soon was clear we were at an impasse so I pantomimed washing under my armpits. The clerk figured out that what I really wanted was jabon –jabon!-– which does mean soap, and she sold me some.
That afternoon, Christmas eve, all Madrid seemed to have migrated to the bars. For a couple of hours, we ate, drank and schmoozed with people from our pension. We were standing at the bar, close to the front entrance. I had pinned the dog turd to my tie and Esther had on the pageboy wig and wore the Groucho glasses. Suffice it to say, we didn’t look especially Spanish. Some madrilenos –university students in Madrid, came in and started ta;lying to us. They asked where we were from. When we said ‘los estates unidos, ‘ they perked up. Here was an opportunity to practice their English (which was close to nonexistent). We ended up singing the one American song everyone knew.
It came out something like this: “Ho when de Sainz / cahm marshing een, / ho when de Sains cohm marching een…”
Afterwards, we returned to the pension where there was to be a holiday celebration for us homesick foreigners –dinner, drinks, dancing. We didn’t return to our room until two in the morning. I was taking my clothes off when Esther said, “Dave, come here!” She took my hand and put it on her belly.
And I felt Jeremy, our son to be, move for the first time.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Bob Dylan: “Lay Lady Lay” (1969)
MUSIC & ME 