Bordeaux and Palmiers

Isn’t it funny how sometimes memories, correlations, associations, don’t make sense to anyone but you? For the longest time, the Billy Joel song “Vienna” was inextricably and unexplainably linked to New York. I don’t know why, but now I know that I was wrong.

“Vienna” still isn’t about Vienna—I loved the Austrian city covered in snow at Christmastime, but not enough to devote that song to it. Vienna, for me, is about Paris.

“You got so much to do and only so many hours in a day.”

“You can’t be everything you want to be before your time, although it’s so romantic on the borderline tonight.”

“Don’t you know that only fools are satisfied? Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true.”

It’s so true, it’s almost a cliché. In fact, it’s sometimes embarrassing to admit how true “Vienna” feels because of how much everyone else agrees with you. How could this song have touched so many different people in so many different ways?

And then, most of all, “waits for you.” The idea that a city even can wait is so foreign to a New Yorker, where buildings are knocked down and built back up again before you can blink, and storefronts change as often as the seasons. And yet, Paris has been waiting for centuries. Each time I arrive in Paris, I wait patiently while I check into a hotel in a new part of the city that I don’t know. I wait for that moment that I now know is so perfectly Paris.

When I come out of Notre-Dame-St. Michel Métro, and see the booksellers on the Quai d’Orsay, I remember. I feel at home. I remember suddenly how long Paris has been waiting. Cities in the States wait for no one, but on this side of the Atlantic, buildings have been patiently standing on the same streets for hundreds of years. Somehow, even though I know it’s childish, when I step onto the Quai d’Orsay and recognize those buildings again, I feel as though Paris has been waiting for me.

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