Paris

I have been happily occupied for two weeks with my youngest son’s visit from San Francisco where he has lived for many years now. Although I am not used anymore to sharing my apartment with somebody else and as this boy - a 43 year old one, but still a boy - is always on the go and never sleeps, he somewhat disrupts my life but in spite of this, I was so sad after he had left that I started counting all the days which would pass before I see him again.

Systems Engineer at the Computer Center of the Bank of America, he has carried on teaching me about the computer he made me buy the year before and I have learnt more about megaoctets as he bought 32 more of them to enrich my machine with memory, a proof that man is more clever than his computer as he discovered how to make it works which requires a lot of knowledge, intelligence and memory while you just have to go shopping and buy megaoctets to keep it from forgetting! Up to now I have used my Clarisworks word processor more than the Internet but I already know a lot about “surfing on the web”, all the more as my sons have decided that France Telecom should equip my computer with DSL so that I may surf 24 hours per day (when do I sleep then?)

If I wanted to use my computer, a iMac by the way as it is nice and compact, as a gadget[1] I would of course be on Internet much more than I usually do. A friend of mine who is one of the best French bridge players and who has been several years world champion of French scrabble (which is quite different from the anglo-saxon game) has been chosen by Michel Field, a French entertainer, to deal with scrabble parties on a site called “alatélé”. Besides my elder son has told me to go to “Flipside” where I would found another way of playing scrabble called “wordox”[2]. Up to know, I have to much to do with my writings and translations and I use the Internet to send and get emails, to learn about hourly events as they are rather hot at the moment. Also my brother told me to go to “webencyclo” an encyclopaedia which is interesting enough and keep me from using all the time my Encyclopaedia Universalis, one floppy which covers about fifty volumes (amazing however!)

Once more I find that I lost myself in digressions. I was supposed to talk about my son leaving me and going to the airport without even mentioning that his sister flew from the South of France to see him, go with him to the last painting shows and share with him and myself the nice meals I prepared with love… I was supposed to keep to the story “Paris-San Francisco via Washington D.C.” so let’s go back to it: I am just going to relate it the way he told me afterwards as I was not aware of course of what was going on when it was going on:

After he had left its rented car at the appropriate parking lot, he got to the register desk with four times more luggage than when he had come in as the family and himself had bought around forty kilos of clothes for Sara, his five year old daughter who is as tall as a ten year old little girl. I had given him one of my largest Samsonites and the bag that went with it. The Air France hostess, after having told him rather curtly that he had many kilos of excess luggage and had to pay F.F.1300 (650 per extra luggage -about $ 150.00 at the time) otherwise he would just have to leave the desk and get rid of two suitcases or to put the contents of four in two (!) which he tried to do with the help of two kind gentlemen who agreed to climbing on the suitcases in order to squeeze the clothes, being careful to take off their shoes before doing so!

I am going to relate more about the adventure but I would like someone to tell me first as my son forgot to give me the explanation on the phone how one suitcase stuffed with twice the clothes it had before can be half heavy as two suitcases. I myself would only take off the weight of one suitcase but the reader will see that all the questions that I could have asked became soon obsolete: when Jean-Claude, streaming with sweat, went back to the desk, not knowing yet what he was going to do with the two empty suitcases (leave them at the baggage check-room so that I could pick them up later?), the Air France hostess was all smiles and embarrassment towards my son whom she had so curtly “welcome” in the first place. Why that? because a call had just come to say that there had been overbooking on the direct San Francisco flight and that Jean-Claude would not be able to climb on board although he had dutifully confirmed his return flight. The company offered him a two thousand francs compensation, the free transport of all his luggage and a free meal in any of the airport retaurants if he agreed to flying to San Francisco via Washington D.C.!

After having accepted all these offers (what else could he do as he had to resume his job on the following Monday and could not wait for the next direct flight?), my son registered “all” his luggage that another hostess had helped him to put back in “all” the suitcases, he then had a nice and quiet lunch in the best restaurant he could find as he had plenty of time ahead, the flight to Washington D.C. not being due until 4 p.m. Back in the boarding room, still another hostess, after having apologized once more, took him herself to the plane, adding that he would travel business class, and to his most comfortable seat, a Pullman armchair with a private television . Thinking that, in spite of the high fare of the round-trip ticket, his seat coming to Paris had been broken, a disadvantage he had warned Air France of, he could not dream of a better way of travelling back to America. Besides the meal started with caviar, smoked salmon and “foie gras” (goose liver) washed down with champagne and Jean-Claude had time enough to watch television, stretching himself out on his Pullman. As soon as the plane had landed on Washington D.C. airport, “still” another Air France hostess came to meet him, making easier the customs formalities, and took him to United Air Lines as he had to fly on an American Airline for the national part of his trip. Two hours in the boarding room and he was back among “ordinary” people although, having been given a good seat, he was able to sleep a few hours after having told the hostess that he did not want to be woken up for any meal.

When Jean-Claude called me from San Francisco to tell me about his flight, he said that in spite of the fact they had had to circle one and a half hour above San francisco as the fog was so thick the plane could not land, he had had the best flight ever and thanked me for the marvellous two weeks he had spent in Paris. I felt nice for him and for myself. Should I add that overbooking is a relatively new concept in France but that it has been going on for a long time in the United States. I have been diverted several times and I remember one time when a friend of mine, a doctor, in his desire to play the perfect host, had wanted to send a limousine to Newark, New Jersey, Airport to meet me. I managed to call him to say that I was diverted to Kennedy and he had time to take his own car and drive to New York to meet me. I still had a limousine in the end as when I called a cab to go back to the airport after my stay, a young woman came in a limousine to get me. I was surprised as my friend was at his practice or at the hospital and as I said I had called myself to get the cab. The young woman told me that there would not be any extra charge as she was supposed to meet in Kennedy people who wanted a treat on a special occasion and were coming back to New Jersey with her. However I have never received a preferential treatment the way my son has from any of the American companies I travelled on and I am glad Jean-Claude did.

One of my bridge friends, an excellent piano player who went back to University to study French literature, has always fascinated me by his “Pic de la Mirandole”[3] kind of knowledge. Thus I was very surprised when he asked me, as he was concentrating on all the tales, novels, plays... that had been written on the theme of Don Juan, to imagine a meeting between Don Juan and Casanova. As Christmas and the New Year were very close, I decided to write a tale which I called: “Tale Of Thousand and Two Nights. As this friend is also a very strange human being, the tale will be here to remind me of him when we shall have ceased to see each other.

[1] When I read these stories I wrote a few years ago, my feelings towards the web have changed a lot as I surf on it several hours per day! Besides, I now have two computers and “google” or “copernic” help me a lot in my research work.

[2] For several weeks now, I have been paying duplicate French scrabble on “International Scrabble Club”, a Romanian site which is visited by English-speaking as well as French-speaking players.

[3] Pic de la Mirandole was an Italian Renaissance humanist (15th century) who went to University and is said to have acquired knowledge about everything existing at the time. This is why we are used to say, when meeting somebody with a great culture, “he (or she) is a Pic de la Mirandole”.