Another Letter from Paris

Wilfred blazer (similar)
Oak + Fort tank (c/o) (similar)
Zara jeans (similar)
Mango sneakers (similar)
Chanel handbag
Anthropologie beret
Celine necklace
Location: Galerie Perrotin – Paris, France

Paris, October 7, 2021

Dear friends,

How strangely wonderful – and how wonderfully strange, to be back in Paris after so long. I am still trying, admittedly without much success, to wrap my mind around the idea that it’s been more than two and a half years since the last time I wrote a letter from the French capital. It was a series, actually. And that series, coincidentally, began in exactly the same place as this one; Galerie Perrotin, very often one of our first stops when we arrive in the city.

But really, this letter begins at the James Richardson Airport in Winnipeg. Before today, the last time I walked through the doors of an airport was in February 2020. At the time, airport visits were my routine and I was absolutely unaware of how abruptly that was about to change. The airport, once a bustling hub of excited people off to go exploring was a ghost town when we arrived today. There wasn’t a single car in sight as Dad pulled up to the Departures terminal.

By the time we were on the plane, though, it was a different story. Nothing at all was changed. It might as well have been November 2019. Packed like sardines with a group of strangers in a tiny regional jet to get to Montreal, I found myself asking Ian how I suffered this level of discomfort week after week, year after year, for work. What was once my normal seemed, after a two year break, completely unfathomable.

…until I looked out the window. What a wonderful moment, to see the ground fall away for the first time in over two years as the plane climbed in the sky. But mostly, I found myself thinking how it was like no time had passed at all. This sight was still one I’d seen hundreds of times, the feeling a familiar one from years of repetition. For a minute, the two years without travel felt more like a blip than an age; more like a time period we’ll look back on with a laugh than one that will define us was we move forward.

That feeling followed us all the way across the ocean to France. We spent the six weeks from booking to departure preparing piles of paperwork – imagine it, real pieces of paper, completed with pen and ink, an almost foreign concept in the iPhone age. All of the travel regulations told us this was expected if we wanted to enter France. But entering France was much as it ever was, a formality of passports casually reviewed and stamped with no questions or fanfare. It was early morning; the customs agents were deep in conversation and reasonably confident we’d come to Paris just because it is Paris. They let us through without a word, to the same arrivals area we know by heart, where we take the escalator to the baggage claim to collect our cases then walk out into the crowded Arrivals terminal to find a taxi.

Nothing was changed except our expectations. After two years of living an entirely unfamiliar life in Canada, to a soundtrack of messages intended to make us wary of non-Canadian places and situations, we believed that life elsewhere would also be different. We’d already begun to see the truth by the time we were fighting our way towards the terminal exit door, bumping shoulders with people in all directions. The concept of social distancing in such a populated city seemed laughable. The space we have to isolate ourselves in Canada is a luxury – but, in many ways, also a curse.

Paris, I can see clearly today, is the same place it ever was, but with masks and proof of vaccination sometimes required. It seems hard to believe that anywhere could be when our life at home is so different, but here people walk the streets with impunity – or perhaps, simply, without unnecessary fear. I stare at the crowds. My surgical mask is still firmly in place over my nose and mouth. The cognitive dissonance is shocking; what I’ve been told and what I can see in front of me do not correspond. I have two choices. I can continue to act like it’s my responsibility to protect everyone around me, like I’ve learned to do at home. Or I can embrace the French attitude that we are all responsible to protect ourselves and each other, knowing I’ve done my part to do that through vaccination, and enjoy life.

Even exhausted and jetlagged, the decision is an easy one.

As I write this letter, I realise it is beginning to sound like I’ve changed my stance on pandemic management. And at this early stage, I don’t think that’s true. It’s just that I’m beginning to realise I’ve only experienced one method of pandemic management when, in reality, there are many different ways to achieve the same result.

We arrive at the apartment of my dreams on the corner of boulevard Beaumarchais in le Marais. This place deserves a letter of its own. That said, while I know the building well, I somehow did not count on needing to climb four flights of old, uneven wooden stairs with my forty-pound suitcase in hand. By the time I reach the top I am sweating, winded and absolutely relieved to see a temporary home that justifies the effort of the climb… as well as everything else it took to get here. Floor to cieling windows open onto views of slate rooftops and brick chimneys. A marble fireplace topped with gilt mirror anchors the living room. The waxed wooden floors, original from the seventeenth century, creak underfoot. It’s true that I waited two and a half years to get here, but this place, this city, is worth it.

A brief nap and then we’re off to enjoy it. Galerie Perrotin, my favourite private gallery among thousands in the city, is just a block away. And, interestingly, currently showing the work of an artist from Minneapolis, Minnesota who is just about my age. Life has a funny way of putting us where we’re supposed to be, when we’re supposed to be there. And of dropping hints in case we weren’t sure it had a plan all along.

We’ve been coming to Perrotin for years but, of course, our once well kept secret is out and we find ourselves dawdling while a group of teenaged tourists take iPhone shots of each other on the stairs. (The whole exercise goes on for a painful twenty minutes. At one point, I ask myself if I shouldn’t step in to help because they seem to need it.) Another wait but again, it’s worth it. We’re back. The places we love are still here. And I think that’s the point of this first letter – time has passed, it’s true. But the world waited. It was still there for me when I was ready to go back out and explore. It will be there for all of you, too.

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