This is my dear friend, Meryl. I love our story.
We both attended the same college; I was a Fine Arts major, she a Liberal Arts major... it was a match made in creative thinkers' heaven.
Though our classes took us to distinctly adjacent buildings to one another everyday, we had never met. This is, until Paris.
The Liberal Arts branch was offering an elective course studying the historical accounts of Americans in The City of Lights. I was so game. Especially considering that I didn't take the trip with my high school French class, horribly worried that my minuscule understanding of the language (at the time) would doom me.
So, off to the sign-up I went with parental units and ridiculous-amounts-of-required-tuition-plus-lodging-per-the-two-units in tow. And that's where I met Meryl. We were assigned to be roommates and hit it off right away. She now recalls that at that meeting my dad made some quirky remark that split the room in two laughing (I don't remember what it was that he said, but take note to heart, my father is an awesomely witty and funny man.)
The next time we would meet again would not be until we were struggling with pulling our baggage up to the row of tufted airport chairs at the Charles De Gaulle. Then we spent five weeks living together along with Michelle, our third roommate, in two rooms of a very French hotel. The first — a single full bed with a pull-down cushioned cot and a tiled bathroom with broken main pipe spewing water out at us, but the most beautiful tall french windows you've ever seen; and the second — an up two levels of inner courtyards with three stairwells and two elevators and-no-my-oversize-vintage-suitcase/house-did-not-have-wheels-on-it with three beds, a rooftop, and the penthouse view of the Eiffel Tower (I loved to watch it sparkle every night before turning in for bedtime) that I would consider the most charming place I have ever called home.
We had a downright proper ball during our time in Paris, drinking in everything we could see around us. Don't fret, there will definitely be an INNER SANCTUM SERIES punctuating my lifetime in one of my favorite cities in the world. I must, it has little bits of my heart scattered all about it in the places I touched — there is a piece at Oscar Wilde's grave, a bit in the cafe with the people we've come to know, tiny shavings in the streets of Montmartre and the Louvre, at Versailles, and les Catacombs and the passages couverts... it will come.
She is always so gracefully impressive in her sense of style.
Share |
