Church on Fire
Years ago, just after graduating from college, I took a trip to Europe. I stayed a few months, starting in Prague and heading west.
This was pre-social media, and before the iPhone. At the time, I didn't own a cell phone. The stories that happened were without a doubt life-changing. One that was so fantastic has never left me. But since no one would believe it, I turned it into a short story where it can live safely in speculative fiction even though it actually happened. The only connection I had to America came through available public telephones and whatever pre-paid phone cards I could buy in faulty languages. If I was lucky, I'd find an internet café to email friends back home.
I realize the above sentence is filled with a lot of vestiges. I can picture my best friend at the time, half way around the world, gripping the receiver of a landline telephone to hear my voice coming from another time zone, literally the future.
Despite my love of the French language and cuisine, in my first experience, France lives up to its rudeness. In Strasbourg, an asshole postal worker sold me stamps for Europe instead of for L'États-Unis, despite my pronouncing this correctly. In Nice, an asshole hotel owner tried to pawn off a half-flooded room, claiming that was all that was available, until I threatened to leave without paying. Considering it was the off-season and the hotel as half-booked, and considering he would have lost out on five days, he was in no place to argue the point. He ended up giving the room to a loud British couple who in the span of one night fucked, fought and accidentally broke something and left without paying in full.
Paris was just as rude an unfriendly. Waiters corrected my accent and word choice, other waiters yelled at me in French for speaking to Americans in English. A city of giant dicks.
And yet. The left bank was charming, a tiny one-screen movie housed a Hitchcock festival and the food was grand. I wanted to visit the places I'd seen in the opening of French In Action, the high school educational videos we watched in class starring the chesty Mireille, the hapless Robert and Le Professeur, the old dude who interrupted the storyline to give you some sort of education. Even in high school the thing seemed dated, as if wearing bellbottoms was still as normal as chain smoking.
These weird videos inspired me to seek out Centre Pompidou and its weird lip fountain, Jardin du Luxembourg and of course Notre-Dame, which is currently on fire.
Such an amazing piece of architecture, perhaps as important and world-renowned as the Eiffel tower is now engulfed in fire. Even more tragic, a splendiferouss work of art made to honor God, in flames during Holy week.
Internet cafés and phone cards we can live without. Art, like morality, spirituality and a cause greater than ourselves is another matter entirely.