Paris-ish

There’s a feeling I can remember from shortly after becoming a mother of wanting desperately to do something small—get a coffee from the other room, visit a store or bakery—and it was just not possible. If you’re nursing every two hours you can’t get up, if you’re only going places with a baby you’re only going places you can go with one and a lot of the autonomy you assume is just a part of adult life is suddenly out of reach. It’s an adjustment and you adjust and then you—if you’re like me—no longer find it strange, and then a newborn isn’t a newborn and you can just walk places with your kids, and that’s its own sort of fun.

It felt a bit like that entire experience, the hey-wait-a-moment and then the this-is-fun-also trajectory, but sped up, going to Paris with my family just now. If I put out of my mind the 15 (?) hours we spent on the plane ride back, diverted to Montreal and with limited water rations, I know we all had fun. More physically strenuous than I can possibly convey (we brought one stroller for two kids who spent time in it, so there was some long-distance child-carrying involved), but exciting all the same. Maybe another post explaining, as if I know the answer, how to take little kids to Paris, when the reality is that if you aren’t already in Belgium, you just don’t do it with kids those ages.

I remembered the city as you experience it if you’re a grad student on a budget but with a stipend and no responsibilities beyond working on a dissertation and you’re someone who writes quickly so this is not by any means work-work. I would wander around, buying I don’t know cheese, nail polish, whatever, various t-shirts, and also visiting special Parisian libraries that had stuff I needed but that part of it is all sort of a blur. I remembered most of all going to a depot-vente, aka consignment shop, on the Rue du Cherche-Midi. I have had dreams where I’m there.

It seemed as if I would never be there again, not in that store, in that city, anywhere other than this bit of Toronto. And then there I was! Except I also kind of wasn’t. Part of it was just August and how nearly everything is closed. Either shuttered or stores will have a sign up taunting you. Photo below for a sample of what I mean; these were not specifically shoes that interested me, but you get the idea:

That, or the realities of a family trip meant seeing things that were open but we were on the march from Point A to Point B, and while a husband theoretically can be dragged along on a boring-for-him shopping excursion (it’s why Aritzia puts out those boyfriend-couches), little kids aren’t along for that ride. Unless you want to go into boutique-destruction debt, you can’t even browse.

I did a bit, though. There were ways. I did get some time in two different Monoprix (like a French Kmart or Target) branches, enough to upgrade various basics for less than this would cost in Toronto. It slightly pains me I didn’t get some royal blue linen pants I saw there, but then I remember that I did get other stuff that was better and that it is already too cold in Toronto for linen pants.

Apart from Monoprix, what was open seemed mainly to be way at the other end of the spectrum, aka upscale international brands like Prada or whatever. Not interested in Toronto and not somehow more interested when on an expensive trip abroad from which everything needs to be gotten home in limited suitcases.

And while the Cherche-Midi consignment shop was a no-August zone, I did go to a different one on Saint-Placide that I remembered somehow more vividly but not where it was. This was exciting in a sense-memory sort of way, but the clothing was meh, or maybe it was just more about the experience. Great shop dog though.

And because I am aiming to be the world’s least practical person, I at long last got the panier I’d been coveting for over a decade. (It’s not quite the Birkin one.) I didn’t remember basically anything about where things were in Paris but the hardware store with what I remembered as 29 euro paniers (they were slightly less!), this I somehow knew exactly where it was. The reason I hadn’t gotten one previously was that I couldn’t picture how you get this enormous woven market basket home. I now know how you do, and it’s by bringing it onto the airplane as your personal item even though never has a personal item been clumsier. Whatever, it is the exact right one, with the brown leather straps and everything.