Paris is Burning.

Like most of the world this week I am grieving for Paris. On Monday night, when I returned home to my apartment at the end of the day, I dug through my old photo albums in search of my own personal records of my experience with Notre Dame.  It is a place I've been to three times in my life - the first on Easter when I was sixteen, again at 22 when I was backpacking through Europe, and the third time just this last December, as a 39 year old woman, on December 30th and again on the 31st as the clock struck midnight and France welcomed in 2019.

As I listened to account after account about people's own memories of visiting Notre Dame, I couldn't help but think of how fortunate I was to have stepped foot into that beautiful, sacred, and historical place on three separate occasions; immensely grateful I saw it as it was - as it had been for hundreds and hundreds of years.  I also found myself comforted by how many years that church has seen - this was not the first fire, it is not likely to be the last.  It's a space that has survived more than 800 years (just think what those walls have witnessed!) and I feel humbled that she'll likely survive another 800 or more long after we are gone. Maybe not as she always was or has been, but like a phoenix, rising from the ashes.

******

In digging through my old photographs I also stumbled upon a picture of me and a few of my college friends, taken the fall of our sophomore year. The four of us had decided to take the bus down to New York City from Boston for the day.  We woke before dawn and schlepped ourselves to South Station, arriving at Port Authority some four odd hours later.  We spent the entire day in the city, wandering here and there and trekking all over the island before catching a late evening bus back to Boston and landing back in our dorm rooms after midnight. Remembering that trip now I'm exhausted; I cannot fathom that we were able to squeeze all that we did into that one day and were still standing by the end of it. Yet I also remember the exhilaration I felt taking this trip with my friends - in part because I told no one I was going.

At 19 I still checked in with my parents on a very regular basis and kept them abreast of what activities I was up to in Boston. (Twenty years later and I still do this.)  However, something held me back from telling them I was taking a day-trip to New York on that sunny October day and I know it was mainly the idea that I *could* hold something back that intoxicated me.  No one, aside from my three friends along for the adventure, knew where I was.  Much like the first moment in college when I gave out my dorm room phone number and it occurred to me that no one else would ever answer that phone (the phenomenon of a shared household landline is something today's youth likely cannot grasp) my day trip to NYC was the first time it truly dawned on me that I was completely unaccountable to anyone but myself. After 17 years living at home, where parents and/or siblings almost always knew where I was, it was a revelation that I could just get up one morning, hop a bus into Manhattan, and tell no one. (I also find it adorably endearing that my big rebellion was to head into Manhattan for a day of innocent tourism, but that's another post.)

I vividly remember the moment my friends and I gathered together in Central Park to have our photograph taken by a stranger.  It's the only picture I have from this trip, or at least the only one that's survived twenty years of moves and adventures.  What I remember, as my friends and I put our arms around one another and smiled for the camera was wondering silently to myself if I'd be back here, if I would figure out a way to make life in the city my reality.  At 19, I felt sure of almost nothing but New York, and my heart seemed to beat for that one truism.

These days there seem to be so many articles and online commentary about what we would all do differently in our lives if we had today's wisdom in our youth; what we would tell our younger selves now if we could.  Of course, if given the opportunity, I have plenty of advice I'd impart on my younger self.  But also?  Maybe I wouldn't tell her anything.  Because she figures it out.  She bobs and weaves and stumbles a bit but that young girl standing on a bolder in Central Park has a good and thoughtful head on her shoulders.  She cares about her family and her friends, overall she has a pretty good perspective on the things that really matter to her.  She loves books and the theater and music and film and travel.  She craves time outdoors in the woods and around horses as much as she needs the pavement and rumble of urban environments.  There are truths that make her who she is at 19 and still are a part of her at 39.  And that makes me now, twenty years her senior, nothing but proud.

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I moved into my apartment on the Upper West Side on September 4th, 2018.  This picture was taken about twenty blocks south of my current address on October 24th, 1998. Twenty years, and a lucky lifetime lived, I did come back. Almost to the day.

"...One morning on my walk to find a 'normal' coffee, I'd stumbled on the Medici Fountain and thought I'd discovered a secret.  It seemed otherworldly to me then, representing all the magic of the world I had been unable to touch growing up.  It was still that for me now, more so even, clocked in the mist of the afternoon.  And standing there I thought about the girl I'd been the last time I was here and the woman I was now, and was pretty pleased with myself.  But also pleased for the girl who had stood here all those years before not knowing but hoping for what her life might be about - namely adventure - and pleased, too, for the future I couldn't yet fully imagine that might bring me back here at some point yet again."

-No One Tells You This - Glynnis MacNicol