It was on my first visit to Europe, a college trip, and I was convinced that the woman selling chestnuts in Paris’s Place de la Concorde in 1974 was an old woman, who had smelled that steam rising from her roaster for decades. I took a photo of her that hung proudly on my wall; it kept my desire to return to Paris vibrant.
Years later, I returned to the Place de la Concorde. There she was, in what I think was the exact spot she stood in 1974. She looked just the same.
Except she really wasn’t. She had become old — the old I thought she was the first time that I saw her. When I returned home, I looked at the 1974 photo again and saw, for the first time, she had deep brown hair then — not the grey that I had “seen” before. She was young in that photo, that year, and I thought her old. I had never noticed the brown.
The canvas was the same, but the colors had changed to me.
Now, I am as she is. Still with my brown hair, dashed by some gray. But photographs from the past, those canvases in all forms, have returned to me these past weeks in changing hues.
Some people and events have faded away complexly, never to return except in memories, where the rainbows are of colors rarely seen in reality. Now, my life is full of pentimento — a picture hidden behind a picture — a still moment that somehow moves.
“The wind blows the hair tufts.
‘Softly, elegantly, invitingly
“It swirls my eyes to make certain
“The wind is not a true wind
“Just a murmur of movement
“A waft enough to move the hair
“Slightly.
“To call.
“Transfix
“Puff open…”
First come forth the “Toms.” Four of us with the same first name, once dashing war correspondents, certainly creaky now. The cause: our onetime stellar translator and fixer is visiting and we join her for dinner.
This canvas was far different from the first time we were all together in Bosnia, where there were no tablecloths, tasty cooked food, ice cubes, or wonderful wine. We reminisced and told of the fun and the bad, the nerves of steel and the nervousness of bravery. This canvas has aged well in the museum of life.
It was the first return that week to one of the many masterpiece canvases of my life. The colors this night were dramatic and flamboyant but in more subtle shades.
It was also a last supper, perhaps.
“Lean your head to the sky
“Close your eyes
“To smell and listen,
“Then open when the
“Morning’s music says now”
A few days later and it was a return to the first canvas, the college campus. Where the brush strokes for the painting that would frame much of life began.
I went back because this painting was fading very, very fast. Friends who I not seen since the last day of campus were dying. Hearing from their partners, saying how they had followed me all these years and “knew” I would succeed. How did they have that confidence, that surety in me, that I did not have? They did. Yet, if you look at the painting from the campus, it was hard to see them in that frame. They and others were part of a slide show that kept ending in a white blank screen with dust over the lens.
Now, the apparitions are desperately trying to help, or perhaps prepare.
The first night there, walking from one end of the campus to the far other side to my car, no one else was around. Not a sound, no movement. A campus frozen of all nature and life. It was stepping into an ambrosial parallel universe, moving through a door of the familiar to a blissful new. A graduation of sort, of life. A prairie of promise.
Only the statute was there. That of a coal miner eating his lunch while reading by the beam from his helmet light. He is from the past but knows of today and a beam of perhaps for tomorrow. The aspirations of each generation, a heartbeat for determination, hard work, caring, giving – he says all, and more. The elements have weathered him but not caused him to fade. I just needed to stand there and be reminded.
Graduation was in two days for the new guard. They have many canvases to fill.
I did return to Paris, one more time. I went to the Place de la Concorde. It, too, was unusually empty.
She was not there. And neither was I.
