Judy Guilliams-Tapia has shape-shifted among various versions of herself throughout her adult life: graduate student living and occasionally studying in Nice, France; wordsmithing career federal bureaucrat; frazzled feminist Mom of two kids and assorted other creatures; anxiety-prone perfectionist introvert; three-time cancer survivor; Buddhist impostor; and long-time partner of an extroverted Chilean. She lives in a suburb of Washington DC, USA, and most recently, in her sixties, has shape-shifted into a writer, mainly of essays. Her writing explores what it means to be a multi-faceted human in our dysfunctional world and has previously appeared in The Metaworker. You can find her on Instagram at @judywrites-essays.
I am plodding along on leaden feet in ninety-five-degree (thirty-five degree in celsius) heat, trying to figure out the crisscross pattern of Paris streets around me so I can find the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, well-known as a former haunt of Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s. It is June 2017 and I have been exploring various corners of the Latin Quarter on foot all day.
I started the day contemplating life in the Middle Ages, as depicted in stained glass windows and tapestries at the dark and melancholy Musée de Cluny, and then walked southeast to the Jardin des Plantes. Once there, I strolled through steamy greenhouses full of exotic plants and under sunlit arches adorned with red, yellow, pale pink, coral, and purple rose blossoms. I then made my way back north uphill along the narrow and ancient Rue Mouffetard, lined with inexpensive little shops, bars, and pizza joints that cater to students of la Sorbonne. I am now somewhere near the university and am trying to get my bearings. My guidebook is no help, since it only shows the main streets and not the one I’m on, and my Wi-Fi access in the city is sporadic. And to be honest, I’ve always been directionally challenged, prone to getting lost. No matter. I have a week to myself in Paris and am determined to soak in as much of the city as I can, following the detailed itinerary I’ve put together. I ask a pedestrian for directions in my rusty French, realize that I’ve been walking the wrong way, and try again.
Finally, it appears before me—a small shop with a green awning facing the Seine, a tree and bins full of books outside, an old wooden door at the entrance. I make my way inside and examine their collection of English-language poetry, classic novels, and history books, lined up on the shelves and stacked high in cluttered rooms. I’m having trouble conjuring up the ghost of Hemingway though. A white and ginger-colored calico cat sitting by a window and lazily licking itself adds a touch of charm. I’m not the only one who thinks so. A group of young tourists are oohing and aahing over the cat and trying to take its picture. The shop is full of people who appear to be from all over the globe. I suddenly realize how tired I am and look for a place to sit down, but there are none. I head out in search of a place where I can relax and have a decent dinner.
I walk across the Petit Pont, over the shimmering Seine, to the Ile de la Cité and pass under the watchful gaze of the grimacing gargoyles and saints, including Saint Denis holding his severed head, on the facade of Notre Dame. I barely notice my surroundings though as all I can think of is being able to plunk myself down on a seat somewhere to rest. I stop at the first café I see, even though it has a dismal air about it and few customers, and approach a waiter to ask for a table. He looks at me kindly and presses a euro coin into my hand. I stare at it in a daze and then realize that he’s mistaken me for someone who desperately needs to pee but can’t afford the pay toilet on the premises. Must be my sense of urgency, haggard look, and shabby outfit. I’m wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and old sandals—my typical comfortable attire when traveling.
As usual, I am trying to fit too much into a day and have worn myself out. I have returned to France, a country I love, after an absence of four decades. My current driven self seems so distant from the young carefree woman who wandered the streets of Paris in the seventies with daydreams in her head. I have lost her somewhere along the way but maybe she’s still buried inside of me somewhere.
For a long time, I have felt caught up in a whirlwind of busyness, pulled in different directions. Managing teams and projects at work while striving to meet tight deadlines and keep narcissistic bosses happy. Nurturing my two kids into young adulthood but never feeling like I had given them enough of my time. Shepherding my aging parents, as much as I could, through the loss of their health. I have rarely found time to just be, to just be me. Despite having a loving husband who has made me laugh every day with his irreverent Chilean sense of humor and has helped keep the household humming, I have often felt overwhelmed and robotic. As though I’m never DOING enough. My brain has long been like a thundering locomotive, barreling day and night through the peaks and valleys of my life, with only occasional stops to refuel. At night it has often awakened me with ideas bursting forth about items to add to my long to-do list, so I keep a pad by my bed to jot them down. Despite my vigilance, or perhaps because of it, some personal calamities have crept into my life, such as two bouts with breast cancer, the first right after my second child was born and the second ten years later. With no time to dwell on them, I took them in stride. However, the national calamity that began with the U.S. presidential election of 2016 weighs heavily on my mind, adding “resistor” to my other roles and making me addicted to my cell phone’s news apps, which continually stream alarming news.
As an undergraduate French major in the mid-seventies, I immersed myself in the poetry of the symbolists of the late 19th century, who wrote about their tortured souls and bohemian lifestyle in Paris with a world-weariness that I found intriguing. I displayed the poem Enivrez-Vous (Be Drunk), by Charles Baudelaire, on my dormitory door. My college-self loved the poem’s distaste for stark reality as well as its call for inebriation in any form: So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry, or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk. I chose wine and poetry.
On my first trip to Paris, during January of my senior year in college, I was enthralled by its ancient-ness, vague subversiveness, free spirit, and elegance. I climbed the many steep stone steps to the top of Notre-Dame and hung out with the horned and winged gargoyles perched there, keeping scornful eyes on the city, and sticking their tongues out at it since the Middle Ages. Around midnight one night, while walking back to our cheap hotel, my companions and I saw several locals furtively pushing a cream-colored Rolls Royce down the cobbled street. Were they stealing it? I was mystified by the simple sophistication of French women, who usually seemed to wear close-fitting jeans, scarves, and long flowing raincoats. My baggy jeans and bulky coat labeled me as an American as clearly as if I had scribbled my nationality across my forehead.
I visited Paris again two years later, when I was a graduate student at l’Université de Nice for a year. My command of the language had improved greatly, thanks mainly to a group of Moroccan, Italian, and French students who took me under their wing. A friend of a friend let me stay in her tiny, rented room while she was away. It was in a typical Parisian building the color of unbleached linen, with a roof of gray-blue zinc, that dated from the grand redesign of the city in the late 1800s. The room had been originally a servant’s quarters and the bathroom facilities down the hall consisted of a Turkish toilet, basically a hole in the floor that flushed with the pull of a hanging chain. No matter. I had felt free and soulful as I roamed the labyrinthine city streets, envisioning the ghosts of the writers, artists, and philosophers who had roamed them before me. I often got lost, of course, but that was part of the thrill of exploring the countless quirky corners throughout the city. I avoided touristy spots, such as the Eiffel Tower, feeling that I had more in common with the inhabitants of the city than with the boisterous and sometimes arrogant American visitors.
I had become a flaneur, a detached wanderer leisurely strolling through the city while closely observing street life. Or, in the words of Baudelaire, perhaps the first self-professed flaneur: To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world…. On my way back to Nice, as the train moved along the tracks, jostling me in my seat in the dark, I made a vow to return one day and then drifted off to sleep.
Over the years I had longed to go back, devouring books on the city and imagining myself, like Hemingway, James Baldwin, or Josephine Baker, as an American expat wandering around the narrow winding streets leading a free-spirited life. However, I had always put a trip to Paris on the back burner. I had made sure that my family took lots of fun vacations: on the beaches in Delaware, the Outer Banks, Cape Cod, and Cancun; on road trips to Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Michigan to visit family; and on journeys to Chile to visit family and explore bustling Santiago and the country’s rocky coastline. But a vacation in Paris had always seemed like too much of an extravagance. Too focused on my own interests.
After my husband and I carted the last boxes of belongings up the stairs to the freshman dorm room of our youngest child, Camila, and bid our farewells, I was numb on the drive home. Who the hell was I if I didn’t have someone to mother every day? In my head, I saw myself standing on a precipice overlooking an abyss, with no possibility of moving forward except maybe flying. But I had no wings. For a while, I had entertained vague notions of becoming a writer and so afterward started small steps in that direction, such as journaling.
One day I saw a notice on a writer’s blog: “My favorite Paris apartment is available the last 2 weeks of June. Only $800. Any takers?” The writer had rented it from a friend but had had a change of plans. It was in a residential neighborhood and the rent was less than half the price of the beach house I had rented in Delaware the summer before. On a whim, I jumped at the chance. Very uncharacteristic of me. The writer got me in touch with her friend, who responded warmly to my email, telling me a deposit wasn’t needed, just to pay up upon arrival.
My husband joined me for the first week. The night we arrived in Paris, we walked along the banks of the Seine marveling at a purplish sunset and the crowd of young people who had gathered there to drink wine, picnic, and socialize. A cheap night out. We did typical touristy things, such as viewing the Mona Lisa from the back of a crowded room at the Louvre and ascending to the top of the Eiffel Tower at night to see the city at its most luminous. But we also danced to live rock and blues music in the streets of Montmartre until 3 am, as part of France’s annual Fete de la Musique.
At the end of that week, my husband flew home. Camila, who had become an art major, was supposed to travel to Paris that same day to join me for the second week. I was eager for us to bond while exploring Paris’ plethora of art and other treasures. However, my husband called around midnight with bad news. “Honey, I’m so sorry but the Air France people wouldn’t let Camila board. The French government requires that visitors have passports that are good for at least 6 months and Camila’s is due to expire in 3 months.” I couldn’t believe that I had never heard of this requirement. No one at Air France had mentioned it to us before and it was nowhere to be found in the guidebook I had used in my planning. Feeling guilty and forlorn, I cried myself to sleep. Camila, meanwhile, went out with friends and made new plans to go camping with our golden retriever.
I awoke the next morning with a strange realization. This was my chance to disappear for a week, go under the radar, wander through the huge maze of Paris streets, and get back in touch with my lost self. Although I started the week in my usual striving mode, ambitiously exploring the Latin Quarter to the point of exhaustion, I got looser and moved more slowly as the week progressed, becoming attuned to life in the city. I observed that the French didn’t seem to be obsessed with their cell phones and that older French women were very stylish. I bought a flowing French raincoat in a mustard color that accented my long white hair. Scanning a French newspaper, I noticed that the utterings of the U.S. president were nowhere to be found, just an article on his economic policies on page four. Taking one’s time and savoring moments—whether they involved delicious food and drink or a loved one’s embrace—seemed to be ingrained in the fabric of daily existence. One afternoon, sitting on a bench looking out over the sparkling Seine, I basked in the sunlight and sense of wholeness and freedom.
On my last full day in the city, I headed to the Canal St. Martin neighborhood, which my guidebook had described as trendy and charming. I got lost while trying to walk there from the metro station, of course. Once I made it there, I climbed up some stairs onto one of the iron footbridges over the canal and surveyed the scene. I didn’t find it charming but, as with all things Parisian, I found it fascinating. Graffiti adorned the footbridge and walls of the tree-lined canal, which shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. A few people were enjoying walks along the canal, but none looked like tourists. I was glad to have found a place far from the chic parts of Paris. I found a modest neighborhood bistro, enjoyed a delicious lunch of coq au vin, and then headed with a full satisfied belly to my final planned destination of the day, a nonprofit called Seymour+. My guidebook had described it as a “refuge for the soul,” a place to unwind, take a break from technology and other external distractions, get in touch with your “inner landscape,” and spark your creativity. Just what I craved.
The walk to Seymour+ was a straight shot along the Rue des Vinaigriers (Street of Vinegar-Makers). True to its working-class name, the street was lined with modest shops and bistros, artists’ studios, a couple of cheap hotels (one advertising rooms at about $50 per night), and many parked motorcycles. Some shops looked as though they were frozen in time. One decrepit shop sold old maps, displayed on a table all covered in dust. A young man hung out in the doorway of a small bookshop with a cat draped over his shoulder. OK, so maybe this scruffy neighborhood was charming after all. The real Paris.
I arrived at Seymour+, paid a small fee and handed over my cell phone. The place, created by an American expat, consisted of large sparsely furnished rooms with wood floors, high ceilings, and white walls. Guests engaged in a different activity in each room, guided by some simple instructions. The main idea was to look inside yourself, break through your conditioned thinking, reconnect with your subconscious, and ultimately, fire up your imagination. I was the only guest at that time and went from room to room, completing each activity in solitude.
One room had instructions for me to write whatever was on my mind, offering a simple pad of paper and a pencil. So, I sat down and wrote: “I feel that I am at the center of the universe or in a cocoon, totally detached from my real life. And it feels good. I like myself and maybe that’s a good thing to discover before I get any older.” My flaneur wanderings in the city during the week had allowed me to see how we get into ruts in our lives and never question our routines. Yes, we all must grapple with stark realities, but there are limits to what we can accomplish. We need to leave room for joy, even for some intoxication, whether by wine, poetry, or the random beauty that crosses our paths. Perhaps I should slow down, not be a slave to my to-do list, and spend less time looking at screens. Develop a sense of style as I get older. Disappear once in a while to roam, contemplate life’s mysteries, nurture my soul, and write some poems.
I completed the final activity, meditating in a room full of plants and cushions, and headed out. As I entered the metro, I got stuck in the turnstile and a rude Parisian behind me said “Allez!” in a gravelly impatient voice and pushed me forward. I only realized later, on the train, that my cell phone was missing and that he must have grabbed it from my purse while I was caught in the turnstile and distracted.
No matter. I made a mental note to stop and see the apartment owner, who lived nearby, to ask if I can use her cell phone to call my husband and alert him about the theft. I didn’t mind that I’d be off the radar until my plane landed back home the next day. I exited the metro and strolled along the Seine toward the spot by the Louvre where I could catch a bus that would take me to the apartment. I reveled in the loveliness of the twilight scene. The string of artfully designed bridges, their lights casting out rays that shone like jewels in the water. The stands of the book stalls were closed, because almost all the city’s stores close at 6 pm. The old Parisian cream-colored buildings, each adorned with unique iron grillwork at the windows. A couple greeting each other with smiles and a warm embrace. My real life could wait another day for my return.