What Happened, 5

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir

About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~ Chapter 4 ~
Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Chapter 5 ~ Holy Spirit

The plains of Paris lay below my feet. A conqueror’s view. Me, I was just an unemployed newspaperman about to turn 30 when May came that Spring. But I’d overthrown something to get here. (Caution and common sense, my congenitally anxious mother an ocean away in Ohio would say). The white walls and soaring triple domes of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris rose at my back this Christmas Eve. From Sacre Coeur’s perch on the butte Montmarte, the highest vantage point in town, I gazed down at the City of Light. Make that a city of a million coruscating lights.

Town — what a funny word to call Paris. What did the Parisii, the tribe from which the city would cull its name, call their settlement here on the river Seine three centuries before Christ? Lutetia. Ah. Even then the place was mellifluous, at least in name. Lutetia Parisiorum, “Lutetia of the Parisii.” The city stretched to the horizon, low to the ground. No skyscrapers allowed, except for a cluster of glass and steel towers to the west in the business district, La Defense, rising like a lone batch of cornstalks from a sweeping field of rye grass.

Out of the flat Parisien plain the eye leapt toward a few other exceptions. The jutting index finger of the Eiffel Tower, bathed bottom to top in bronze light. The stout, bulldog shoulders of the Arc de Triomphe in the Place Charles de Gaulle. The arch’s mouth was big and wide enough for an exuberant French pilot to steer his biplane though a couple weeks after World War I ended in 1919. There’s newsreel of it somewhere.

I shivered from the bone-cold chill. What was I doing here? When I began mulling the answer to that question (whose translation into motherspeak was: ‘What are you doing with your life, not-so-young James?’) I ducked. Weaved.  I answered the pocket-size version of the question. What am I doing here? Going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve in Paris. In Paris. That bore repeating. I turned from the low marble parapet, from the living postcard view of the city, and entered Sacre Coeur. The basilica was packed, hardly a pew to be squeezed into throughout the vast interior. France was a mostly Catholic land, after all. This was the place to be on the eve of the day that marked the entry of the faith’s Messiah into humankind’s grubby midst.

Look at me talk. I was raised Catholic, too. Did my turn as a cassocked altar boy. I always looked forward to rousting the couple of sleepy, bony nuns in the empty pews at 6 a.m. Mass at Holy Spirit in Columbus with a boisterous ‘Clang-a-lang!-clang-a-lang!’ of the handbells as the priest swapped the water into wine. My favorite part of the job. But things happen. We sat together as a family at Mass when I was 6. Dad drifted to the back of the church by the time I was 9, so he could leave when restless. Stopped coming altogether when I was 12. Mom started raising beefs with what she was expected to believe as Vatican II and the ‘60s steam-rollered Catholic America. Stopped coming herself every Sunday by the time I was 16 or so. Then the day came – I think I was a cub reporter in West Virginia – when I had to fill out some official form. Religious affiliation, it asked? ‘Roman Catholic,” I wrote, adding: “Retired.”

From my peripheral vision, I noticed a bearded man with glasses, in black shirt and black pants staring my way. When I looked at him, he looked ahead, down the cross-shaped interior to the far-off altar. We stared over a sea of shoulders as a priest and what looked like 50 altar boys performed the ballet of the Mass. The priest had a microphone strapped to the bib of his robe. He uttered the liturgy in French words that boomed and echoed in the high, dark reaches of Sacre Coeur. The place smelled heavenly. Great amoeba-like clouds of incense with an aroma like sweet wood smoke swam above the heads of the congregants. I was instantly transported back into the sanctuary of Holy Spirit. Back in the day, the church could sometimes feel like a warm, cozy cave, a bright blaze burning inside while a blizzard howled outside the walls. My second favorite altar boy job was clinking the metal censor, the incense burner hung from a chain, brought out only for special holy days. As a collector of exotic words, it was only decades later I’d learn the delightful name for this device  – a thurible. The massed Parisian altar boys clinked and clanked their many thuribles, the only sound now in the basilica but for the scraping of shoes and clearing of throats by the assembled.

I glanced again to my left. The bearded man in black stared up at the fingery wisps of incense, probing the higher darkness. He turned my way again. I looked away. Time to go. I had to find a phone booth, then get back to the apartment. My Muslim friend had far more interest in the depths of his sleeping bag than in thuribles and holy hosts. You could be sure Abdullah snored in delight in our little den, rubbing his fragrant socks together as he did in repose, chafing the charred cuffs of his pant legs, secure in the sleepy knowledge  he would not be catching on fire this night.

Down in Montmarte, the streets were quiet and cold. I found a phone booth but it was occupied, perhaps someone else calling out of the country to family on Christmas Eve. Which country, I wondered? Surinam? Russia? Algeria? Who else would be in a Paris telephone booth past midnight on Christmas Eve? Even urban terrorists should have the night off. I found another phone booth on another street corner. It ate my change and clicked off. Omigod, I had change for only one more try. I’d be toast – hell, use the Latin, it was Christmas Eve – I’d be persona non grata if I didn’t call home on this night of nights, ringing up the family gathered at my parent’s house. What time would it be there? About 7 p.m. The festivities would be in full swing, a crowded house. Maybe everyone would be holding their plastic, numbered  sheet with a few lines each from Clement Clark Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.”  Under my mother’s no-nonsense supervision of the tradition, each person would have to recite their page in sequence. Who would get the final call-out, one of my three brothers, one of my two sisters?

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

Which grandchild would earn the high honor (usually the youngest one that could walk without tipping over) of cracking open the small jewelry box. Unwrapping the porcelain figurine of Baby Jesus from its toilet paper coverlet. Then, elven feet approaching the crèche, depositing the Messiah in his porcelain bed of straw in the nativity scene on the fireplace mantel. This was a nativity scene whose cows, donkeys, wise men, Mother Mary, Joseph and holy angel we’d all been rearranging in various, often un-holy configurations since we ourselves had come to earth.

This would not be an unalloyed holiday hello. My parents had expected me back from Europe by this night. Expected me back in America, looking for a new job after my three-month adventure abroad, fitting my wagon wheels back into the ruts of a secure, sensible career. Time to bring to a close this open-ended wandering across borders! The phone swallowed my last coins: Clink! Ring-Ring…

“Hello?”
My mother.
“Hey, there. It’s me.”
“Where ARE you?” she demanded.

I filled in the details. She was glad to hear from me. Sad I was an ocean away. The very first of her six offspring ever, ever to miss a family Christmas. She sounded like she was crying over there on the other side of the Atlantic. I was passed on to my father, my brothers, my sisters. I wished I could travel down the phone line, hop off into that Ohio living room. Open presents, give them. Wiggle Baby Jesus in his bed of straw. Then, after dinner, after hugs, dial up Paris. Hightail it back to the City of Light. As it was, we all wished each other love, wished each other well.

“Merry Christmas!”
“Joyeaux Noel!”

I hung up and headed back to the flat. Along the way, I passed the spot where earlier that day Abdullah and I had passed a small, waist-high Christmas tree discarded on a corner. It now lay tipped on its side upon the sidewalk. So, I adopted it. I hefted it by its small trunk, hoisted it on my shoulder and struck off through the empty streets of Paris. It was no fun hauling it up those seven flights of stairs. But it looked just fine in the apartment. It needed ornaments, though. That’s why Abdullah awoke that sunny Christmas Day to find a surprise Christmas tree beside his head. I’d decorated it with my white plastic comb, a brightly colored Metro map, a panel from the comic strip “Nancy” in French torn from a newspaper, a couple Polish teabags and assorted doodads scrounged from around the flat. The star at the top of the tree was the keys to the flat.

“Joyeaux Noel, mon ami!” I said.
“Joyeaux Noel, Jimmy,” he said.

He gazed out the window at the sunny streets. “Par Eese,” he added.

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir

About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~ Chapter 4 ~
Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

1. 

   DAVE says:

   March 17, 2010 at 6:32 pm

   Some things, often the most important things, need to be done when the time is right. I had not started reading TohuBohu Tales because the right time had not come. However, when I got your email note about chapter 5, the time had apparently arrived.

   For unknown reasons I could not access chapter 1, but I could connect to Chapter 5. So, I read the TohuBohu Tales backwards, Chapter 5 through 1. The tales appear to be a good read in either direction.

   Assuming the intensity residing in the story’s roots, I look forward to future chapters but have no idea what to expect. Remembering the intensity associated with my own writing of “The Key to My Grandfather’s House” in CowGarage, I respect and maybe even understand the power and trepidation in telling such a tale.

   I admire all such explorations into unknown territory and hope that all sibs, family, friends and acquaintances will follow you down that trail.