Friends

An extremely rough month on the family front, and tomorrow I go north for another stint on the far front. (The one at home has been bad enough.)

News is worse. As I walked through the kitchen at different hours yesterday, both times the news coverage was showing the Notre Dame spire falling, which gave me a sharp, unpleasant throwback first to 9/11, but then also (in black and white) to certain clips of President Kennedy's assassination, which you could not get away from, late '63, early '64. TV, magazines, had those same pictures, now permanently etched in my memory.

Re Notre Dame, that 800 year old edifice has taken hits before. Notably, the French Revolution. It was very badly damaged by revolutionaries. It was gussied up superficially by Napoleon so that he could be crowned emperor there (though French kings had actually been crowned and buried at Reims and St-Denis respectively). It wasn't until Victor Hugo wrote about it so nostalgically (he also did that about other parts of old Paris in Les Miserables) that it was finally restored as much as nineteenth century tech was able to do so. I believe some of those famous gargoyles appeared then, if I'm not mistake, remembering my tour as an awe-filled student in 1972, listening to the tour guide heavily French-accented German.

The dawn of the automobile has done nearly as much damage as the revolutionaries, just not to the art, which was carried out. Whenever I smell diesel smoke on a city street still, I'm thrown back to the Paris I roamed in '72, and then again in '75, which smelled of diesel first, then equal parts cigarette smoke and urine. (there were outside urinals for men in those days, and there was also a lot of alleyway and building pissing). The urine never hurt the church building, but I bet anything that grainy smoke that got all over your clothes and in your hair after a day's wandering certainly did. It had had an entire century of accumulation.

Notre Dame was a living church--that is, unlike many, hadn't been turned into a museum, but was still consecrated. I image Palm Sunday masses were held earlier that day, before the fire.

In other news, something that likely only excites me--the narrator for A Sword Named Truth is really taking the pronunciation seriously, and even consulted me about overall narrative tone. Wow, this is what the A-listers must feel like. I don't expect to ever get this kind of attention again. I am so grateful.