Three businessmen absorbed in their laptops are the only other passengers on this flight. My seat is toward the front of the small private jet.
“My cousin David bought my ticket,” I tell the flight attendant. “He’s really rich.”
The flight attendant isn’t interested. “Landing in Paris,” he says, bored.
The plane does a sharp descent, ending in a bumpy landing. I have with me my cat in a carrier, my guitar, and a rolling suitcase.
“Will you help me with my stuff?” I ask the flight attendant.
“No,” he says, turning away.
I struggle down onto the tarmac, where I no longer have a cat in a cage but a small curly-haired white dog on a blue leash. The dog pulls the leash out of my hand and runs away.
I wonder how to say “catch him” in French. I could call out “stop!” but the verb for “catch” isn’t accessible. Do I know it in Spanish? No. Recouper? No. Aha! Attraper!
A woman waiting with her family intercepts the dog. A pet carrier appears so I lock him in it.
Then I go into the crowded waiting area where people are standing because all the seats are taken.
Where am I going? I don’t know. Somewhere in France? Maybe to the Languedoc. I’ve been reading about the early heretical Christians who once lived there.
So I sit on my suitcase and wait with my guitar and my dog. Or is it a cat again? It is too dark to see.
I first posted this piece about Shakespeare and Co in 2022. I’m currently listening to the audiobook of The Paris Novel, by Ruth Reichl. The protagonist, Stella, stays at Shakespeare and Cowhile she searches for information about the model Victorine, who posed for Manet’s painting, Olympia. As in Reichl’snovel, Delicious, there is a mystery that the protagonist is unraveling, as well as rich descriptions of food. Even the gingerbread from Delicious makes a reappearance.
I’m totally caught up in the story, already sad that it’s going to end and I’ll never again be able to read it for the first time.I was describing the book to some members in my dance group, and Howard’s eyes turned bright. “I stayed at Shakespeare and Co in 1971!” he said. “I ran out of money and this Norwegian guy told me I could sleep there for free. He told me to sleep on the floorbecause there were bedbugs.”
I wonder now what famous or up-and-coming writers I might have encountered there had my friend and I chosen to crash among the books at Shakespeare and Co in 1971.
*
*
Today I returned some books to the library and picked a new one to read: The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher. It’s a fictionalized biography of Sylvia Beach, the founder of the first Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris.
I was drawn to the topic because I had been to Shakespeare and Company, although, as I know now, it was not the original bookstore started by Sylvia Beach.
How did I end up at this iconic bookshop in Paris in 1971? I’ve been trying to remember but it’s a long time—fifty years—ago. I was twenty, attending the University of Bordeaux, and hitchhiking to Paris with a friend whenever we could.
Perhaps we were looking for a free place to sleep. At the time, the proprietor was George Whitman. He was slim, slightly hunched, missing some teeth, wearing disheveled clothes. He drifted through the store eating a soft-boiled egg out of a glass. The yellow yolk stands out in my memory.
The bookstore itself was perfect: musty, cluttered, stuffed with books. The clientele ranged from older history buffs, writers, and literary tourists to unwashed youthful travelers.
We were directed upstairs where the travelers crashed. My friend and I looked around at the backpacks, rumpled sleeping bags, dirty dishes, and agreed that this was not for us. We’d find a cheap hotel room instead.
Here’s a bit of history, excerpted from the link below:
Shakespeare and Company is an English-language bookshop in the heart of Paris, on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame. Since opening in 1951, it’s been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers, becoming a Left Bank literary institution.
The bookshop was founded by American George Whitman at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Kilometer Zero, the point at which all French roads begin. Constructed in the early 17th century, the building was originally a monastery, La Maison du Mustier. George liked to pretend he was the sole surviving monk, saying, “In the Middle Ages, each monastery had a frère lampier, a monk whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I’m the frère lampier here now. It’s the modest role I play.”
When the store first opened, it was called Le Mistral. George changed it to the present name in April 1964—on the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth—in honor of a bookseller he admired, Sylvia Beach, who’d founded the original Shakespeare and Company in 1919. Her store at 12 rue de l’Odéon was a gathering place for the great expat writers of the time—Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound—as well as for leading French writers.
Through his bookstore, George Whitman endeavored to carry on the spirit of Beach’s shop, and it quickly became a center for expat literary life in Paris. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Richard Wright, William Styron, Julio Cortázar, Henry Miller, William Saroyan, Lawrence Durrell, James Jones, and James Baldwin were among early visitors to the shop.
It’s Paris’ second Shakespeare and Company bookstore
This bookstore takes its name from an older store which was started in Paris in 1919, by a lady called Sylvia Beach, another US expatriate. It was at 12 rue de l’Odéon and in the years leading up to World War II, it became a literary haven and a publisher in its own right – it was the only place that published James Joyce’s Ulysses in its entirety when no one else would. The store was closed by the Germans in 1941 and Sylvia was interned. Ernest Hemingway is said to have arrived at the shop after Paris’ Liberation and personally declared it reopen, but it never did. At least not in the same location or with the same owner. Sylvia Beach bequeathed the official name to George Whitman in the late 1950s and upon her death, he renamed his bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in her and the store’s honour. He had originally called his store Le Mistral.
* * Wild winter night the old house creaks and rattles Outside in the leaking dark an old woman smiles * Wrapped in shabby shawls carrying a shuddering candle she seeks a path around the grief that stabs her groaning heart * Keening low and lissome shadows sigh and sway a song of the lost…
* * Old lady nails a yellow 5 on the door post Raises her reedy voice to the widening sky Moonlight, starlight the solstice is coming Ice light, snow light winter stars humming * Redtail, blue jay, woodpecker, finch Sing a song of four birds a pocket full of leaves Round the house Round the…
* * Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe. From Remember by Joy Harjo She came in the door today, carrying a bundle of leaves. You sit there, she said, like a rotting avocado, picking out your black spots with a spoon. She flicked her fingers through my hair,…
This memoir comes from 2005, when I was teaching English as a New Language (ENL) to kindergarten and first grade children.Now, seventeen years later, I still have “teacher dreams” like this one.
*
I am in a room filled with the brightly colored decorations and clutter of a primary class. It is 8:30 and the first student comes in bundled in snow jacket and boots and burdened with a backpack almost her size. I am teaching kindergarten (God give me strength) and it is a winter day with no outdoor recess.
A boy enters next, followed by a parent: my class mother. She greets me pleasantly and proceeds to remove her coat. There being no place for it, she folds it up and stashes it in a corner on top of her purse and a brown bag she was carrying. More students arrive with parents in tow. I become anxious, and check the week’s schedule posted on the bulletin board. No PTA program is planned. I have no choice but to whisper a question to my class mother. “Why are you all here?”
“For the math demonstration,” she replies. “Parent-child hands on math?”
“Oh.” My co-teacher and I scheduled this activity for a weeknight. Or so I thought.
Now eight parents, with bags of materials, are perched around the room. One dad has brought a guitar.
“Apparently there is some mistake,” I say with a smile. “This class was scheduled for a Thursday evening next month.”
Most of the adults do not hear me. Three look up vaguely and continue talking to their children. No one moves to put on a coat and leave. The room is crowded. Seven moms and one dad are perched on bookshelves and miniscule chairs, conversing with each other, and being interrupted by noisy children showing off their work. The rest of the students have unpacked and are milling around the room aimlessly.
A sickening knot begins to form in my gut. The room is descending into chaos. I call to the students to sit in their chairs. Most do but I see two girls go out the door. I follow them into the neighboring classroom where they are taking toys off the shelf. I speak to them severely; they put the toys back and return to the overcrowded classroom.
Maybe I can teach some math. Frantically, I search through a stack of math worksheets that I have collected for emergency lessons. All the tasks require pre-teaching new concepts. I couldn’t do that with this group. No math lesson this morning. I decide to read a book and paw through a shelf of paperbacks to find something appropriate. I come up with a story called “Scrub” about a backhoe. I call the children to the rug. I have to shout to make myself heard over the noise. The students are distracted: some sit down and some hang on their mothers.
The dad takes out his guitar and begins singing a silly song that gets the attention of the group. He is a much better guitarist than I. I feel a pang of jealousy and inadequacy. He is doing my job and I am now looking bad: unprepared, unable to maintain order.
My last thought is that I will read the story and improvise a lesson on phonemic awareness: have the students identify pairs of words that begin with the same sound. I’m feeling sick.
Like the trite endings of third grade stories: I wake up. Relief pours over me, the nausea subsides. It was only a dream. I don’t teach kindergarten, and I will not be presenting at Math Night.
Whew. Deep breath. Time to get up and get ready for work.
Tangled Magic 