a blind flaneur

When I was imbibing the pinyon smoke and stacking the cord-wood yesterday, I felt as unconditionally happy as I did last summer in Paris when I walked down Rue Mouffetard with a freshly baked loaf of bread. Simple pleasures for simple people, I guess.
Two days earlier I learned with shock that the sawyer who […]

[Photo by wallyg]
I heard these guys almost every afternoon as I crossed Place de la Contrascarppe, the heart of our Paris neighborhood. One time they were playing “On Green Dolphin Street” and I imagined one street  in New York while walking down another in Paris.

[Photo by peterhoneyman]
Soccer may supercede kissing everywhere else on the planet, but not in Paris. Most of the crowd outside this café at the foot of Rue Mouffetard are fixated on watching France trounce Togo in the 2006 World Cup. Not the couple on the left. Someone has to safeguard the city’s reputation.

I’ve been thinking about my beloved Rue Mouffetard, one of the oldest streets in Paris. Two thousand years ago, when the Roman village of Lutetia spread along the Left Bank of the Seine, what is now Mouffetard was the road that led to Rome. Rue Mouffetard runs through time like the Street […]

[Photo by roboppy]