27. Printemps a Paris

It's springtime in Paris, my lovelies. The sun is shining, the air is warm, flowers are all blooming and stuff...and all of this together combines to act as some sort of magnet on Parisians. From the homes and salles de cafe (cafe interiors) where they've been holed up all winter, this perfect anti-storm of pleasantness sucks them right out into the open, into the parks and out onto les terrasses to sit in the sun. And although there are holdouts, most of them leave their big coats and scarves (their scarves!) behind.

This may look like a patch of grass, but it's actually human-sized fly paper.

The changeover from cold to delightful seems to have happened overnight. Well, over the course of a weekend. Seems like just a couple weeks ago that we were at Chez Nails, looking at tiny outposts of rogue flowers. And now the Luxembourg Gardens is full of beds of blooming hyacinths and pansies and daffodils. Like someone flicked a switch.

Parisians make out in public at the drop of a hat. 

Megan abandoned the library to study at a cafe in the Gardens itself. 

I love the relaxed-yet-intense thing she's got going on here

 We walk through the place from time to time, and all winter it was a ghost town. Two or three people going for walks, kids playing basketball or tennis on the weekends was all you'd see. But then spring happened and...you know that theory about Glacial Lake Missoula? So, Glacial Lake Missoula (GLM if you're hip) existed somewhere around 15,000 years ago at or near the place we now call Missoula, Montana. The Cordilleran Ice Shelf, as it froze its way south during ye Olde Yce Agge, blocked off a river. A giant lake formed, at times holding as much water as Lakes Erie and Ontario combined. The ice sheet acted as a dike. I envision a towering wall of ice, glittering blue-white, looking out over a plain where mastodons graze, smilodons hunt mastodons, and humans work on pointy- and burning-stick technology. 

Wall of ice. 2,000 feet tall. What could go wrong?  This is the kind of idea
 Michael Bay dreams about. Of course, he'd probably have to go and
make it a wall of ice from space or something...

As many as forty times during the few thousand years that the source material for the Ice Age movies were happening the dike failed. This is a euphemism for broke, cracked, shattered, emptying the entire inland sea in as few as two or three days. “The peak rate of flow was ten times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world.” (http://www.iafi.org/floods.html In the near future, all citation will just be a link to a digital archive. Sooo much easier than MLA).

All of that research and googling was to compare the failure of the ice dam to the influx of people to the park.

The other day Megan and I went to Orange to replace her stolen phone. I realize I haven't told you of the story involved in getting our phones in the first place, back in September when everything was hard. It's a long tale, and I may get to it at some point, but the upshot of that was that I expected replacing her phone to be very difficult. It turned out not to be; she chose a phone, she bought it, they gave her a SIM card already synced up to her old account so she didn't need to change her number or anything. Super easy. We celebrated by heading to the Latin Quarter for some lunch. The Latin Quarter is pretty close to a certain bridge that crosses the Seine, and I had a plan.

The bridge, called Le Pont des Arts, is a pedestrian bridge that spans the Seine between the Institut de France and the Louvre. It was built in 1802 and 1804, but got bombed a couple times during World War I and its sequel, not to mention getting rammed numerous times by barges whose captains liked their wine a bit much. In 1979 a final barge rammed it, causing a 60-meter section to collapse. It was rebuilt-- exactly to its original specifications-- between 1981 and '84.

Somewhere around 2008, some couple attached a padlock to the bridges's railing with their names on it. Quicker than you could say "Wazzup?" or have your wedding party dance down the aisle instead of walk, it became a thing, although this one was awesome instead of lame, and now the bridge si lined with thousands of padlocks. I think it's to signify their belief in the integrity of Paris and their willingness to add their own strength to its continuance. Right?

Oddly, I couldn't find any pictures of the damaged bridge, or the bridge with
 a boat smashed into it. It seem like historical barge-washing to me

Nah, I know. It's love. I first saw this bridge back in December, when Megan's parents were here. I liked this idea. And I love me some Megan. And so I took measures.

It is hard to get one of those out of its hard plastic packaging without
 alerting the lady who's sitting three feet away. but I managed it.

After lunch I got Megan to wander down by the river, and then over the bridge. I said, “Here looks good,” and pulled the padlock out of my bag. Ta-dah! All set to go. We sanctified it...

Attached it...

and took our picture with it. The sun was in our eyes.

I wasn't aware that the tradition was also to throw the locks off the bridge into the river, so I didn't. It also seems too...litter-ey, for me. So I still have the keys. Eventually they'll just join the other keys I have in a drawer somewhere, no longer remembering what they're for. But that won't matter. I'll never need to use those particular keys.

It's somewhat controversial, in that some people think it spoils the looks of the bridge,
 while others think it adds to the tale of the bridge. I'm in the latter camp.

So now we're part of Paris. There along that bridge is a padlock with our name on it, and it'll stay there...forever, I guess. I don't believe there's a city employee whose job it is to get some massive bolt cutters (because some of those locks are serious) and go down the bridge, cutting the things off. So it's permanent.

Until a barge rams it again.