General Anesthesia, and Paris

Only a Tenuous Connection Between the Two

We have lots of books about Paris in our house. This will come as no surprise to those of you who are regular readers of my Substack pieces. By lots, I mean well over a hundred, what with the pretty picture books and the décor books, and the cookbooks, and the garden books and the guide books and the map books and the Paris-as-it-was history books … We could easily fill the shelves of a belle, petit boiseried salle de livre (which may not actually be the right term ; I don’t speak French) with only books on Paris. Picture me leafing through volume after volume as I sit in an enveloping fauteuil upholstered centuries ago in supple leather of an antique hue. Sipping an apéro or bonnet de nuit – in reverie.

Once upon a time I thought I’d live in Paris. Now I know I never will. But that’s OK. I’ve done the next best thing: I’ve declared our house a Paris suburb – one of the more distant, leafier ones. And I’ve been lucky enough to visit the actual Paris scores of times. Enough times that I even felt comfortable that I know the city well enough – at least “our” neighborhood, the 5^th – to set a novella there. And as a visitor I haven’t had to trouble with keeping the plumbing working, or carrying the street-market treasures home through sudden showers, and up flights and flights of stairs. Or getting internet service that works. All challenges I’ve read about in the laments of others actually living there. Lucky me, I’ve just had to live the dream.

And a dream I know it’s been, being in a place – oh, a lovely place – where someone else always does the cooking and cleaning, and the doctor’s office – and the ailments that get diagnosed there –  is back home, where the real-life things happen – things left behind for little excursions to paradise. (You’re right. Not everything about Paris is paradise – but enough is to keep the dream alive.)

“I thought it would last my time,” to quote a line from Philip Larkin – a line that has nothing to do with Paris, but comes to mind for me so often lately.  A recent medical adventure (nothing serious; recovering nicely) has reminded me that while Paris may last – we’ll see if it survives the Olympics – my time there will not.

My medical involved general anesthesia, so I don’t remember any of it after the nurse said, “You won’t feel a thi …” No, I don’t remember a thing, until I heard another nurse’s voice: “…ow are you feeling?” as my head spun and my eyes tried to focus on the revolving walls.

For that hour between the two nurses - it couldn't have been much more than that  - I'd given over any pretense of control - my person and fate completely in the hands of others. People I hardly knew – the surgeon, talked to only twice; the anesthetist met only once, minutes before he did his job; the operating room nurses not met at all, just there as someone rolled me in. Everything I am, have been, might hope to be, in the hands of strangers, just humans, “only people”  – just like me. What an act of faith. In retrospect, it takes my breath away.

But that amazement at faith isn’t the thing that stays with me most about this recent adventure. My fear is that this is the beginning of the decline, or at least a noteworthy acceleration of it. We cancelled a trip for my medical reasons – the first time we’ve ever done that. And like falls among the elderly (do I have the courage to say, “Us elderly?”), once they begin, so often they just keep happening until the final fall – the one from which there’s no getting up. I saw it in my mother’s final phase. She wanted – don’t we all – to spend her last time of life at home.

And then the falls began, and they dictated that she’d spend her last five months – disrupted months during which everything that had been her life, except the being alive itself, fell away – away from home. And yet, knowing that about falls, and having seen her last bit of life, and having taken falls myself (so far I have managed to get up), I still refuse to accept that I have reached the stage of old-manhood when I should (yes, SHOULD, for my own good) sit down to put on my pants: that’s the one best thing old men can do to help keep themselves (“ourselves”) from falling, they say. But what an admission of “I’m old,” what a giving up of the illusion of control, that simple act embodies. And so I still foolishly put mine on standing up.

This time it’s likely I’ll recover to go to Paris again, maybe many times. I hope so. But this morning, as I leafed through one of those Paris volumes, I thought of a friend of long standing – acquaintance I should probably say now; we’ve fallen out of closeness; it happens, even when you have no idea why – an acquaintance who loves Paris, and the idea of it, at least as much as I, and whose time there is over. At 90, and mobility restricted, she’ll likely never go again, except, possibly, through Hemingway’s “moveable feast” – or maybe as ashes. Paris is now, for her, all memory or dream. And I know that I’ll be there all too soon myself. I admit it, a tear came into my eye as I thought of her (and me).

As with my acquaintance, so with me as well before too many more years (so with us all, but I’ll leave you to get to that conclusion on your own). It was ever thus, and always will be. The way of nature. So philosophical of me to say that, don’t you think? And with hardly any bitterness in my tone.

And now, I wait to recover. Get better, anyway: recover sounds too grand at my age. Get better for what? Another trip to Paris? I hope so. My friend (I think I’ll call her friend again, even though she’ll likely never know, she taught me so much about living) has taught me not to take that for granted – not to expect it – maybe not even to hope for it.

If I do make that trip – I think I will; I now know I’m a person of previously unimaginable faith – I’ll do it in honor of her. Though she’ll likely never know. I won’t tell her. That might be too painful for her, knowing that I still can go to Paris and she never can again. But it could be that as I’m thinking of her on the Rue Mouffetard or in the Luxembourg she’ll sense it and feel a warmth – she won’t know why – and think back to when we still were close and both could dream that our Paris dreams still might be possible.

As my own act of defiance against the fate awaiting me, I’m ordering another book about Paris, rush delivery! It should be here tomorrow.

Gather ye Paris books as ye may,
	Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today
        Tomorrow will be [long gone, at least where you are concerned, 
         you better believe it!]

I’m ordering another one, that is, if I can find one we don’t already have. But not to worry about that, I guess. One thing you can always count on in this life, in addition to death and taxes, is another book about Paris.