Home from Paris: Now What?

I've been home from Paris for a week now, after my pilgrimage there to rekindle creative joy in my writing. First, of course, I had to deal with all that is involved with reentry into one's life after a long time away: recovering from jet lag, facing accumulated LTs (Loathsome Tasks), and giving attention to the dog who had pined for me so mightily during my absence. 

But now it's time to prove myself worthy of Paris by fulfilling the promises I made to myself there.

I don't have any current works-in-progress, so this is going to be the year of creative reinvention. My goal as of this moment is to head in two different directions.

First, I want to get serious about growing as a poet and trying to "do something" with the poems I've been writing for the past decade - and for my whole life really. With this goal in view, I've dragged out craft books I've purchased over the years: The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky, Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, edited by Michael Theune, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio, and The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser. I've made a stack of  slim books of poetry published by friends and other poets I admire.

I plan to sign up for the Poem-a-Day group that poet Molly Fisk hosts online every month, and to attend an online poetry seminar, and to do a monthly ZOOM with a poet friend to share our work. I will immerse myself in poetry!

My other creative pull is toward immersing myself in the past: to grope toward an autobiographical novel based on my own turbulent adolescence in the turbulent late 1960s - for middle-grade readers? for young-adult readers? for adults? Who knows? I've unearthed the two 100-plus page books I wrote (and typed on an old-fashioned typewriter) while I was in eighth grade. T is for Tarzan is a collection of humorous episodes about various hijinks; Maybe in Heaven is a chronological account of my doomed love for a boy I called Apollo (the Sun God), who (very wisely!) didn't love me back. The title expresses the hope that he might love me back someday... in heaven. 

And, oh, the poems! Shoeboxes full! Many of them love poems to this same greatly persecuted boy.

I have journals, too, filled with so much pain that I have to take a break after reading every few dozen pages, and the start of an autobiographical novel about all of this that I was working on during winter break from my freshman year in college.

The girl I was in those years was so intensely passionate and troubled; she loved so much, and so loudly; she felt so deeply, and shared it so fully. (She cheerfully allowed these ridiculously personal and embarrassing books to be circulated among the entire student body). It's as if she didn't have any skin, but was rubbed raw from how hard - but also how glorious - it was to be alive. So I may try to tell her stories now, enriched by all I've learned about writing and about life in the past half century. 

My younger son's girlfriend sent me a special candle for Christmas, intended for those homesick for France. The label describes its fragrance in this way: 

I'm burning it now.

My Last Day in Paris (for now!)

Yesterday was my last full day in Paris before flying home this afternoon. So of course it had to begin as all last days of international travel must do at this moment: with a COVID test taken any time on the calendar day preceding the day of departure.

Fortunately this was very easy to accomplish here. The pharmacy that is just a block from my hotel sets up a little tent every day for walk-in tests with immediate results.

I was there right when the pharmacy opened at 9, but a short line was already forming. I submitted my identification, paid my 29 euros, had the swab up the nose, and came back in twenty minutes for my results. The document was entirely in French, but the only two things I needed to be able to read on it were my name and the crucial word "NEGATIF"!!! So hooray for that. 

The weather was cold, gray, and gloomy. "But you always say you like this kind of weather best," I reminded myself. Still, I planned an outing full of sparkle as compensation. I have walked everywhere on this trip, partly to avoid the (excellent) Paris Metro system for fear of crowds and also because my favorite part of a trip like this just is the walking. So I set off on an hour-long walk to a museum I had never visited before, the Jacquemart-Andre Museum, which, in the words of the ever-reliable Rick Steves guidebook, "showcases the lavish home of a wealthy art-loving Parisian couple" and their collection of European masters.

I crossed the Seine on the ornate, ostentatious Pont Alexandre III:

When I reached the museum, it was as lovely as I had been told it was. 

There was a Botticelli exhibit upstairs so I sighed in the presence of his beautiful Madonnas. But then I settled myself to write while sitting on the most appealing bench I'd found in any museum so far:

I would like to say that I wrote a poem worthy of the red velvet cushions, or found an idea for the book that will be my career-culminating masterpiece. But I felt a bit shy with its splendor and just wrote in my journal.

The museum's cafe is equally splendid, and I treated myself to lunch there, including selecting a delectable pastry from the dessert case. Most of the other patrons seemed to be French ladies having lunch with other French ladies; I was the only person without a companion, but I was happy to be an American lady having lunch with her journal.

My next stop was less satisfying. Boulevard Hausmann, where the museum is situated, is also the site of Paris's two grand department stores: Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. I had bought a brightly colored tropical plush toy bird there on a trip to Paris back when I was in my 20s, which I then had to lug in a shopping bag on the rest of the European tour. But this time I just found both stores overwhelming. They have now sprawled into adjacent buildings as well, and as I entered I saw so many signs for Prada, Gucci, and Chanel that I knew this was not the place for frumpy, dumpy, dowdy me. Here is the famous rotunda of Galeries Lafayette: 

I will confess that I had visions, when I planned this trip, of returning from Paris completely transformed. Maybe I would change my hair style from the same way I have worn my hair since high school! Maybe I would return chic and stylish, as Audrey Hepburn does in Sabrina. Before her trip to Paris, she is merely the chauffeur's daughter with a hopeless crush on the son of the manor. But upon her return, she is such a stunner that now he is the one smitten. When her father worries that she is still "reaching for the moon," she is able to tell him, "No, Papa. Now the moon is reaching for me."

Well, I slunk away from the Galeries Lafayette sadly sure that the moon will NOT be reaching for me. The only way this transformation could happen would be that I would have to want it much more than I do, spend much more money that I am willing to spend, and most important, have a stylish friend with infinite patience to take me on as a project. 

Oh, well. My true goal had been, not to transform my wardrobe, but to transform my writing. So on this last day of the trip it was time to ask myself: had I achieved that goal? I have to answer: not really. I wrote less than I had planned and mainly focused on children's book projects - what I've always written - instead of something daringly new-for-me. 

But the real goal of the trip hadn't been so much to change who I am as a writer but to recover who I have always been - someone who finds deep joy in the act of writing itself and in being part of a supportive community of other creators. 

And that I did, both as I sat writing in the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, the Centre Pompidou, and on a velvet bench in the Jacquemart-Andre, and as I spent three wonderful days with Catherine Stock in Rignac. 

I hereby declare this trip a SUCCESS! Now I just need to get home today despite various logistical challenges that are too boring to talk about. And really, there is no scenario I can imagine on which I don't get back home sooner or later.. and with renewed joy in my heart. 

Au revoir, Paris!

Back to Paris from Southern France with a Grateful Heart

When I am "old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire" (Yeats), I will still remember these past three days in Rignac with Catherine Stock as some of the sweetest of my long and happy life.

I left in the early morning darkness on Monday to walk for half an hour along the Blvd. Saint Germaine and the banks of the Seine to the Gare d'Austerlitz to catch the train that would take me south for four and a half hours to Brive la Gaillarde where I would change to a smaller train for the shorter ride to the tiny Gramat station in the Lot Department. (I had thought Catherine lived in the Dordogne, but she lives in the adjacent Lot). The train moved so swiftly and smoothly that it hardly felt as if it was moving at all, but it was: first past the graffiti on the walls of outer Paris, then past seemingly endless flat fields already sprouting green fuzz, and then to the rolling hills, copses of trees, and patchwork of small farms of southern France. 

I was a bit nervous on the train as my French is adequate for reading, but not for hearing rapidly delivered announcements, and I had no timetable of stops along the way to help me listen for my own, plus I had no luck at all with wi-fi at any point on my journey away from Paris. But all was well, and Catherine was there to meet my train with her two beautiful and affectionate border collies, Jim-Jam and Babou.

Many people don't know that children's book authors do not choose their own illustrators, nor do they have any official contact with them during the course of the publication of a book. So even though Catherine had illustrated the ten books of my Gus and Grandpa series of early readers (and one earlier chapter book, Melanie Magpie, which we had both forgotten completely about!), she and I had never met in person. But it had been absolutely uncanny that without ever meeting me, or seeing a picture of the real-life grandpa the books were based on (my father-in-law), Catherine's fictional grandpa had a startling resemblance to him. The only difference had been that she gave him a mustache that he lacked in real life - a discrepancy he promptly remedied by growing a mustache of his own to match her wonderful pictures! Once I met her in real life, however, it all made sense, as she is someone able to make compassionate connections with all kinds of people, and she and I are kindred spirits in many ways despite her being vastly more cosmopolitan and adventurous than I am.

Catherine immediately whisked me off to the nearby town of Rocamadour, which she has painted many times with her watercolor students, teaching me to recite, "The town is above the river, and the cathedral is above the town, and the castle is above the cathedral." Rocamadour is said to be the second most visited site in France, after Mont St. Michel, famed for its Black Virgin statue and associated miracles.

It is impossible to see steps like these and not want to climb them - though I was glad not to climb them on my knees as devout pilgrims do!

Catherine's nearby hamlet, Rignac, radiates charm, and her cottage, Le Tramizal, is most charming of all.

The village even had its own tiny charming Christmas village tucked beneath a tree next to the Romanesque church dating to the 1200s.

On the next day, Catherine drove me on extremely narrow roads past one picturesque village to another, with their churches, cloisters, and chateaux, each one contending for the title of "most beautiful village in France." 

Catherine pointed out the farmhouse where poet W. S. Merwin lived (and hosted visits from Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath), the cathedral where the summer opera performances are held, the chateau with the heartbreaking love story, the village square where she had seen a staging of scenes from West Side Story.... paradise heaped upon paradise!

But the best part of the trip wasn't the sightseeing, glorious though it was, or the peace of the Lot after the hustle-bustle of Paris, relaxing though that was. It was the deeper connection with Catherine, as well as the chance to meet her friend, author-illustrator Rachel Isadora, who also migrated to this part of France. I loved feeling part of this global community of book creators, of people who strive to bring even more beauty into this beautiful world through their words and pictures. I loved that Catherine and I had made so many books together that we are both still proud of, and now there we were, together in person, sharing the story of our lives in all their messy complexity. 

And when I returned to Paris yesterday, I loved being back in my sweet little hotel room. How could I have ever thought it was cramped and cheerless? It was warm and welcoming. It was my little Paris home. 

And tomorrow, if I pass my COVID test today, and if neither of my flights is canceled, I will be back in my little Boulder home....

Writing with the Modernists at the Centre Pompidou

Once I made my plan to slip away from Paris for a couple of days, the rain stopped! The skies were gray but nothing wet was falling out of them, and church bells were pealing out joyously to summon the faithful to worship, as I trotted to the Centre Pompidou, for my third day in a row of writing dates with myself at Parisian museums. This is Paris's modern art museum, with a building that is as extravagantly modern as its contents (internet photo - our sky today was not this blue!).

The escalators taking visitors to the permanent collection on the upper floors are on the outside of the building and futuristic-feeling, as if you might be getting ready to be launched into space. 

When you get to the top there are lovely views down to the plaza below, where old and new meet in a strange embrace.

I especially loved the distant views to the iconic sights of Paris: the Eiffel Tower with its soaring spire, Sacre Coeur on the heights of Montmartre. Most of my photos turn out pretty awful, but the Eiffel Tower one pleased me, with the effect of the raindrops on the glass making it seem even more mysteriously beautiful. 

Despite its later opening time (11:00), this was the least crowded of the museums I chose for writing, and I found a perfect bench in a quiet room on the Contemporary floor (which contains the art that is actually more modern, in the sense of recent, than the mid-20th-century art on the Modern floor). I sat facing Untitled 42 by Alain Seches and had my best writing day of the trip so far.

I worked on the characterization-deepening revisions for my second verse novel that I had started musing about in the company of Rembrandt at the Louvre. Now I had to actually make them happen. The bench I was sitting on was long and wide enough that I could spread out the manuscript pages and plan out exactly which poems I needed to add and exactly where they needed to be placed, so that I could capture the full complexity, ambivalence,  and messy confusion of human life that would unfold at this moment in the protagonist's life. When I had built this crucial bridge to the scenes that follow, I had tears in my eyes, I was so deeply moved by my character's dark night of the soul and how she had worked her way through it. I felt the light radiating up from her like the shafts of color stretching upward from the painting facing me. 

Thank you, painting titled Untitled 42!

Best of all, for the last fifteen minutes or so, a young woman - maybe forty years younger than I am - sat herself down on the far end of the same bench and began writing on the lined pages of her bound journal. We didn't speak through our masks or even have a fleeting moment of eye contact. But I felt a kinship with her, a fellow writer, sitting side by side with me, both of us placing one word after another on the page.

I will skip over the part of the day when I somehow inexplicably lost my Denver Art Museum umbrella but purchased a pricey Pompidou Centre umbrella to replace it. A cafe on the museum plaza was three-quarters empty, so I had a mediocre quiche Lorraine for a late lunch there, with a small glass of wine (what one does in Paris!) while reading the exquisite and heartbreaking poems in my poet friend Ruth Bavetta's gorgeous collection, No Longer at This Address. Step one toward writing better poetry is to read a lot of truly wonderful poems of the sort you aspire to create.

With the sun beginning to peek out, I walked to the Pont Neuf to give my regards to the statue of Henri IV, who offers guidance to Betsy Ray in the Betsy-Tacy series of Maud Hart Lovelace, the books I love best in the whole world, when she is on a trip to Europe - also all by herself - in 1914, on the eve of the first World War. The advice he gave me today was just an echo of the advice I had already given myself: You love writing, so keep on doing it!

As pale sunshine filtered through the clouds, I decided that I might as well make the long walk to the Eiffel Tower. I had told myself that the good of this being my fifth trip to Paris was that I didn't need to "see the sights" in a dutiful way. But after spying the Eiffel Tower through the rain-spattered windows of the Pompidou Centre, it was beckoning to me. Like the mountain peaks I remember from hiking trips in the early years of my marriage, you walk and walk toward the Eiffel Tower and it never seems to get any closer. But then suddenly, you turn a street corner and there it is! 

And then you are standing beneath it, and if you had any doubt that you are in Paris, that doubt vanishes now....

Why This Trip Is Not Quite as Wonderful as I've Made It Sound

Dear readers who have followed my rapturous posts about the bliss of writing with Rembrandt at the Louvre and with the Impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay, and the joy of wandering gray Parisian streets in a misting rain, it is time for a dose of ruthless honesty. 

This trip is hard. 

It's hard to be all alone in a foreign city in the winter during a global pandemic. 

This is my fifth time traveling to Paris, and four of the five trips have been in the winter, and on one of the other trips I was also completely alone. But on none of the other trips was the whole world consumed with terror over COVID-19, and that has altered everything. 

In wintry weather, one seeks out cheerful, cozy, convivial cafes. Parisian cafes continue to be cheerful, cozy, and convivial, and every person who enters must first scan the bar code on their pass sanitaire, proof of vaccination. In this way, Paris takes COVID much more seriously than we do in the U.S. But that said, once seated at a closely spaced table in these crowded spaces, off come the masks. I just haven't felt like spending endless hours there (but nor do I particularly enjoy spending the entire day every day in a mask - and Paris now has an outdoor mask mandate, too). Yes, the museums have been delightful, but by noon they, too, are uncomfortably jammed with my fellow tourists. Yes, I do love walking in the rain, but a gentle drizzle is different from the kind of rain that soaks the only pair of shoes you brought and dampens the backpack filled with your writing dreams, with occasional gusts of wind that threaten to turn your tiny umbrella inside out.

The title of my blog is "An Hour a Day" because throughout my long writing career, I've always written for just an hour a day. Even on this trip's delicious museum-writing stints, I feel done after sixty minutes, ninety tops.  I did bring books to read, but my room, my refuge, my only mask-free space in this entire city, is SO SMALL. It looks sweet in this picture, but truly, here you pretty much see THE WHOLE ENTIRE ROOM.

Finally, the more I walked past glorious Impressionist landscapes of the French countryside in Paris's art museums, the more I wanted to be NOT in a museum staring at paintings of those landscapes, but entering INTO those paintings, inhabiting the actual landscapes themselves. In fact, here is a poem I wrote when I was in Paris in January 2016:

La Neige à Louveciennes

Wherever they painted, I want to be,
those Impressionists with their loving gaze,
to walk down just that snowy street
by just those laden trees
toward just that muffled church
for just this silent blessing.

Samuel Johnson wrote, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Perhaps when a woman is tired of Paris, she is tired of life - but maybe she just needs a little break from Paris in relentless winter rain during surging Omicron statistics. I don't fly home until Friday (and even then, only if both of my two flights are NOT cancelled and my mandatory COVID test taken within 24 hours of my departure is NOT positive). I realized yesterday, with a sigh, that I was contemplating these remaining days of my precious trip less with eagerness and more with something akin to dread. 

I needed to make A PLAN!

And I did! 

And I love my plan!

The ten titles in my Gus and Grandpa easy reader series, which I published between 1997 and 2004, were illustrated to perfection by Catherine Stock, who spends much of the year in the picturesque village of Rignac in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. Over the past years, whenever I needed cheering, I would go to her website and fantasize about a stay in her rental cottage there or taking one of her summertime plein air watercolor classes. 

Well, although I have never met Catherine in person, even after the Gus and Grandpa series ended, she and I remained connected via Facebook. She saw my first post from this trip and commented that one of these days I should jump on a train from the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris and come down to visit her in Rignac. So yesterday morning, as I was pondering how I would spend the rest of my trip and the rest of my life, I sent her a timid, tentatively worded email. What if... what if... I hopped on the train ... this coming Monday? And she wrote back: YES! So on Monday - tomorrow! - I will board the first of two trains that will take me on a six-hour journey through beautiful French countryside to the Dordogne! I'll spend two nights there and return to Paris on Wednesday, for a last joy-filled, writing-filled Parisian day before I fly home on Friday.

Hooray! 

I'm very proud of myself for being brave enough to alter plans that needed improvement, and to find such a thrilling way of doing this!

Here, from Catherine's website, her watercolor of Rignac...

Writing with the Impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay

Today I took my writerly self for a creative outing to the Musée d'Orsay.

It was another gray morning when I headed out on the twenty-minute walk there from my conveniently situated hotel. How lucky I am to actually prefer Paris under wistful, melancholy skies!

I arrived well before the museum's 9:30 opening, so I took a stroll across the Seine to the near-deserted gardens of the Tuileries.

When the museum did open at the appointed hour, the crowds were less daunting than they had been at the Louvre yesterday, and I was relieved to find that I could leave my backpack with an actual human attendant at the cloakroom instead of struggling to master the keypad for a locker. Spoiler alert: this turned out not to be as great a boon as I had thought!

First, I wandered through the museum; the choicest Impressionist paintings seem to be in a different location from when I was here six years ago; now they are up on levels five and six, which led me to the famous clock.

Benches were fewer and farther between than at the Louvre, unless I wanted a spot on the long stone benches by the procession of sculptures. With seating options so few I felt guilty about monopolizing an entire glass bench (yes, the benches by the paintings are made of glass!) for a full hour or more, but I did find one that was longer than the others so more easily shared. Why glass benches? Why glass slippers for Cinderella? Maybe glass is the preferred medium for objects of enchantment. 

My bench faced two strangely shaped canvases of Monet. When I read the label, I learned that he painted his own Déjeuner sur l'herbe with the hope of imitating not only the theme but the fame of Manet's famous painting, here displayed on the wall opposite. Manet's is the one notable for the fact that a completely naked woman reclines on the grass, unabashed by the absence of any shred of clothing, in the company of two fully clothed gentlemen. My photo of it turned out terrible, so here is a image of it from the museum website:

Alas, Monet's painting did not make the splash he had hoped for and became damaged from prolonged storage, so he had to chop it up to salvage what he could. Hence the oddity of the two adjoining paintings in their mismatched sizes.

Lessons to be learned here: 1) competitiveness is (sadly) ubiquitous among artists; 2) and often doomed to disappointment; and 3) we salvage what we can.

So I sat on my bench and wrote. I took the first picture of the glass bench with writing pad laid upon it. A kindly stranger took the other two, one of me posing myself as if I've just looked up from writing a creative masterpiece and one just of my head sans mask so you can see me looking like the happy writer-in-Paris that I am!

Today I used my writing time to make notes for a book that I have been thinking about writing for literally - get this - FIFTY-FIVE YEARS!!!! I have several dozen typed pages that I wrote either in high school or in college (I think I wrote them in high school, but they were saved in a Wellesley College folder). They are highly autobiographical and self-indulgent, but they are my entrance point into writing a ruthlessly honest, tender and heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in the turbulent years of the late 1960s. (I like writing the flap copy first, so I know what to aim for!). I came away from the session with six handwritten pages of questions I need to ask myself as I begin the task of - at long last - actually writing the book. I celebrated this progress over lunch at the museum's lovely cafe.

The museum was getting crowded at this point. If it's this crowded mid-day in January, one shudders to think how crowded it must be at the peak of the tourist season in July. So it was time to leave. I rummaged in the little side pocket of my purse for my claim ticket for the cloakroom. It wasn't there. I rummaged throughout my entire purse, though I was sure I had NOT put it in my wallet, or secret zipped compartment, or anywhere else. WHERE COULD IT BE? I checked each location again. It was nowhere. It must have fallen onto the floor at some point when I retrieved my phone to take these photos.

Oh, well. I must not be the first museum visitor to lose her cloakroom ticket. So I waited in line for the attendant and threw myself on her mercy, even practicing saying in French: "Je suis désolée, j'ai perdu mon billet!" Désolée sounds so much more genuinely heartbroken than merely saying "I'm sorry." I explained that it was a green backpack, not too large, and she set off to look for it in the row of cubbies. She held up an assortment of green backpacks. Was it this one? Or this one? Perhaps this one? As each proffered green backpack was rejected, she allowed me to come back to look for it myself, but I had no luck finding it, either. All it had in it was my coat, raincoat, and umbrella, but those are things someone would miss rather keenly on a rainy day in January, 

I searched again for the missing ticket, but it was just as gone as it had been ten minutes ago. The kindly lady admitted me again for another search, even though it was plain as plain can be that there wasn't a single green backpack there that was mine. Then suddenly - oh, joy! - I found it! But it was NOT green, it was navy blue!! I filled out the form required for the staff to surrender an item to someone who had no ticket for it, and then headed out in the afternoon drizzle, grateful for my outerwear and umbrella. 

There really are some people too dumb to be allowed to travel through the world alone, and I am one of them!! 

The topic of my next post is going to be why, although I am making it SOUND extremely wonderful to be a writer all by herself starting the new year in Paris, there are a number of reasons why this trip is . . . hard. And then I'll share what I'm planning to do to make it wonderful, anyway. 

Writing at the Louvre

On day three of my writing retreat in Paris, it was time to get serious about . . . writing. Rain was predicted so I planned to spend all day writing at the Louvre. 

The museum was just a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, and as I strolled there for my 9:30 timed admission, it did indeed start to mist, and then to drizzle, and then to rain. I'd told myself - and everybody else - that I love Paris best in the rain. What if this turned out not to be true? A mere fantasy inspired by the picture of a rainy Parisian street that hung on my closet door all through my high school years growing up in North Plainfield, New Jersey?

I was relieved to confirm that I had not lied to myself. Paris in the rain, in the early-ish morning, is truly lovely.

The rain intensified as I approached the Louvre, so I was glad not to have to wait too long in line for admittance.

Once inside, I hastened to the cloakroom to deposit my dripping umbrella and soggy jacket (I hadn't opened the umbrella soon enough, too preoccupied with rhapsodizing), in one of the hundreds of free lockers provided. I finally figured out how to create a combination on the keypad and open the locker, but after closing it with my items stowed safely inside, I had zero success as I practiced trying to make it open a second time. Oh, well, it would be exceedingly unlikely if I had somehow done something to make the locker unable to be opened ever again, so I decided to deal with that problem later and set out to find an inspiring place to write in the huge and (at that hour) nearly empty museum.

Lacking any map (I think you're supposed to call one up on your phone these days), I simply wandered. What about the elegant Napoleon III rooms? Didn't my writing deserve such royal splendor?

But the red velvet sofa and matching chairs were off limit to visitors. I might have feel too intimidated by them, anyway.

When I saw a sign for Northern European paintings, that sounded more promising. I would love to write in a room full of Vermeers! But the Louvre, to my surprise, owns only two small ones. 

Then I found the room of Rembrandts. Ooh! My self-assigned task for the day was to read over the manuscript of a middle-grade novel written previously to see if I could revise the last portion of the book to add more depth and complexity to the characters. Nobody expresses depth and complexity of character better than Rembrandt; no one equals him in expressing the very soul of his subjects.

So I settled myself on a bench with my manuscript. 

It might have been nice to have found a bench with a back to lean against, but it was worth a slight lack of physical comfort to be in the presence of the master of character himself, as shown in this stunning late-life self-portrait that I could gaze upon every time I glanced up from my toil. 

I sat there for almost two hours, lost in this manuscript that I hadn't looked at for a full year. I was pleased to discover that, after this long time away from the story, I myself thought it was wonderful! Eminently worthy of being published! But I could see that at a crucial point in the story I had indeed rushed the action and flattened out the characterization. This was nothing that Rembrandt and I couldn't fix!

By this point I was hungry, so I somehow found my way out of the Northern European painting galleries (not easy for this directionally challenged person), bought myself a soup and salad lunch in the museum eatery (averting my eyes from the travesty of a Starbucks there!), and wrote poetry in my journal while I ate. The museum had become crowded now that it was afternoon, so I took one last hasty peek into the French and Italian wing; when I was in the Louvre back in January 2016, I had a chance for some one-on-one quality time with Mona (maybe I had been there in the early morning?), but this time she was mobbed with star-struck fans, so I called the writing day a success and prepared to head back to the hotel. First, however, I had to face the deferred problem of the impossible-to-open cloakroom locker. To my total (but most pleasant) surprise, this time I achieved success on my second try. It's such a relief when occasionally I am NOT totally pitiful and pathetic with all technology. The sun was shining down on me as I headed outside, and it's hard not to love Paris in the sunshine, too, especially after a day of progress on a stalled manuscript and a new stirring of creative joy.

Tomorrow: writing with the Impressionists at the Musee d'Orsay.