Février 2003 (14)

One of the main streets in the Marais neighborhood in Paris is la rue Vieille-du-Temple. It was in existence as early as the 13th century. Walt and I spent a week in an apartment on this street, near its intersection with the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, in the year 2000. We had a friend who lived just across the street from the Bar des Philosophes back then. I wonder if she still lives there today....

I had lived not very far away, on the rue Saint-Sauveur just steps off the rue Montorgueil in the 2nd arrondissement, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Friends of mine in those days lived on the rue des Archives and the rue du Bourg-Tibourg, so I was over in the Marais a lot. Those were good years. In some ways, my French was probably better back then than it is now. In 1981 I met Walt and in 1982 we left Paris and went to live in Washington DC on Capitol Hill. In 1983 I was hired as a editor at the US Information Agency by CHM. I was in my early 30s. In 1986, Walt and I moved to California and stayed there, in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, until we came to live in France in 2003. We traveled to France every year during that time for vacations and/or work.

I'm posting these photos just because I like the color contrasts, and because they bring back so many memories. Ironically, one of the first people we met when we came to live in Saint-Aignan 20 years ago, a man named Jean-Luc who passed away prematurely in 2009 at the age of 52, had grown up in the Marais neighborhood. He and I spoke the same language (Parisian French) and used many of the same expressions. We had frequented many of the same places years before we met each other and became friends. It's too bad he left us at such a young age.