Looks like Paris

I'm a huge fan of the blue doors in Paris.

Some days, when I was living in Paris, when I didn't quite know what to do with myself, I would just wander the streets for hours snapping photo upon photo of variations on blue doors.  I posted them here. And here.

And now, looking back, I wonder if that need to see the same image repeated in various forms was in fact a comforting, Le-Petit-Prince kind of activity.  As in, the Little Prince who one day watched 43 sunsets.

“One day,' you said, 'I watched the sunset forty-three times!'

And a little later you added:
'You know, when one is that sad, one can get to love the sunset.'

'Were you that sad, then, on the day of the forty-three sunsets?'

But the prince made no answer.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I never really thought about it at the time.  I just looked at more blue doors.

But yesterday I was jostling down the street and -- ta-dah! -- found a fabulous set of blue doors, complete with the Parisian enameled street number sign above.  The door handle in the middle of the door.  The whole enchilada.  So French!

Except that one quick look gives away the telltale sign ("Driveway NO Parking") that we are not in Paris, but in fact in Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Maybe I should offer the owners a little round sign with "Défense de stationner - jour et nuit" sign?

Lessons from Mrs. Goodfellow

When I was in college, I spent summers waitressing in a perfect, perfectly charming historic inn in Maine.

One of the delights was to be assigned to a table of summer "residents" -- guests who came to stay at the hotel for a month or so, who had been coming to the inn for decades.  One of these was Mrs. Goodfellow.

True to her name, she was a delight to be around.  Just taking her order for breakfast or dinner was a lesson in grace, old-school courtesy, and a pinch of old-girl mischief.  A spry octagenarian, she was my lifetime role model.

Her birthday was August 3, and somehow, I always remembered it.  The dining room in those days was low-key and tables were covered in ancient white damask, and the atmosphere was genteel and calm, with the most beautiful view of Somes Sound and Acadia National Park. Men in jacket and tie, ladies in dresses. Mrs. Goodfellow shared her table with another widow and a spinster, all from Philadelphia.  They were a jolly trio.  If you could look forward to serving breakfast (and I did) it was for those three ladies.

On my morning walk to work, I strolled past all the most beautiful Maine wildflowers.  So, for Mrs. Goodfellow's 83rd birthday, I picked her a bunch of lupine and Queen Anne's lace, black-eyed susans, added to a mass of of fragrant phlox and roses from our family's garden.  I arranged them artfully in a vase and set it at her place before she arrived for breakfast.

She exclaimed over the thoughtful gesture even more than was necessary, her luminous blue eyes shining, lighting up my day.

Sometimes being the giver of a gift is happier than being the on the receiving end.  That's certainly how I felt giving that simple bouquet to Mrs. Goodfellow.

The next week, after the flowers had faded, she returned the vase to me.  With a box of chocolates inside.  "Mother always said to repay a kindness with a kindness."

That was lesson #1.  A life lesson, and I have never forgotten it.

A few weeks later, I was about to depart Maine for France to begin my junior year abroad.  At tea time on the porch, as we sat chatting, Mrs. Goodfellow quietly slipped an envelope into my waitress pocket. Patting my arm, she said, with a twinkle in her eyes,  "Mother always said, 'When travelling abroad, take twice the funds and half the clothes that you think you'll need.'"

The wisest travel advice ever.

Thank you again, Mrs. Goodfellow.  And Happy Birthday.