Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

Goodbye parties: first of all, you don’t get many. Second, they’re a unique opportunity to honor someone when they’re alive. Along with weddings and showers, a goodbye party is a chance to gather, appreciate, love, and give credit. But, as this cautionary tale will tell, at many public occasions, there’s also a chance to blow it.

We were leaving our small southeastern New Mexico town at last. After a two-week glad-you’re-on-board trip back east, my husband was set to drive all five of us to our new home in western Ohio.

I’d supervised the household packing weeks before, our three-week-old baby on my hip. The house was for sale and we were now living out of a hotel. The moving van was already on its way east. Our driver had seemed a little too energetic to me, and I worried he was doing drug deals with the local muscle men he’d hired to help him. Maybe he’d get stopped and our household goods would be impounded while the police sorted out the driver’s real cross-country mission.

But before we could actually leave, there was the goodbye party. Held in a hotel, there was a bigger crowd than some of the parties I’d been to for the other engineers and their wives. At those parties, people made toasts, gave presents, shared stories and laughs, and plied each other with elaborate cocktails. I was really looking forward to the one for us. I remembered one party in particular where the engineer had given a romantic tribute to his “bride of 34 years” for supporting his career. At another retirement party, the other engineers had toasted the wife’s good humor and good cooking. We’d been in town for almost seven years, and this was finally going to be my turn.

I took our five-week-old to our goodbye party, expecting a few kudos for leaving my teaching job to move. Hoping for some stories of how I’d raised three boys while my engineer went on lots of cave and river trips. Getting a little credit for the custom cakes I’d created for parties and birthdays. Hoping for a little romance, a few toasts, a husbandly nod.

But at our party, somebody else took our tiny son and paraded around the ballroom with him while I stood with my glass of Sprite. My engineer got roasted with funny speeches, work and river trip stories, and some awful gag gifts. Maybe the group was too big, my engineer too overwhelmed, my cooking too ordinary, but there were no bride comments or wifely tributes, no kudos, no credit, no romance. Weeks later in Ohio I got a card with a note from some of the secretaries saying, “Thanks for making those wonderful cakes.”

My dad was a brilliant suburban Cleveland kid, a loner, and an only child till his little brother came along when he was 12. Starting his teenage years with a little tag-along brother couldn’t have been easy. He wasn’t brilliant in school academics, though, telling my brothers and me that his teacher separated the class into the Flowers and the Weeds, and that he always sat in the Weed Row.

He met my mother in the high school band: she played clarinet and he played trumpet. Dad courted her by playing trumpet fanfares in the elementary school play field across the street from her house. Their first date was on a band trip in Elkhart, Indiana, where they went to a movie together while the band was doing I don’t know what. The band trip chaperons perhaps didn’t even know they’d gone missing. I never asked which movie they’d gone to see. (Continued)

I’ve listed below my top ten reasons to travel to Paris. Maybe you’ll be able only to visit a day or two, or stay for a week, or maybe you’ll be able to move your household to the Left Bank. In my modest 60 days here, these are the reasons I think make sense for making the effort to visit this spectacular (the Eiffel Tower!) and difficult (this is the third day of a transporation strike and I’m not sure how I’ll get to the airport on Sunday) French capital. 

10. Paris is part of your literary culture. You’ve read literature based in Paris or you’ve seen plays and movies based on French books. From Honore Balzac to Victor Hugo to Jules Verne to Marcel Proust, Paris holds much of your impressions of the world of words. I saw Victor Hugo’s home today on La Place des Vosges. I saw Marcel Proust’s bedroom reassembled in the Musee Carnavalet yesterday. And I’ve seen Auguste Rodin’s plaster and bronze images of Honore Balzac at the Rodin Museum. This is the real deal.

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Sometimes you fool yourself into thinking you’ve pretty much seen all the gorgeous art there is to see. You’ve seen towering sculptures by Michelangelo. You’ve seen the sketch-like brushwork of Fragonard. You’ve marveled at the pastels of Cassatt, and you’ve looked goggle-eyed at works by Van Gogh, Soutine, Lautrec, and Monet. I just hadn’t realized some works of medieval needlepoint would take my breath away.

The Musee National du Moyen Age–the National Museum of the Middle Ages–better known as the Cluny Museum, is a Left Bank treasure of stone heads, Byzantine ivories and altarpieces, stained glass, fabrics, and tapestries. This museum is in a medieval house built on top of Roman baths (one of three sets on the Left Bank) on busy Boulevards St. Germain-des-Pres and St. Michel. ”The Cluny” may be built of stone, but at its heart are works of sublime beauty: the six tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn. 

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There was a memorable party given at the gorgeous chateaux and gardens at Vaux le Vicomte by Nicolas Fouquet in the summer of 1661. And I’m not talking about the wedding of Gina Logobria and Tony Parker. Mr. Fouquet put on his celebration in the 17th century in response to a request from Louis XIV, king of France (1738-1715). The story goes that the 23-year-old king (shown below) was so jealous of the estate’s splendor–as well as suspicious of where Fouquet had gotten his hands on such money–that Fouquet was invited to Louis’s hunting lodge for a party, then arrested, then put in jail. (Where Fouquet eventually died.)

It seems however, that in fact Nicolas Fouquet was the fall guy for a large amount of embezzling that was done by the Cardinal Mazarin (coincidentally the king’s godfather) who had died that same year. Fouquet himself didn’t help matters by refusing to tone down his parties and other excesses. 

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