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First day in Paris and already a gentleman caller

The laptop was all hooked up, but the router wasn’t on. The proprietaire (landlord) called her computer expert friend Guilloume, who could come over after work.

Many times during that first afternoon afternoon, Barb and I insisted we’d know the answers to details of our discussions if only we’d been able to Google them. From where Anne Frank was born to how long Eisenhower was in the Phillipines before World War II, we missed our instant, worldwide Internet searching capabilities. We told ourselves that Hemingway and Kerouac had written with pencils and pens in notebooks and other tourists got information from books; it certainly wouldn’t kill us to not blog and actually look things up in travel books, or write postcards and actual letters.

Guilloume arrived promptly at eight, introduced himself in perfect English, removed his shoes, and crept up the narrow stairs to my loft where the dead computer lay. The router was quickly back on, and we were back in business.  Guilloume left his number, though I never again needed his help in the rest of my two months on rue Dussoubs. Barb and I immediately Googled some artists, the hours for the Opera House, and Parisian temples holding Yom Kippur services. Modern habits are hard to break.

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