Bonjour
Paris is reserved for morning persons, even though hardly anyone I know are early risers. But I am not a Parisian (at least not yet), and I do not know many natives (again, not yet).
The morning I reserved for the Latin Quarter was a spectacularly sunny one. It was three quarters past nine when I awoke. As it was a Saturday morning, I had a strong inclination to be lazy and took my time to get myself ready for the day ahead. My aunt had left for the Saturday marché.
“The place needs new flowers.” she told me the night before. “Do you want to join me?” Before I could say yes, she continued, “I’ll be going in the morning at 8, it’s supposed to be rain in the afternoon.”
“Oh 8? Maybe next time, I will be going to Gibert Joseph tomorrow.” Frankly, there was no conflict between going to Gibert Joseph and the marché. In reality, my body could not be ready to leave the house by 8 o’clock in the morning. The early-rising side effect of jet lag had already worn off.
“All right then,” answered my aunt. It seemed as if she wanted to say more, as her gently pursed lips suggested, but she stopped there. She knew that the real obstacle to my joining her was 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning (or any morning for that matter), not a bookstore. She understood.
At that point of time, we were still warming up to each other. Despite being relatives, we did not spend enough time with each other to really be too comfortable with each other. My aunt, a cousin of my mother, was in her forties. A very well-maintained mother of two, she was mistress of her household and her husband’s business partner. The couple ran a fashion merchandizing business. How very French. She embodied the dream life I had as a child. My idea of that had changed over time and morphed into something I could not quite describe. Still, I found the situation of my aunt very fantastical.
The water boiled. I could hear the tap dancing of the eggshell on the steel pot as I detect a small crack across the shell. My lack of patience led to retrieve the egg a little too early. The egg white was still too runny when I peeled a fragment of the shell to see. I placed the egg back into the water and turned on the induction stove to the maximum “9” again.
My second dissection proved my impatience again, and I settled for a very soft-boiled egg as part of my Saturday breakfast.
The morning ritual took one and a half hours. Weekends allowed for a slow pace of activities. I set out for my Latin Quarter adventure at a seventeen past eleven.
