When my mother was a teenage girl living in Brooklyn, she dreamed of growing up and living in Paris.
She
was a teenager during the Roaring Twenties, when Paris was the epicenter of
art, literature, and fashion. Paris was
the home of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Coco Chanel.
Yes,
Coco Chanel. My mother planned to move
to France and become a fashion designer.
She knew she had an innate sense of design, and she knew she had the
talent to draw --- she had the drawings to prove her skill.
My
mother knew the first step in preparing for a fashion career in Paris was to
learn French. She asked to take French
as an elective in high school, but there was a problem: my mother was a twin.
Her
father said that both his twin daughters must be treated equally.
My
mother’s twin sister did not want to take French; so Mom was not allowed to
take French. Her future plans to live in
Paris were squelched.
My
mother used her design talents in other ways: she made lovely Christmas
decorations for the house, her garden was the envy of the neighborhood, and she
became a certified ikebana instructor.
Ikebana
was a Japanese system of flower arranging, and it became popular in the US in
the 1950’s.
Decorating,
gardening, flower arranging. But Mom
kept her book of teenage drawings; she kept the book her entire life.
Mom
did get to go to Paris. I took Mom and
Dad there when Mom was sixty-seven years old.
I was living in London at the time and knew of a delightful small Paris hotel,
run by Madame and Monsieur. The hotel had a resident dog. A sidewalk café was right next door.
The
hotel was modest: every room had a toilet and a sink, but the shared bathtub
was down at the end of the hall. You
told Madame when you wanted to take a bath, and she would clean the bathtub for
you.
My
mother refused to use a bathtub like that.
I tried to point out that in America, people had used your bathtub
before you rented your hotel room. The
only difference: in America, it would be 24 hours since a stranger used the
bathtub; in our French hotel, it may be half an hour since a stranger used it.
So,
my mother flew from Paris back to the US, unwashed. Maybe, just maybe, that experience took a
little bit of an edge off her disappointment, fifty-three years before, when
her fate as a twin squelched her dream of living in Paris.
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Here is a 2-minute newsreel segment from the Roaring Twenties - if you are an artist, Paris is the only place to be:
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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath. Price = $11. Send an email to ParadiseDouglas at gmail.com to find out how to purchase a copy by mail
