We did not know when to arrive and the official brochure for this outdoor cinema announced poetically that the features would be shown “à la tombée de la nuit.”  While we love the flair of that statement, this being summer, night does not fall until very late, and on some nights, it appears not to come at all.  To be on the safe side, we arrived a little after eight and found the open field of the Prairie du Triangle only half occupied.  So, we made the most of the time by visiting the next-door exhibition entitled, “Dots Obsession,” by the artist Yayoi Kusama.  It was free, a tie-in to the Cinéma en Plein Air, and Nez had heard of its influence on the designer Marc Jacobs in her fashion design class.  At the entrance, a volunteer curator offered us a few words of introduction – he could have gotten more in had our French been more adequate – and invited us to “get lost among the dots.”  We did and it was aesthetically pleasing, although I will honestly say that we didn’t “get” it, whether that was a goal or encouraged.  Although we certainly could identify on many levels with the artist’s declaration:  “Ma vie est un pois perdu parmi des milliers d’autres pois.”  (My life is a lost dot among the thousand other dots.)

Afterward, we found ourselves a nice spot in the middle of the field, near the projection tower.  Around us, dinners on the grass had begun in earnest; diners at every cluster were seemingly lost in their own world.  Everyone except the two guys to our right who had set, and continually reset, the plates, wine glasses, and utensils on an immaculate picnic blanket.  They were obviously waiting for someone.  (Nez rightly speculated it was a double date although the girls did not arrive until minutes before the movie started; the guys made do with a bottle of wine until then.)  We had our wonderful little picnic under a gorgeous evening sky strewn with tuffs of cloud and streaks of long-gone jets.  Nez makes the best salsa and cuts the best chunky slices of mango.  After a while, I plopped my head on her lap while she fed me the mango.  The weather was a perfect t-shirt temperature and the low humming cacophony of laughters and voices wafted about.  The fresh cut grass caressed our feet while the sweet evening air put time on hold.  As I rested my head back down on Nez’s lap after rising to take a sip of wine, I looked up at the contours of her face silhouetted against a lazy sky, drew a deep breath, and on the exhale a distinct note escaped through the slight part of my lips:  “Wow.”

The movie had not even started.

Le changement est arrivé.  “Mom, so Barrack Obama is the new president.”  That was how Nez woke her mom up early the morning of November 5, Central European Time.  Her mom had a flight back to the States to catch; Nez and I had been up all night, more or less, perched by the computer screen.  The way Nez softly uttered those words one would think she was merely telling her mom the time.  But these times were anything but ordinary.

Like millions of people, Americans and otherwise, we have been caught up with this election like we never had in our lives.  We kept up with the long primaries, counting delegates and super delegates.  We stayed up to date with the campaigns, keeping daily tabs on the polls.  On our first visit back home in late August, the entire family sat in the living room, transfixed by the master orator on TV, coming through all the way from Denver, never mind that our plates of food were getting cold.  Nez and I even stayed awake on this side of the Atlantic to watch every presidential debate plus the vice-presidential one.  We were, however, unable to catch Tina Fey live on Saturday nights and had to resort to replays on the web.

Admittedly, we are partisan through and through, which made it hard at times not to snicker at or be infuriated by the words and deeds of the other side.  Overall, we felt a sort of inevitability, an undeniable sense that all is possible as we were on the right side of history.  Nevertheless, there were also moments of unease, a nagging fear that this victory would somehow be snatched away in the waning days of the campaign.

On Election Day, I walked around Paris proudly with my Obama button as a sign of faith.  We had sent in our absentee ballots weeks before to be safe, now all we could do was wait.  The results started coming in slowly, snail-paced; a few electoral votes in one column, a few more in the other.  As the night drew on, we would drift off to sleep only to jerk awake moments later to see the numbers inching toward 270.  Then, at around 5 A.M., it came.  I don’t recall hearing anything.  I just remember holding Nez and the two of us staring silently for a very long time at the unmistaken announcement on the computer screen.

It made me think back to four years ago, to a walk through the streets of the Marais a day or two after that presidential election.  Someone had put up on the wall a fresh poster with the image of the winner and underneath a sole word:  “Merde.”  I had just recently arrived in town from a layover at O’Hare where I sat in a stupor watching the depressing post-election coverage.  Before that I had had beignets with Colleen at Louis Armstrong, both of us trying hard not to look disappointed.  Just hours prior, we had been at Southern University to encourage those already in line before the poll closed to stay and vote.  We did not have to do much, however, the hundreds of students who were there were already determined to stay and vote in an election that had already been decided in their state.  We left at around midnight.  The next day’s news article reported that the last of the students did not leave until two or three in the morning.  Finally, not more than a day removed from Paris, I had been driving through the unfamiliar streets of the Big Easy, looking to purchase a whole lot of flash lights.  The non-partisan organization, Election Protection, was conducting a training session for Election Day volunteers, which included Colleen and me, in a church whose power had gone out.  When I returned with a few from the local corner market, the large room was pitch black save for the speaker who was illuminating herself with a small flash light as she continued talking to an attentive crowd.  Those days in New Orleans went by in a blur but the uplifting feeling of being able to do something, anything, for the greater good never diminished.  Even now, for me the memories from 2004 remain bittersweet.

Requiem for the small things.  Paris, in many ways, is defined by the River Seine.  In a way, there is probably no more singular Parisian experience than taking a stroll along the Seine, either high above by the quais with their green bouquinistes, or just hovering near the water surface on the banks below.  When one’s legs tire, there are always the stolid stone benches scattered about and the ample expanse of inviting cobblestone under one’s feet.

In our Paris, there need never be a reason to head to the river.  We could be walking to get our favorite Lebanese wraps or gelato on rue Saint-André des Arts and feel the urge:  “Want to eat by the river?”  Or, we could be exiting from the BHV superstore, carrying large bags of household goods, and inexplicably decide to walk home along and across the river instead of taking the more direct métro.  And, for a short while (unfortunately, far too short), we would eagerly await the midnight calls to join Neil and Jenn by the river where a bottle of wine, pâté, bread, and the allure of boundless conversation and true friendship awaited.  The river gives much, but sometimes the river takes.

Before the gentle current of the Seine ever took our digital camera into its midst, I had first unwisely placed it on the inside of one leg of my jeans as I sat riverside, with my other leg dangling over the water.  It wasn’t a totally mindless thing to do, you see.  We were having our fried chicken fix and making an oily mess, and inside the pant leg seemed like an ideal place to temporarily shelter the camera.  It did its job exceedingly well until I decided to suddenly shake away all the crumbs on my jeans.

In slow motion, we saw the camera tumbling out of its resting place, bouncing on the sloped embankment, and slipping rapidly beneath the water surface.  Our beloved and invaluable camera was out of reach even before we could muster a thought.  It gave a last, little struggle to rise and then disappeared into the murky water.  I thought to myself, “Should I go in the water to get it?” before voicing the same to Nez.  It was a ridiculous, although not entirely unreasonable, thought and Nez was in agreement.  How was I going to scour the river bottom, not knowing where the river bottom was?  Would this delicate piece of electronic gadgetry still work even if I did manage to recover it?

Then came a pang of sadness, the thought of the one object that I had been carrying around on almost a daily basis sitting on the cold, dark riverbed, abandoned forever even after all it had suffered through to capture the beauty of our everyday existence.  I once more thought of going into the water, without again thinking about how, to try to retrieve the camera.  Instead, I felt a warm embrace from behind and heard Nez’s sweetly whispered words, “Don’t worry, it’s just a camera.”

And it was.  It was a great camera but still just a camera.  It was a metal box without feelings.  It didn’t know or care that it had been carelessly dropped and left behind in a watery grave.  But here on the surface were two human beings and one with a mastery of empathy without ever realizing it.  In the same situation, some might have gotten upset at such clumsiness or carelessness:  “Why did you put it there?”  “Do you know how much that cost?”  “What were you thinking?”  I, myself, might very well be one of those individuals.  Nez, instead, said the only thing that needed to be said and did the only thing needed done.

I’m sure we’ll be returning again and again to the banks of the Seine.  Perhaps even to this very spot — opposite the last tree of a row of trees alongside the Quai des Orfèvres, as you walk westward, away from the Pont Saint-Michel — to remember a once treasured object and to capture future memories with its successor.  

In its short life, of less than a year, this unassuming camera took 8,984 photos and videos, traveled to Vietnam, Cabo San Lucas, New York, Boston, France, Germany, got dragged all over San Francisco and Paris, and attended as many Cal football games as we could get to, home and away.  The last two photos it took and took with it to the bottom were images of Nez and I eating on the embankment on a typical, cool, and never-ending Parisian evening, watching and waving at the passing tour boats.

Of all the fates that await a digital camera, including undignified obsolescence in a forgotten drawer, our camera might very well be resting in camera heaven, perhaps even blessed with the company of lost items from strollers and picnickers of yesteryears and perhaps even a few relics from the former Roman’s Lutetia or the bloody French Revolution.  It will forever be in Paris long after we are gone, from here and anywhere thereafter.  

The ephemeralness of things was further highlighted when we returned home only to find the square in front of the Saint Sulpice church empty of all the shacks that just yesterday, it seemed, were hawking their antiques.  We both had wandered aimlessly through this temporary, now gone, market many times coming home from language class.  Now, all that was left was the imposing fountain and a barren square, beautiful but empty.