Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #28: "Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking?"

Ernest Hemingway wrote that line of dialogue. If only I had been listening.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF OCTOBER 17TH, Paris was brisk and encouraging. To me, fall has always been the start of something, rather than the end. That afternoon, I thirstily wandered over to Shakespeare and Company; I had been without a book to read for nearly fourteen hours! I came away with David Copperfield, and read the first 120 pages on a park bench. 

As I picked my head up from Victorian England, I saw my favorite low, black clouds driven by a northwest wind, and I ran toward Samaritaine to discover the city in the midst of a great storm. When I reached the rooftop terrasse, my umbrella nearly leapt from my hands in the full force of the wind, ten stories above the Rue de la Monnaie and the Seine. I imagined the spectacle in the street below if the umbrella had blown away from me, the pedestrians looking up and pointing as the black form floated toward the earth. 

The city was gleaming gray in the rain—stone and metal glistening with the falling drops. 

The circular map on the observati…