Cergy-Pontoise

It was in the mid 1970s and I was in the Paris apartment of French friends. We'd just has a wonderful meal of rabbit. The carrots served with it, were some of the best I've ever eaten, but I wasn't surprised. Odile could make a gourmet meal out of anything.

They showed me a brochure of the town of Cergy-Pontoise, where they planning to move. I would visit them there in the future and then in the late 1980s I would go with Michel as he signed to the papers to sell the apartment.

Now in 2022, as I'm in bed reading The New Yorker's 7 February 2022 edition, I'm fascinated by an article about a French film maker who lives in Cergy. It was déjà view back to that discussion in Paris so long ago. They wrote...

"Before Cergy-Pointoise existed Bernard Hirsch, the engineer in charge of the project gazed out at what was then a chaotic patchwork of small farms and market gardens. Already he dreamed that it would someday be a town with a 'personality' of its own...Hirsch embraced what he called the Donogoo Method: to create the city by making people believe it exists."

I had to smile. Growing up, I tell people, my mother acted as if you left our town, you fell off the edge of the world. Many decades later, I can pick The New Yorker, read about a small town near Paris, from my bed in Southern France after coming back from three months in our main home in Geneva, Switzerland along the lake. As my mother would have said, "Who'd have think it?" 

And I didn't fall off the edge of the earth either.