Dinner in the Latin Quarter

My Syrian friend and former neighbor has an apartment in Paris where she studies medicine. On my way home from the States I decided to spend a few days with her. As often happens, when staying with Marina, any number of people, show up.

This time it was another American, Marsha, a person Marina had met in Syria when she was opening the a poison center. Marsha had been in Egypt and was taking an overnight break on her way home to see Marina.

“I’m taking you both to dinner,” Marsha said.

Marina lost out on her usual protests with the arguments she had been on call for almost 24 hours with only a short nap after Marsha’s arrival. Marina’s cooking is wonderful, but she needed to be cared for instead of caring for others. Both Masha and I are older, and lectured her on what a great giver she is, but she needs to learn to take. If pushed, Masha and might have told her, we recognize the dichotomy because we are the same, but fortunately that didn’t come up.

Because of the French transportation strike (which is so organized the trains and metros that are running are posted on the internet – although the French strikes are terribly disruptive, they are so much better than people accepting worsening conditions in their lives without protest) we grabbed a cab to Saint Michel.

We wandered into the Latin Quarter to peruse the restaurant windows with Gourmet Magazine photo-like window displays of fish, meat and other goodies. Broken dishes, another tradition, littered the sidewalk as the maître d's tried to entice us into their restaurants with offers of a free cocktail, music, mouth-watering descriptions of how our meals would be prepared and circular tables.

The final selection left us seated on the second floor (American) or first floor (European) over looking the street where we could see the ancient buildings, the tourists. We could imagine students in the middle ages wandering by on their way to classes at the nearby University of Paris.

Marina took our picture and the waiter offered to take one of the three of us. The expectation that our salmon and skate would be sauced to perfection and presented with a sense of art worthy of a painter, was met, but we weren’t surprised. This is Paris. This is the Latin Quarter.

And we talked about politics, the war, our lives, the lives of others we care about, the decisions we make and how aging really instead of something to be feared has freed us, not limited us.

We even gave into dessert, a bitter chocolate cake with black chocolate sauce, tarte des pommes and crème caramel. We were freed from calorie worry.

Good food, good wine, good conversation with intelligent caring women, good ambience. Life does not get much better.