...perhaps wearing pointy toed high heeled leopard print pumps, while she waited for her handsome dark lover.  She would later meet people like herself who also had come to Paris and they each would have their reasons for wanting to stay. Yes, great city, cute guys, art and history everywhere, that softer government system, cozy neighborhoods, but like any foreigner who did not speak French well it would not be easy to find a job.

June also had always liked doing things that had an element of risk, starting with learning to ride a frisky pony at five years old.  She liked challenges and loved seeing things new ways and the thrill of independence.  This character trait had made her a good nurse who was persistent in finding solutions to problems.  She liked the thought of winging it in Paris, living by her wits and seeing if she could make it.  This wasn’t a plan for the faint hearted, considered June gazing into the hallway seeing if any of her patient call lights where on. 

So, before coming to work that night, she had sold her 1994 Toyota Corolla, after running an ad in the paper,  and with this money she planned to go to take a drawing class at a school she had found in a travel magazine in Paris.  Her slightly unrealistic hope was that she could stay indefinitely.  Since she had not studied french and had visited Paris one time, she admitted to herself  this was an unlikely and crack brained scheme, to stay for the rest of her life.  Her immediate goal  a semester and with a bit of luck maybe she could stretch it out to  a year seemed more reasonable.    She was an optimist without any illusions.  This had been a John F. Kennedy quote.  June felt it summed her up as it   spoke to her sense of things turning out all right and her understanding that our higher aspirations are rooted in reality. 

These thoughts ran through her head as she reviewed her charts.  She also had a more compelling and stronger under motive for wanting to go to a foreign country and starting all over.  She hoped that living abroad  would somehow help her forget her persistent sad feelings about her father not keeping in good contact with her since high school. She felt better about this situation in Paris and couldn’t exactly explain why but she did. That Paris would somehow work like a retraining.  Like her past was a stroke to recover from.  Just a little brain upkeep she thought would do the trick.  That by living in such a different environment and hearing french her mind would be forced away from her inner world.   The distance and strangeness and beauty of it all.  She was slightly embarrassed to be one of those Paris lovers.  It was so unexceptional and mainstream like eating cheese sandwhiches or reading Archie comics.  June thought of herself as unique but she could not deny that the city was a marvel to her and she loved how people seemed more beautiful there.  Something about the human scale. The femininity of the city.

Suddenly the image of this other failure life, like the  Bizarro parallel life of Superman.  She had this nagging fear that she would return to Albuquerque a slump shouldered failure.  She would begin most of her sentences with, during my student days in Paris. Then in the years to follow would bore all the patients and coworkers with stories about her year in Paris until she retired. She could see herself as a loser in life.  The pathetic June.    She would have buck teeth instead of a slight overbite.  Instead of being mildly overy weight she would have a large ass and heavy upper arms.  Her apartment would be a shrine to France or perhaps Bob Dylan and she would have bad breath and get drunk on her days offon vodka and orange juice.  She snapped out of her reverie.  She hoped she was not making a big mistake and wasting money and wasting valuable possible fertitlity time while her biological clock was in its last ticks.  She heard it was harder, well next to impossible to get pregnant after 40 unless with fertility treatments, and here she was 38.  

In other words June was old enough to know better than to do this.  In the tarot there is the Fool card. The Fool is the inexperienced risk taker.  The innocent who believes that wherever you go people will be kind.  Well after one has fallen in love and lost or failed at something important, one becomes the Hanged Man.  Or the card of the experienced risk taker who knows what could happen.  June had wisdom.  The trick was to act like an innocent despite this wisdom.  It was frightening to go ahead knowing it might not end well.  Although she hoped it would. 

coonen-voillemin@msn.com, jeese, double jeese.