On Sunday, I'm taking a swing back through the northern part of Nebraska. It's a familiar place for me. I began there.
I'm headed to Valentine, about half way across the state, not more than 50 miles from the northern border.
It's a town of 3800 people. It still feels like a community there. Land is $400 an acre (but the lot size is around 640 acres, a square mile).
There is a restaurant, called the Peppermill, that is famous in Nebraska. Steak? "You want the 16 oz? It's gonna be flopping over the edges of the plate on both sides." It caters to the ranchers, who tend the cattle that end up on the plate. On a Sunday night, it's "Yes, Ma'am, No Ma'am, Excuse me please." Boots and hats and buckles, trucks, and sunburned brows. It's worth a detour to see it.
So, in Paris last April, I took some pictures on an island, in the middle of the Seine, the river that divides the left bank from the east. At the end of the day, there was this table, see?
Here's the story I'm taking back to Valentine, to the state where I grew up. The pictures are at the end of the story.
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An American Dog in Paris
Paris has a birdmarket. It isn't for pheasant or quail or any other delicacy. It's devoted to canaries and finches and every exotic bird you can imagine. Someone buys them and takes them home and they live for a day, a month, a year and drop dead. Maybe some last longer. Maybe some outlive their chic elderly owners.
The bird market has a plant market around it, so there is a lot of greenery and small stalls with smiling ladies selling beautiful plants that will go home in a leather bag to languish in the mirrored shadows of a yellow painted room with poutraines, claire et calme, until they (or their owner) croak.
There is a very nice room among the vegetable kingdom part of the market, where you enter into an Amazon-like jungle. It is moist and warm, very most, very warm, and the seller is very warm and moist and smiling. She smiles. You smile. The plants aplaud. You remember to breathe.
The room is filled with orchids. Orchids aren't big on leaves, but they are unsurpassed in the showy flower department. They erupt with color, with succulent outpouring of fleshy, leafy, languid "petals", though the "petals" aren't really. The flower is something more exotic, buried inside, I think.
The room also has man-eating, no I didn't mean that, insect-eating plants. Little diabolical beasts from the moors somewhere, living on nothing for months until, SNAP, a bug wanders in. GULP, it's time for brunch. Trays of (nice little, nice boy) plants. You are torn between admiring the hanging orchids, so thick you can't walk upright, and protecting your rearward companies from attack. It is a delightful room. I'll go back some day. Really.
Back into the street, among the white vans, and French suburban Paris farmers, with their finches, and lunches, and bottles of good French wine, where the seed flows from the burlap bags onto the street and the vendors stand among pets of all descriptions, there is the crowning jewel of the Bird Market, perhaps of the entire island of Ile de France (or Ile St. Louie), whatever, there is a cage on a folding table, with a handwritten sign warning of the dangers of putting the little fingers through the little bars, in very polite French. The cage contains four Prairie Dogs, long though of as the Rat du Prairie in safe states like Nebraska or Kansas. In the good ole U.S. of A, these dogs are very skittish around their villages, and it isn't just because there are hawks and eagles patrolling the prairie. They view a pickup the way an Iraqui might view an American tank, "Oh Lord, Deliver Me".
In Paris, le Chien du Prairie is regal. He is to be fawned over, oohed and awed over, perhaps to be purchased for $250 and be hauled home in Le Bag to die in a month or so.
In the meantime, he is hell-bent on gnawing his way through the tough wire mesh of the cage to run free and inhabit, as he has always dreamed, the sewers of Paris.
Some pictures of the bird/flower/prairie dog market are here:
http://www.jriver.com/~jriver/prairiedog/Index.htm
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Topic: An American Prairie Dog in Paris (Read 1263 times)