I went to a Paris Poker Party this week. 5 euro buy-in, no limit, rebuys allowed. It’s interesting to see how observant you can be when you can’t understand a word spoken by anyone around you. (I must not have been too good; I lost 10 euro.)

Poker is never too much fun when your entire night consists of 3-7 off-suit, 10-3 off-suit, 2-6 off-suit, etc. (No exaggeration; the nobility were paying me no favors that night.) Still, the ambiance must count for something, right?

The party was held at a coworker’s home. It was a 50 square meters (approximately 535 square feet), 2-bedroom apartment, which is quite large by Parisian standards. Cigarettes were burning constantly throughout the night and everyone drank a kind of beer that I felt like I should recognize, but didn’t. After losing my second buy-in, I got up from the table to get some fresh air from the single window in the room. The window opened onto a tiny ledge with just enough room for two people.

I stepped onto the ledge…and there was Paris. The city on top of a city…thousands of tiny cylindrical chimneys perched systematically on every rooftop…stretched out for miles. The Sacre Coeur preened majestically from her hilltop perch. The Eiffel Tower rose up from city center.

It was Rockefeller Center at Christmas. It was Notre Dame on Easter. It was Anytown, USA on the Fourth of July. It was Ruby Red grapefruits from the Rio Grande Valley, a spontaneous second line in New Orleans, a cat stretched out on its back in the one sunspot in the house. Perfect in its imperfection, it was familiar, yet foreign. There is something raw and available about a place that has seen hundreds (or thousands) of years of life. In every inch of this city, people have loved and laughed and bled and cried. They’ve danced and they’ve died. All of life has been lived here, and you can feel it. (I felt the same way about New Orleans. Newness is over-rated; it’s the old places that carry an almost perceptible energy gathered from the lives that have come before. They gather you in, and they keep a bit of you when you leave.)

I lived in a turn of the century stone house after we moved back to Kansas when I was a child…perhaps that is where it all began. It was big and solid, with enough nooks and crannies to appease any precocious 10 year old. It was full of secrets, like the storm cellar with the working phone line, which we would use to call boys we liked so the parents wouldn’t hear. An asparagus garden (harvested every third day) ran along the side of the house, and a creek full of crawdads was just down the gravel road. We would put Eddie Rabbit singing “I Love a Rainy Night” on the radio in my mom’s room and slide across the original wood floor in our socks, like Patrick Swayze was just begging us to dance. We only lived there a year or so, but it was my favorite house I lived in with my parents.

Political Commentary of the Day: Russia and Georgia…tragic, yet predictable. Read about it…