A Paris attraction not for the faint-hearted!

My fifth-grade teacher at Jackson Street School, Ms. Cleona Picus, had some very good ideas about how to get students working together. I remember how, in teams of three or four, we built replicas of Native American villages—my group was in charge of constructing a Pueblo village from salt-flour clay. We also created our own marbled paper, turning our big, high-ceilinged classroom into an artist’s workshop. We also sang. Above all, we danced.

We danced to Chubby Checker’s version of “The Twist” and, on our knees, our heads and chests thrown back, tried our best to become “limbo stars” as we jerked to his “Limbo Rock.”

As part of music appreciation, we also did what you might call “interpretive dancing.” Ms. Picus put a record on the phonograph (yes, that was the word in those days for the heavy, cloth-covered contraptions that were standard in schools) and told us to spread out across the classroom. Once she lowered the needle onto the spinning vinyl disc, we began by listening, tuning in to the beat and the tone of the music. Then, once we were ready, we started to move, any way we wished, following no special pattern or steps.

That was the kind of dancing I preferred and, losing all inhibitions, I swooped around the room, waving my arms in all directions, transported by the music, transported by one particular piece of music, that still haunts me to this day:

For Halloween 1963, Ms. Picus played for us “Danse macabre” by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). It was a dance of death, our teacher told us, the dance of the dead who, one night a year, return to haunt the earth.

I listened to the music, I imagined ghosts and goblins buffeted by autumn winds, swirling among the treetops, pressing distorted faces against the windows of what were once their homes. Whirling around the classroom, abandoning myself completely to the music, I set in motion the creation of a very personal and romantic image of death.

One week ago, that image was shattered and, since then, the word “macabre” has taken on a different meaning for me. Looking in my Webster’s dictionary, I read that the word can apply to a personalized representation of death. It can also mean “gruesome” or “ghastly.” Those terms, much better than the swelling, swirling music of Saint-Saëns, describe what “macabre” means to me today.

One week ago, I visited the Paris Catacombs, the biggest underground cemetery in the world, home to seven million souls. It is a major tourist attraction and people from every corner of the globe come especially to see it, waiting in line, rain or shine, for a minimum of two hours. Once inside, they descend 130 steps and walk through a mile-long labyrinth of dank corridors. These are some of the abandoned tunnels of underground quarries, from which the limestone that built Paris was cut.

I have lived in Paris for over twenty years and, until one week ago, I had never visited the Catacombs. After having made the visit, I think I understand why:

Imagine a winding gangway in a coal mine, with, off to each side, hollowed-out breasts or chambers at regular intervals. Imagine dripping water, sweating walls, darkness broken here and there by flickering light. Once you have that in mind, fill up each chamber with thousands and thousands of bones, and you’ll have an idea of what the Catacombs are like…, but only an idea.

The horror of being there is something else.

In fact, the Paris Catacombs are not a cemetery. There are no marked graves, no headstones, not a single one of the dead is identified by name. In reality, it is an ossuary, a depository for the bones of the dead. Above the underground entrance, inscribed in stone, are the words, “Take pause: here begins the Kingdom of the Dead.”

Once over the threshold, the visitor walks between walls of bones, arranged so that the heads of femurs compose what might first be taken for a pebbly surface, broken at two levels by a long row of shiny marble spheres, that turn out to be skulls. Those walls are like dikes, holding back an avalanche of bones, deposited pell-mell in the abandoned quarry chambers. Here and there, the walls have given out. Those sections, visible to the public from behind iron bars, reduce death to a heap of rubble, forgotten, belonging to no one, hardly human at all.

When I came across a museum guard (for the Catacombs qualify as a museum), I asked if the exit was far away. Not too far, she told me. I almost ran to escape, climbing up a winding staircase, afraid to raise my head, afraid to see more stairs when I was so yearning for the light of day.

The Catacombs, I’d warn readers, are not for everyone, not for “the sensitive,” as I read in the museum brochure. I guess I belong to that category because they weren’t really for me, but now I’ve seen them, a once-in-a-lifetime experience I will never forget. Nor will I forget the intriguing history of the place, an underground Parisian cemetery created by King Louis XVI at the end of the 18th century, because, at ground-level, cemeteries were overflowing, pushing corpses to the earth’s surface or into the cellars of people’s homes.

In 1785, once the decision was made to move the dead to the abandoned quarries, for two years solid, day and night, processions lead by priests transported millions of bones across the city, depositing them in the underground chambers, consecrated by the Catholic Church.

Today, the cool, dank Paris Catacombs are one of the city’s “hottest” tourist attractions. Macabre, if you ask me, and I can’t figure out why each year 300,000 people make the trip to this particular “Kingdom of the Dead.” Maybe I’m just too “sensitive,” maybe I prefer to hear and imagine, rather than see, certain images of death. But, dear Readers, aware of the Catacombs’ popularity, I went there for you, and I’ll let you judge if, someday, you’d like to discover them yourselves.

Coal making a comeback in much of Europe, but not in France

In the European Union, coal is making a comeback, from Spain to Poland, home to one of the biggest strip mines in the world. Spain has become a leader in the storage of carbon dioxide emissions from coal. In the Asturias region, located in the northern part of the country, researchers are attempting to inject CO² back into coal and then extract or eject it as usable methane gas. The Germans, while investing heavily in renewable energy sources, are depending more and more on coal for the production of electricity, 42% of the country’s needs, at a time when nuclear power plants are being phased out.

All in all, coal-powered generators produce 25% of electricity in the European Union, that figure rising to 87% in Poland. The Poles, with coal resources to see them through the next half-century, prefer their energy independence to buying cleaner natural gas from Russia. With memories still fresh of Soviet domination, they are ready and willing to put up with the pollution from their giant open-air mine in Bełchatów, in south-central Poland, and its adjoining power station, which produces 40 million tons of greenhouse gasses per year.



The French, on the other hand, have largely rejected coal and its by-products. Coal-powered generators produce a mere 4% of the country’s electricity, and, for the moment, fracking is not authorized. In northern France, in the Nord-Pas de Calais region, once the heart of the country’s mining industry, there is, however, some interest in extracting coal bed methane as a replacement for conventional natural gas, despite local protests that the reserves are too small and the price of drilling too high.

In this region, one of the poorest of France, where unemployment hovers around 14%, mayors would like to see the money invested to improve housing and attract “clean” industries. They also fear that methane extraction could very well be a first step towards the legalization of fracking, and consider the non-conventional drilling of coal bed methane a threat to local water supplies because of the wastewater it produces.

Though suspicious of coal today, the French have carefully and lovingly preserved their mining past. In 2012, the Nord-Pas de Calais coal mining region, located in the far north-eastern corner of France, was chosen to be part of the World Heritage List of Unesco for its “remarkable cultural landscape, the result of almost three hundred years of coal mining and the technological and urban developments associated with the mining industry.” In an area stretching across about 75 miles, in a “living” museum, implanted in a landscape where people work and have their homes, former mines have been turned into theaters, eco-museums and art galleries—and culm banks (called “terrils” in French), some rising to an elevation of over 700 feet, can be explored along graded hiking paths.



At the heart of the region, in the city of Lens, on the site of a former mine, the Louvre, one of the world’s great museums, inaugurated a new extension in December 2012. There, for free, visitors can view a rotating collection of art from the Louvre in Paris, including a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci (though not the Mona Lisa—she never moves!), monumental Greek statues, and pottery and porcelain from Turkey and Iran. Imagine such treasures, exhibited for free and on a daily basis in Pottsville or Hazleton and you’ll have an idea of what this museum means to the city of Lens and to inhabitants of the region.



The nearby town of Lewarde is home to France’s biggest museum of mining, Centre historique minier du Nord-Pas de Calais, which, until June 2nd, will be hosting a special exhibit devoted to “men and machines,” tracing almost three hundred years of mining technology. The site of the museum is that of a former mine, the Delloye “fosse” or “pit,” and visitors, much like at The Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine in Ashland, can explore its underground tunnels. They can also visit the building where coal was sorted by “galibots,” the French word for “breaker boys,” and by women, who also worked in the mines.

The extensive complex of redbrick buildings and underground installations that is home to the museum includes several permanent exhibits: one documents the formation of coal over millions of years; another is devoted to daily life in the mines and includes visits to shower and dressing rooms as well as to the room where mining lamps were stored; another tells the story of the role of horses in the mines; still another explores energy resources past, present and future. An important place is also reserved for the testimonies of those who worked in the mines. From them, visitors can learn about the first day on the job, the dangers miners encountered underground, and their life at home and at the local bar or “estaminet,” where, at the end of the day, they shared a drink with their buddies.



Throughout the region, just like in Schuylkill County, there are company towns (known as “corons”), still inhabited today. The houses that compose them are built in all shapes and sizes, though nearly all are made of brick. These homes, inhabited by miners or their children, are also a part of the “living museum” of Nord-Pas de Calais, where the French have built an impressive and moving monument to the heritage of coal.



As for coal’s future, though it plays only a minor role in France’s energy production today, there are stirrings here and there that seem to indicate things may soon change. In February of this year, Arnaud Montebourg, Minister of Industry, made a plea for “le gaz made in France,” referring to the potential for extracting France’s resources in coal bed methane.

Along with other Europeans, the French also look on with wonder and envy when they hear reports that the United States, thanks in part to shale, may begin exporting oil and gas by 2025 and possibly achieve energy independence by 2030. Considering those predictions, even the most hardcore opponents to fracking and fossil fuels might begin to have second thoughts.

Yet, predictions remain just that, predictions, not facts. And the “Halliburton loophole” of the US Energy Policy Act of 2005, which exempts fracking from certain requirements of the “Safe Drinking Water Act,” may already be depriving future generations of safe water to drink, which, if proven true, would raise the cost of energy independence beyond what anyone can afford to pay.

Love (and marriage?) in the Parisian metro

Spring has finally come to Paris after the longest winter I’ve ever known since my arrival in the city over twenty years ago. Temperatures, the weathermen and women promise, will soon rise to 70° and tomorrow we’re going to see the sun! Yes, this winter has been bleak, cold and dark, relentlessly so, day after day, and Parisians have behaved accordingly. Already famous (or infamous) for their unfriendliness towards each other and towards strangers, they have outdone themselves this past winter, freezing facial muscles into a permanent frown.

Luckily, to ward off the cold and escape the blues, we can always head underground. There, riding the more than 130 miles of the Parisian metro system, travelling between its more than 300 different stops, we can benefit from sauna-like conditions year-round, while participating in a form of urban theater, complete with surprises, laughter and tears.

For example, about two weeks ago, when temperatures were still hovering around freezing and we were all wrapped up in winter coats, a young man in shirt sleeves stepped into the car and launched into a speech, beginning with the customary “Mesdames, messieurs.” Shuffling our feet, turning away from him, we all closed in upon ourselves, prepared to listen to yet another appeal to our hearts and to our wallets, stiffening up in anticipation of him rattling a cup filled with coins in our face.

But no, he began by assuring us, our loose change did not interest him. His was a different mission. He was asking us to listen, appealing to our hearts, but his message was unique and he soon managed to put a smile on our faces and even got us talking, perfect strangers in the metro carrying on a friendly exchange.

He had entered our car with something to offer, not to sell, he told us, and it was up to us to choose if we were interested or not. He was offering, in fact, himself, which he did in about two minutes, the time it took to travel between two stations before he stepped off at the third.

He told us his age, 28, and his profession—he was trained as an engineer. And I can attest he was a nice-looking, clean-cut young man. Though he did not tell us his nationality, I would say he was from what the French call the Maghreb, Tunisia, Algeria or Morocco, all countries where French is a second language spoken by almost everyone. He spoke it extremely well and quickly got his message across.

He was single, serious and available and what he was looking for was a potential bride, a woman standing or sitting in that stuffy car of the metro interested, like him, in tying the knot. He wanted a wife, a home, a family, and there he was in the flesh, not like on those on-line dating sites, where you never know if what you see is what you get.

All the while he spoke, he smiled, and soon we were all smiling too. And talking. The woman standing next to me expressed her surprise. I commented he looked like a nice young man. Both of us, hitting sixty, were spectators. He was not addressing himself to us, but to some young woman sharing his desires. All she had to do was follow him onto the platform when the train came to its next stop.

And when it did, the doors opened and the young man got off, alone. No woman followed him off the train. No bites, at least not on that ride.

He did, however, brighten our day and lighten our hearts. He surprised us, in the best sense of the term, shaking us out of our commuter lethargy at the end of a long, hard day.

Strangely enough, the very next day, as I was walking down the street where I live, I was attracted to a sign posted on a phone booth (they still exist in Paris, though rarely do I see anyone inside making a call. Most often, phone booths serve as shelters for the homeless, offering protection from rain but not from the cold). Printed in bold letters on the sign were the words CHERCHE FEMME, in other words, “WOMAN WANTED.”

Was this an ad offering work to a cleaning woman, a babysitter, a companion to accompany an elderly person to the market? I was curious so I approached to read the fine print and discovered the ad offered none of the above. It was another offer of marriage, direct and to the point: 42-year-old Czech psychotherapist would like to meet a woman for marriage. Serious offer, children welcome. At the bottom, there was a cell phone number to call.

A few days later, another man stepped on the metro, begging not for money, but for a bride. This time I was less surprised by his plea than by the fact that it was happening again, three times in the same week, three unconventional offers of marriage. I said to myself, this qualifies as an urban trend and on-line dating services should take note. The search for love may be moving away from phone and computer screens and back into the real world.

Now it has been about two weeks since my last spotting, but I am still on the lookout, hoping to further document this trend, which, if sincere, surprises both by its directness and its old-fashioned appeal.

But springtime has arrived and it is natural that “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” above ground and below. There is even a Facebook page called “Spotted”: dans le métro parisien (in the Parisian metro), with over 20,000 fans. There you can leave a message for that intriguing person you spotted during your commute to work, with hopes of receiving an answer and meeting him or her again.

All in all, Parisians spend a lot of time underground, at this time of year, cut off from the sounds, sights and smells of spring. Luckily for us, everyday we descend into an urban theater, where we can find the best and worst of life, spectators and actors despite ourselves.

For those of you back in Schuylkill County who climb into your car, turn the key, turn up the music and drive, keep your eyes open, don’t shut out the spring. And at stop signs, look carefully in all directions. You never know whose eyes you’re going to meet.

Appeared in The Republican Herald, April 28, 2013

France’s Gothic cathedrals, rooted in a far distant past

Published in The Republican Herald, March 31, 2013

This year, Notre Dame de Paris is celebrating its 850th birthday and millions of visitors are expected to drop by to pay their respects, though there is nothing unusual about that. Every year the cathedral receives more than 14 million visitors, making it one of the most visited monuments in the world. Also, though France is a country where many Catholics have deserted the Church, you would never know it at Notre Dame. When it’s time for mass, whether it be on Sundays or weekdays, the rows and rows of straw-seated chairs are always filled with worshippers.

Other churches in France, though equally beautiful, are not so lucky. Many are deserted, some open for the occasional mass, others are being destroyed. Still others, though their doors are always open, attract few visitors inside.

In the town where I work, there is such a church. Its façade is a bit shabby and its sanctuary is often deserted. That may be why, after teaching, I like to go there to sit, resting my mind, restoring my soul. Contemplating the play of colored light against stone, I’m convinced I am sitting in one of the most beautiful churches of France (the photo following the title illustrates the church's interior).

The church is the basilica of Saint-Denis, named after the patron saint of the French monarchy. He also gave his name to the town and his story is inseparable from its origins.

In the third century A.D., Saint Denis was named the first bishop of Paris. At that time, the city was still a Roman colony, with public baths and an arena, a miniature version of the Coliseum in Rome. The Romans also imposed their gods on their subjects and forbade the worship of the Christian god. Saint Denis, whose true identity remains a mystery, brought many to the Christian faith and for this, on the Mount of Martyrs, also known as Montmartre, he had his head chopped off.

That might be the end of his story, but it is not. After his beheading, he simply bent down, picked up his head and, holding it firmly in his hands, began walking north. After travelling about two miles, he collapsed, died and was buried in a small settlement that became the town of Saint-Denis.



Two hundred years later, a chapel was erected on the spot. Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, wished to honor the martyr who had saved so many souls in the city she saved from physical destruction. In 451, joined by other women who rallied to her call, she stopped the advance of Attila the Hun, not with weapons, but with prayer.

Today, in 2013, the chapel she ordered built is the core and the heart of the basilica of Saint-Denis. It is located beneath the present-day altar, enclosed within not one, but four different churches. Archaeologists have excavated the foundations of that first church and there they discovered the bones of a man who was indeed beheaded. No one can ascertain that these bones belong to Saint Denis. But there is no doubt that, at one time, an axe came down on the neck of the person buried there.

In those early days of Christian France, it was an honor to be buried near a saint and soon the chapel became too small for the kings and queens who desired to rest near Saint Denis. In the sixth century and then again in the eighth, the church was enlarged. Today, the painted walls of the eighth-century basilica surround the altar and tombs of the earlier chapels.

I often visit that basilica with my students. They find it strange and mysterious to stand within that church within a church, with its thick walls and its tiny windows, both considered architectural marvels at the time it was built. The Emperor Charlemagne visited that church and walked on its stone and marble floor, decorated with porphyry, brought all the way from Egypt.

Further enlargements and additions came in the following centuries but in 1135, nearly thirty years before the first stone of Notre Dame was laid, construction began on a totally new church, built atop the others. The basilica was under the care of an adjoining Benedictine abbey and its abbot, a man named Suger, had some very big ideas about how he wanted to transform “his church.” His plan was to build the nave higher and open the basilica to light, making the “light of the world” visible through the use of stained glass.

Using intersecting arches and flying buttresses, he was able to elevate the ceiling of the church and open the walls of the sanctuary, creating space for immense stained-glass windows. For the western wall, Suger designed a rose window, the first in architectural history. He calculated that at sunset, the sun’s rays would flood the altar with the colors of the rainbow, renewing God’s covenant with the earth.



Suger’s church was one of the wonders of his age and he made sure he would be remembered for it. In a stained-glass window, today at the Louvre, we can see him, at the foot of the Virgin Mary in a scene of the Annunciation. He is also present in the Church’s main bronze door, where we find him kneeling among the disciples at Emmaus.

In his lifetime, Abbot Suger did everything he could to assure the glory of his church, but in 1789, with the French Revolution, the basilica of Saint Denis came upon very hard times. For centuries, it had been the official burial ground of the kings of France and for that reason, the tombs were sacked and the church vandalized. Legend has it that children in the town used the bones of kings to play jacks, called “osselets” in French, a word that has its root in “os,” bone.



Today a large part of the church is a national monument, a museum of funerary art, where visitors can admire the refurbished tombs of the French monarchy. That visit also includes the earlier churches hidden beneath the Gothic cathedral.



Certainly, Notre Dame de Paris is more imposing and its façade, far more beautiful, but on a sunny, spring-time afternoon, I’d rather be sitting in the basilica of Saint-Denis. There I watch the dance of colored light, the work of Abbot Suger, who, nine centuries ago, strove to abolish the boundaries between earth and sky.

US, France fight war against terror

War used to be different. It was neither more nor less tragic, but it was different from today, as the example of the Battle of Gettysburg shows. During the first three days of July, 1863, 51,000 soldiers died, nearly a third of the forces engaged. Around the little town of Gettysburg, the hills ran with blood, but in the town itself—and here’s the difference—only one civilian died.

When I was a child, we often visited the battlefields of Gettysburg and I remember visiting her home: Ginnie Wade, a 20-year-old woman, killed by a stray bullet, while she was in the kitchen kneading bread.

Since January 11, 2013, France has been involved in a military operation in Mali, a land-locked country of West Africa. On that day, the Ministry of Defense launched “Operation Serval” (the serval is a wildcat native to that region). In an official statement to the French people, the Defense Minister explained that the intervention was in response to a request from the government of Mali to help stop the advance of rebel and terrorists forces upon its capital, Bamako, and to aid the Malian army in re-establishing control over the entire national territory.

In a matter of days, French forces made it “all the way to Timbuktu,” the legendary Malian city whose name was once a synonym for the most distant place imaginable. At this time, after more than a month of operations, with about 4,000 French soldiers on the ground, only one of them has died in combat—which, of course, is one too many, but that figure attests to Operation Serval’s success so far.


The Gandamia Massif, northeast of Timbuktu

In mid-February, however, as French troops headed further north and east into the Sahara, the nature of this war began to change: landmines, suicide attacks, a sharp rise in civilian deaths. Back in Paris, the government reinforced homeland security, deploying more troops in airports, train stations and the metro, in response to a heightened risk of terrorist attacks.

Operation Serval, as the Minister of Defense Jean-Yves le Drian announced on Feburary 6, 2013, is a “real war” against “terrorists.” And, in “the war on terror,” as opposed to the Civil War, civilians are fair and often easy game.

Yet, in Paris, in the metro that I take almost every day, riding cheek to cheek with perfect strangers, we are all our usual, indifferent selves, more worried, at the peak of flu season, about germs from a neighbor’s sneeze or cough than the risk of a bomb going off in our midst. In general, I’d say, we’re indifferent to this war. I don’t hear many people talking about it nor do I see any outward signs that the French are supporting their troops—no banners, no flags, no ribbons, all signs of excessive American patriotism to French eyes.

This may be one of the reasons members of the French military are feeling discouraged, be they in the army, the air force or the navy. France has its “West Point,” a prestigious army academy called Saint-Cyr, founded in 1802. It also has its “Annapolis,” Ecole Navale, a naval academy founded in 1830. Its officers are among the best in the world. The military’s code of honor is strong and all its branches project an image of highly qualified professionals. The problem is, French society at large doesn’t seem to really care.

Blame it on former President Jacques Chirac, some would say. He’s the one who, in 1997, abolished the draft in favor of an all-volunteer army. He’s the one who put an end to what was once two years of compulsory service to the French nation (later reduced to 16 and then to 10 months), where young men of all backgrounds, races and classes came together in what many considered France’s “melting pot.” In a recent survey, 62% of the French regretted Chirac’s decision. This would appear to be an implicit wish for the draft’s return—though people may simply be feeling nostalgic about the “good old days” when a Frenchman knew what it meant to be French.


Recruitment poster for an all-volunteer army

In 2013, believing their glory days are behind them, feeling pessimistic about the future, the French are no longer so sure of who they are. Back in the days of the draft, when almost all young men served, the army was an essential component of French identity. Today, pushed to the periphery of society, the military, despite its annual budget of 43 billion dollars, placing it fifth in the world in terms of defense spending, is like a poor relation you’d rather forget about—and, in some important ways, the French have.

Last October, for example, French army wives began “battling bare,” inspired by Ashley Wise, the American who went to battle for her husband suffering from PTSD, spelling out her demands for better care on her bare back. These French women adopted her methods to bring national attention to the fact that their husbands, many on duty in Afghanistan, had not been paid for almost a year. They called themselves “un paquet de Gauloises en colère”—a angry pack of Gauloises, a reference to France’s best-known brand of cigarettes, but also, very literally, an angry pack of French women.



Their “bare-backed” methods worked. Just before Christmas 2012, emergency funds were unblocked so military wives could get creditors off their backs while, far away, their husbands served the nation.

Members of the French military are subjected to another strange injustice. Though medical care is excellent, if a soldier loses an arm or a leg in combat, he or she cannot be sure of who is going to pay for its replacement. Neither the health insurance nor the complementary insurance available to members of the military covers the costs. The national veteran’s association, as well as private charities, has stepped in to make up the difference, helping to pay for artificial limbs for those gravely injured in service to their country.

In early February, President Hollande, France’s Commander-in-Chief, paid a visit to Mali, where he was welcomed as a hero. In a speech, he proclaimed “terrorism has not been vanquished,” promising French troops would stay in Mali as long as necessary.

No one can tell how long this will be. That is another difference between the “war on terror” and past conflicts. As Americans know from their experience in Afghanistan, policing the world in the name of justice is an endless, often thankless task.

Paris art exhibit recalls home

Published in The Republican Herald, January 27, 2013

A current art exhibit in Paris, a “blockbuster show,” as it has been called in the French press, has carried me back to Schuylkill County, filling me with strong nostalgia for home. The exhibit, which will end on February 3rd, is devoted to the work of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). The French have proclaimed him the greatest American painter of the 20th century.

In the Grand Palais, an enormous exhibition hall between the Champs Elysées and the Seine, 128 of Hopper’s works have been brought together from all over the United States, being exhibited together for the first time ever. To see all these paintings, engravings and watercolors on American soil, it would be necessary to travel from sea to shining sea, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, visiting museums and art galleries from coast to coast.

In Paris, under one roof, we can see them all—if we’re ready to stand in line for two or three hours, or, once inside, stand on tiptoe to catch a glance of Hopper’s most famous painting, “Nighthawks,” which measures a little over 50 inches in length but is only 22 inches high. Hard work, waiting and then battling the crowds, but the French are up to the challenge. Hopper has been dubbed “an American for the French,” presenting them with images that correspond to their idea of the United States, a nation of loners lost on a vast continent.

Their vision, however, is not mine. For me, Hopper is inseparable from my memories of growing up in Schuylkill County, of how it used to be and still is.

I first discovered Hopper’s work when I was in high school, thanks to my art teacher, Mr. Robert Koslosky, fondly remembered by anyone who had the good fortune to study with him. Each year, with members of the sketch club, he organized a trip to New York City and there, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I first met Hopper, though I had the feeling I already knew him, his paintings immediately haunting me with a sense of “déjà vu.”

I recognized the streets of redbrick buildings rising no more than two storeys high, the railroad platforms (in those days there was still daily train service between Pottsville and Philadelphia), the Victorian homes, the vacant lots overgrown with weeds. As a child, I used to play at one on Greenwood Hill, next to the fire company, a gravel and coal dirt field later replaced by a “real” playground.

After that trip, after that encounter with an artist I knew would count for me, I went to the Pottsville Library and looked for more of Hopper’s paintings (today, if you scroll down the Wikipedia site in French, you’ll find a long list of links to Hopper’s works, more than on the English-language page: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hopper). There, what I saw in art books reconfirmed my initial sense of “déjà vu.” Discovering other paintings, I discovered places I already knew.

His 1927 painting of a drug store reminded me of Cable’s Pharmacy, once located at Second and Market Streets. In the display window, dominating the bottles of perfume and boxes of chocolates, were two suspended glass globes, each filled with colored water, catching and reflecting light. They were natural beacons, which is how they were used before the invention of electricity.

Hopper painted many streets and building façades that would look familiar to residents of Schuylkill County, including, in 1947, a street in a Pennsylvania coal town. He is also well known as a painter of interior scenes associated with transience: hotel rooms, motels or restaurants. Looking at some of the restaurant scenes, painted in muted tones of gold and burnished brown, I’m reminded of my all-time favorite restaurant in Schuylkill County, once located in the building home to the Brass Tap Tavern today.

I’m wondering how many readers, like me, often crossed the threshold of Joyce’s, turning into Logan’s Alley and pushing open the door of the “Ladies’ Entrance.” Hard drinkers entered on East Norwegian Street to gain direct access to the bar, but those of us who wanted to sit down in a booth for a meal entered on the side. Once inside, we were greeted by chef Joe Talpash, who was on a first-name basis with everyone.

“Got some fresh blue fish for you, Mary,” he often announced to my mother as we slid into a wraparound booth, and following Joe’s suggestion, that’s what she ordered, a sizzling filet of fish, served on the plate on which it was broiled, along with julienne fries, thin and crisp. Joyce’s Restaurant also reminds me of my father, Lewis, who died in 1968. He often took us to “Joe’s,” as we called it, for steamed clams, oysters or lobster tail. Thanks to Joe Talpash, my family became lovers of seafood and shellfish, what I’d call “coal region food.” When we wanted crab cakes, however, we deserted Joe and headed to Melnic’s in Saint Clair.

Looking at Hopper’s black and white engravings, I have a different kind of memory. I’m reminded of Schuylkill County artist Nick Bervinchak, whom I had the honor to meet before he died in 1978. Though he is best known for his mining scenes, I remember in particular one of his etchings of a ticket counter at the Reading Terminal in Philadelphia. The atmosphere and the angle of the scene (we see a heavyset woman from behind, leaning on the counter, waiting to purchase a ticket to the shore) could have very well been chosen by Hopper himself.

I am a child of the second half of the 20th century. Of course, I am also my parents’ child and Hopper’s work has the power to intimately connect me to their world, to that first half of the century when they were growing up and, in my father’s case, going to war. Though limited to an instant frozen in time, Hopper’s paintings tell stories, suggesting past and future, speaking to us about his world, but also about our own.

I don’t think Hopper ever visited Schuylkill County, but to those of us born or living here, he has many stories to tell. His work, viewed in Paris, poignantly carried me home.

Everyone deserves a place to call home

Published in The Republican Herald, December 30, 2012

When my mother was the reading teacher for the fifth and sixth grades at the Lengel Middle School, every year at Christmas she read her class The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson. This 1971 novel for young readers tells the Christmas story from a different angle, that of the worst kids in town, who get involved in a Christmas pageant when they hear the rumor that chocolate cake is served on a regular basis at the local church.

Those children, the Herdmans—and they are quite a herd—live over a garage on the wrong side of the tracks. At school, they steal from their classmates’ lunchboxes and at home they try to crush each other beneath the automatic garage door or sic the ferocious family cat on any social worker who comes to call. Their dad left home one evening, never to return. Their mom works two shifts in a factory, surely out of need, but mostly to get away from the kids. Needless to say, the Herdman children, two girls and four boys, had never been to church before they heard about the chocolate cake.

At the first rehearsal for the Christmas pageant, the story of the Nativity, they bully themselves into all the main roles, Mary, Joseph, the wise men, and the angel of the Lord. There’s just one problem: they are the only ones who don’t know the story and, hearing it for the first time, hearing how on a cold winter’s night a pregnant woman and her husband were turned away from the inn, the Herdmans are up in arms. Where were the social workers? Why was no doctor around? And how could anyone leave that poor couple in a stable, with, as the carol goes, “no crib for a bed” for their baby, nothing but a dirty trough filled with straw? What kind of people could do such a thing to a couple of refugees, cold, hungry, and with no place to go?

Bethlehem, a mountain city, is a cold place in winter, but not nearly as cold as Paris has been this December. Winters are generally mild here, compared to Pennsylvania, and snow, since my arrival in the city in 1991, has been rare. December 2012, however, has been different. Snow, intense cold and freezing rain have become our daily lot and fashion-conscious Parisians have taken to wearing hats or caps, pulled low on the forehead, putting at risk (for men and women both) stylish coiffures.

For the city’s contingent of over 5,000 SDFs, a French acronym referring to the homeless, sans domicile fixe (without a permanent home), the cold and snow have added yet another layer of difficulty to their daily struggle to survive. Between the time those lucky enough to have a bed for the night are turned out of shelters early in the morning until they line up to get into a shelter the next night, they have a long day in front of them.

In warm weather, they can take refuge in city parks. In cold, they head underground, into the metro. There, they tend to melt into the woodwork, or, more accurately, into the white tiles which cover the walls of the corridors and stations of the Parisian subway system. As for us commuters, unless one gets in our way, we hardly notice them, so used have we become to the presence of the homeless in our midst.

On crowded subway platforms, we turn our backs on them. Craning our necks, on the lookout for the next train, we stand poised to elbow our way inside. Once the train pulls in and the automatic doors slide open, we surge inside, leaving the homeless behind. We’re heading home, they’re left to sit on the incredibly uncomfortable seats provided by the transportation authority ever since benches were done away with, in order to prevent the homeless from lying down. Since the cold has set in, they’ve set up camp. Wrapped in blankets, they picnic on the platform, washing their meals down with cheap beer or wine, staying till closing time (the Parisian metro closes for about five hours each night).

Inside the train, we commuters travel with beggars. They’re not as easy to ignore as the homeless, who sit and stare but rarely speak. Beggars, on the contrary, speak out. They make speeches, describing the difficulties of their life, how hard it is to keep clean or find a bed for the night. Some go on and on.

Gypsies, for example, go from car to car, all the while shaking a paper cup from Starbuck’s or McDonald’s, repeating monsieur-dame, s’il vous plaît, aidez-moi, please help me, help my baby. And that’s the worst of it—these beggars, mostly women, usually balance a baby on one hip and are often pregnant with another. For weeks, every Tuesday, at the same hour, I cross such a woman, wondering if she may soon give birth before my very eyes.

On another occasion, a woman, a Rom, as gypsies prefer to be called, sang in a keening voice, while her little son worked his way through the crowd, holding a dirty paper cup. Nobody was giving so I reached in my pocket, found a fifty-centime coin and dropped it in. The boy said “merci” and gave me a beautiful, genuine smile. I’d just given him a little more than fifty cents. Did I really deserve so much in return?

Since 1997, the homeless in France have a special number to call, 115, when they need a place to sleep or urgent care, except that, these days, no one’s picking up the phone. Too many requests, too much need, no room at the inn, which, in this case means a shelter where the homeless are offered disposable sheets and a “kit propreté,” containing what it takes to keep clean. What’s even more disturbing, more young people than ever are making the call. Homeless, without work, often alienated from their families, many would join their voices to that of one homeless young man who recently said on the evening news, all he’s asking for is electricity, running water, and a place to lay his head.

I guess there has never been enough room at the inn, not in Jesus’ day nor our own. Then as now, a too large majority has ignored the homeless, the way we commuters do in the metro today. Should we offer them our garages or tool sheds, contemporary versions of the stable of long ago, or the extra room in our apartment or home? Like the Herdmans, should we all be up in arms because so many men, women and children sleep out in the cold? Wouldn’t 2013 truly be a better year if all of us had a place to call home?

You can watch the 1982 made-for-TV movie of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, with Loretta Switt, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4KSXrz28uE