Live entertainment: past, present and the way of the future?

On a rainy April evening in Paris, I went to the theater. I had a free ticket that I’d picked up at work, at the ticket office at my university where students (and teachers) can get discounts and sometimes tickets for free. I didn’t know anything about the play I was going to see. I just felt like going to the theater so I walked in and took a seat.

The lights went down. A man sitting in the front row stood up and stepped onto the stage. He began by speaking in Italian. I felt an uncomfortable rustle around me. The play was called Nous n’irons pas ce soir au Paradis, “This evening we won’t go to Paradise.” So where were we going, we asked ourselves.

In the end, we went to Hell, and to Purgatory, a voyage that transported us outside of time to a place where minutes don’t count, where the worries of daily life fall away, where nothing matters as much what is happening this very instant on the stage:

In front of us stands a man in street clothes. There are no props, no stage décor. There’s simply one man, the actor Serge Maggiani, who speaks to us about another, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.

Sounds like pretty highbrow stuff, doesn’t it? A narrative poem written in the early 14th century where all the characters, except the poet, are dead, some freezing in Hell (yes, the coldest parts are reserved for the worst sinners), others biding their time in Purgatory, and a happy few residing in Paradise (we won’t be going there, we’ve been forewarned).

But the evening is anything but that. Serge Maggiani, our guide, introduces us to Dante and points out that’s the poet’s first name. Right away we’re on a first-name basis with a man who, like us, has known suffering, disappointment and loss in love.

In fact, when Dante begins his journey, it sounds like he’s seriously depressed. He’s lost in a dark forest and with each step sinks deeper into the mire. In real life, he is an enemy of the powerful pope Boniface VIII and has been condemned to permanent exile from his beloved Florence. He has no income, no home, few friends.

He does have ink, pen and paper, however, and though he has been deprived of his birthplace, no one can take his native tongue away. Dante writes in the Italian of Tuscany at a time when no self-respecting writer would use anything but Latin. He lives in his language and makes it his home. Participating in the creation of the Italian language that will one day be spoken all over Italy, he also takes a writer’s sweet revenge when he condemns Pope Boniface to Hell before he’s even dead.

By the end of the evening, we may not have been to Paradise but we’ve met Dante, as real, as close to us as any man alive. We’ve also encountered the poet’s special genius and had a taste of eternity.

That rainy April evening, I experienced a moment of serendipity that no screen could ever give me. What I found with a group of strangers and a single actor on stage I could never find on my computer, my cell phone, my TV or even a giant movie screen. Live theater makes us more alive and this is something we all need.

In Pottsville, the people who have worked so hard to bring back the Majestic Theater understand this. They understand the importance of a community theater that makes live entertainment available at a reasonable price. Recently there have been Robert Thomas Hughes’s “A Miner’s Tale,” and “Triumph and Tragedy” to commemorate the end of the Civil War.

I remember the Majestic Theater when it was a farmer’s market. My mother remembered it from its early days as a movie theater though I don’t know if she ever knew it as a nickelodeon. That’s how the Majestic began when it first opened in 1910, four years before the great fire of 1914, which destroyed the city’s finest theater, the Academy of Music.

Rooting around in the past, I came up with the name of Robert B. Mantell, a well-known actor in his day. In New York and on the road, he played all the great Shakespearean roles and married four times, each of his brides a leading lady who played at his side. In September 1902 he was on stage at the Academy of Music in a popular play of the day, “The Cross and the Dagger.”

The following year, in the same theater, the Pottsville Musical Society put on a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance.” In 1913, the year before the Academy burnt down, the Honey Boy Minstrels were on the bill. Led by George Evans, co-author of “In the Good Old Summer Time,” they sang and performed vaudeville acts.

Once the Academy of Music was gone, other theaters took its place. The Hippodrome on E. Market Street brought in vaudeville acts and big bands. The Capitol on N. Centre Street was more palace than theater. It could seat over 2,700, had thirteen dressing rooms for vaudeville stars, and its interior décor was a cross between a Moorish castle and a very ornate Italian church.

Pottsville also had dance halls and in the days of prohibition, speakeasies galore. At the Holly Roof on the top floor of the Hollywood Theater, couples danced to the beat of Paul Whiteman’s orchestra and the Dorsey Brothers of Shenandoah were regulars in town. There were also lots of clubs and bars on Minersville Street.

In the 1930’s and 40’s, Pottsville had so much live entertainment that the city was off limits to soldiers from Indiantown Gap (though this was a rule hard to enforce). A trip to Pottsville was the equivalent of a descent into Dante’s Inferno. In just one visit, a young man could lose his soul, his health, and every penny in his pocket.

It would be easy to say “those were the good old days,” but they weren’t. There was the Great Depression and World War II. To make it through hard times, people got together to dance, sing, go to a show. They had fun and we could have more too if we put our screens aside and exchanged the virtual for the live.

The world’s biggest “button tin” on display

Do people still have button tins filled with hundreds of buttons, each one different, a world unto itself? Do mothers still take them out of a cupboard or down from a high shelf for their children to sift through on rainy afternoons?

I spent hours of my childhood with the family button tin, trolling the bottom, always coming up with a button I’d never seen before. That button tin was a treasure trove and one of my favorite toys.

Later in life, I forgot about buttons or, let’s say, they became functional objects, a part of everyday life. Buttoning up, unbuttoning, smooth yet by no means simple movements I undertook without giving them a thought.

Since I recently visited the biggest button tin in the world, all that has changed and I’ve returned to my earlier fascination with buttons. In fact, I’ll never look at a button in the same way again.

The “button tin” in question is on view in Paris at the Musée des arts décoratifs, the Museum of Decorative Arts, located in a wing of the Louvre. Continuing until July 19, 2015, “Déboutonner la mode,” “Unbuttoning Fashion,” is all about buttons, 3,000 of them, each one unique, each one a work of art in miniature, all part of a collection of 37,000 buttons acquired by the museum in 2012.

That’s a lot of buttons; it’s also a lot of history.

Buttons are as old as clothing and as far back as the Bronze Age, over three thousand years ago, our ancestors were using buttons to accessorize, but not to button up—they had not yet invented the buttonhole.

In 1250 in France, the first button-makers guild was created at a time when buttons were a luxury item and a token in the game of love. Aristocratic ladies wore tight-fitting gowns that buttoned up the back and had button-on sleeves, practical because they could be changed when dirty, romantic because they could be offered as keepsakes to their beloved knight.

Treated as family heirlooms, fashioned from gold or precious stones, they were passed down in wills and used to pay off debts. Monarchs passed laws against them. Aristocrats were stepping out of line, spending a fortune on buttons, and when they wore them at court, they out-dazzled the king.

The Church also understood the danger of buttons. The deadly sin of lust was associated not only with an intense desire for sex but also for luxury. All that money spent on buttons could lead to eternal damnation, as could their vain display on bodices, breeches or gowns.

In the 17th century, the Amish and the Quakers shared this view, which explains why they preferred clothing with hooks and eyes. Well into the 19th century, buttons were considered inappropriate on funeral garb.

But neither the Church nor the King could stop the rise or the spread of the button, and the French and American revolutions did the rest, transforming the precious buttons of the past into democratic commodities, with the help of the English, the first to mass-produce buttons in the mid-18th century.

In 1789, on both sides of the Atlantic, buttons participated in revolution and democracy. In America, men sported an American eagle or George Washington’s portrait on special buttons created for his inauguration. In France, revolutionaries proudly displayed their political convictions with buttons that were “bleu, blanc, rouge” (blue, white and red).

In those budding democracies, “campaign buttons” remained functional. Men used them to button coats or breeches. Women hardly wore them at all. When they did, however, a button could serve the same role as a brooch. Porcelain buttons were often hand-painted with the portrait of a child. Men’s buttons, on the other hand, took up the issues of the day: a call for an end to slavery, the celebration of the hot-air balloon, or souvenirs of famous monuments or events.

Sometimes a row of buttons could contain a riddle, a message of love or an in-joke for friends. Popular at the time of the French Revolution, this practice of using buttons to communicate continued well into the 20th century, as a woman’s dress from the 1940’s demonstrates: down its front, a row of buttons announces “my sweetheart is a prisoner of war.”

In the 19th century, men’s fashion became more sober and women’s fashion began imitating men’s. The braiding and triple rows of buttons found on military uniforms began appearing on women’s coats.

In general, as the button lost its prominence in men’s fashion, it began showing up everywhere in women’s, on camisoles, bloomers and petticoats, on skirts, dresses, gloves and boots. And once again, it became a marker of social class because only a woman with a lady’s maid could make sure she was properly buttoned up the back.

If the button had a heyday, it was the 20th century. Fashion, art, craftsmanship and mass production all united to turn it into a work of art accessible to everyone, and the number of materials used to produce buttons boggles the mind: glass, plastic, mother-of-pearl, straw, stone, fur, cut steel, papier-mâché, wood, nut and sea shells, copper, leather, even coal and elephant skin, to name just a few.

Also, once women got rid of their corsets, rejecting the hour-glass figure and smelling salts for freedom of movement and form, the button came into its own as a full-fledged fashion accessory. For the French designer Paul Poiret, whose 1920 dresses favored vertical lines, a button’s sole purpose was to bring harmony to the new feminine silhouette.

In the 1930’s, artists such as Salvador Dali made buttons and surrealism inspired fashion, as button-makers reached new heights of creativity. The most stunning example is a 1937 woman’s jacket by Elsa Schiaparelli. In the place of buttons, four painted plastic butterflies alight down its front.

For fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, buttons were the jewels of his creations. The credo of Coco Chanel was “never a button without a buttonhole.” For both, buttons were as essential to fashion as any of the other materials used.

The 1950’s was the golden age of costume jewelry and the same techniques were often applied to buttons. If any readers have a button tin at home, I’d recommend they take a look inside. They may come across treasures, even objects of value, relics of that time.

All in all, the button may be small but it is not humble. And from now on, each time I touch or see one, I’ll give it the credit it’s due.

“Railside France” brings back memories

Old-timers like to reminisce. I guess I’m an old-timer then, because ever since I visited the headquarters of the French Association of Friends of the Rails (AFAC: Association française des amis des chemins de fer), I’m alive with memories of train travel the way it used to be in the “olden days” of Schuylkill County a half-century ago!

The headquarters of AFAC, an association dedicated to all facets of rail technology, is located in the basement of Gare de l’Est, one of the six major train stations of Paris, serving points in eastern France and Germany.

Beneath the station, you can also find a shopping center, a parking lot, and a metro station where three different lines cross. Somewhere in that underground labyrinth there is a door, behind that door, a hallway and then another door that leads to an old-fashioned wooden staircase. At the top, AFAC opens every Saturday afternoon to those lucky visitors who have found their way.

Once inside, once past the administrative office and the library, where a group of white-haired men deep in discussion ignore the bustle of visitors, we enter “Railside France,” a world in miniature, where model trains travelling at speeds equivalent to 80mph rush through tunnels and around sharp curves, crossing towns, cities, mountains and countryside that replicate the urban and physical geography of France.

The association possesses three platforms, all of which conform in the minutest detail to the standards of the French rail system, right down to the switching equipment and the railway signals. The most popular, built to the HO scale of 1:87 (model train buffs will understand), has an oval circuit with about 150 feet of track where sixteen electric engines can run at the same time. There is even a terminus with ten station platforms and nearby repair and cleaning stations.

The model trains, all replicas of engines and cars that run or once ran on French tracks, pull into stations that could be nowhere else but in France. Anyone who has ever travelled there will recognize the two-story country stations with their red-tiled roofs and stucco façades painted in pastel tones. On the miniature platforms travelers wait for the train, some leaning out over the tracks, others seated on benches, with, on the wall behind them, posters that look like the real thing, as do the station clock and the sign with the station’s name.

High in the miniature Alps, a model train fitted with cog wheels zigzags in and out of mountain tunnels. In Provence, a train traverses a valley between hills with stone villages perched on the slopes.

In honor of the station that is home to the association, originally called Gare de Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, members have built by hand a miniature main street of an Alsatian town. Naturally, there is also a replica of Gare de l’Est and just like the station above, recently renovated, its miniature underwent a major overhaul in 2014.

Wandering from room to room, from platform to platform, from one miniature corner of France to another, I’m reminded of my first visit to Roadside America in Shartlesville, PA. I can’t remember if it was an outing with the church choir or with the Brownies, but I’ll never forget my fascination and delight with the miniature main streets lined with houses whose windows glowed, making me feel as if miniature families really lived inside.

“Railside France” may not be as grand as Roadside America, “the world’s greatest indoor miniature village,” but it is a fitting tribute to a nation that has built a first-class rail network for both passengers and freight.

Freight trains still cross Schuylkill County, still hauling coal, but in no way can the tonnage compare to the days after World War I when the Saint Clair coal and rail yard was the biggest car and engine repair station in the nation and the biggest coal yard in the world. I still remember the rows and rows of tracks and the huge round house, which I could see from the Mill Creek Bridge when I was a child. After it closed in 1964, I visited it with my father and finally got up close to the monumental building, circling it, looking up at its glass and cement walls, feeling very small.

I also remember the Reading Station on East Norwegian Street, as I imagine many readers do. It was a big wooden structure, brown and tan (in my memories), Victorian in style, with a covered porch facing Railroad Street and the William Penn Hotel.

Sometimes I’d go to the station to wait for my father to come home from a business trip, running to him when he stepped off the train, dressed in the elegant way men dressed in those days: he wore a blocked felt hat and an overcoat over his gabardine suit. Sometimes I’d go there to catch the train myself. My Aunt Mildred often took me to Reading to go shopping and have lunch at the Crystal Restaurant. On rare occasions, we’d travel all the way to Philadelphia to visit the eagle at Wanamaker’s and eat at the automat.

Memories, memories! The Crystal Restaurant, the eagle at Wanamaker’s, the automat, young readers may have no idea of what I’m talking about, but old-timers like me surely do.

They probably also remember the quiet beauty of the train ride between Schuylkill Haven and Hamburg, which followed the path of the Schuylkill Canal through thick forests until it reached the Kernsville Dam. For miles, the train left the noise of highways and cars behind, travelling beneath a canopy of green in summer, through pristine fields of white in wintertime.

I loved that train and I rode it until service between Pottsville and Philadelphia was discontinued around 1980. The train was fast, quiet, relaxing. Too bad it had to come to an end.

Today train travel is making a comeback in the US and there are predictions a high-speed rail network could be in place by 2030.

In France, the first high-speed train, the TGV, joined Paris to Lyon in 1981, cutting travel time in half. Soon afterwards the first miniature TGV showed up at AFAC headquarters, where members are too busy keeping up with the times to feel nostalgic about the past.

“Timbuktu” and terrorism, at home and far away

At the beginning of January, I joined Sarah, a very old friend of mine, for a Sunday afternoon at the movies. I’ll never forget the first time we met 23 years ago. In January 1992, Sarah appeared in a sixth-grade English class I taught in a private school in Paris. This new student had big, thoughtful eyes and looked wise beyond her years.

Sarah is from Bangladesh and in January 1992, her father became his country’s ambassador to France. Before, he had been serving in Kuwait, but at the time of the first Gulf War, he and his family had to flee across the desert to safety in Jordan. Sarah spent her early years in Poland when that country was under martial law, before the victory of Solidarity. By the time we met, Sarah, 11 years old, had quite an experience of the world.

Today Sarah lives in Bangladesh and teaches at Asian University for Women. She has a PhD in Economics from Harvard, but rather than turn her talents to international finance, she has committed herself to helping other women in her part of the world.

In 2015, Sarah has the same beautiful, thoughtful eyes and she remains wise beyond her years. Whenever she visits Paris, we meet and I always discover something new thanks to her.

This time, she suggested we see the film “Timbuktu,” nominated to compete in the 2015 Oscars for the best foreign language film and to be released in the US on January 28th. I hope it will come to a theater near you but if it doesn’t, I encourage readers to note this title and rent it if you can.

When I was a child, I dreamed of wandering “all the way to Timbuktu” without the slightest idea of where such a place could be. Two years ago, war in Mali brought that city into my living room through the evening news. In January 2013 France launched “Operation Serval,” sending troops into northern Mali to support that country’s army fighting an invasion of Islamist militias.

The movie “Timbuktu,” directed by the Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, takes us back to 2012-13, the time of the Islamist occupation of that legendary city, home to a collection of ancient manuscripts and once surrounded by hundreds of Sufi shrines, destroyed by the invaders. The first image of the film shows a jihadist at target practice, blowing traditional African sculptures to bits.

The fighters themselves are a motley crew, some young, some old, some experienced soldiers, others lost young men who just want to go back home. They speak a jumble of languages and have as much trouble understanding each other as they do the racially and culturally diverse inhabitants of Timbuktu, who do not give in easily to the harsh laws these half-baked followers of radical Islam seek to impose.

They outlaw music but a young fighter from the Libyan desert falls under the spell of a voice singing in the night. They’re praising Allah, he tells his superior, incapable of understanding the words. Another night, the singers will not be so lucky and a young woman receives a public flogging the next day.

They outlaw soccer, the national sport of Mali, yet to fight boredom, jihadists from France pass their time reliving the careers of their favorite players.

Another French jihadist, a man in his thirties, finally learns to drive (readers may remember what I went through to get a driver’s license in France). After several attempts, he finally, joyfully, gets the knack of driving his chauffeur’s pickup around in circles in the desert sands.

In “Timbuktu,” there are no monsters, only men and women, victims of themselves, of each other, and of a system, the morbid interpretation of the Koran by a group of angry, lost, frustrated men, too fearful of each other and of their God to think for themselves.

“Timbuktu” is also the story of the deep love between a father and his daughter. They are nomadic Tuaregs, living in tents, herding their cattle in the Sahel. When a stray cow destroys the nets of a sedentary fisherman, conflict erupts and with it come tragedy and the deadly justice of a misguided band of Islamists. (To see a trailer of the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CspcDYQ-SiY)

A few days after I saw “Timbuktu,” Paris became the target of homegrown jihadists in a series of terrorist attacks that made worldwide news. On January 7th, eight journalists were killed at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly newspaper of satire and commentary known for its irreverent tone. It was its caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that incited the Kouachi brothers to take the journalists’ lives. Two policemen and a maintenance worker were also killed that day.

On January 8th, a policewoman was killed by the Kouachis’ accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly.

On January 9th, he also killed four Jews while he held other customers and employees hostage in a kosher supermarket in Paris. On that day, when all three terrorists were killed by the police, I sat in front of my computer, watching blow-by-blow accounts of events in real time.

On January 11th, nearly four million French people marched through the streets in a show of national unity unlike any since the end of World War II.

On January 7th and 8th, at the same time French terrorists were murdering their victims in Paris, in northern Nigeria, members of Boko Haram, followers of a distorted brand of radical Islam, killed 2,000 while chasing 20,000 Nigerians from their homes. Sitting at my computer, I can look at images of that massacre in the comfort of my home.

Since Sarah has returned to Bangladesh, her country has been paralyzed by several hartals, massive strikes that in many cases turn violent. They are a part of her everyday life. Since childhood, events she has lived have made her aware of the tragic dimension of history, which may account for the wisdom in her eyes.

“Timbuktu” is about that tragic dimension and recent events in Paris have plunged us into its midst.

The 21st century was born under a double star: the worldwide explosion of the digital revolution; the explosion of international terrorism as well.

Yes, in the 21st century, we can have the world at our fingertips and terrorists at our front door. May we learn to be as wise as Sarah in confronting these difficult times.

Christmas far from home

“Home for the holidays”: these are sweet words for those who can celebrate with their families, bittersweet for those far from home or homeland, separated from the ones they love. In Schuylkill County, some families have members serving in the US Armed Forces in places as far away as Iraq or Afghanistan. During this holiday season, their sons, daughters or spouses must be wishing for “home sweet home.”

Here in France, in the Paris region, there is a large Christian community celebrating Christmas far from home, longing for the country of their ancestors and for the churches where they celebrated mass in Aramaic, the language Jesus most likely spoke. They are the Christians of Iraq and there are about sixty thousand living in and around Paris.

Two of them, German Odeesho Banyameen and Stevani Odesho, are my students and they kindly took the time to tell me how they are celebrating Christmas this year. But, to begin, they told me something about themselves.

German and Stevani, who also happen to be cousins, arrived in France in 2008. The two previous years had been difficult for all Iraqis, but this was also a time when attacks on Christians were on the rise. Young Christian women were being kidnapped for ransom; terrorist bombs were exploding near schools and in busy shopping districts. German remembers the day all the windows shattered in her classroom when a bomb went off nearby.

Reluctantly, for reasons of security, both families decided to emigrate. They did not want to leave their country or their city, Baghdad, where they lived peaceably with their Muslim neighbors. But threats to the Christian community were increasing and, to protect her from danger, Stevani’s family had already sent their daughter to the family village in northern Iraq. The next step was for each family to leave the country for Damascus, Syria, where, as political refugees, they waited for an opportunity to immigrate to a country in the West.

In 2008, France opened its doors to Iraqi Christians. Without knowing a word of French, knowing little about the country, the two families settled in the Paris region. Today, German and Stevani, who now speak French well, are preparing a degree in English at the University of Paris 8. At home they speak Aramaic. While in Iraq, they went to public school, where all teaching was in Arabic.

Both young women and their families are members of the Assyrian Church of the East, one of the two main churches of Iraq, whose seat today is in Chicago, Illinois. This is an independent church, whereas the Chaldean Church of Iraq is affiliated with Rome. The two churches, whose history begins in the first years of the Christian era, were once one, but they separated in the 16th century. Only since 2001 do members of the two churches officially celebrate Holy Communion together.

Recently, I joined with Assyrian and Chaldean Christians to celebrate mass at Notre Dame de Chaldée, presided by Father Petrus Yousif, rector of the Chaldean Mission in France. In a modern chapel in northern Paris, Father Yousif celebrates mass in Aramaic, Arabic and French, in an effort to include everyone. The mass itself follows an order that would be familiar to Catholics the world over, but there are also prayers and blessings particular to the Chaldean Church.

While waiting for mass to begin, I listened to the young choir practicing, singing melodies that had an “eastern flavor” to my ear. During mass, readers chant passages from the Bible and prayers are sung by choir and congregation. Listening to these beautiful chants, often in a minor key, I was filled with a sense of another place and time, of music resonating with strong faith kept alive across the centuries.

As soon as mass is over, everyone heads downstairs for tea. As 2014 draws to a close, a new flow of Christian refugees, victims of the violence of ISIS, is arriving in France. These Iraqi Christians from Kurdistan, where their community has been present for thousands of years, have turned to the Chaldean Mission for help, and some are present at mass. For these new refugees, this is their first Christmas far from home and I hope they are able to celebrate in the traditional way.

For German and Stevani, this means a special Christmas breakfast of kadeh and kolache, served with hot tea and milk. Kadeh, sweetened raised bread, is a specialty of the Assyrian community whereas kolache are filled pastries common to many Middle Eastern countries and considered the “national cookie” of Iraq. In the Odeesho family, the pastries are filled with dates, walnuts or coconut. Family members may also eat eggs and cheese, breakfast staples in Iraq.

Once breakfast is over, it’s almost time to move on to Christmas dinner, where a variety of dishes make up the traditional fare. There may be a choice between harissa, an Assyrian “chicken porridge,” a thick soup in a yogurt base, containing chicken, saffron and finely ground wheat, or pacha, a soup made of boiled lamb’s feet and tongue, considered a great delicacy.

To accompany the soups, the table is covered with side dishes, some common to the Middle East, others Indian in origin. There are stuffed grape and cabbage leaves and many of the appetizers the Lebanese call mezze, as well as kubba, ground meat cooked in bulgur wheat. Rice mixed with meat, vegetables and spices is called biryani, as in India, and chicken curry is another favorite dish.

Throughout the meal Iraqi Christians drink wine—they consider it good for the digestion. For dessert, there will be more kolache, Iraqi “cookies,” served with tea.

Then Christmas day is over, but Santa Claus has yet not arrived. Don’t worry, he will. In Iraqi Christian homes, he comes the night of December 31st, hiding gifts under children’s beds instead of under the Christmas tree. He also visits Muslim homes in Iraq and in neighboring Iran, where Muslims too like to decorate a Christmas tree.

German and Stevani are looking forward to the holidays but, they both admit, they miss Christmas “back home,” a feeling anyone far from home or country on Christmas can understand. They will, however, do their best to keep their traditions alive and they wish you all “Aethokh Breekhta,” which means “Blessèd Holidays” in Aramaic, one of the most ancient languages of the world.

Searching for autumn in the city

Autumn came late to Paris this year. After a summer of rain and cold, September and October were two months of warm, sunny days. On November 1st, All Saints Day, a holiday in France, families picnicked outside and sunbathers peeled off jackets to bask in the light of a generous mid-autumn sun. Leaves on the trees remained mostly green, with here and there a splash of pale yellow. Autumn, the season of crisp air, crisp Macintosh apples, and hillsides aflame with color (my memories of the season in Schuylkill County), was nowhere in sight.

By mid-November things had changed. Temperatures dropped, gray skies returned, and rain washed away the dusty remains of summer so that autumn could finally settle in. Keeping up a family tradition—in the fall, with my mother and aunt, I often took a Sunday afternoon walk along the western slope of Sharp Mountain or in the woods behind our home—I set out to search for autumn in what I consider my “backyard,” the neighborhood where I live.

In Schuylkill County, autumn is easy to find. Most towns are nestled in valleys or gaps between the ridges of the Blue Mountain chain of the Appalachians. Lifting their eyes to the hills, residents can take in a riot of fall color. In the surrounding countryside, dry corn stalks rattle in the wind, and backyards are carpeted with fallen leaves that need to be raked.

In Paris, I lift my eyes to a gray sky and lower them (remember, I’m on the sixth floor) to macadam and gray façades, cars and busses. Craning my neck, further up the street, I can see a few chestnut trees whose leaves turn from green to brown and then fall. The next step is for municipal workers to blast them off sidewalks with leaf blowers while blasting the ears of anyone within a 100-foot radius.

The view from my living room window is not promising, but my “backyard” is full of surprises, proof that autumn in the city has splendors all its own. For example, in Belleville Park, at La Maison de l’air, “the House of Air,” a modern structure with a glass façade, where visitors can learn about atmospheric conditions in Paris, I meet Agnès Joly, an agricultural engineer. To explain her work to us, she takes time off from tending her aquaponic garden, a long row of above-ground edible plants fertilized by dozens of gold fish swimming in a pool at the garden’s base.

Founder of Joly Mer (mer=sea), Agnès has been chosen by the city of Paris to develop aquaponic gardening as part of a plan to promote urban farming and innovative green spaces. In her above-ground garden, Agnès is tending three separate plant beds, each devoted to a different form or urban gardening, all thriving without soil. In a modular unit holding several small pots, kale, chives and basil take root among clay pebbles receiving a balanced flow of oxygen, nutrients and water. In one unit, plants receive mineral fertilizers (hydroponics), in another, organic (bioponics), and in the third (aquaponics), the fish provide the nourishment the plants need.

Using less water than traditional agriculture, with no need of soil, above-ground gardens of this type can be installed almost anywhere, even in a city apartment, and the ultimate goal, as in traditional truck gardens, is to give city dwellers access to fresh, locally grown produce. And that is Agnès Joly’s plan: to sell her fresh greens and herbs to Parisian restaurants, proving that aquaponics is a viable economic and ecological model of urban farming.

On a crisp autumn day, against a changing Parisian sky, Agnès tends her garden, one moment awash in sunlight, the next, darkened by threatening black clouds. A few steps away, in the same hillside park, the leaves turn red and orange on the vines of one of the city’s oldest vineyards, still producing Chardonnay grapes. Centuries ago, these vineyards belonged to one of the abbeys that farmed the hills above Paris, irrigating their crops with the water of nearby springs.

Wandering through my neighborhood, I come across vestiges of that long-ago time in street names: rue des Cascades (waterfalls), rue de la Mare (pond), or rue Savies, named after an underground spring first mentioned in a document dating back to the 11th century. It is one of many still surging from sources beneath the hill where I live. With fields and vineyards located far from the Seine, the monks understood the value of these springs and watched over them as carefully as they did their crops, building springhouses and stone trenches with descending steps to control the water’s flow.

They called each springhouse a “regard” because it was the place where monks could not only observe the workings of the source but also care for it. In rue des Cascades, a fine specimen still remains, a small building made from cut stone, with a sloped stone roof. Built in the early 17th century, known as “le regard Saint Martin,” it protects Savies spring, which flowed naturally from its source until 1986, when the construction of an apartment building got in the way.

On a recent walk I found the door open and got to step inside. A local historian, holding a gas lantern, showed us the steps along which the spring flows, thick with lime deposits. This is very hard water, neither good for boiling or working up a sudsy lather. For centuries, however, it served agriculture and industry in the section of Paris known as Belleville.

Leaving the “regard” behind, we climb stone steps, crossing a small wood. Somewhere among the trees another springhouse is hidden. In the woods, leaves are falling, some orange, some bright yellow. Not yet five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and already dusk is closing in…

In Paris too, autumn has finally arrived. This is the urban version, where we can come across a micro-farm or a springhouse hundreds of years old. With luck, we may see some bursts of fall color and, above our heads, the expanse of a magnificent autumn sky.

Hunting season underway in PA and in France

Throughout October, the Republican Herald has regularly printed articles about hunting and now that antlerless deer season is underway and turkey season about to begin, this seems the right moment for me to add one more, a look at hunting in France.

I'm a city-dweller and I've never hunted, though nothing says I might not like to give it a try. Last Sunday, throughout all of France, the National Federation of Hunters was looking for people like me. In Fontainebleau Forest, once the hunting ground of French kings, only forty miles from Paris, in the Jura Mountain and the Alps that form the border with Switzerland, along Atlantic and Mediterranean shores, members of local chapters welcomed all those wishing to learn more about what it means to be a hunter in France today.

In the Jura Mountains, among forests, mountains and fields that remind me of those of Schuylkill County, hunters welcomed non-hunters in a typically French way: the day began with coffee and croissants. Then, after having donned a blaze orange vest, participants were assigned a mentor, an experienced hunter, who, along with his dogs, accompanied them for a morning hike.

In a region where deer, roe deer, and wild boar are the favored game, hunters explained how they track their prey, using dogs to flush the animals while they wait, poised to shoot, posted in strategic spots.

After a morning spent outdoors, where participants also learned about small game, waterfowl and game birds, they finally got to sit down to a meal of local game and wines, offered by the hunters, a perfect finishing touch.

Last Sunday, all over France, many people had their first contact with hunting. Some will surely take the next step: they'll begin preparing for the national exam required to obtain a French hunting license, which to the eyes of a non-hunter like me, seems no easy task.

To start with, as in Pennsylvania, there's an application to fill out, followed by written notification of an exam date at an exam center in the region where the candidate resides. On the day of the exam, he or she will be tested on practice and theory, with emphasis placed on safety, physical ability and good common sense.

For example, candidates must climb over a fence or a ditch while carrying their (unloaded) arm. While in a simulated hunting situation, they must avoid shooting in the direction of hedges, which may hide homes, or in that of a human decoy dummy representing other hunters or hikers who share the same terrain.

In France, when transporting a firearm, it must be stored, unloaded, in a special case and the prospective hunter must show he has installed one in his vehicle. Most importantly, he must demonstrate he can shoot. Hunting rifle in hand, he has six chances to test his skills, as six clay disks are projected into the sky, with the added challenge that in one or two cases, he must also prove he knows when not to fire: at a red clay disk, representing a bird belonging to an endangered species, or at a disk flying into the air at the same moment a human decoy suddenly springs up. In either case, a shot means an immediate fail.

If he makes it through the skeet shoot, the candidate can move on to aim and fire at a moving ground target. Then, after having taken his rifle apart, unloading it and loading it again, he’ll sit down for the theoretical test, ten questions chosen from a list of 414 based on hunting safety, wild game and animal habitat.

To give an example, candidates are asked if a deer loses its antlers once a year, once every three years or never. I'm sure I don't have to tell Schuylkill County hunters the answer to that one. They may be shown the photo of the wing of a game bird, such as the partridge, and asked if it belongs to the hen or the cock. There are also questions that lead to an immediate fail, even if the candidate has already passed the practical exam, such as this true/false example: “It is legal to hunt with a compressed air rifle.” If the candidate answers 'true', it is an automatic out.

It seems to me this test requires a lot of preparation, a lot of skill and a lot of knowledge (I've read over all 414 questions!). I'm not sure how it compares to the one Pennsylvania hunters have to take, but I'm convinced safe hunting requires great skill and great respect for nature and for one's fellow hunter.

In fact, the National Federation of Hunters of France chooses to call hunting an "art," and in its charter, it lays out the values its members share: active participation in the conservation of nature; a willingness to interact with all those who enjoy contact with nature, including those who do not hunt; and an ongoing commitment to improving safety for hunters and non-hunters alike.

In the United States, the rules and regulations of hunting are established at state level, by state game commissions. In France, there is a national office of hunting and wild game (ONCFS). As on the site of the PA Game Commission, the French site provides practical information as well as access to the most recent legislation concerning hunting. There is also a link to each "département" in France, an administrative unit somewhere between a county and a state, where hunters can find the dates for hunting seasons in their region. They can also find accident reports for the last three years.

France has long been a country of hunters and many men and women continue to share that passion today. They have also kept alive traditions going back to the Middle Ages, such as hawking and "par force" hunting, where, before the kill, the prey is exhausted by a relay of dogs. Though painstakingly difficult to train, falcons and sparrowhawks are still used to hunt rabbits and small game birds.

In France, "par force" hunting can takes two forms: there is the fox hunt on horseback, much as it is practiced in England. There is also a literal "running with the hounds," where unarmed hunters run or ride mountain bikes, following a team of dogs. In this kind of hunting, where the goal is not to capture or kill, hunters, lead by first-class hunting dogs, are in it for the chase, which is only one letter away for the French word for hunting: la chasse.

And to all of you hunters or chasseurs, in Schuylkill County or in France, I wish happy hunting during the 2014-2015 season.