January 25–29, 2026

I have come back to Paris again, this time walking with sticks, slower than I once walked and attentive in a way speed never allowed. The only people I pass are the very old, most of whom walk lopsided with canes.

Paris has been part of my life since my twenties. It has seen me married, broken, open, reassembled, tested, loved, and now alone. I have come back to this city at every major turning point in my life, though, at the time, I didn’t know that was what I was doing. Perhaps cities remember us, even when our bodies forget who we once were.

When I first came to Paris, I was young enough to think of it as a tourist destination. I arrived with my first wife on a weekend leave from the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, restless and unformed. I remember little of the city itself, only fragments—walking, cafés, crowds, a sense of excitement that did not quite belong to me. The marriage was short and ended violently enough to rupture whatever story I thought I was living.

In the aftermath, Paris assumed a new role. In 1970, my father was living on a forty-foot boat named Circe, moored on the Seine near the Place de la Concorde, a place that seemed to float between solidity and impermanence. I stayed with him for several weeks. He had been a difficult man during many phases of my life—brilliant, charismatic, emotionally erratic. But during that period, he unexpectedly became a listener. I spoke. He did not interrupt. He offered no advice. He let the story unwind. He helped me let go of a marriage I never wanted.

The next time Paris entered my life decisively was in the summer of 1980, when my life partner, Deborah, and I stayed for a month in an apartment belonging to her Parisian friends, Alain and Simone, whom she had known as a student at the Sorbonne ten years earlier. We were young enough then to walk endlessly, to sit for hours talking, to believe, without saying so, that time was on our side.

That summer became a turning point, though I didn’t recognize it while living it. Deborah was fluent in French and at ease in the city. I was tentative, open, and receptive in ways that surprised me. I read books that unsettled me. Simone later gave us tickets to a Holocaust photography exhibition, after which we spoke with a survivor. Something in me shifted—not belief or doctrine, but orientation. A sense of inheritance, I hadn’t known how to claim, found me.

That same summer, Paris was where our relationship was tested.

Deborah told me she intended to spend a week in Sweden visiting a former boyfriend from her early twenties. The announcement landed with a force disproportionate to its calm delivery. I spent the week wandering around Paris in a fugue state, wondering whether she would return.

She did. Between those two moments, something fundamental shifted. We did not argue our way through it. We faced it. What was required was not reassurance or forgiveness but a choice about how to live together. Our life would have to be entered into fully.

Her choice and mine reverberated for decades. I learned then that commitment is not an emotional state but an act of alignment. You create it, step into it, and remain within it, renewing it daily. Paris did not give us answers; it gave us a place to hear the questions clearly enough to respond.

In midlife, Paris receded into something more ordinary. We visited briefly once with friends. Years later, Deborah and I returned again, wandering together for days in search of the perfect croissant. We walked without calculation. We took endurance for granted.

Those visits blur together now. Not because they were unimportant, but because nothing in them demanded interpretation. They belonged to the long middle of life, when continuity feels natural, and the future still extends without a visible edge.

Now I am here again, nearly eighty, walking alone.

Deborah is no longer able to travel. Alzheimer’s has made her present in my life and absent from the world at the same time. She lives with me in near silence now. The disease has taken her personality but not her soul. I carry her with me, not as memory alone, but as habit and expectation—a presence that still shapes how I see. Paris contains her, too. Every street overlays earlier versions of us walking side by side.

I see her now as a beautiful young student, long dark hair flowing, wandering the city in a flâneur’s state of mind, eyes roaming, body moving rhythmically, becoming Paris by inhabiting it fully. Deborah was Paris.

I move more slowly now. I notice benches. I calculate distances. Effort has become explicit. But slowness has brought something with it, a heightened sensitivity to texture and rhythm, to the quiet intelligence of place. Standing on a bridge at the Île Saint-Louis, I look past the stone and water to the scaffolding around Notre-Dame, to what was lost, to what is being rebuilt, to what will never be the same. Time no longer feels linear. It stacks itself in translucent layers, each visible through the next.

I am here, in part, to walk the path of a fictional character I helped create, Anna, a young Jewish woman, a sculptor, living in Paris between the wars. Writing her required imagination; walking her streets now requires effort and revision. At the Bourdelle atelier, where she studied, the scale of the sculptures clarifies what I could only intuit on the page. They are massive, resolved, finished. Standing there, I understand why Anna needed to leave. Her work demanded motion, not permanence.

Later, at La Rotonde, I sit where artists once argued their futures into existence. The café is polished now, expensive, self-aware. Whatever urgency once gathered there has been absorbed into its décor. I can afford to sit; Anna could not have. The distance between us is not fictional, but temporal.

I could not have written that novel earlier in my life, not because of craft, but because the necessary experiences had not yet layered themselves into something coherent. That is part of what aging offers—not wisdom in the grand sense, but legibility. The story does not change. Our ability to read it does. I am no longer trying to arrive somewhere. I am trying to recognize where I am.

Paris is not an escape at this stage of life. It is an old friend. It has watched me arrive young and unformed, return broken and searching, pass through in strength, and now come back carrying loss openly. The city has not healed me. It has not consoled me. It has done something quieter. It has held continuity while everything else changed.

Walking here now, I began to notice something I had missed before. Certain places do not simply remain in memory. They continue to act upon us. They wait for us to grow old enough to understand what happened there first.

I realized, slowly, that a story I thought I had invented years ago had in fact been waiting for me here.