Why the Cafe Chairs Face the Street

Or, 265 feet to family but 4000 miles to community

Cartoon by Paige.

My parents moved into a hundred-year-old rowhouse in NW DC when I was three, and still live there. The first bed I slept in that didn’t look out the back of that house was an extra-long twin in a freshman dorm.

Many of the twenty-foot-wide lots lining our two-block street housed families spanning three generations. When I moved back in 2012, the neighborhood had changed—but plenty hadn’t. There were still familiar faces, shared walls, and casual chats on stoops.

The house I purchased had a lot going for it—principally financial value and a blank canvas for ingenuity—but community wasn’t on that list. It wasn’t until I moved to a randomly assigned building on another two-block street in Paris’ 16ème arrondissement that I even understood what community meant.

One of my earliest school memories is of sitting in a circle with a bunch of other kids atonally singing Frère Jacques. Years later, my first school project was using my parents’ Panasonic camcorder to film myself wearing an apron, hosting a cooking show as “Julien Child”, en français, bien sûr. There was the song about Napoleon avec cinq cent soldats—I understood he had 500 men, but not what good that could possibly do him.

I was indoctrinated young, and the pace was kept up. It wasn’t enough to make me conversant, but it gave me so much familiarity that language and culture would always appeal.

Little wonder then, that my first passport stamp was a poorly inked rectangle labeled Roissy-CDG. And then I went back: the first time for a few days, but once for only a few hours. I’ve spent far more time on the Champs-Élysées than I have in Times Square—not that I can recommend either.

So I was more than a little unsettled by my apprehension when given the opportunity to move to Paris for three years with no responsibilities and all my needs taken care of—I’m using “needs” loosely since few people would consider a 100-square-meter apartment in a tony part of Paris a “need.”

It turns out, though, that living isn’t about perks. The nice-to-haves are nice to have, but the essentials—the things that make life vital—are the people you interact with and the things that you do. And a ticket to Paris doesn’t come prepackaged with either. I would be leaving two decades of focused work and an embedded network, six hours in the past (time zones) and 4,000 miles away, with no support in setting up a beachhead.

This was my rejoinder to people—who looked with envy at what they didn’t understand. But the rest of it? I don’t think I realized until months later: I am the things that I do and the people I interact with. If I leave all of them behind, what am I? Worse, actually: I know my stock price in the United States. I know where I stand and what that means. I’ve done well. I’m happy with it. I’ve a little sumpin there, gonna brush my shoulda off. I’m really not into the idea of voluntarily giving all of that away. Not for anything. I am far too old to be naked in front of new people.

One of the facets of the pandemic that few got to experience was just how different it was in different places at the same moment. You could almost smell the fumes from the tire fire that was New York, and seven hours later, you’d land in post-lockdown Paris—no masks, no COVID, no tourists. The most draconian curtailing of liberties since the Germans were running the show had just lifted, as if for me. It was the Twilight Zone. Experiencing the Louvre like Beyonce was cool, but this was not exactly solid ground for a reinvention.

If you’ve ever been someplace new, you know the pull—stay in the hotel, take the Uber, control what you can. The natural path is to pat yourself on the back for a split-second social transaction that slips through. Observe a difference and pretend you engaged. But what is novelty without the surrender of control?

And then one fall day, fresh off the proverbial boat, I walked out of my temporary apartment at mid-morning—when all respectable people are at work. I walked out without my suit or fancy shoes. I walked out without a place to go or a purpose to fulfill. I walked out without a solid command of the language. I walked out without the armor of the stories I’d been telling myself for 35 years.

I don’t eat breakfast, and it wasn’t long before that caught up with me. So I stopped in one of the ubiquitous boulangeries to buy a pastry. It wasn’t busy. In fact, the person behind the counter was chatting with a friend—not a fellow coworker, a friend. A person who had come by the shop not to buy anything but to say hello.

Both people acknowledged me immediately—a failure to say “Bonjour” upon entering an establishment automatically summons the gendarmes—and returned to their conversation. I scanned the case, mentally composed my sentence, and then looked up at the employee with a quarter smile, who rose, maintaining eye contact with her friend and finishing her point. Then she turned to me, with a courteous smile of her own…maybe a hair flirtatious? —and said, “Good morning, sir, and what would do you pleasure?” The friend assuming a polite standby posture prepared to comment on the weather, but not demanding to be included. It was ballet.

I experienced this hundreds and hundreds of times and then, to my great satisfaction, I participated. Let me diagram this a bit since Americans will have no idea what is going on here. An employee is at work, but when they aren’t working there is no obligation—perceived or explicit—to pretend to work or to make up work in hopes of acknowledgment. This second person, whether a close friend or a mere acquaintance presumably with other places to be, is taking time out of their day and potentially away from their job, to engage–not incidentally but intentionally. For the sake of it. The employee is socially aware enough to read whether I want space or to be engaged, skilled enough to break contact without disrupting flow with their friend and, best of all: perfectly, beautifully, and unfailingly polite. High art and these strangers let me–invited me, expected me–to dance.

The armor in this country is the language. Tourists show up intent on their Disney-fied mental Paris. Fashion week could be mistaken for Halloween. But it’s how you speak rather than how you look that resonates. You are human if you are polite, but you are French if you speak French. I hadn’t figured out my long-term plan, but I had my first goal: sound like I belonged.

I did eventually find some place to go (work), find people to see, and things to do, but it was those first crucial months when I realized: my concept of value was the most American thing about me and it simply didn’t apply in France. Of my five closest friends in Paris, I only know what one of them does for a living. And that is because I spent a lot of afternoons in his café talking to him between his serving customers.

This is in spite of hundreds of glasses of wine, cups of coffee, and hours of conversation. I haven’t the slightest idea if any of them have a decent car, whether they rent or own their apartments, how much they make, or how many people they supervise. It just never came up.

One of the paradoxes of Paris is that tourists think of it as this big city. This idea is somewhat reinforced by the fact that les Parisiens find it arduous to cross three arrondissements for dinner, but the truth also lies in that fact. Why leave your neighborhood?

I used to make plans with this café friend maybe once a quarter. How often you think I saw him? Nope, wrong: three to four times a week. How is this possible? Who has the time? Yeah, exactly—you American! Commuting in your sardine can and living in your shoebox. On my 15-minute biking commute, I could stop by his shop and chat, to or from work. And I don’t mean for five minutes, but if I sat in the window too long, another friend would be walking down the street, and now we’re in it for an hour or so… and I, at least theoretically, have to get to work.

“That isn’t your friend,” you say, “that’s your barista.” To which I reply: Touché—probably why I was the officiant at his wedding. Mic drop.

The number of times I sat at a café sharing a bottle with a person, and another walking past who one of us knew would stop, say hi, and then sit. JOIN US FOR A DRINK! I can barely count. This was normal. This was life.

No one talked about "community." There was no label that I was aware of—it wasn't even an interest. It was water, and people were just fish. Every institution, every facet of the culture seemed designed for exactly this kind of interaction.

I’ve been back long enough that the brevity, the busyness, the isolation, the culture shock of an East Coast American life has worn off. I am once again acclimated. But because my ego was so tied into this game, this obviously fallacious construction when viewed from another context, I can’t really go back to being satisfied with the way things are here.

The math I learned to do reflexively here is comfortable. Who is up and who is down and exactly how to present for effect. It’s obviously a fraud, obviously a waste, obviously a game. I look around and every incentive is to play a game.

The hard thing is to find your people; the easy thing is to keep score. You can win if you like, but the prize is just more game.

I’m not writing this because I figured it out. I’m writing it because I didn’t. Paris showed me what it can look like when a culture is built around people, and DC reminded me what it looks like when it isn’t. The idea is to carve out space, come together, and see if we can get some 1+1=3 alchemy.

But we didn’t just forget how to do that on this side of the pond—we tossed it out for something supposedly better. The work isn’t making space in a benign environment. The environment is hostile.

Even if we’re wildly successful at rebuilding it here, we’ll still be swimming upstream. Maybe together it’s possible—certainly going it alone is a nonstarter. But in that river over in France, people aren’t swimming. They’re on inner tubes, eating baguettes, sipping champagne, and floating in the right direction with an idle kick.

I’m not selling a solution. I’m holding the contrast long enough to see what it can teach. And maybe treading water long enough to notice who else is swimming.