June 8 Feeling it

 I need a rest day. The sun is sparkling the star jasmine on my little patio and I can see it clearly from the bedroom. It’s not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere this morning. Before I take my first step, I know my knees are unhappy. I should have taken the new prescription anti-inflammatory before I went to bed last night, but I was too happy to remember. What a day! Perfect one-hour commute then the surprise of John McEnroe playing in the Suzanne Lenglen stadium. His knees looked a bit shaky, too, but oh his hands were quick at the volleys. 

I enjoyed watching how he and Michael played cross court rally drills and how the four men deliberately kept the volley rally alive for ten + hits. Quite a show. The Lacoste Grande Boutique had many items, but very few for women.  By the time I returned, I’d walked nearly 6 miles.

So many things I could do today, but my body says Rest! I’m averaging over 12,000 steps a day, well over my 7000 limit back in CA, so I’ll catch up on writing and watch the bird sit on her nest. I’ll take the Haunted Pere Lachaise cemetery tour, for surely there’s a story there.

I arrived at the meeting point at 3:30 to tour with Carlos and two Americans from Florida. Carlos took us on a very standard tour, with not a lot of references to ghosts, but many of the monuments he did show us perfectly demonstrated the grotesque and macabre. The spiritualist whose tomb was surrounded by living flowers, Allen Kardec, provided a tempting superstition. I succumbed to it. By rubbing his left shoulder and making a wish, I committed myself to return to his grave with living flowers within a year to thank him for granting my wish. Based on the number of bouquets and flower pots, which overflowed onto other graves, I’ll start shopping for inexpensive airfares.

I started noticing some emblems on several monuments. Some had an hour glass as the body of an angel, with the angel wings spreading over the doorway. Time ran out? Protection from the Grim Reaper? Others had upside-down torches, for a flame extinguished. These were pretty cool, but when they were combined with bats, I started wondering. What were the bats suggesting or protecting? When I asked Carlos, he hemmed and hawed, so I started taking pictures of them. I think I found six. We saw the grave of Jim Morrison, cordoned off so no Americans could do the wild thing on top of his stone anymore. Oscar Wilde’s monument was also glassed off so nobody could plant red-lipstick kisses on it. Both sites had evidence of folks chipping off parts of the granite. Both men had been left in Paris as no relatives would claim their bodies. But Parisian benefactors paid to bury them and they are now the most visited residents.

The first person buried in Pete Lachaise was a nameless 7-year old. They didn’t mark her grave, but there is an ossuary for other children’s bones. And, if you paid for a 50-year lease on your spot during your life but nobody kept up the payments after it expired, the cemetery managers would exhume your body and throw your bones into the mass ossuary tunnels under the cemetery. Some of the paths sink in places as the tunnels are collapsing. We began to tread lightly after hearing that.

About 5:30, an old man started walking through the cemetery, ringing a bell that sounded a lot like the one in Monty Python when the fellow says, “Bring out your dead” during a plague scene. Very creepy, but they have to close up as many people like to stay behind and do strange things in the cemetery.

When I returned from my haunted jaunt, I decided to look up the bats. Of course there was a legend about them. Apparently 14 graves have bats and if you follow them in the correct order, you’ll end up at a tomb where the remains of Vlad Dracul now rest.  Can’t believe that. I saw them in Romania. In three different places, one an island where the vampire couldn’t escape.  Hmm, there’s a story there!

A little girl whose remains were lost. A group of people who had signs of a vampire wrought in iron. A tomb with the last name “Vallechia,” a derivation of Wallachia, where the real Vlad Dracul’s family of the dragon lived…Two parallel storylines? The plot thickens…

I started seeing strange shadows in the apartment. The bird screeched out of its nest, nearly touching my hair as it flew out. I hobbled into the bathroom, popped the new anti-inflammatory, and prayed I wouldn’t have any nightmares. Within minutes I was dreaming about a movie starring Frances McDormand, a crusty middle school teacher who finally got her dream trip to Paris, only to be dragged into some ancient curse of the bat…