Ralph Gardner Jr. reflects on what Paris means to him after terror attacks
When I heard about the attacks in Paris—it was on NPR around 5 p.m. on Friday and the killing was still unfolding—I was reluctant to break the news to my wife.
I was less concerned about her reaction than my own. I was afraid I might have trouble maintaining my composure.
We spent a lovely week in Paris exactly this time last year, the weather unseasonably pleasant, as I understand it also was Friday night.
But my relationship with Paris well predates that. With only modest poetic license I can argue the city runs through my veins.
My parents met there in the late ’40s, and my first visit occurred when I was 8 years old. We stayed at a small hotel off the Champs-Élysées called the Gallia whose restaurant served the best coffee ice cream I’ve ever tasted.
We’d go for pony rides in the Jardin des Champs-Élysées, between the Rond-point and Place de la Concorde, and once or twice to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, an amusement park in the Bois de Boulogne.
Paris served as the point of departure for a hitchhiking trip that my cousin George and I took the summer I graduated from high school in 1971. We traveled to the North Cape at the top of Norway and back again.
To this day, my 91-year-old aunt Lily, who lives in Paris, reminds me of my alarm when, as a “new hippie” as she described me, I met George at her apartment (me with my pristine backpack) and he announced we’d be attending a rock concert in the suburbs that evening.
When I asked, jet-lagged, where we’d spend my first night in Paris, he said matter-of-factly, according to Lily again, “Wherever we sit, we sleep.”
Fortunately, it was raining so hard that we checked into a hotel instead.
I have fonder memories of celebrating my younger daughter Gracie’s seventh birthday in Paris, with a superb mocha cake at the Ladurée on the Champs-Élysées. And chasing her down the tree-lined boulevard as she sped off on the brand new Razor scooter we’d secreted in the overhead luggage bin on the plane and surprised her with at her party.
I turned on the TV in the living room to follow the attacks—for once the “breaking news” boasted on the screen was actually breaking—and continued to do so live on my phone’s CNN app as I took a bath. Still having not told Debbie, who was in our bedroom reading.
When I returned to the living room she joined me, but I hardly said a word. The images and words on the screen spoke for themselves.
It occurred to me—as the news from the soccer match at the Stade de France, the restaurant shootings, and the still-developing hostage situation at the Bataclan theater arrived—that as horrific as the situation in Paris seemed to be, 9/11 had been much worse.
So why was this event so shocking?
Does the memory of everything, even the collapse of the Twin Towers and the death of thousands, fade over time?
I don’t think that’s what it was. I visited Ground Zero a week after the attacks. And what most struck me was that the destruction—the 110-story skyscrapers reduced to smoldering rubble, the surrounding buildings with huge holes gouged by the falling debris—was of a scale typically associated with natural disasters.
Yet it had been accomplished by human planning. People had made a decision that chaos was more attractive than order, death than life.
New York City is a monument to ambition. But Paris, perhaps more than any other city I’ve visited, is a rolling celebration of life.
The architecture is routinely beautiful. The generosity of its boulevards suggest that something other than maximizing real estate values was at work in their planning. The city isn’t divided, but united, by a river with beautiful bridges to linger over.
And best of all, the outdoor cafes serve as testimony that what matters most is air and light, food and drink, and perhaps socializing and people-watching above all else.
The terrorists attacked what it means most to be human in the most human of cities.
—Ralph.Gardner@wsj.com