Last time we were in Paris, in 2004, we were staying in the 20th Arrondisement near Place Gambetta, an upscaling neighborhood on the edge of one of the more multicultural areas of Paris. It was winter and you'd see African women in long traditional dresses and flipflops and their elder kids in flipflops and their younger kids in regular children's shoes and it wasn't clear if that was how the money stretched, or if the older kids and mom had been born/grew up in Africa and didn't like closed shoes while the younger ones were conforming to Western footwear.

New Year's Eve we planned ot go out and see what was going on. No specific plans; maybe down to Etoile for the fireworks, maybe not, but definitely out. Earlier in the day we'd been down to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the hideous golden sculpted flame over top of the tunnel where Princess Di died, where to this day people leave notes in memory and dead flowers that wither and fray like autumn leaves all year round. There was a fancy schmancy street market nearby. Jim picked up a duck foie gras for our New Year's Eve dinner. He also impulse-bought a bottle of Chartreuse. Chartreuse is a spicy green 140 proof liqueur. It is not what makes Gervaise die in a sodden heap of rags under the tenement stairs in Zola's L'Assommoir (that's absinthe) but it might as well be.

This was pre-Maisie so I'd read to Jim while he cooked in our dank one-room studio apartment. I'd sit under our loft bed on the one lumpy chair and Jim would chop and stir two yards away.

Have you ever tried to pan-sear foie gras on an electric hot plate in a stainless steel skillet? Ha! Jim's foie gras recipe: Cut eight slices of foie gras about a half-inch thick. (This isn't the pate or the canned stuff, this is the whole liver, raw.) Try to use an iron skillet and if possible get it so hot the skillet turns gray. Put the slices of foie gras down in two rows of four. By the time you get all eight slices down, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, immediately start flipping them from the beginning, same order. Once you get all eight flipped, instantly take them out in the same order, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. Use nothing in the pan, and put nothing on the foie gras, forget that raspberry sauce crap and whatnot. Eat it plain, right away; it turns to molten buttery liver in your mouth.

Anyway, this trip, I'm reading Tristram Shandy out loud to Jim. He prepares the rest of the meal first: Potato pancakes, haricot verts, black trumpet mushrooms that will cook in the foie gras fat after it's done. I'm sipping Chartreuse and reading the part where Uncle Toby is asking Widow Wadman if she wants to see where he was wounded (in the groin). "I can show you the exact spot."

Then we eat, and decide to drink more Chartreuse and read more Tristram Shandy and drink more Chartreuse and eventually it's clear we're really not getting anywhere near Etoile tonight. Then, sooner than we know, shouts begin to ring out from all over the neighborhood. "Bonne Annee! Bonne Annee!" So we go out and around the corner and there are two little girls alone, maybe 8 and 12, on one of those mini-scooters piping "Bonne Annee," while across Gambetta and past the Mairie, siren rising and lazily falling, all of the 20th Arrondisement's sapeurs-pompiers (firefighters), and their wives and husbands, and their children, atop a single firetruck, drunker than us! man, woman and child. The truck looks like an enormous centipede.

Now, the firefighters of Rome are beautiful, there should be a calendar. The firefighters of Paris are not. But it must be said, they can party.

The moral of this story is, if you are a pyromaniac arsonist, the place to be on New Year's Eve is the 20th Arrondisement of Paris. Your fire will not be put out.

Or, as EE Cummings said in "La Guerre":

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it