I Love Paris; The Best Nightmare Ever

Opening thoughts: There exists about me a painful legend of undeniable veracity that exposes some bugs in my programming. Most versions of the tale start with me boarding a train with a saxophone and some baggage; they end with me exiting the train with … some baggage. A second thought: I normally despise proselytizing tales of ‘real-life miracles’, blasted through the Internet, in an effort to prove the validity of some system of belief. So take the following harrowing and uplifting tale of midnight madness however you choose.

I awoke this morning early by New Yorkers’ standards, late by Parisians’. I walked off the jetlagged malaise on a stroll through Montparnasse, feating on a salade du saumon and pounding an espresso before attending to some logistical matters, sauntering in and out of a few stores.

A couple hours later, back at my hotel room, I pulled out my soprano saxophone, blew through a few etudes. I planned to hit the Marais and wax nostalgic for the days when, in the throes of autoimmunity, I managed to wander with my family through the labyrinths of wide avenues, alluring alleys and dignified old buildings. Interrupted by a burst of lucidity, I delayed my excursion by an hour to notate a new composition. When I finally left my apartment at 11, I grabbed my saxophone and some baggage and hopped on the train.

Arriving at the Montparnasse metro station and distracted mid-tweet – it is strange that even now, my inner technocrat is fond of the underground internet – I jumped off the 12 train and looked dazedly at the map before freezing. The train was pulling away, taking with it the closest thing in this world I have to a baby.

I would have screamed, cried, launched into a Turretsian tirade, but the moment was too surreal. Proverbially, I had been fooled twice. In the span of thirty seconds, my mind raced. I thought about running after the train. I thought about how my parents would question the investment they had made in my musical career nine years ago when they bought me the horn. I thought about the incredulous stares I would get tomorrow, showing up in La Rochelle with half as many saxophones as promised.

Then I thought, “[golly gee whillackers], the train just left, it hasn’t reached the next station, what [on earth] are you going to do?” Running along the track, I begged each of my fellow travelers, “Do you speak English?” I got several funny stares and a chorus of “un peu.” Finally, after pantomiming a saxophone peformance and pointing down the track, one young woman had a sufficient combination of empathy and comprehension to race with me to the metro’s information booth.

The first booth worker that we encountered spoke less English than I spoke French. After my new friend explained my case – pun not intended but cheekily accepted – the teller phoned the next few stations without success. She then shrugged her shoulders and made it clear that I would find more answers in a bottle of vodka than blocking up the queue at her booth. I asked where I could find a police station and took off in desperate pursuit.

While power-walking my way down the street, I consulted a kind-looking, well-put-together gentleman as to the whereabouts of the elusive commissariat. The man, named Martin, happened to speak English natively despite being raised in Paris, the the progeny of a mother from the United States and a father from Paris. This serendipitously placed companion offered compassion, brains, and a cigarette – my first since a night in college spent crying over a girl.

He also offered an irreproachable knowledge of the Parisian rail system. By the time we arrived at the police station, he had already concluded that the police were not likely to be of help, offering a contingency strategy. We planned to head back to the metro, trying our luck with the employees at the other booth, hoping to find out, at the very least, the location of the citywide lost-and-found. Barring success, plan B involved a taxi to the northernmost station on the 12 line, likely our last best chance to find my horn before boarding the TGV 12 hours later for La Rochelle.

As we laughed, walked, discussed our families, education, I kept remembering sitting on the train across from a nice bloke, of whom I asked directions before boarding at the Volontaires station. I checked my phone manically for an email (a business card sat in my case in anticipation of an occasion such as this), hoping that he might have noticed my incomplete departure and found my identification or turned in my horn.

I told Martin that I was likely to cry like a sentimental fool if indeed my horn was lost to the abyss. He laughed it off, studied the details of the case, what time it was lost, which direction I was traveling. Back in the Montparnasse station, I told Martin that if the horn was found I would go to shul on Saturday and hug the first Rabbi I saw. He found the info booth and immediately launched into a precise explanation to the attendant. I would have offered details but he already knew them. After a couple phone calls and some quick exchanges, he asked me, “the case was black?”

It had been found.

As a point of intellectual pride, I consider myself foremost to be empirically minded and rational. Enamored of tradition, but suspicious of superstition. Had this been the first and only runaway Selmer in my life, I would sigh deeply but pass it off as a remarkable statistical outlier. But however hard I try to rationalize this dumb luck, doing so seems wrong. Maybe we have evolved the instinct to read meaning into random events for a reason. It reinforces the sense of reward for doing things we already know are right, punishes us for what we already know to be wrong.

After scrambling on the last train to Sèvres – Babylone, I collected my horn, kissed it, played it, and then walked to Châtelet. I purchased a miniature model of a saxophone, sculpted from a single piece of an aluminum wire, possibly to pay forward my good fortune to the starving street artist who needs it more than I do. Maybe I simply wanted a physical artifact to serve as a memento, a manifestation of unreasonably good fortune.