Paris Werewolves

Though I would never consider myself a gourmand, I'm by no means a fussy eater. But traveling in Europe and living in France reminds me that the typical American palate is actually pretty narrow--particularly where animal protein is concerned. Basically, Americans eat mostly cows, chickens, pigs, sheep and some fish and seafood. And with few exceptions such as tripe, caviar, and chopped liver, they mostly eat the muscles rather than the internal organs. These exceptions are important. How else would we know the boundaries if no one ever crossed them? But in the US, crossing those boundaries means doing some work to seek out the delicacies in specialty stores, rather than expecting to find them on any given menu or front-and-center in a typical chain supermarket. A whole store for snails. The difference in France's cuisine is in both the breadth of common ingredients and their ready availability. Snails, rabbit and blood sausage ( boudin noir ) can be had in the US, but they rar

In Paris, I'm sitting at latitude 48 degrees, 50 minutes and 57 seconds north. For comparison, the only "major" cities in the U.S. that far north are Seattle, WA and Fargo, ND. Today (June 24), the sun rose at 5:48 AM and will set at 9:58 PM. That makes 16 hours and 10 minutes of daylight--or more than 17 hours of light using the conventions of "first light" and "last light." May 16, 10:16 PM Having always lived in more southernly latitudes (from 40 degrees N in New York to 34 degrees N in Los Angeles), these long early-summer days are bizarre. There are lots of people out on the streets--but that's usually true everywhere in Paris, all the time. Streetlights don't really come on until very late, and you get a good view of the bats working the trees late into the night. The warmest part of the very warm days (30 celsius today, 85 Fahrenheit) comes at about 5 or 6 PM, so it's not as if the evenings offer much relief in terms of temperature.

The Great God Pan in the 7th Arr. A few years back, I read Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) for the first time. I was not surprised that the book was very different than the story told in the 1949 Disney cartoon The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad , which was then my only point of reference. But I was not prepared for chapter 7 , in which Rat and Mole, after searching all night for Otter's lost child, have an eerie encounter with the great god Pan. “Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!” Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.  It seems like an odd passage in a children's novel, and Pan doesn't reappear anywhere else in the book. Then again, it may be the key to the entire story, especially if the cover of the book's first edition is any indicati