It’s now the morning of my last day in France. Tomorrow I will wake up, get on the train to the airport, and catch a flight home. By now, the idea of home seems exotic. I’m thinking about collecting wood for the stove, about playing my banjo, about spending the winter in front of the fire working out accordion tunes.
But a part of me will also miss Paris, I think. After spending the afternoon in the park yesterday pecking at notes and being just a little too cold (although it will be colder still in Virginia), I went to the bar to catch up with Ilan and his French old-time band. Sadly for them, the show was really poorly attended, but it worked out for me in that they invited me to sit in with them, which was good fun. Ilan is an ex-pat American who married a French girl and has lived in Paris for four years. He’s primarily a piano accordionist, and spent a year in Transylvania learning Romanian and gypsy styles. At his apartment after the show, he played some modern Romanian fiddle music for me – great stuff. We’re going to meet up later today to play old-time music by the Seine, which I find to be an amusing juxtaposition. Tonight we’ll hit the Cajun show, a band led by Sarah Savoy of the legendary Savoy family from Louisiana. So my last two nights in Europe will have been spent playing and dancing to traditional American music. A month ago, that would have seemed like a cop-out; today it just feels like a segue.
