Notes on Parkgoers 6/8/23 8:38pm-9:08pm Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, France
I’m sitting on the other side of the deer statue this evening, what I assume to be a drawing class to my right. A line of green metal chairs uniformly angled towards the tinged oxidized metal sculpture. A family of deer. The father beneath a crown of horns, has his nose pointed upward above my head and his eyes cemented in a forever stare in my direction.
The class is a group of older women, all with almost classically French uniform: wireframes glasses and about shoulder length gray or bottle brown hair. They trade their stare with the statue and their wide angle off-white drawing pads. The pages crisp layers marked in pencil smudges and mounds of eraser shavings.
The assumed to be teacher—a late middle-aged man with a brown beige worn in crossbody bag—left and now returns again, whiskful. Just as I thought the teacher was leaving he reduced his independence, deferred it slowly and paced in the mixed sand soil. He colorfully cracks jokes with the now fleeing students; their oversized notebooks stuffed away to be shipped back to crowded apartments. Knowing their creative inclinations, probably small ones. The class briskly exists in groups of threes and fours. The uniform light green metal chairs remain in line, staring at the statue.
I arrive for the park to close. For the whistle to sound. For the Parisian rats to be unearthed to be shunned from the living and return back into the ground, to be shuttled home. But until then I see the flowers bloom, the light drift-fully wandering and make eye contact with the austere younger man who most definitely is carrying a book in his bag.
The aging art class did not leave but instead migrated to an outer lip of the grass patch we share. Now they're to my left. The green shirt teacher speaks to the group but directs his gaze to a large evergreen, a tree that could’ve been found in the Pacific Northwest and eagerly replanted. The students join his artistic symphony, the lonely audience of this misnomered tree. An older man in a crisp white button-up long sleeve sneezes almost musically, sirening laughter from neighboring bodies.
An older woman slowly wanders toward me speaking on her phone. She smiles softly and sits with her friend to face the statue. She pulls up a chair to rest their feet. The woman on the left scrolls through her phone, small round glasses adorn her pinched face as she searches for the desired visual addition to their conversation. An avocado green leather handbag lays on her lap as the two smile and laugh at the phone. The older woman fashions black strappy sandals, Parisian Tevas if there ever was a thing and enjoys the cooling June evening in the park.
In this tranquil stillness I can watch the world and inactively think. I watch the people move unhurriedly, for the hurried are underground in racing metro cars. The park feels like another world. The routine emergency sirens dull and the aromatic sonic crunching of ground crowds my ears.
An older woman to my left leaves her phone and looks up at the world in awe that she’d left the green for pixels. I too come to that reality often and apologize that I left in such a hurry. For what is this world if not for people in parks on summer evenings?