Memoir of a Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur, OR How Time Traveler Tours Came to Be, Ch 5

Sprung!

Wiggles was finally sprung from his airport prison a full week after his landing in Paris and delivered to us, jangled nerves and all, in our completely empty ground floor apartment in the Auteuil neighborhood of Paris’ southern 16^th arrondissement.

We had chosen the apartment quickly – and largely with Wiggles in mind – several months previously.

The main objective of that weeklong visit had been to find the perfect school for Loo. We accomplished this surprisingly easily – a bit too easily, it would turn out – and so used our remaining days to seek out a neighborhood and select, from among a paltry smattering of offerings, a home in close proximity to the school.

We picked this particular apartment because it let out onto a large private courtyard and garden that boasted the perfect climbing tree for Wiggles, from which he could ogle French birdies and work on his claws. What we hadn’t considered on that rainy March day was that its location on the rez-de-chausée (1^st floor in US parlance) would leave it in darkness for the better part of the day, even in summer. Over the course of the intervening months, our future Paris abode had transformed in our minds into a stunning palace. In reality, it was anything but. And without our familiar possessions to mark it, without any furniture to sit on or lighting to brighten it up, or any of our favorite pieces of art or photographic memories adorning the walls, the place was strange and unfamiliar, and not just for Wiggles.

Nothing smelled right in Paris. Even the bedraggled rose bushes of our garden courtyard, which I was determined to nurse back to life while waiting for our container to arrive, gave off an alien perfume.

Nothing felt right it Paris. We’d left New York wearing shorts, sandals, and tank tops and that’s what we’d arrived with, packed in our one suitcase each. We had had to go shopping our first day on the ground and now we were in sweatshirts and long pants again. Rather than enjoying the rejuvenating summertime sensation of the sun warming our skin, we were left begging it to come out from behind the damp, gray clouds that blanketed the city day after day after day...

And Paris didn’t sound right either. Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks made an odd whining sound, as if embarrassed to be asking permission to get where they needed to go, so unlike the commanding “out of my way” shout of emergency vehicles we’d left behind in the States. The constant river of scooters and motorbikes that flowed down our street bombarded our senses like mosquitoes that refused to relent in the night. And the language, everywhere we went everyone, even the children, spoke a language that, though exotic and exciting from afar, up close was foreign and frightening and incomprehensible.

Life buzzed all around us, yet without the language we could not participate. We were shut out, set apart, cast off, ostracized. Even the smallest and most common of tasks, like purchasing a pint of milk, felt insurmountable without the language. And we couldn’t even buy a pint. We had to buy a liter!

Little wonder that Wiggles, rather than falling into the bosom of his loving family as we’d expected, sprang out his cat caddy prison and bolted. He made straight for the kitchen, where we had been scrubbing out the under-sink cabinet just moments before his arrival, and leapt into it. He paused just long enough to eyeball the hole cut around the plumbing lines and, determining that it was just big enough, he squeezed his furry red body through in a literal blink of an eye. We clambered behind him, but could not catch him.

It was the perfect hidey-hole – one that I wished I could crawl into as the days passed. Indeed, it was so good that he didn’t reemerge for several more days. We finally decided that he couldn’t, that he was no longer able to find the proverbial lamppost that would transport him back from his adventures in Narnia. So Jimmy searched the hastily installed under cabinets of what was clearly a bargain-basement purchase right off the IKEA showroom floor until he found a good hand hold. He then proceeded to rip the cabinet unit right out of the wall in order to free our darling pet.

Wiggles tumbled out, somewhat calmer and ravenously hungry. We all sighed with relief. Wiggles had survived his ordeal with the French authorities – it appeared that perhaps they’d even cleaned his teeth. Our family was now whole again, even if holed up in an empty dungeon-like apartment with a bruised and battered IKEA kitchen.

Now it was time to make us official, time to receive our police-sanctioned medical examinations to ensure that we, like Wigs, were not carriers of any weird or infection diseases, and to obtain our visas giving us right of abode in France.

Unfortunately, that's all our visa would grant to me - right of abode.

I was about to meet the nemesis with whom I would do battle for the next six years.

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