A Shove & a Great Landing--Paris! In Search of the American Dream

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This Traveling Writer Got a Shove Out the Door!

By Norma Jaeger Hopcraft

I was mad as hell at the time, but it turned out to be the best thing that could happen.

Here's the first installment in the story (and pics) of how I ended up in Paris on a creative writing sabbatical for one year. I had never dared to dream of such a thing. In fact, I told myself that I would never go to Paris because the Parisians had an attitude I didn't like and I would not bother with them as a result.

Hah! This is a story of how my Higher Power took me beyond my wildest dreams.

First: the loss

It started with the loss of my job due to a merger. I worked like a stevedore on a crowded dock to come up with another one. But it simply did not happen.

I was living in a Cape Cod cottage in New Jersey at the time. I loved that house. More important, it loved me. I felt so good there, especially when sitting on the screened-in porch on a summer's night, reading with a soft white light and bugs bouncing off the screens. It was the one sign of any sort of success in my life. I had a tiny piece of the American Dream.

As my savings dwindled, I realized I would have to do something that it broke my heart to do: rent out my beloved house and go live with my mother.

To be honest, I cursed my HP for not giving me a job so I could stay in the house. I did NOT want to live with my mother. What a sign of earthly failure. To go back to my parent's house at my age really annoyed me. All I needed was a job, but HP didn't bring me one.

I cleaned every nook and cranny of my house--to prepare it for SOMEONE ELSE. I cried a lot and stomped around a lot. It was one of the hardest times of my life. My fiance and I had broken up not long before, my 84-year-old mother wasn't well, and now the one thing I wanted most--to live in my adorable cottage--was slipping away from me. My decades-long search for the American dream felt more thwarted than ever.

I cursed as I packed my "must-haves" into boxes and dragged them out to a big rental van. I drove to my mother's house in Mystic, Connecticut one night and limped to bed, mightily P.O.'d.

Then the gains

I woke up the next morning and felt my mother's love drifting up from her bedroom directly below mine. I said, Thank you, HP, this is exactly where I need to be.

I took care of her in hopes of keeping her going for years more. But after just six weeks there, she suddenly took a turn for much worse. But just before that happened I found a book. To be continued!

How did the triple tragedy of losing my fiance, my mother and my house bring me to Paris? Stay tuned! Next week, more of the story.

It seemed like every vista in Paris had something beautiful and graceful.

I'm especially enamored of the scalloped pattern of the cobbles. Crowds tore these up during the French Revolution and the German occupation to create barricades.