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WHICH REMINDS ME
Raymond Luczak
Words: 626
[Response to "Paris"]

Editor's Note: Readers are invited to suggest a thing, person, place, event, or concept for Raymond Luczak to write about. You can suggest anything up to three words and send it to editor@clercscar.com and Raymond will pick one to respond to each week. To help him get started, I suggested three things in advance, and the first one is "Paris." --J.L.C.

I had the unfortunate luck of being born the night before Thanksgiving.

Family lore says that my father had forgotten completely about our traditional Thanksgiving dinner due the day after I was born, so he told my six brothers and sisters that they could eat as much as they wanted of a gallon of ice cream. My birthday was forever cursed with being tied to Thanksgiving, so when I realized I would have the bad luck of turning 40 on Thanksgiving--of all my birthdays!--I decided I had to celebrate it in a country that didn't celebrate Thanksgiving at all. So I went to Paris. I'd never been there before.

It was surreal to see that the stores around me weren't closed or had its windows decorated with pictures of turkeys and pumpkins and cornucopias. No one was in a long line with shopping carts full of traditional ingredients like cranberries, canned pumpkin, and whipped cream. No, it was just another day as far as Parisians were concerned. I was so happy to see that no one was celebrating Thanksgiving at all!

After eating a sublime lunch of hangar steak, eggs, and fries with homemade mayonnaise, I decided to go underground in the Catacombs of Paris and face my own mortality. For those who don't know what the catacombs are, Wikipedia says the following: "Most of Paris's larger churches once had their own cemeteries, but city growth and generations of dead began to overwhelm them. From the late seventeenth century, Paris's largest Les Innocents cemetery . . . was saturated to a point where its neighbors were suffering from disease, due to contamination caused by improper burials, open mass graves, and earth charged with decomposing organic matter." So in the late 18th century, the Parisians finally dug out the bones from these cemeteries, transported the bones discreetly at night, and brought them underground to these subterranean tunnels. The problem was, the tombs in the old cemeteries had been so old that no one knew whose bones belonged to whom. At first the bones--arms, legs, and skulls--were arranged on shelves carefully out of respect, but eventually the sheer number of bones inspired the transporters to display, rather like mosaics of a macabre sort, alongside the walls of the tunnels.

At first it was freaky to see all these skulls and bones on the walls. Some walls had nothing but rotting skulls. There was a constant drip of water here and there, leaking centuries. But turning 40, I felt great. I would not let thoughts of death and insignificance defeat me. I would not become just another skull on the wall; I would try to make a positive difference.

After walking over two miles among walls and tunnels of eerily-lit bones, and gasping at the inventive ways at how skulls and bones were arranged, it was surreal to climb a very tall spiral staircase and find myself in a small room lit by fluorescent lights with a bored guard watching television. He had to inspect my backpack to make sure that I hadn't stolen any of the bones. He spoke both French and English, so I talked with him in English about his job. He kept saying, "You have no idea. No idea!" He pointed to the day's catch--a few confiscated bones--on a small table near the exit door.

Once outside in the cloudy sunshine I felt as if I'd beaten death at its own game. Of course, we will eventually die, but when you reach a certain age, I think it's important not to think of death as a grim reality but as a fantastic reminder of how much more we need to do before we take our place among the skeletons.

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Raymond Luczak is the author of eight books, the latest of which is Assembly Required: Notes on a Deaf Gay Life. His Web site is at http://www.raymondluczak.com and six of his poems appeared in Deaf American Poetry, available at http://www.clercscar.com/books.

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