Up & Coming Weekly

August 14, 2018

Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.

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6 UCW AUGUST 15-21, 2018 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM PITT DICKEY, Columnist. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcom- ingweekly.com. 910-484-6200. anks to the calendar, with some help from the Earth rotating around the sun, summer comes every year. is phenomenon leads to my unrequested, rarely read and inevitable column about summer vacation. Mrs. DelGrande, my fourth-grade teacher, began this process for me. Old habits are hard to break. To quote a time-honored adage, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. When it comes to enjoying foolish consistencies and cranial hobgoblins, count me in. is summer, we went to Paris to renew our acquaintance with cafe au lait and Monet. e trip began on a spooky note. Our seats on the plane were in the last row, which meant they would not recline, resulting in an up-close-and-personal olfactory rela- tionship with the toilet. We were on the interior row of three seats. No window access. As a bonus, a lady with a 2-year-old was our row companion. Four humans in three seats. What could go wrong? e little darling would sit on her lap for the next eight hours. Small children typically enjoy being confined in a small space for prolonged peri- ods. We were really looking forward to being joined at the hip with our new roomies for the next 4,000 miles. Fortunately, a very kind stewardess took pity on us and moved us to another location. We went on the red-eye flight, arriving at 7 a.m. Paris is six hours ahead of North Carolina. is results in sleep deprivation on arrival. Lesson one: do not at- tempt to negotiate the Paris Metro with a head full of lack-o-sleep. We had a bit of a fun meltdown in a vain attempt ride the metro. Undaunted, we tried the Paris Uber Survivor Chal- lenge, which is not for the faint of heart. You plug in where you want to go. en the Uber Fuehrer starts you on a 5-minute race to meet your driver at an unknown location several blocks away in an unfamil- iar city. e stakes are high – find the Uber, get a ride; don't find the Uber on time, and you are penalized six Euros and remain a pedestrian. Until you have had a phone conversation with a non-English speaking Uber driver who keeps repeating the number 21, you cannot truly say you have experienced Paris. On Sunday, we went to the Gregorian Mass at Notre Dame, which was solemn, ancient and impres- sive. We left the spiritual world to re-enter the tem- poral plain when we left Notre Dame. We emerged to the frenzied preparations for the completion of the Tour de France that afternoon on the Champs Elysees. ese preparations involved setting up food stands and a large presence of heavily armed sol- diers and gendarmes in case of bad guys. e sight of French soldiers with Uzis is surprisingly reassuring. At the Pompidou modern art museum, we tested the resilience of our somewhat worn museum feet for hours while viewing the finest in nouveau art. One ex- hibit stood out particularly strongly – a plain wooden chair sitting on a slab of plexiglass. e exhibit was labeled "Chair." You could not sit in it. You were just to contemplate the chairness of it in relation to the cosmos and the dilemma of man and Mr. Death. It dramatically demonstrated that Andy Warhol was right when he said, "Art is what I can get away with." We subsequently passed a sanity test when we went upstairs to the rooftop cafe at the Pompidou to get lunch. After sitting down and studying the menu, we saw it offered a $36 hamburger. We got up and left without eating there. e cafe obviously subscribed to Warhol's theory that "Burger prices are what we can get away with." My wife Lani ate snails at a sidewalk cafe. I discov- ered that there are few better ways to contemplate the meaning of life than sitting in a clean, well-lit place at the end of a Paris day nursing a cup of cafe au lait and a Cognac. It doesn't get any more Parisian than that. La vie est belle. What I did on my summer vacation by PITT DICKEY OPINION is summer, we went to Paris to renew our acquaintance with cafe au lait and Monet. WEDNESDAYS 10A - 2P BRONCO SQUARE MURCHISON RD FRESH & LOCAL Across from Campus of Fayetteville State University SPENCE FAMILY FARMS • PARKER'S TEN ACRE FARMS MS. CHERRY'S BAKED GOODS • MS. RHONDA'S SOAPS BEZZIE'S BARBEQUE SAUCE

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