Dying is easy, parking is hard

You could always count on Art Buchwald to make you double over and today's title did just that. As the CNN anchor uttered those words this morning in tribute to the great humorist I burst out laughing. And while most of today's obituaries will focus on Buchwald's vast canon of political humor, I'll always be grateful for a tiny little memoir he wrote a decade ago, I'll Always Have Paris!, a book that describes a life I've always secretly coveted.

The book looks back lovingly--and hysterically--at a time of incredible innocence and opportunity in the world, a time when all the great journalists, photographers, musicians and writers (basically, anyone who was anyone) coverged in the only logical place to, well, converge: Paris.

Of course a lot has changed since the days when Bogart and Bacall would call up a newspaper columnist to take them to lunch on Avenue George V. If you hadn't noticed, the world isn't all that innocent anymore, Paris is a tad on the expensive side, and flying just isn't the jetsetter experience it once was. But that doesn't mean we can't dream.

In a 1999 interview with Mitchell Martin in the Herald Tribune Buchwald recalled the time he took the Aga Khan to lunch: "We had a fantastic bottle of wine. The check came and nobody made a move for it, so I had to take it. It was like about $50 a person." Fifty bucks back then translates to about $900 in today's money. Even in those days, the Herald Tribune's accountants kept an eagle eye on expenses, so of course the $150 was an outrage. "Where do you get off taking the Aga Khan to lunch?" Buchwald recalled his editor, Eric Hawkins, berating him. "So I looked at him and said: He wouldn't pay."

I think we all harbor the expat dream, to be sipping our coffee (in my case, chocalat chaud) at some snooty French bistro whilst reading the International Herald Tribue. My very first trip abroad was to Paris and we've made a beeline there ever since. Our honeymoon in 1997--to Morocco and Spain--started with a few days in Paris. How could one not? Maya looked beautiful in the Loro Piano wrap and Burberry hat that I had gotten for her.(I'm not sure which is a dopier thing to lug on a honeymoon: an expensive hat or a Hasselblad.)

Last January, some nine years later, we took Alexandra, then 2 1/2, on her first trip to the City of Light. Following in her father's footsteps, she drank hot chocolate at Angelina's, discovered carousel after carousel, and jumped for joy just about everywhere we went. A year later, when we pass the hideously ugly radio antenna on Glebe Road, Alexandra always says the same thng: "Look--the Eifel Tower!"

Whatever happens down the road, she'll always have Paris.

Matt