Melody and I have seen each other several times since we first met outside the Pompidiou Center. I like her. She has a compassionate heart. Her life has been filled with struggle yet she finds joy in the smallest things.
Have you ever noticed that some colors of nasturtiums aren't solid colors but inside the petals are deep burgundy flames bursting from the center? And if you eat the flower petals, they taste both sweet and peppery? Melody has.
Have you ever noticed the smell of coffee and the smell of a skunk are at first sniff almost the same but coffee remains at the same level of intensity and the smell of skunk continues to explode until your eyes are burning and your nose is wrinkling and the lovely initial smell of coffee is long gone? Melody has.
Have you ever noticed that the bugs children call rollie pollies -- pill bugs that roll into a ball if you touch them -- have eight legs and would therefore need four pairs of tap shoes? Melody has.
I often treat her to a bite of lunch at a cheap bistro and then we sit on a garden bench and just observe life together. I've seen many new parts of Paris with Melody -- hidden parks and areas where the homeless gather, tucked away from prying eyes of the public and more importantly, the authorities.
She tells me she has a daughter somewhere, a lovely girl named Natasha, who ran off with a boy named Igor. They were headed for Marrakesh, which is this year's favorite destination for young people. She hasn't heard from them for a long time and she wonders if she ever will again. I assure her that of course she will -- when Natasha needs something. Everyone calls their mothers first.
She misses her child but she doesn't seem to feel the pain and worry that most of us would. She has the nearly child-like trait of always believing the best will happen, even when faced with unusually grim realities.
She isn't homeless as I first thought, though she lived for months before I met her at Extended Hand of Tara, a Buddhist shelter for homeless women. Now she and her cat have managed to find a room in a run-down residence hotel in Les Halles, much like the single residence occupancies (SROs) in the U.S.
She invites me there for coffee and I am curious to see where she lives. The room is essentially bare. I'm not surprised, since all of her money must certainly go for rent. She sleeps on a small cot mattress on the linoleum floor. Two straight wooden chairs and a narrow bench create a dining space. The small bench is covered with an unraveling blue towel that is draped over it like a table cloth. Scotch taped all over the walls are pictures cut out of magazines, almost all of cats and cat food ads.
With all the grace of a queen serving tea in a castle, she serves me instant coffee in a flea market mug. Her old gray cat sits on her bed and gloats over his glamorous new nest in his own place, while keeping his one and only eye pinned on Bernie. I guess I didn't realize until now that the eye infection was in the only eye he has! Melody assures me again that he is healed and well now.
His color is almost exactly the same color as the blanket on the bed, which is the same one Melody had wrapped around her shoulders when we first met.
As we drink our coffee, she confides that she was once a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet. Always in the corps de ballet, she hastens to add, and it was long ago of course. She tells me she still goes to the Paris Garnier Opera House to buy honey. It is the very best in Paris, she insists.
Jean Poucton, the now retired Prop Master got the idea to put his hives there many years ago after talking to a member of the Opera House fire brigade, who was raising fish in the basement. His five hives on the ornate roof of the building produce 100 kilos of honey each per year. It is packaged and sold in the lobby. She shows me a jar -- pale yellow, an irridescent jewel in a small glass container. The oval paper label has Poucton's signature and a sketch of the Opera House.
"The honeybee flies from flower to flower almost a million times to make just a pint of this," she tells me proudly. Then she pulls out an old worn copy of The Christian Science Monitor and reads to me:
"Paucton remembers the call from the 'Societie General,' one of Frances's biggest banks. The CEO's conference room was buzzing. One of his hives had swarmed, he realized, and he had to smoke the trespassers out of the bank's chimney. Only when a swarm goes into attack mode are bees dangerous...and when that happened in the Luxembourg Gardens they had to close the whole park."
Melody looks up from the paper and smiles that endearing missing both front teeth smile. "Oh yes," she says. "It's a challenge to keep bees. You have to overcome your fear."
