Perfect Day

Tue 4/22
(5/21)
Perfect Day

The soundtrack for this entry is Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”, but without any of the cynicism or sarcasm that one assumes just because it’s Lou Reed.

Mainly we walked around Avignon. It’s a beautiful French city dating from before the middle ages. It’s historic, quaint, fun.
While we took on the vistas of the Papal Palace, we were also distracted and enthralled by a kid on his little red bike. On a day out with his dad, he was using an angled cobblestone as a ramp and having a dandy old time in high energy.
Weird enough a couple hours later when he buzzed by again. Now we were a couple of miles from the Palace where we first saw him, we’d been enjoying the warm sunny south-of France day, absorbing the ancient architecture, and generally feeling really good about the set of choices we’d made that led us to this day.

On this trip we generally ate fairly cheaply. We ate more sandwiches than I’d like to admit, and we rejected more than one menu based on the idea that we could get a cheaper meal fairly quickly.

Not tonight, though. Tonight it’s time for a nice meal. A nice meal on an ancient medieval square looking over an old church adorned with Klu Klux Klansmen kneeling to Jesus Christ.
A meal with wine and pate and a “floor show” of small, loud birds acrobatically flocking and swarming above us.
A meal with good wine, and friendly waiters, and a table of happy Frenchmen at the other restaurant on the square, adding the music of a laughing French conversation from a distance.
A good meal with wine and pate and a southern French seafood dish and the kid on a bike.
For the third time in the day, our leitmotif returned and buzzed through the square, as full of happy bike energy as the first time we saw him. If I was shooting a film or writing fiction, the third appearance of the kid on the red bike might have seemed heavy handed, but in the reality of our actual perfect day, it was simply perfect.
It’s such a perfect day,
I’m glad I spent it with you/
Such a perfect day,
You just keep
Me hanging on!