THE man in the queue at the cafe had more than a few years on me. Elderly, some might say, wearing the kind of coat that whispers of wet Sunday afternoons in front of the fire watching black n white films – Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracey.
He had a wooden walking stick with a curved top and a stiffness on one side that would suggest a stroke in the not so distant past... just call me Nuala Welby MD.
He had kind blue eyes. No, he didn’t want any help with the tray and yes, he also wondered why we stood and waited in the queue at the cafe in the middle of the shopping centre when there was a perfectly good restaurant around the corner.
But still we waited. The queue was a Sunday one. It had the air of a herd of cows waiting patiently to be milked about it – no hurry, no speed. After all, it takes time to make a decent cappuccino.
And we waited – he was getting a scone for his wife and I was serving up a chocolate chip cookie for my nephew.
Then, just at the last moment, as he was paying he flipped open his wallet and the ghosts of long ago slipped out and rose up through the air, mingling with the steam from the hot milk machine, rising high up above the shops and the waiting queue and my curly haired nephew, sitting in his seat, head in his hands, wondering would that cookie ever make it to his table.
Perhaps it was the wallet that struck a chord. It was an old fashioned wallet – the larger, cheque-book size and it was soft burnished leather, polished from use.
But it was really that when he flipped it open, I just caught a glimpse of an old black and white photograph. It was a studio portrait of a young woman – probably his wife out there waiting for her scone.
But it was her from a long time back – a picture of radiant youth.
And I paused because as the man took out his money to pay, in walked the ghost of my father – in his old brown raincoat, the same soft leather wallet tucked in his jacket pocket.
And I knew that if he flipped it open, inside would be an old black and white photograph of my mother in the early 1950s – in just the same pose – looking young and glamorous with her pearls and her hair curled just right.
And tucked beside it would be a faded black and white shot of my big sister when she was not so big at all – in fact, as she stood smiling at our front door when she was all of four and just about taller than the glass milk bottles set neatly at her side.
So ghosts were everywhere last week.
We took a trip back to Paris. When I was 19, I was an au pair for the daughter of a countess and her husband, a captain in the navy.
They lived in a very chic apartment with their three children, all dressed in Liberty print that looked to me like fancy curtains – and I had one day off a week to explore the city. So they drew me a walk from the pyramid of the Louvre down through the Tuileries Garden past the needle on the Place de la Concorde and on down the hustle of the Champs Elysees past chic mademoiselles and close-shaven French businessmen, down Avenue Kleber until, all of a sudden, the Eiffel Tower loomed up ahead.
And then, I was back in my 20s in Paris again, on holiday and back again in my 30s when I lived there and could saunter day after day down long boulevards.
We are always returning to the city – in good times and bad and we shall always love it.
On this last visit, on street corners, I kept stumbling across the ghosts of my younger self – at the Sainte Chapelle, where, on my first visit, I paid my ticket and wandered about downstairs, not realising that the chapel was upstairs and how I was missing all the beautiful kaleidoscope of colours.
But I went back and discovered what I’d missed and in the early 1990s, I brought my mother to share the beauty of the long stained glass windows stretching up into heaven .– I carry that picture warm in my heart.
And as we walked the streets last week, we found the ghosts of our younger selves in cafes and museums, in gardens watching our once small child chase pigeons down tree lined paths that were white and dusty in summer sunshine.
Or standing by as our boy used a stick to push a wooden boat across the circular fountain in the Tuileries Garden... there were memories aplenty.
Yes, this time around, there was more security – we had to open our coats and our bags before lighting a candle for those we loved in Notre Dame. But we’re from Belfast, all that comes with the DNA.
And finally we returned to the Cafe des Arts to toast all those ghosts of times past. We raised a glass and sat under the big gas heater and tried to pick up some of the students’ slang.
And we laughed at our younger selves and the ghosts on street corners and the times that slip softly through your fingers like water trickling from an old fountain in a sunny courtyard... and we thought, liked old Bogie said... we thought ... we’ll always have Paris.
