Getting our minds out of the gutter

Since my interest in eating has been rather dramatically curtailed in the last week, I've been spending a lot of time enjoying my second-favorite pastime: movies. Michele and I met up a few days ago in St. Michel to see a fairly terrible Johnny Depp period piece that just came out here.

As we exited the theater and waited to cross the street, a gust of wind swept Michele's little purple Metro ticket out of her gloved hand and deposited it smack-dab in the middle of the lustily burbling gutter in front of us. (In case you are unfamiliar with the Paris sewers, allow me to mention here that part of the city system involves daily flushings of the gutters; water rushes out of specific spots and sweeps down the edges of every street as a cleaning mechanism. It's acceptable to throw bits of trash and assorted detritus into these gutters, because they are regularly washed clean.)

A couple was standing nearby, and smiled sympathetically as we laughingly bemoaned the lost ticket. The woman, well-dressed in a fur coat and elegant make-up, encouraged Michele to retrieve it. Like a chorus, she and her husband began chiming together in English, "But it's a buck! Pick it up! You still have time!"

True, the ticket was just bobbing lazily before us, biding its time before making its exit into the bowels of the city sewers. We did have time. But even with all the time in the world, who the hell is nuts enough to reach down into a filthy, waterlogged Paris gutter just to save a little Metro ticket? We all know how many dogs live in Paris. We all know what is smeared all over those curbs.

Michele just shook her head.

Perhaps if we had not just come from a movie depicting a pestilential seventeenth century London, whose streets were awash with mud and grime and sexually transmitted disease. Perhaps if this movie had not ended with a shot of a putrid, toothless, disfigured Johnny Depp finally perishing from the ravages of syphilis after his skin rots away until nothing is left but a constellation of weeping lesions and crusty sores. Perhaps then we might have felt more amenable to plunging our bare arms into the frigid, foul, stinking Parisian gutter and risking any number of diseases just to save a buck.

But probably not.

There was no freaking way either one of us was going to do it. Was this woman insane?

Apparently yes, she was, because SHE reached into the gutter, furry sleeve be damned, grabbed hold of the ticket and proudly returned it to Michele's gloved hand. We both stared at it, sopping wet with cholera and vermin and dog doo germs. Michele smiled wanly, graciously accepting the benevolent woman's gift, and then promptly dropped it back into the gutter like a live coal as soon as the woman's back was turned.

"I'm gonna have to boil this glove now."
"Maybe lye. Or some sort of acid. And bleach. Lots of bleach."
"I mean, who DOES that? Why did she do that? We clearly didn't want it."
"I have no idea. She can't possibly live here. Maybe she's a tourist from, like, some country where the streets are impossibly clean. Switzerland, maybe."

We walked on, stopping briefly so I could get a crepe citron, and then descended into the Metro station, all the while marvelling at the kindness of fearless (and possibly clueless) strangers.