Letting the serendipities happen

I have a bad habit of trying to make things happen when--and I know better--if I didn't, they would happen anyway if they were meant to, or not happen if they were not meant to, or something better would happen. This is not to say that my philosophy of life is that things go best when I float along passively letting things happen. Rather it is the recognition of my uncanny ability to wreck what I'm trying to do. Or if I actually brought about what I thought I wanted, I would be precluding something better--and unanticipated--from happening. It's like when I was six years old and the Zimmer kids said there was a robin's nest in their attic. We all took turns trying to lift out the beautiful blue eggs--which broke the moment we even touched them. "Here, let me try," I said when I watched Danny Zimmer cloddishly destroy one of the eggs between his thumb and forefinger. The one I tried to lift broke too--their shells were as thin as tissue paper. If we had done nothing, there would have been baby birds.

That's way too much preamble to get to here: namely that I knew Marcel Proust lived at 102 Boulevard Haussmann and that the room where he wrote most of Remembrance of Things Past is now an office of a bank. However, Boulevard Haussmann is quite long, and I didn't know the cross street--so, I had no intention of looking for it. For what? To take a picture of me in front of the building? To bother the bank people?

We found it anyway. I might as well say Proust's apartment building found me. Here is a picture of me looking rumpled and touristy (don't worry, I told everyone I was from Texas) doing what hundreds of people do all day long--getting their picture taken in front of the building where the greatest novel of the twentieth century was written:

Here I am eating a hotdog (or, as the French say, "un hot dog") in the gardens surrounding Notre Dame with someone who is more glamorous than I will ever be:

Thank you for taking those pictures, Marty!