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We were on the Pont Neuf. Beneath us the Seine was roiling liquid jade. Above us, in the Parisian sky, a bevy of winged, chubby cherubs were floating, disguised as clouds. We knew better.
In front if us a neatly dressed attractive woman in her thirties was smiling warmly at Kate and me. We were strangers passing in the day, our smiles and eyes all complicit in the shared beguilement of a perfect moment.
"Bon jour," she said
"Bon jour right back at ya bien sure" we answered. We were in a buoyant mood, freely dispensing smiles and bilingual idioms garnished with a dollop of pun.
She had passed us less than three steps when she whirled and said, "Oh, Madame, Monsieur. I have this for you..."
She pulled out a gleaming goldish ring and offered it to Kate.
"This was just given to me by a stranger..." she said.
"Let's go, Kate," I interrupted, wishing there were a way I could retrieve my smile.
"...and my religion forbids me to keep such things. I offer it to you."
"Kate, really, let's go," I said, all the while thinking: Gypsy. But she doesn't look like a gypsy.
"How much?" Kate
asked the Gypsy In Disguise. Kate reached for her Euro coin stash, cleverly hidden in full view.
We had been warned about Gypsies. Nobody warned me that one of them might not be dressed as what I thought a gypsy should look like.
Before we left, one of our daughters, filled with the lightly examined certainty of youth, had warned us: "Be careful of the Gypsy Baby Tossing trick!"
"What is the Gypsy Baby Tossing Trick?" we asked.
"You'll be carrying luggage. A gypsy carrying a baby comes along. Suddenly the gypsy tosses the baby towards you. You catch the baby, the gypsy makes off with the luggage..."
How sinister, was our first thought. Our second thought: but wait. The gypsy has your luggage, but you end up with the gypsy's baby, so how the...
Well, maybe it wasn't the gypsy's baby? Maybe they just found it somewhere. Maybe they just KNEW you'd give the baby back. Maybe...
The gypsy on the bridge said to Kate: "Madame, for you, there is no charge." She tossed me a sidelong glance, disdainful of my distrust.
I let her glance bounce off my eyes and fall at my feet, uncaught.
I had learned
a thing or two.
Kate gave the gypsy five euros.
"Kate,"" I said. "Really. You know that the ring can't be gold..."
The gypsy vanished.
I bit my lip.
When we had been to Paris on an earlier trip, after 24 hours en transit, I had seen a gypsy mother and child near our hotel, near the Tuileries. Stupid from jet lag, I reached into my secret pocket (which was cleverly hidden in my pants and camoufloged as a secret pants pocket), pulled out some change, gave it the woman, walked across the street, and discovered that, somehow, my wallet was missing.
And I know SO much better than to put myself in that position.
"Maybe she needs the money" Kate said of our ringer. "And even if the ring is brass, it makes for a story..."
Weeks later back home, on a whim, Kate had the ring appraised.
It was pure gold.
It was worth more than five hundred dollars.
I could hear Kate biting her tongue when she told me this.
*****
THE MORAL OF THE STORY: Come on, there's no moral here.
But there is a hidden tale: sometimes your child comes back to you, however foolish
or desperate you may have been when you lost her.
Only Connect....
And there's this, about appearances.
A young man (we'll call him the SEEKER), heard that there was a wise, and powerful Dragon who lived near a hidden cave, who would share the mystery of knowledge with the one person who could find him.
After many years and adventures, the Seeker actually found the entrance to the cave. In front of it stood a man the same age as the Seeker, no longer young, who was guarding the cave.
We'll call the guy in front of the Dragon's cave the GUARDIAN.
"I am here to see the Dragon," the Seeker said to the Guardian.
"I am here to guard the cave," said the Guardian.
And for the rest of their lives, there was a standoff.
Decades passed..
Now in his 80s, the Seeker felt weaker and weaker. Dying, he begged the Guardian. "The Dragon I seek..." he said, "why would you not let me into the cave?"
"The Dragon is not in the cave," the Guardian said, truthfully. "I am the dragon. All these years I was right in front of you. But you did not recognize me. And you thought I was hidden away, when all this time, the only thing you had to do to know me was to recognize me. Why didn't you at least just go into the cave? I would have followed. I mean, I was expecting you. I even installed a new lighting system just before you showed up, like, sixty two years ago. Put in a skylight too, but it's some two hundred feet up to the roof. I had dinner set and everything."
"Whaaat..." the Seeker tried to ask.
" I never said you couldn't go into the cave," the Dragon continued, "I just told you I was guarding it. I was guarding it so that no one else could go in there but you. I couldn't like just blurt out, 'Hey, lookee, I'm the Dragon'. We Dragons are a bit circumspect in that regard."
"But, but," the Seeker said with his last breath, stubborn to the last in his misconception, "this can't be true. You can't be the Dragon I sought. You don't even LOOK like a Dragon..."
******
"Maybe" Kate said, "maybe the Gypsy was actually an Angel of Good Fortune..."
"Well", I said, "she sure wasn't dressed like a gypsy."
But if she were indeed an Angel of Good Fortune, what better disguise could she have chosen than that of a gypsy who wasn't dressed as a gypsy?
My head hurts. Riddles are hard. Metaphors are easy.
Incidentally, the Dragon story also works if the Seeker and the Guardian were women.
Or any combination thereof.
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Linda
non-member comment
Where was the ring from?
As I read I kept wondering, so where did the "gypsy" get the ring? We will never know but I guess treasures can be given away or sold for less than they are worth. Possessions are not really that important in life.