I went back to Paris to meet my Father, but we never actually arranged where or when. In the end, we missed each other so I wandered around and got to reminiscing. I was around 12 years old the first time I went to Paris with my Father. The square in front of Notra Dame was for parking. Many of my memories from Boulevard St Michele include the smells. This is before Greek restaurants replaced the Thai, Vietnamese Algerian and French restaurants along the tight streets, and the atmosphere was thick and noisy. Throngs of people meandered through the acrid smoke of Gauloises and the sweet smell of we called “African Doughnuts”; huge rings of fried batter as big around as my head, dipped in sugar. An olfactory counterpoint of the open urinals doting the street.

Those urinals are gone now too. I’m hesitant about the new, self-sterilizing outhouses that replaced them. It's not just the aesthetics or the uncivilized fact of having to pay (out of place in an otherwise civilized city). The French - not noted for their technological acuity - have provided toilets a bit too high tech for my taste. I don't trust them. The way they work is this, once you’ve finished your “business” and leave the toilet, closing the door triggers the cleaning cycle, which is like a car wash turned inside out. The room is flooded with disinfectant and then intensely blow-dried. Supposedly, an elderly lady opened the door to leave, remembered her purse and went back to get it. The door closed and you can guess the rest

The Quartier Latin was bohemian then. The streets were exotic, filled with movement, color and sound, black people in bright robes selling African jewelry, leather goods, and carvings, arranged on colorful blankets along the Boulevard St. Michele and Boulevard St. Germaine. Music and the sound of drums in the background reverberated through the crooked streets lined with bookstore tables stacked with paperbacks, students and hippies sipping coffee or Pastis outside bistros, and street performers. I even saw a fire-eater; a nifty trick on a crowded street. I tended to stick pretty close to Dad.

I “discovered” the Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Years later I learned that it was a landmark, a place Earnest Hemingway borrowed books and Gertrud Stein pontificated.

Paris is a first love that deepened when I was lucky enough to live there in 1993 and 1994. My heart skips a beat whenever someone mentions it, or an image flicks across the TV screen. I’m back as often as I can.