You Say Versailles.... and I say Hello

The train station at Montparnasse-Bienvenue has a tall staircase leading down two ways: one way goes to Port Orleans and the other to the suburbs. If you dont know which way to go, it is a very confusing place to be.
I arrived at the station after my train to Versailles was rerouted because of fetes in Paris this weekend. I was upset with the Metro for another reroute, but it turned out to be a good expereince.
Hordes of tourists pushed their way towards the suburban side to catch the Versailles train. It was a mad-house.
At the top of the stair stood a woman in her middle fifties, I would say. She was dressed in a sweat suit and running shoes. She had one of those haircuts you get when you dont have the money to tell the person what you would like: it was close cropped and messy, but short enough to pass for appropriate. Her hair was also thinning badly. She didnt seem to care.
I saw her from behind standing there turning head from left to right and back again. She couldnt have seemed more lost, or been more obviously frightened.
I thought to myself, "This woman has no idea where she is going and is probably going to get on the wrong train. She should have brought a map if she was coming into the city today and didnt know her way around. Serves her right to be lost."
I really thought that.
Somebody once told me about pies in the face that karma sends your way. You know, when you cut someone off to make the green light, but don't. Pie in the face.
When you make some inappropriate joke about someone, and they are standing behind you- pie in the face.
That kind of thing.
I was about 30 feet from this woman when the crowd cleared a bit, and her seeing eye dog came into view. There is a huge sign explaining which side for which train not 5 feet from where she is standing, but she cant see it.
I dont know where she was going, and its too bad that they dont make reading eye dogs.
She just stood there.
As I got closer, I could get a better look at her face, and though her eyes were wide open and blank, she didnt seem frightened at all.
She was breathing out of her mouth and kept craning her neck around, like she was trying to hear something.
It seemed like she was waiting for someone.
Just then, someone came by and took her by the arm. The blind woman asked, "Is this the train to Port Orleans?" The other person said yes and they went down the curved stairway together.
I thought, "Oh good, her friend is here to help," but at the bottom of the stairs, this other woman just went on her way. She was just some random stranger.
I thought about what that must feel like: to be alone in the dark in a crowded place like the huge station at Montparnasse-Bienvenue. I would be terrified.
This woman seemed comfortable. She seemed like she knew someone would come to help her, like someone always has. I thought about that and my persistant thought was, "Yeah, someone has always helped you, but you cant count on things always being that way."
But this woman just stood there; she knew someone would come, and they did.
What is that like? The feeling of a foreign hand around you arm to guide you where you need to go, to be so reassured by that- that a foreign hand of someone you cant see is a familiar feeling that you wait for and can count on it coming.
I think that must be the most reassuring feeling in the world-for the blind woman, for the woman who helped her, and for me.
It was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in Paris so far.
Versailles was, after that, a bit of a let down.
Its huge and beautifully decorated and its the most visited chateau in all of Europe and the Hall of Mirrors was where the treaty to end WW1 was signed and the art in the rooms are all masterworks and the walls are literally oozing history, but really, what have you done for me lately?
The crowds were crazy, pushing and elboing for their pictures. How many people around the world have the same exact pictures of the same exact things? How many people take pictures of things they have seen in their guide books? How many people spend thousands of dollars and so many hours on a plane to go stand in front of a fountain and take a picture, and the scurry on to the next fountain or statue or whatever? Is this vacation? Is this learning? Is this appreciation?
I tell you, these people didnt stop to appreciate anything. It was like the mad dash to get as many pictures of 17th century chairs as possible. I dont know how you tell who wins.
The tour of Versailles ended like every tour ends, in the 17th century gift shop.
I dont know; I think I have had my fill of dead white people and their fancy chairs.
I left discouraged and depressed. I travelled for two hours to get there and left with a handful of OK pictures, but nothing that I am excited about. I was also 20 euros lighter for the wear.
I got back to my hotel and had missed all my friends. I dont know where they went. So I sat there, dejected and alone.
An hour later, I stepped outside my room because I thought I heard my friend Esteban's voice, but it wasnt him.
On the plasma screen TV in the lobby was a review of the goings on about Paris this weekend. I only caught the last bit- it was a story about a race that had been run at the Parisian horse race track. This weekend, the horses took a day off to allow twenty women in bikinis to burst out of the gates and charge towards the finish line.
Really.
Twenty barefoot women in bikinis running in the mud. It sounds like the start of a naughty limerick.
Some of them fell, and some of them fell out of their tops, but in the end, they all jumped and clapped and hugged together. I dont think they cared who won their race.
It was the weirdest thing I had seen all day, and it made me smile.
I went back to my room and laid down in bed, and my mood was much brighter.
I turned off the lights and thought about the woman in the train station and laughed to myself about twenty woman covered in mud, laughing and clapping and living it up.

And life is good- because even when we are most alone and in the dark, it seems there will always be someone, maybe even twenty someones covered in mud and horse shit, or one blind woman with her dog, who will come along, and lend us a hand...

and all we have to do is wait.