Step Up, Don't Step Down

At one time in the history of my family-of-origin, there was a dark period. My mother referred to it as “step up don’t step down.”


What was it? My father bought a Hudson Hornet, a car so fast that it’s tail lights frequently arrived hours after its headlights, so low that you had to step down to get into it, so odd-looking that people pointed when you drove by, so much ahead of its time that it went out of business. 

You also have to step down to get into the  Paris Metro. 

What’s strange is that once down in the tunnels, you take additional steps, sometimes up, sometimes down, to ride the trains. 

It’s like an Escher drawing filled with lost souls, (there's that lost theme again), clutching Metro tickets. They step down into the Metro world. Sometimes they walk down another flight, ride a train, walk up a flight, ride another train. It goes on a and on under the streets of Paris.

Speaking of steps, these are the steps leading to my apartment on the second floor of an ancient building in the Marais neighborhood of Paris. Literally translated Marais means "swamp." But the swamp is long gone, paved with cobblestone streets and stone sidewalks. Any water is carried away by a vast underground network of sewers, made famous by Vic Hugo and Herb Kretzmer in Les Miserables, which translates into "the wretched ones." No wonder they're wretched, living in a swamp. Who's Herb Kretzmer you ask? Poor wretch never never gets credit, but I bet more people watched the movie than read the book.) You can take a tour of the sewers of Paris, but that's a step down I can do without. Oh ya, the steps inside the ancient building in the wretched swamp of Paris leading to my apartment on the second floor. Here they are.

 But the French call the second floor the first floor. That way whenever a Frenchman asks you to meet him on the first floor, you show up at ground level and he starts out at advantage one story above you. Pretty smart if you ask me.

The apartment stairs are made of a solid hardwood, and are so old that people’s footsteps have worn deep waves in each tread. 

Imagine how many people walked those stairs in the last hundred years. On closer inspection, you realize they are laid right over the stone steps that were likely there two or three hundred years ago. 

All night long, I can hear the silent footsteps of Escher lost souls walking up and down those stairs. Now you might think I'm creeped out having all those lost souls traipsing up and down the steps outside my apartment, but I’m not. You see, I’m sleeping safe and sound in a loft in the apartment. These are the steps to the loft.

No zombie I know (and I’ve known my share, no I won’t name them) could scale those steps in the middle of the night. Of course, when I rented the apartment with the charming loft, it hadn’t occurred to me that an aging prostate would compel me to step down and up them several times a night, in my own induced zombie state. Why is it that steps are always steeper going down than up?

Maybe that's what my mother meant when she said, step up don’t step down –  down is always greater than up. But one thing I'm sure of , when in Paris, you step up, step down, step all around.