out the window of our NYC apartment, where a conga line had formed along a side street.

“Look” she told me, “Remember this. People are dancing in the street. You’ll never see this again.” She was wrong about the last part, not having foreseen the election of Obama, but whenever, as a child, she told me “remember this”, I did.

...hung this huge banner, in preparation for a visit by Chirac, to celebrate France's single handed victory in World War 2.

The banner depicted a bomber squadron, B24s if I recall correctly.

I had a fun mock hostile joshing wonderful relationship with my French friends, and so I mused, "I wonder if any of those planes are French?"

It's funny because just last night I was reading from Nigel Hamilton's FDR trilogy on FDRs strategic thinking in WW2, an account of his very unpleasant meeting with Charles de Gaulle at the casablanca conference. De Gaulle was arguing about French sovereignty over It's empire while his whole country was a German puppet state. FDR was not amused.

Stalin could not understand at Yalta why the hell the Americans and Brits wanted to give a zone of occupation of Germany to France. FDR had his reasons.

...with ny French friends concerned a claim that the French invented democracy. Whence that came, I don't know.

My repost went like this: "Let's see, we had a revolution and wrote a Constitution that's operated for over 200 years. You had a revolution followed by a an emporer, a king, a short lived emporer and a few rickety Republics thrown in here and there.

It's sad to think of it now as our Constitutional government committed suicide, but back then, 30 years ago I could be proud of being an Americsn.

I am hoping my son will move to France after completing his Ph.D.. For now they're a safe country.

about his old girlfriend Atha May and, what a wonderful girl she was. My mom would always chuckle a little, which we all thought was kind of weird. We figured it out eventually...