The Last Time ...

I'm in Paris again.

Like the last couple times I've come here, I can't t help but wonder: "Is this the last time I will come to Paris?" Part of it is being 38 years old and right about the middle of my life expectancy; for no rational reason, having less time to live than I've already had reminds me that I will not do everything I would like to do, nor will I do anything unlimited number of times.

I am actually quite fine with this. From my perspective, I've already had three fulfilling careers (music, academics, business), even if they weren't all as successful as I might have liked. (I recently read The Last Tycoons, a breezy book about the investment bank Lazard, which mentioned some banker who made tens of millions of dollars and is now getting a Ph.D. in history; "done that," I thought.) And I don't have what is these days called a "bucket list;" if I were to learn I had six months to live, I would spend most of it at home with my wife, my daughter, and my dog, with maybe a few trips to see a few close friends.

But it is a fact that there will be a last time that I visit Paris, and for all I know this could be it. Our European teams are getting bigger and more experienced, to the point where they will need fewer visits from founders like me; with a child, our vacations now are more likely to be at beaches in Florida or Delaware than in Europe; and it gets harder and harder to spend time away from my daughter. When I'm home, one game she likes is when I pick her up so she can look at the family photos in the hallway. If I say "Where's Daddy?" she points at my picture and then points to me (actually, she sticks her finger in my neck) with a big smile. My wife emailed me to say that now when she points at my picture she puts up her hands in her sign for "Where?"

If this was my last trip, it was, unfortunately, probably the worst few days of eating I've ever had in Paris. Part of this is due to being a vegetarian - when you subtract fish, there are virtually no main courses you can eat in a French restaurant - and part of it was staying in an area with many tourist hotels (we were next to the Hard Rock Cafe, of all places) and hence many mediocre restaurants, but mostly it was due to having just too much work to do. We had two days of meetings with a potential and very large French customer, and I had to present and demonstrate to them for most of those two days - in French. And on top of that I spent two hours late Tuesday night - before preparing for Wednesday's presentation - explaining our business to our finance team. So speed, not quality, was the key culinary requirement.

Somehow I managed to avoid eating a single good croissant au beurre in five days (I had one decent one and two mediocre ones), a single piece of pain Poilane, or a single spectacular fruit tart (one good, two mediocre). On Sunday I took a walk with Alex and Sigrid, and we stopped by Cacao et Chocolat for hot chocolate and Pierre Herme for macarons, which were not as sublime as I remembered them, and on my last night Jay and I went to Le Tastevin, a nice restaurant on the main street of the Ile St. Louis where I had two scoops of Berthillon sorbet - green apple and cassis (black currant) - which, despite being freezer-burned, did have the intense concentration of fruit found nowhere else in the world. (I also split a bottle of wine with Jay and had two whiskeys in his apartment afterward, which, after the last time we got together, I guess makes us drinking buddies.)

But I did get to stroll one more time through the Luxembourg Gardens, which I remember from my first trip back in 1991, and from when I used to live on the Left Bank, and watch the kids playing with their boats in the central fountain - only now the boats are all remote-controlled, not the miniature sailboats you used to see. So if it was my last trip - which I doubt - I can live with that.