Yesterday I attempted to go meet a friend in the southern end of Paris (I’m way in the north) and managed to get on a bus in rush hour going the wrong way (well, first I missed a bus, or couldn’t manage to get on because it was too full; after that, when I got on the next one, I realized I was going the wrong way). On that bus I stood next to two French women who were (and with apologies to dogs and humans, there is no other appropriate word) bitching about traffic, and bus stop failures, and organizational failures, and construction. I made a joke in French: “A Chicago on dit qu’il y a deux saisons, l’hiver, et travaux,” which got me a bitter nod and a one and a half second pause in the bitching. Before that, I sat at the bus stop and was drawn in as an external arbiter between an elderly Senegalese man and a young Romany woman, on the question of whether or not it was a public shame that she was barefoot in France. I said “Oh, maybe not necessarily,” which got me a big grin from her, but somehow avoided offending him, either that or he really wanted to talk, because then he proceeded to tell me about France. In 1972 the metros here were still segregated. In 1974, if you were from another country, and you wanted to visit home, you had to buy an identity card for ten thousand francs to get back into the country. At this point an Algerian (I think) chimed in, and they got in a discussion I couldn’t quite follow, about work. Definitively, in the seventies there was more work and fewer immigrants. Now there are more immigrants and less work. But either now or then (I got lost at this point) nobody wanted to work night shifts.