Your Gifts are Not Yours

It was exactly two years ago this past Friday. Peter and I were in Paris for our 15th wedding anniversary, a lifelong, long-deferred dream of using my high school French come true. We were walking off some wine and foie gras along the Seine. It had been raining for days, and the water level seemed unusually high to me, the walkways underneath the bridges deluged, and getting higher every hour. And then, out of nowhere, a tiny European police riot van suddenly raced by. Which in itself was a surprise. I thought the French police had long ago beaten their billy clubs into baguettes. Then another went by. Then another. Then another. I counted, and I’m not exaggerating, 43 riot vans went by over the next 20 minutes. 43!