“If money were no object and you could go anywhere in the world where would you go?”
Now, perhaps it is because I am a woman or perhaps because when I asked him the question my then-boyfriend gave me the “You’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look” nevertheless I went first and answered the question with a plethora of reasons why Paris was my dream destination. Once my soliloquy was complete I repeated the all important question…“If money were no object and you could go anywhere in the world where would you go?” Without skipping a beat (because by this time he’d had plenty of time to think about it while he listened to me drone on and on about the fabulousness of France) his one word response was “Cooperstown.” Apparently he really likes baseball! (For those of you who, like I needed to be enlightened, Cooperstown New York is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame) And thus began the relationship between the enthusiastic, dreamer, somewhat neurotic, aerobics instructor and the down to earth, dependable, faithful-with-the-little-things engineer.
It was during our tenth year of marriage that Russ came home from work late one night, sat down next to me on the edge of our bed and informed me that in a few months time there was the distinct possibility that he would need to leave the country for a business conference and if we could work it out I just might be able to join him…in France! As I took off running, jumping and screaming around the bedroom I could hear his voice trail off “Now Tracy, don’t get too excited…”
In no time I was visualizing and studying all the places we would be visiting while in France… the Eiffel Tower, the Champs D’Elysee, and that famous Cathedral “Notre Dame.” The more I thought about our trip, the higher my expectations rose.
The culmination of years of dreaming finally arrived. We’d landed on French soil and were quickly approaching our first tourist attraction “The Notre Dame.” As we came upon that famous cathedral I fully expected to be “blown away” by the magnificence of the stained glass, the beauty of the frescoes, the intricacy of the architecture and the fierce faces of the famous Gargoyles that sit atop the towers, but as we walked up to the Cathedral what I was OVERCOME by was a humble vision, “a little thing” that caught me out of the corner of my eye…
Standing in front of one of the many gardens that lead up to the Notre Dame was a little boy of about twelve. With the hedges of the garden below him he stood with both arms outstretched in front of him. As he stood there, palms turned up to the sky, his father, standing next to him would reach into a bag, draw out a handful of seed and pour it into the boys’ hands. As long as the boy stood there with his hands open and his arms outstretched, tiny little birds would fly down and eat the seed…right out of his hand! And, as long as the boy stood there with his arms outstretched and his palms up, his father would continue to fill his hands.
I was absolutely riveted by this image; struck to the core by the beauty of it and, sensing that there was something greater going on here, a deeper meaning that I would need to remember, I brought out my camera and took a picture of that father and his son.
There I was in Paris, living one of the biggest dreams of my life and yet the first image I felt necessary to capture on film, the first thing that “took my breath away” was a simple, humble, relational moment between a father and his son.
I developed that picture and stored it in an album along with all the other photos from our trip. It stayed there for a few years until one day when the meaning of that image came into focus at which time I gave that picture a place of prominence in my home and in my life…
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