Up up up

You climbed how many flights of stairs today? What’d you do, walk up the Eiffel Tower?

Why, yes we did.

That’s 674 steps from the ground to the second floor, from which point those who want to go to the summit must take the elevator, so we did. The view was gorgeous. If not for just a trace of haze and the curvature of the earth, we could have seen San Francisco.

Surely there are action movies in which people actually climb the Eiffel Tower . . .

. . . but the powers that be frown on it, and insisted that we take the stairs. Between the ground and the first floor, there was a pep-talk poster on each flight, often with a little Tower trivia thrown in.

“You’re doing great!”

“Uh oh, you’re slowing down–slower than the elevator (which goes 2 m/s!)”

“Your face is getting red, like the Eiffel Tower when it was being built.”

“Keep hydrated! Did you know the elevator has a hydraulic mechanism?”

Corny, yet cheering. Above the first floor, there were no more posters, as if to say that they weren’t going to treat us like kids anymore; this was serious business, and it was time to just put our heads down and climb.

I went up the Eiffel Tower when I was a little older than my daughter is now (I don’t remember whether by stairs or elevator). How strange and wonderful to think of the changes in my life since then.

We looked out at the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Joy was (“I’m waving at you–can’t you see me?” she texted), and we talked a lot about Munchkin’s plans and dreams, and then we walked down 674 steps and took a bus to the Jardin.

Some people thought the tower was hideous when it was first built, and looked forward to its being torn down after the expo for which it was designed. I have always thought it was beautiful, both far off and up close, and it looked even more beautiful after we had been among and atop its web of struts. Lots of things in this world don’t live up to the hype about them, but as my daughter declared, this one totally does.