Further Illumination Rounds....again by: Evan

Further Illumination Rounds (with apologies to Michael Herr): "Un petit canon" translates directly to "a little cannon" but might more accurately be taken as "a little shot" since it is how the old men in the cafes take their tiny morning draught of red wine.  As I do now. ...... Creed has, in exile, and much to my surprise, developed some skill at "Angry Birds":  firing upon Goliath structures with a slingshot, adjusting trajectories and velocities and burst intervals. So I should not have been surprised when, atop the majestic military mountaintop that is the Arc  de Triomphe, Creed occupied one of the brass telescope emplacements, found his range through the small sighting telescope, and prepared his angle for an artillery attack upon the Eiffel Tower!   While Zelda was knocking over the barricades and distracting the gendarmes down below, on the Place de L'Etoile, with its commanding access to Hausmann's axial consensus of avenues.  The twins are the latest occupying army to take this gateway to the Cité. ...... When Madame Gail Antoinette has reached the end of her rope, out in the streets, and the little peasants are revolting (literally and figuratively), and all seems lost, she reaches into her bag (Comme des Garçons) for her Secret Weapon, and deploys it:  she lets them eat ... Cake! ...... King Evan XIV is distracted from the Revolution around him by the images he finds on the street and in the Metro, of an idealized culture (where women are colorful sensuous models, and men are gray stern statues) that is tattered and crumbling at the same time that it is being papered over and reborn and critiqued daily.  Missives broken into shards and fragments: advertisements, mostly, placed in antique frameworks and then torn and "modified" by the street denizens.  Words untranslatable appear and disappear in these contexts, and he (Evan XIV) dreams and schemes how to bring the whole experience home and render it into paintings and constructions.  While he is thus transfixed, Zelda has wandered up the platform, and Creed has run up the escalator in the opposite direction. ...... Nothing so focusses the mind as traversing a dark apartment in the middle of the night, guided only by the antique ivory streetlight staining some of the walls, seeking the added-as-an-afterthought toilet near the front door, telling oneself it is better then the old system of walking out into the staircase naked to find the closet with the hole-in-the-floor à la Turque ... when one steps barefoot onto a tiny Lego landmine.  Trying not to scream and wake the sleeping combatants. ...... We, the family, had dinner on the terrace one evening.  Creed came up with a new version of his patented, but not necessarily popular, cut carrots and ham shreds, by adding bananas to the mix: carottes, jambon et bananes.  Zelda, of course, stuck to her Cheerios diet.  Gail made a salad of lettuce, salmon, dressing, and a little French soil or sand (we couldn't tell which) that snuck in somehow.  Evan served everyone their drink of choice:  Creed had nectar de pomme, Zelda had lait, Gail had inexpensive rosé from the market, and Evan had bière brune.  All was quiet, all was well. The setting sun lit the variety of chimney pots across the street.  "I don't care what it cost," Gail whispered to Evan, "I would do it all again for this meal together".