the Fourteenth Nome . . .

If the ancient Egyptians ruled our world today, Paris would be their Fourteenth Nome and, given my French heritage, I might be in some serious trouble at the moment—the moment being about 40% into Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid.

In my defense . . . who was it, really, who wrote her first “term paper” ever on Carter’s discovery of King Tutankhamen’s burial place, a discovery he made just two years before her mother was born in a village in France?  Who was it really, who waited in line one icy January morning, her youngest child in a stroller, to see the first ever American exhibit of Tut’s Tomb artifacts at the Smithsonian?  OK, so maybe she never made a point to visit l’Obelisque—aka Cleopatra’s Needle, the Obelisk of Luxor—during any time-over-a-lifetime in Paris . . .  And, yes, maybe she did make one of those pilgrimages during the demon days of late December, when she might have discovered a way into and, hopefully, out of the Duat . . .  But she meant well, she’s one of the innocents, she didn’t know about the magic . . .

. . . or the history.  Maybe it is more that . . . Place de La Concorde was, after all, home to the guillotine where so many lost their lives in the days of the Revolution . . .  When she was two, she played in the gardens at Versailles, where Marie Antoinette and her mother once played . . .  Why dwell on the ends of eras—of France with its King and Queen who lost their royal heads, both symbolic and real . . . of Egypt whose royal lineage expired with the legendary bite of an asp, ancient symbol of power over life and death . . . ?

OK, on her bucket list it is.! See Cleopatra’s Needle.  Not the ghosts of the guillotine and its victims (is taking the life of another ever justified?), not those troubled spirits.  Not Cleopatra’s ba . . . should it walk there.  But if there is indeed a portal to the underworld, doors that open to the untrained and the innocents on the demon days of December, she thinks she just might be able to find it, eternal believer in allthingspossible that she is . . .

In the meantime, she has uncovered digital and therefore indisputable (?) proof that, through the magic of her camera’s eye, she did indeed connect, from her top-of-the-Eiffel-Tower vantage point, with l’Obelisque on a not-so-long-ago balmy August afternoon . . .